I Alphabetized All The Jailed Authors At The Kurt Vonnegut Museum

I really fell down on exposing the kids to modern American literature in high school (although my coverage of esoteric ancient texts, gothic horror, and Greek mythology was exceptional, ahem), up to and including neglecting to have them read anything by our very own local son, Kurt Vonnegut.

Even more of a shame, because they would have loved Cat's Cradle, for instance, and Slaughterhouse-Five would have been an excellent supplement to a World War II study. Although only the older kid really dipped back into modern history in high school (we studied modern history very extensively in middle school, so the younger kid still knows about Hitler and AIDS and the Berlin Wall and all the important stuff!), and she still jokes about our "fun Mommy/daughter" date with popcorn and cookies and hot chocolate... and Schindler's List, yikes. I'll be minding my own business cross-stitching on the couch, and suddenly she'll be all, "Hey, remember that time we watched that heartwarming drama about found family in beautiful, war-torn Poland? I'm definitely not still traumatized!"

Sorry, I guess, but being traumatized by Schindler's List is how you know you're not a sociopath!

Anyway, the kids and I were BIG field trippers, so the only way I hadn't visited the Kurt Vonnegut Museum in Indianapolis before was that I fell down on my duty to provide my children with their full component of modern literature to study.

However, both my partner and I, for various reasons, read plenty of Kurt Vonnegut for our sins while we were in college, and so a few weeks ago we took ourselves on our own field trip to the museum.

I do think this museum is best appreciated if you're familiar with at least some of Vonnegut's work, so it was well-suited for our own little Saturday morning date of wandering around and reading labels and looking at interesting stuff. And there's an extra fun looky-loo aspect when you're both local!

As in, I am OBVIOUSLY going to drive by these houses!

Because I'm literally that nosy I also spent a bit of time trying to figure out where Kurt Vonnegut Sr. moved to in his final years, since the place was apparently just the next county over from me, and thus even more driveable for my looky-loo nosy self, but everything in Brown County is so middle-of-the-woods and also middle-of-nowhere that I couldn't work it out.

Oh, well, current residents of the house that Kurt Vonnegut Sr. lived in at the end of his life, you can mark yourselves safe from me driving slowly past your home and gawping... at least for now.

There weren't a ton of personal artifacts of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s own, but there were a few precious and interesting objects:

I WOULD like to show the kids that course schedule! They go through agonies each semester getting their schedules finalized, and somehow they always manage to make it my problem, too. One kid's school has them register in waves, so you get a Round 1, from which you're guaranteed to get at least two of your four picks but you probably won't get all of them, and then by the time Round 2 rolls around all the good classes are full. The other kid's school lets them put their complete schedule into a "shopping cart," and then they run a lottery for every class that's overenrolled, so she'll be minding her own business trying to study for finals and get an email telling her that she lost the lottery for her most-anticipated class and so got dropped from it, and then three days later she'll get an email saying she was dropped from her next most-anticipated class, and she'll have to wait until the day before classes actually start next semester to scramble for open classes with the other unlucky kids.

When their dad and I were in college, we stood in line to meet with the registrar, and during that meeting we worked out every single aspect of our schedule, alternate classes and all, so that when we walked out fifteen minutes later we, just like Kurt Vonnegut Jr. up there, had our final schedule in our hands. IT WAS FAR SUPERIOR!

I thought this was an interesting display, in that it makes overt a gap in our understanding of Vonnegut's life, caused by the fact that nobody was taking photos of the help:

It's sort of like those who did the real labor of keeping house and caring for the children are the equivalent of ephemera, utilitarian and constant on a day-to-day level, but rarely valued enough to keep. It's crazy how quickly knowledge is lost when it's not carefully preserved.

A large part of the museum was devoted to the Dresden bombing and Slaughterhouse-Five:

This is the most viscerally upsetting of Vonnegut's novels, and I'd been prepared to see upsetting images and displays, but it was pretty visually gentle. I think this was the only actual artifact--

--although many of Vonnegut's quotes were highlighted:

I'm impressed with Vonnegut's processing of his war-related trauma, and I wonder what combination of his personal characteristics made him able to do that? My Pappa very rarely spoke about his part in the war, until he finally grew so old that I guess the memories eventually lost some of their bite and he was able to relate some very disturbing stories that I'd never heard before. Even with everything that he wrote, I wonder if Vonnegut also had war stories so disturbing that he never told them?

Here was another good artifact--evidence of a writer's life!

The museum has also recreated Vonnegut's habitual writing set-up, in case you, too, want to try your hand at the most ergonomically incorrect situation possible. Dude wrote in a low-slung easy chair pulled up next to an honest-to-god coffee table that had his typewriter sitting on it! You'd write your ass off just for the pleasure of getting up and stretching your spine out once you hit your word count!

