Hocus Pocus (3 page)

Yes, and we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays:

 

 

I HAVE DISCOVERED from reading old newspapers and letters and diaries from back then that the men who built the machines for Elias Tarkington knew from the first that they would never work, whatever the reason. Yet what love they lavished on the materials that comprised them! How is this for a definition of high art: “Making the most of the raw materials of futility”?

 

 

STILL ANOTHER PERPETUAL-MOTION machine envisioned by Elias Tarkington was what his Last Will and Testament called “The Mohiga Valley Free Institute.” Upon his death, this new school would take possession of his 3,000-hectare estate above Scipio, plus half the shares in the wagon company, the carpet company, and the brewery. The other half was already owned by his sisters far away. On his deathbed he predicted that Scipio would 1 day be a great metropolis and that its wealth would transform his little college into a university to rival Harvard and Oxford and Heidelberg.

It was to offer a free college education to persons of either sex, and of any age or race or religion, living within 40 miles of Scipio. Those from farther away would pay a modest fee. In the beginning, it would have only 1 full-time employee, the President. The teachers would be recruited right here in Scipio. They would take a few hours off from work each week, to teach what they knew. The chief engineer at the wagon company, for example, whose name was André Lutz, was a native of Liege, Belgium, and had served as an apprentice to a bell founder there. He would teach Chemistry. His French wife would teach French and Watercolor Painting. The brewmaster at the brewery, Hermann Shultz, a native of Leipzig, would teach Botany and German and the flute. The Episcopalian priest, Dr. Alan Clewes, a graduate of Harvard, would teach Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and the Bible. The dying man’s physician, Dalton Polk, would teach Biology and Shakespeare, and so on.

And it came to pass.

In 1869 the new college enrolled its first class, 9 students in all, and all from right here in Scipio. Four were of ordinary college age. One was a Union veteran who had lost his legs at Shiloh. One was a former black slave 40 years old. One was a spinster 82 years old.

 

 

THE FIRST PRESIDENT was only 26 years old, a schoolteacher from Athena, 2 kilometers by water from Scipio. There was no prison over there back then, but only a slate quarry and a sawmill and a few subsistence farms. His name was John Peck. He was a cousin of the Tarkingtons’. His branch of the family, however, was and remains unhampered by dyslexia. He has numerous descendants in the present day, 1 of whom, in fact, is a speech writer for the Vice-President of the United States.

Young John Peck and his wife and 2 children and his mother-in-law arrived at Scipio by rowboat, with Peck and his wife at the oars, their children seated in the stern, arid their luggage and the mother-in-law in another boat they towed behind.

They took up residence on the third floor of what had been Elias Tarkington’s mansion. The rooms on the first 2 floors would be classrooms, a library, which was already a library with 280 volumes collected by the Tarkingtons, study halls, and a dining room. Many treasures from the past were taken up to the attic to make room for the new activities. Among these were the failed perpetual-motion machines. They would gather dust and cobwebs until 1978, when I found them up there, and realized what they were, and brought them down the stairs again.

 

 

ONE WEEK BEFORE the first class was held, which was in Latin, taught by the Episcopalian priest Alan Clewes, André Lutz the Belgian arrived at the mansion with 3 wagons carrying a very heavy cargo, a carillon consisting of 32 bells. He had cast them on his own time and at his own expense in the wagon factory’s foundry. They were made from mingled Union and Confederate rifle barrels and cannonballs and bayonets gathered up after the Battle of Gettysburg. They were the first bells and surely the last bells ever to be cast in Scipio.

Nothing, in my opinion, will ever again be cast in Scipio. No industrial arts of any sort will ever again be practiced here.

 

ANDRÉ LUTZ GAVE the new college all those bells, even though there was no place to hang them. He said he did it because he was so sure that it would 1 day be a great university with a bell tower and everything. He was dying of emphysema as a result of the fumes from molten metals that he had been breathing since he was 10 years old. He had no time to wait for a place to hang the most wonderful consequence of his having been alive for a little while, which was all those bells, bells, bells.

