"The Birth of an Extra Edition" is a short piece written for the collection A Century at Cornell, published in 1980 and edited by Daniel Margulis. It was republished on the website of the Cornell Daily Sun shortly after Vonnegut's death in 2007.[1]
Summary[]
Drew Pearson, 1967
Vonnegut attended Cornell because his Uncle Tony, Class of '06 "or thereabouts", was an excellent quarter-mile runner while there. Because his father said he could only go to college if he studied something useful, Vonnegut set out to be a chemist, which "annoyed and bored" him since he had no talent for it. By the time he left in his junior year to become a private in the infantry, he was failing all his classes and was glad to leave. Were it not for the war, he would have surely been thrown out of the school. The only thing he liked about Cornell was working on the newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. Since all his fraternity brothers were engineers, the Sun was his only contact with the liberal arts.
While he was night editor, news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor came while he was sitting in a bathtub. Vonnegut rushed to the office where the staff laid out a new first and last page, keeping the rest intact. Taking whatever came from the Associated Press, they expected to have an extra as the first paper in the state of New York reporting the bombing. However, immediately after receiving a telegram from Drew Pearson listing all the ships that were sunk, a second followed from the Department of War. It stated that while they could not prevent the Sun from publishing whatever it pleased, it asked them as patriots to suppress Pearson's information. They did. Vonnegut wonders now if they were wrong.[2]
- ↑ "Kurt Vonnegut's Days at the 'Cornell Sun' -- And The Great Pearl Harbor Controversy", Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher.
- ↑ "The Birth of an Extra Edition", A Century at Cornell, Daniel Margulis, ed., 1980, pg. 66.