I really like it when writers are Virginia Woof's idea of "writers-of-all-trades," so I thought it was interesting to see that Vonnegut also turned his mind towards song lyrics at least once, as well as writing an exceptionally charming note to the singers:

My search for that song led me down a rabbit trail of discovery, and I'm delight to tell you that Vonnegut himself recorded versions of some of his books on genuine vinyl record albums, and those albums are now on Spotify!

This introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five, read by the author, is absolutely brilliant:

Is his authorial voice exactly how he spoke, or did he read his work so wonderfully that it feels like he was simply speaking it impromptu?

Spotify also has this exact album whose cover I photographed because it cracked me up:

Vonnegut SINGS on this album!

My latest Spotify Wrapped was messed up because I sometimes listen to podcasts in the middle of the night to help me fall back asleep, and then those podcasts just keep playing softly under my pillow for the next four hours. So excuse me for a few moments while I go make myself a Kurt Vonnegut playlist for future bouts of insomnia...

Other large parts of the museum were focused on the importance of the arts--

I should make a quilt that has a favorite book quote on it, because this is beautiful!

--and on the issue of banned books. As part of that exhibit, I think, or at least tangential to it, was my favorite display in the museum, this one on authors who have been jailed:

I should probably confess that these books were not arranged alpha by author, with their spines tidily aligned with the edge of the shelf, when I arrived... but they were when I left!

The display was really cleverly created by putting the information about each author's jail experience on a bookmark in that book, and I read every. Single. One! They were also hilariously non-discriminating about circumstance. Authors who were wrongly jailed for things that shouldn't have been crimes, like Oscar Wilde, Nelson Mandela, and Daniel Defoe--

--were right up in there with authors who full-on murdered people!?!

Okay, I looked this up, and it's pretty crazy. The murder of Honorah Parker sounds devastating, and I can't imagine what it would have been like at the time, knowing that a couple of teenaged girls brutally murdered one of their perfectly nice and perfectly normal mothers like it was nothing. People only found out about Anne Perry's history because Peter Jackson made a movie version of it which got journalists interested in finding out what happened to the murderers. It seems like both women did their jail time, were rehabilitated, and led solitary and upstanding lives afterwards. A career writing murder mysteries is a choice, but I guess your brain wants to write what your brain wants to write. 

Anyway, that information was so wild that afterwards my partner and I had to go and eat Korean barbeque about it:

And yes, I DID just request a few of Anne Perry's Christmas mysteries from my local public library. Just because I've smashed my 2025 reading goal (108 books read of my goal of 104!) doesn't mean that I can't still get festive!

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One More Site To Go Until I Earn Wilbear Wright

Local, independent museums are always so delightfully surprising and strange.

As in, I never would have told you that when I planned to hit up Butler County Warbirds, part of the Dayton Aviation Trail, early on a Saturday morning, I would also be visiting one of the best, most interesting, and absolutely most surprising private collections of World War II memorabilia.

But there we have it!

The primary goal of Butler County Warbirds is to preserve, protect, and restore its collection of antique planes and equipment, but the founder also made a small museum out of his own personal collection of military memorabilia, padded out with donations and loans from other collectors. The display is my favorite kind of intense--as in, there's a LOT of stuff, and a lot of it is the kind of everyday item or ephemera that it's more unusual to have had preserved for our present-day benefit. 

World War I gas mask

I remember this one from when the kids and I studied World War I. We engaged in trench warfare and listened to rousing tunes on Spotify!

A newspaper is usually a great example of ephemera you wouldn't normally see preserved, but people actually often saved entire newspapers when there was a big headline. It doesn't make it any less interesting to see, though!

The displays are well-organized chronologically and by theme, but one place where there's room for a research-minded volunteer to contribute is in explanation of provenance, meaning, and context. The volunteer docents had excellent general knowledge but weren't able to speak about specific pieces, so I had to martial my patience and bide my time until I could look everything up at home, ahem.

For instance, check out this INSANE KNIFE!!!

Have you ever seen anything more baller outside of a movie? It's apparently a Skull and Cobra Fighting Knife, and in my enthusiasm I just happened to take a photo that shows that it's also the even rarer "pig nose" variant, so probably made for a Marine with a blade repurposed from another knife. It's interesting that soldiers wanted fighting knives enough to make them for each other when they weren't being issued, but now I'm curious to know if soldiers were really out there knife fighting each other during World War II or what?

I thought it was cool to see a real syringe, but I wish I knew whose Purple Heart that was...

My partner and I had just seen some other examples of painted flying jackets when we were at the National Museum of the Air Force, but I love that this display has several of the pilot's things together:

This display was also pretty wild. The caption for this armband reads "JEWISH ARMBAND VILIJAMPOLE GHETTO":

That location is particularly notable because there was a well-documented underground resistance movement there, but over a year before the end of the war that ghetto was emptied and everyone who lived there was sent to be murdered in concentration camps. 

This page from the Zekelman Holocaust Center has examples of the typical badges that Jews were required to wear in different regions. The one in the photo matches the first example. I'm curious about the stamps on the badge in the photo, though. I've seen stamps on other badges, but I've never learned who did them or why.