They were no surprise. They had been 18 months in the making. The founders whose work he supervised had shared his dreams of immortality as they made things as impractical and beautiful as bells, bells, bells.

So all the bells but 1 from a middle octave were slathered with grease to prevent their rusting and stored in 4 ranks in the estate’s great barn, 200 meters from the mansion. The 1 bell that was going to get to sing at once was installed in the cupola of the mansion, with its rope running all the way down to the first floor. It would call people to classes and, if need be, also serve as a fire alarm.

The rest of the bells, it turned out, would slumber in the loft for 30 years, until 1899, when they were hanged as a family, the 1 from the cupola included, on axles in the belfry of the tower of a splendid library given to the school by the Moellenkamp family of Cleveland.

The Moellenkamps were also Tarkingtons, since the founder of their fortune had married a daughter of the illiterate Aaron Tarkington. Eleven of them so far had been dyslexic, and they had all gone to college in Scipio, since no other institution of higher learning would take them in.

THE FIRST MOELLENKAMP to graduate from here was Henry, who enrolled in 1875, when he was 19, and when the school was only 6 years old. It was at that time that its name was changed to Tarkington College. I have found the crumbling minutes of the Board of Trustees meeting at which that name change was made. Three of the 6 trustees were men who had married daughters of Aaron Tarkington, 1 of them the grandfather of Henry Moellenkamp. The other 3 trustees were the Mayor of Scipio, and a lawyer who looked after the Tarkington daughters’ interests in the valley, and the area Congressman, who was surely the sisters’ faithful servant, too, since they were partners with the college in his district’s most important industries.

And according to the minutes, which fell apart in my hands as I read them, it was the grandfather of young Henry Moellenkamp who proposed the name change, saying that “The Mohiga Valley Free Institute” sounded too much like a poorhouse or a hospital. It is my guess that he would not have minded having the place sound like a catchment for the poor, if only he had not suffered the misfortune of having his own grandson go there.

 

 

IT WAS IN that same year, 1875, that work began across the lake from Scipio, on a hilltop above Athena, on a prison camp for young criminals from big-city slums. It was believed that fresh air and the wonders of Nature would improve their souls and bodies to the point that they would find it natural to be good citizens.

 

 

WHEN I CAME to work at Tarkington, there were only 30C students, a number that hadn’t changed for 50 years. But the rustic work-camp across the lake had become a brutal fortress of iron and masonry on a naked hilltop, the New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Institution at Athena, keeping 5,000 of the state’s worst criminals under lock and key.

Two years ago, Tarkington still had only 300 students, but the population of the prison, under hideously overcrowded conditions, had grown to 10,000. And then, 1 cold winter’s night, it became the scene of the biggest prison break in American history. Until then, nobody had ever escaped from Athena.

Suddenly, everybody was free to leave, and to take a weapon from the prison armory, too, if he had use for 1. The lake between the prison and the little college was frozen solid, as easily traversed as the parking lot of a great shopping mall.

What next?

 

 

YES, AND BY the time André Lutz’s bells were at last made to sing as a carillon, Tarkington College had not only a new library but luxurious dormitories, a science building, an art building, a chapel, a theater, a dining hall, an administration building, 2 new buildings of classrooms, and athletic facilities that were the envy of the institutions with which it had begun to compete in track and fencing and swimming and baseball, which were Hobart, the University of Rochester, Cornell, Union, Amherst, and Bucknell.

These structures bore the names of wealthy families as grateful as the Moellenkamps for all the college had managed to do for offspring of theirs whom conventional colleges had deemed ineducable. Most were unrelated to the Moellenkamps or to anyone who carried the Tarkington gene of dyslexia. Nor were the young they sent to Tarkington necessarily troubled by dyslexia. All sorts of different things were wrong with them, including an inability to write legibly with pen and ink, although what they tried to write down made perfect sense, and stammering so severe as to prevent their saying a word in class, and petit mal, which caused their minds to go perfectly blank for seconds or minutes anywhere, anytime, and so on.

