Dave Wood

That would be the popular satirist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who burst onto the literary scene in the 1960s when I was a grad school studying American fiction. Vonnegut broke all sorts of literary molds that appealed to the maverick in many of us, tired of required reading of long tedious Victorian novels. Vonnegut was short, snappy, well-aware of the midwestern vernacular and master of outrageous and unapologetic irony. What rebellious young scholar could forget characters like Montana Wildhack in “Cat’s Cradle,” philanthropist Elliot Rosewater, who doled out his fortune ONLY to underserving recipients like Diana Moon Glampers, who lived in constant fear of being struck by lightning in her “kidleys.”

While some meeklings like me stuck to conventional topics like 18^th century British Drama, my clever pal David Goldsmith wrote a doctoral dissertation that received national attention: “Kurt Vonnegut: Fantasist of Fire and Ice,” a catchy title that emanated from Vonnegut’s WWII experience as a prisoner of war who was locked up in a refrigerator unit in Dresden and managed to survive its fire-bombing.

Little did I realize that I would become acquainted with the author himself. My enthusiasm for this Indiana author was rewarded by several chance encounters with the author of “Slaughterhouse-Five” and more than a dozen other novels.

Chance? You bet! When I finally escaped from grad school, I found a job teaching at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., where its English department had a budget that allowed them to pay famous authors to come and press the flesh with academic peons and wide-eyed students. That year’s guest was Vonnegut, who grew up in Indianapolis, 40 miles from Muncie, Vonnegut’s setting for “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Or Pearls Before Swine.” A town where “Carp as big as nuclear submarines lurked in the muddy waters of the muddy river that flowed through town.” I still haven’t figured out what the department’s muckamucks thought would happen when this take-no-prisoners satirist was cut loose on a student body whose most famous student was David Letterman. What did happen? Nothing very pretty, I can assure you. After he found enough jug wine to make most folks merry, one prof came up and introduced himself as “The Department’s sci-fi specialist,” making reference to Vonnegut’s “Sirens of Titan,” an early novel different from any of his other efforts. “Really?” replied Vonnegut, who found a sofa and laid down and fell asleep.

It should be noted that the following year, the departmental muckamucks chose as guest writer Jessamyn West, an aging Quaker novelist, author of “Friendly Persuasion” and a cousin of Richard Nixon.

Nor was I asked back to Ball State the following year. I ended up at tiny and kindly Augsburg College in Minneapolis, where I befriended a cellmate, Dr. Douglas Ollila, a popular religion prof who one day reminisced about his years as a grad student at Union Seminary. “Every morning I commuted in from a far-off suburb and befriended a guy named Vonnegut who was working as a copywriter at General Electric and hating every minute. Said he was trying to write a novel.  Wonder if he ever got it finished….”

The next morning, I slipped my well-worn copy of “Mother Night,” Vonnegut’s tale of  a character who works as a double agent posing as a propaganda copy writer for Joseph Goebbels.  Hilarious.

After a decade at Augsburg, I became the book editor at The Minneapolis Tribune, which found me in Las Vegas at a bookseller’s convention. Vonnegut’s publisher had just released his latest and I was invited to a gala luncheon where I found my seat right next to Guess Who? We chatted about Muncie, (Indianapolis, Ball State, he didn’t remember much about that). Finally, it was his turn to speak. He arose holding a copy of the publisher’s catalog.

“I asked the publisher what he wanted me to say,” Vonnegut said. “’Just something you are proud to have written’. So here goes.”

He read the blurb he had written summarizing his new book in the new catalog! I read the book and found that Vonnegut’s blurb was better than the new novel! SO, as this Hoosier, satire master would often write, IT GOES.