"Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

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 300 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 Moelhenkamps for all the college had managed to do for offspring of theirs whom conven-
tional colleges had deemed ineducable. Most were unrelated to the Moehlenkamps 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
Tarkinglon. 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?” transmogrifled into the alma mater of this campus
until it became a penitentiary 2 years ago.