It was simply the Moellenkamps who first challenged the new little college to do what it could for a seemingly hopeless case of plutocratic juvenile incapacity, namely Henry. Not only would Henry graduate with honors from Tarkington. He would go on to Oxford, taking with him a male companion who read aloud to him and wrote down thoughts Henry could only express orally. Henry would become 1 of the most brilliant speakers in a golden age of American purple, bow-wow oratory, and serve as a Congressman and then a United States Senator from Ohio for 36 years.

 

 

THAT SAME HENRY Moellenkamp was author of the lyrics to one of the most popular turn-of-the-century ballads, “Mary, Mary, Where Have You Gone?”

The melody of that ballad was composed by Henry’s friend Paul Dresser, brother of the novelist Theodore Dreiser. This was 1 of the rare instances in which Dresser set another man’s words to music instead of his own. And then Henry appropriated that tune and wrote, or rather dictated, new words which sentimentalized student life in this valley.

Thus was “Mary, Mary, Where Have You Gone?” transmogrified into the alma mater of this campus until it became a penitentiary 2 years ago.

History.

 

 

ACCIDENT AFTER ACCIDENT has made Tarkington what it is today. Who would dare to predict what it will be in 2021, only 20 years from now? The 2 prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.

As the tag line of my favorite dirty joke would have it: “Keep your hat on. We could wind up miles from here.”

 

 

IF HENRY MOELLENKAMP had not come out of his mother’s womb dyslexic, Tarkington College wouldn’t even have been called Tarkington College. It would have gone on being The Mohiga Valley Free Institute, which would have died right along with the wagon factory and the carpet factory and the brewery when the railroads and highways connecting the East and West were built far to the north and south of Scipio—so as not to bridge the lake, so as not to have to penetrate the deep and dark virgin hardwood forest, now the Iroquois National Forest, to the east and south of here.

 

 

IF HENRY MOELLENKAMP hadn’t come out of his mother’s womb dyslexic, and if that mother hadn’t been a Tarkington and so known about the little college on Lake Mohiga, this library would never have been built and filled with 800,000 bound volumes. When I was a professor here, that was 70,000 more bound volumes than Swarthmore College had! Among small colleges, this library used to be second only to the 1 at Oberlin, which had 1,000,000 bound volumes.

So what is this structure in which I sit now, thanks to Time and Luck? It is nothing less, friends and neighbors, than the greatest prison library in the history of crime and punishment!

It is very lonely in here. Hello? Hello?

 

I MIGHT HAVE said the same sort of thing back when this was an 800,000-bound-volume college library: “It is very lonely in here. Hello? Hello?”

 

 

I HAVE JUST looked up Harvard University. It has 13,000,000 bound volumes now. What a read!

And almost every book written for or about the ruling class.

 

 

IF HENRY MOELLENKAMP hadn’t come out of his mother’s womb dyslexic, there would never have been a tower in which to hang the Lutz Carillon.

Those bells might never have gotten to reverberate in the valley or anywhere. They probably would have been melted up and made back into weapons during World War I.

 

 

IF HENRY MOELLENKAMP had not come out of his mother’s womb dyslexic, these heights above Scipio might have been all darkness on the cold winter night 2 years ago, with Lake Mohiga frozen hard as a parking lot, when 10,000 prisoners at Athena were suddenly set free.

Instead, there was a little galaxy of beckoning lights up here.

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REGARDLESS OF WHETHER Henry Moellenkamp came out of his mother’s womb dyslexic or not, I was born in Wilmington, Delaware, 18 months before this country joined the fighting in World War II. I have not seen Wilmington since. That is where they keep my birth certificate. I was the only child of a housewife and, as I’ve said, a chemical engineer. My father was then employed by E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Company, a manufacturer of high explosives, among other things.