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Yesterday was the 99th anniversary of the birth of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. This year also marks 41 years (I had it at 40 in an earlier post but I was wrong) since he joined the staff of his journalistic alma mater, The Cornell Daily Sun, at its annual spring banquet on the occasion of the newspaper's 100th anniversary in May of 1980. It may have been his first return to anything connected with the university since leaving it during the Second World War. That speech appears in its (slightly edited) entirety at the beginning of Chapter 3 of Palm Sunday, his collection of essays. The entire book, in a form itself in need of some slight editing, is available at this link; it may open outside your browser as a pdf, and the speech he gave to us begins on page 32 of the file.
Yes, us. I was part of the editorial staff that was invited to dine with our probably second-greatest newspaper alumnus of all time. The only greater one then living, as Vonnegut admitted himself, was a few years ahead of him at Cornell:
The most distinguished living writer who was also a Sun man is, of course, Elwyn Brooks White of the class of 1921. He will be eighty-one on July eleventh of this year. You might want to send him a card. His mind is as clear as a bell, and he is not only sentimental about dogs but about Cornell.
E.B., of course, went on from Ithaca to have a few things to say about writing, from SOME PIG to The Elements of Style. He also stayed long enough to take his degree from the same diploma mill I did- unlike Vonnegut, who told us this:
I remember, during my sophomore year here, when a world traveler said that Cornell was the forty-ninth greatest university in the world. I had hoped we would at least be in the high teens somewhere. Little did I realize that going to an only marginally great university would also make me a writer. That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time. I spent an awful lot of time here buying gray flannel. I never could find the right shade. I finally gave up on gray flannel entirely, and went to the University of Chicago, the forty-eighth greatest university in the world.
I never shared his experience of war, or his literary talent, but the sentiments he expressed at the end of the piece are entirely common to him and me- and many others who remain friends of mine forty years after we graduated and 41 after we heard this:
We on the Sun were already in the midst of real life. By God, if we weren’t! We had just designed and written and caused to be manufactured yet another morning newspaper for a highly intelligent American community of respectable size—yes, and not during the Harding administration, either, but during 1940, ’41, and ’42, with the Great Depression ending, and with World War Two well begun. I am an agnostic as some of you may have gleaned from my writings. But I have to tell you that, as I trudged up the hill so late at night and all alone, I knew that God Almighty approved of me.
One of those friends from back then saw my post and shared words from the man I had never before heard about. He was one of the higher-up editors who had inquired as to the author's availability for that year's centennial banquet, and he received this in response:
I hadn't even heard the story behind it before, much less seen the actual note, and replied to the sight of it with my hope that his wife and children had all been entrusted with the combination to the safe he damn better be keeping it in. Another editor of the day commented that he hoped the envelope had also been preserved; he had seen it before, and remembered that the envelope looked like he'd written it out in crayon and that the business office almost threw it away.
The "Cayuga Inn" reference reminded me of the one dark side of that event. This venue was a lakeside fancy-dress place several miles up one of the other Hills which surround downtown Ithaca, and it had hosted this annual banquet with somewhat less lumniscence for my entire time on the paper. I remember one of the other senior editors having pre-ordered a vegan entree and the proprietors "fulfilling" it with a scoop of cottage cheese dumped on a bed of iceberg. I also remember someone from the paper pointing out to the management that this was an unacceptable way to treat a building full of soon to be former customers. But my final memory came a few years later, when I drove up State Route 89 to go back home, and saw the place had burned to the ground, never to be rebuilt. Apparently cottage cheese is a powerful accelerant.
Vonnegut would return a quarter century later to honor The Sun's having gone around itself another 25 times since that original visit. I was not at that occasion; somewhere around here I have a DVD of the speech, but who cares where it is because it is generally viewable on the Tubeything. He passed away within a couple of years of that appearance, and those are not the words I remember him by as much as those short sentences encapsulating our short and frequent post-midnight trudges up that other hill.
Well, those words and Slaughterhouse-Five, which I really ought to get out from the library.
----
On the subject of odd envelopes, I came home today to find a particularly strange one.
We get other peoples' mail misdelivered to our house all the time. Mostly it's people on our street, or a grandma misaddressing a birthday card to a little one. Today, though? An envelope from the Canadah, addressed to a name I knew and who could only be the one I knew. He's a near-original Sabre and a member of the team's Hall of Fame. I vaguely knew where the street was, in our zip code but a few major cross-streets over. The house is actually right next door to the home of a guy who I chased after unsuccessfully for a client for the better part of three years before the client finally gave up on it.
Further proving the hockey connection, the return address on the envelope was from a town in Nova Scotia. On a street called Jollytown Road. This is a real thing.
No way was I trusting this to the post office to misdeliver again. We ordered pizza from a beloved restaurant more than halfway to the Hockeytown portion of Amherst, so I kept going and found his home. I wanted to bask in a bit of past Sabre glory, there still not being much of it in the present ::checks score, hmmmm....::- and maybe get an autograph or selfie oot of the deal.
