4. “Jonny, give me paradise!” Ibid., 125. Great Jane was misheard. What she actually said was, “Jonny, give me a pair of dice!” The diseased ex-hooker loved craps almost as much as she loved Jonathan.
5. Two months passed before Jonathan found the courage to mention Great Jane to his mother. The reference was strategically buried within the letter Jonathan sent home on November 2, 1905, an excerpt of which follows. JBP.
“I am quite the diligent one when it comes to my studies, and my marks have been very good. Yet, I am not at all the proverbial dull boy and do spend some time in recreation with my mates. I have been learning to swing the tennis racquet upon the grassy patch that serves as makeshift tennis court here. Football is too rough-and-tumble for me, but I have a good arm for playing third base and I am happy that autumn has made a delayed appearance this year. We have a chef who once served a British earl in India and his offerings are quite exotic and flavorful. I am not a glutton but I do so enjoy the food here, as well as the company of a girl named Jane, backgammon, reading Owen Wister novels and lively conversation.
I hope all is well with you and Father. Has his elbow healed?”
6. Jonathan displayed a knack for making easy friendships with some of the other students. Jonathan befriended even the terminally friendless among the residents of Orville House. This group included Jiminy Crutch, a mestizo who lived in fear of squirrels, and thus found himself constantly confronted by them in his bed, wardrobe, and dresser — placed there by the more mischievous among his dormitory mates. Young Jiminy won abundant sympathy and support from Jonathan, who encouraged the quaking, stuttering young man, to shake hands with his fear and turn it to positive use. Following Jonathan’s advice, Jiminy went on to become the nation’s foremost expert on squirrel aggression, and in 1941 was awarded the prestigious Van Weems Small Mammal Research Prize for his paper on the infamous 1826 Hamilton County, Indiana, squirrel migration — an aberration of nature that residents of Noblesville still speak of today. Contemporary accounts note that thousands of squirrels one morning decided to move en masse across the county. Swimming like otters across the picturesque White River, and foraging voraciously along the way, the squirrels were met by angry club-wielding farmers at every turn. The devastation wreaked by the two-week rampage took months to repair. Cordell Glover, Three Legs, One Heart, 45–48; Belva Curry, “On the Move” Sciuridae; Journal of the American Squirrel, 1952, No. 4, 366-75
7. Jonathan sold ads for the little literary journal; his friend Finley Sanders offered illustrations. A passionate anti-war socialist, Jonathan’s artistic college chum Finley Sanders was to gain some notoriety in later years through his opposition to what he referred to with great disdain as “The War to Trump All Wars,” “The Industrialists’ Carnage Party,” and “The International Killing Machine Wilson Lubricates with His War-lusting Salivations.” A political cartoon in The Worker’s Brow in which Sanders depicted President Woodrow Wilson gleefully dining on a goulash of roasted miniature American soldiers while Lady Liberty tearfully serves him heaping seconds, resulted in a lengthy stay for Sanders in a federal penitentiary. He passed the time by forming a barbershop quartet with fellow anti-war advocate Eugene Debs; Philadelphia bond forger Gordon Roman; and Dubuque serial ax murderer Eldred Jorguess, whom the others nervously allowed to carry the melody even when he seemed to be making it up as he went along.
Incidentally, Sanders’s equally rebellious brother David was a stowaway on the ill-fated “Peace Ship,” a Scandinavian cruise liner that had been enlisted to transport a disparate group of American pacifists to Europe in November, 1916 with the ambitious goal of convincing the warring armies that human bloodshed was an expensive price to pay for national hegemony. Though bankrolled by Henry Ford, the most recognizable member of the delegation, the effort was doomed to early failure. Pope Benedict XV, the ubiquitous Helen Keller, and Ford’s lifelong friend Thomas Edison all expressed early interest in joining the international diplomatic venture, but backed out long before the ship left port. Helen allegedly confessed that she had always been a poor shuffleboard player and, besides, Edison generally got on her nerves: “His lips never stop flapping; my fingers get so tired.” (Helen Keller, At Ease [Indianapolis: Three Senses Publications, 1988] 238). Ford himself bailed out of the endeavor as soon as the ship reached Norway. In his uncharitable, self-published biography of the automobile titan, Henry Ford, Jew Hater, Garner Qualms surmises that Ford hadn’t realized until he was already at sea how many of his fellow neutralists were Hebrew deniers of the divinity of Jesus Christ, and this discovery left him irritable and unmotivated. David, for his part, spent the trip rolling matzo dough in the ship’s galley while happily debating the merits of the Zionist movement with the many shipboard followers of Theodor Herzl.
8. “I promise to stop being so sesquipedalian.” Jonathan’s Diary, 4 April1906. A difficult task, it would seem, since the word itself means “given to use of long polysyllabic words.” The irony was, nonetheless, lost on companion Crutch, whose attention had been diverted by the sudden unsettling appearance of a tree squirrel upon the open-window sill.
9. By Jonathan’s second year, correspondence with his mother had become comfortably routine. The following is typical of the many letters Jonathan received from his mother during his years at Devanter — brimming with chat and reportorially framed gossip. JBP.
October 3, 1906
Dear Jonny,
I am so proud of you I can hardly express it. You are now a college sophomore! No one in our family has ever been to college before except for your Great Uncle Phineas and it still isn’t clear whether he was actually enrolled or merely pretended to be — a situation similar to that in which he pretended to be an assistant of Mathew Brady’s — the one in charge of photographic portraiture of the “unencumbered female physique.” While he was in prison I do believe he even pretended to be a guard at one point, but only in an odd exchange with a brain-addled sentry who on occasion liked to pretend to be an inmate to break the daily monotony. This is why your great uncle was able to walk out the front gate of that place to attend the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.
Your father is doing well, and the farm is on a slightly better footing. That new heifer had a beautiful twinkle-eyed calf we have named after Pastor Stoddard’s daughter Igraine. (Remember the way the reverend would rub his temples and say, “That troublesome Igraine! She gives me such a migraine!”) We may even make a nice profit at the end of the year.
Aunt Lindy sends her love. She had a nasty altercation with the butcher. She accused him of placing his hand on a part of her body men generally should not touch without a marriage license. If she had been the one holding the cleaver, I don’t know that he would be here right now. I think that your Aunt Lindy needs a doctor’s care and some strong medication. Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound is not doing the job.
I have seen little Mildred and she wishes to let you know that she is “doing quite well, thank you.” There was an edge to her voice that belied the sentiment. She must have heard about your friend Jane.
With all my love,
Your Mother
10. Jonathan’s experiences at Devanter shaped his politics for years to come. One individual, in particular, made the strongest impression of all. His name was Andrew Bloor and he was a young history professor who had taken an instant liking to this intellectually curious three-legged student. Ostracized by most of the Devanter faculty and subsequently sacked by the school’s administration for his liberal views on race and gender, Bloor obviously recognized Jonathan’s nascent early progressive tendencies and sought to encourage and nurture them.