Here's another amazing, and also baffling, artifact:

Its caption reads just "CONCENTRATION CAMP ARM BAND JEWISH HOMOSEXUAL," and I have so many questions! Obviously, I want to know where it came from, who wore it, what concentration camp they were confined in, and what happened to them. I'm also curious about how atypical the badge is:

People normally had to make their badges themselves, or obtain them from someone else who had handmade them, and this one is beautifully done. But it doesn't seem to be how they were technically meant to look, and I can't find another one like it. The closest comparison is here, interestingly also part of a private collection.

It's almost physically painful to look at it and not know who had to wear it and what happened to them, much less what happened afterwards that led it to a display case in a tiny museum in Ohio. 

After the Butler County Warbirds--and its Dayton Aviation Trail stamp!--we went to Wright "B" Flyer, Inc., another small non-profit that makes and flies recreations of the Wright airplanes. 

We got to actually climb up and sit inside a working recreation of the Wright B Flyer--

--and an actual Model T, including honking the ooga horn--

--and check out another modernized version of the Wright B Flyer that's still in progress. At this point, I think we've encountered 50 Wright Flyer images, models, and recreations!

Here's a good video that shows what the organization does. Pay a lot of attention to that good footage of wing warping--that's the Wright brothers' biggest innovation!

At some point while touring the Butler County Warbirds planes with two docents, I asked about how people were able to fly these DIY and kit-built literal airplanes. Was the FAA not... concerned? That's when I learned that there is literally such a designation as "experimental airplane," and yes, you CAN get the FAA to come to your backyard shed and certify your experimental airplane so you can tool it around unmonitored airfields!

Y'all. I think I found my mid-life crisis.

My other mid-life crisis plan is to buy land that has genuine prehistoric Native mounds on it and then, just, I don't know... roll around on all my mounds, I guess. While preserving and protecting them, of course.

So obviously, after all this airplane content, we had to 1) pick up Raising Cane's chicken (my favorite fast food place because the menu is so manageable, so PLEASE do not tell me who the company's owners donate money to or what other atrocities they've committed because I promise you I am boycotting enough businesses at it is) and 2) take it to the nearby Miamisburg Mound to eat it:

I did not realize it until we got there, but you can also CLIMB the mound!

So we did!

I find it frustrating when a mound like this doesn't seem to have been professionally studied in contemporary times (this excavation in the 1800s doesn't count, because they're also talking about how the mound definitely contained Nephilim skeletons, sigh), but I'm also horrified whenever I learn that a mound has been taken apart and then put back together just so people can see what's inside, so I guess there's no pleasing me.

When I buy my property with mounds on it, you're not even going to so much as look at them while you've got a garden shovel in your hand or I swear to God I'll bite you.

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Three More Sites To Go Until I Earn Wilbear Wright

 I will never get over how weird it is to say that the National Museum of the United States Air Force is the most underrated museum I've ever visited.

I've been there twice now, and I still haven't seen half the museum.

I was told before I visited the first time that it's better than the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, and it IS.

I guess if you're the US Air Force, you've had a good, long while to collect some cool stuff!

What's even better is that the museum actually hosts TWO Dayton Aviation Trail stamps, as they treat the Aviation Hall of Fame inside the museum as a separate site. So my partner and I dutifully saw more early flight exhibitions and Wright flyer reproductions (I think we're up to about 20 at this point, and we'll have hit at least 40 before we're through)--

--and then before you know it, the Wright brothers have their plane business up and running and it's time for World War 1!

Check out Snoopy's plane:

I really like how colorful planes got to be before they were standardized:

I had to text my kids when I came across this poem on display:

I knew I'd required one kid to memorize that poem while the other kid had to memorize Dulce et Decorum Est, but which was which?

It was this one, and she still remembers it!

Fun fact: the big kid had actually had a choice between memorizing "Dulce et Decorum Est" and "Boots," but she thought "Boots" was too scary and she liked shouting "GAS! GAS!" in "Dulce et Decorum Est." 

The museum moves chronologically into World War 2--

logbook from the only American pilot killed in action during the Battle of Britain

--and then the Cold War:

the Mark 6 was the first mass-produced nuclear weapon

I'm so interested in all the Cold War spy stuff, all the normal bits and bobs of luggage with their secret compartments full of mysteries.

Yet another nuclear bomb, because I guess why not keep upgrading them until you're quite sure you can blow the entire planet to smithereens?

Mark 7 nuclear bomb, first produced in 1952

The last years of the Cold War are when my partner and I were impressionable kids, and so, of course, we both have our favorite planes from that time. Mine is the SR-71 Blackbird:

--but because he's a bad boy, I guess, his is the MiG:

But we both have the same favorite Desert Storm plane, the F-117 Nighthawk!

We only had time for a couple of exhibit galleries before we really needed to get back on the road (college move-out appointments do not wait for parents who are distracted by sightseeing!), but on the way out I did spy this cool exhibit of women's flight suits. Yay for strong female role models!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!