Alas, a light was on, but nobody was home. And my phone was near dead anyway, so the selfie would've been a lost cause. Which, for the Sabres, is perfectly appropriate ::checks score again::
Oh my. Maybe he wasn't home because they put him back out on the ice;)
Yes, us. I was part of the editorial staff that was invited to dine with our probably second-greatest newspaper alumnus of all time. The only greater one then living, as Vonnegut admitted himself, was a few years ahead of him at Cornell:
The most distinguished living writer who was also a Sun man is, of course, Elwyn Brooks White of the class of 1921. He will be eighty-one on July eleventh of this year. You might want to send him a card. His mind is as clear as a bell, and he is not only sentimental about dogs but about Cornell.
E.B., of course, went on from Ithaca to have a few things to say about writing, from SOME PIG to The Elements of Style. He also stayed long enough to take his degree from the same diploma mill I did- unlike Vonnegut, who told us this:
I remember, during my sophomore year here, when a world traveler said that Cornell was the forty-ninth greatest university in the world. I had hoped we would at least be in the high teens somewhere. Little did I realize that going to an only marginally great university would also make me a writer. That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time. I spent an awful lot of time here buying gray flannel. I never could find the right shade. I finally gave up on gray flannel entirely, and went to the University of Chicago, the forty-eighth greatest university in the world.
I never shared his experience of war, or his literary talent, but the sentiments he expressed at the end of the piece are entirely common to him and me- and many others who remain friends of mine forty years after we graduated and 41 after we heard this:
We on the Sun were already in the midst of real life. By God, if we weren’t! We had just designed and written and caused to be manufactured yet another morning newspaper for a highly intelligent American community of respectable size—yes, and not during the Harding administration, either, but during 1940, ’41, and ’42, with the Great Depression ending, and with World War Two well begun. I am an agnostic as some of you may have gleaned from my writings. But I have to tell you that, as I trudged up the hill so late at night and all alone, I knew that God Almighty approved of me.
One of those friends from back then saw my post and shared words from the man I had never before heard about. He was one of the higher-up editors who had inquired as to the author's availability for that year's centennial banquet, and he received this in response:
I hadn't even heard the story behind it before, much less seen the actual note, and replied to the sight of it with my hope that his wife and children had all been entrusted with the combination to the safe he damn better be keeping it in. Another editor of the day commented that he hoped the envelope had also been preserved; he had seen it before, and remembered that the envelope looked like he'd written it out in crayon and that the business office almost threw it away.
The "Cayuga Inn" reference reminded me of the one dark side of that event. This venue was a lakeside fancy-dress place several miles up one of the other Hills which surround downtown Ithaca, and it had hosted this annual banquet with somewhat less lumniscence for my entire time on the paper. I remember one of the other senior editors having pre-ordered a vegan entree and the proprietors "fulfilling" it with a scoop of cottage cheese dumped on a bed of iceberg. I also remember someone from the paper pointing out to the management that this was an unacceptable way to treat a building full of soon to be former customers. But my final memory came a few years later, when I drove up State Route 89 to go back home, and saw the place had burned to the ground, never to be rebuilt. Apparently cottage cheese is a powerful accelerant.
Vonnegut would return a quarter century later to honor The Sun's having gone around itself another 25 times since that original visit. I was not at that occasion; somewhere around here I have a DVD of the speech, but who cares where it is because it is generally viewable on the Tubeything. He passed away within a couple of years of that appearance, and those are not the words I remember him by as much as those short sentences encapsulating our short and frequent post-midnight trudges up that other hill.
Well, those words and Slaughterhouse-Five, which I really ought to get out from the library.
----
On the subject of odd envelopes, I came home today to find a particularly strange one.
We get other peoples' mail misdelivered to our house all the time. Mostly it's people on our street, or a grandma misaddressing a birthday card to a little one. Today, though? An envelope from the Canadah, addressed to a name I knew and who could only be the one I knew. He's a near-original Sabre and a member of the team's Hall of Fame. I vaguely knew where the street was, in our zip code but a few major cross-streets over. The house is actually right next door to the home of a guy who I chased after unsuccessfully for a client for the better part of three years before the client finally gave up on it.
Further proving the hockey connection, the return address on the envelope was from a town in Nova Scotia. On a street called Jollytown Road. This is a real thing.
No way was I trusting this to the post office to misdeliver again. We ordered pizza from a beloved restaurant more than halfway to the Hockeytown portion of Amherst, so I kept going and found his home. I wanted to bask in a bit of past Sabre glory, there still not being much of it in the present ::checks score, hmmmm....::- and maybe get an autograph or selfie oot of the deal.
Alas, a light was on, but nobody was home. And my phone was near dead anyway, so the selfie would've been a lost cause. Which, for the Sabres, is perfectly appropriate ::checks score again::
Oh my. Maybe he wasn't home because they put him back out on the ice;)