Hocus Pocus

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Judging from letters to The Musketeer, I think the change that generated the most passionate resistance was the modernization of the Lutz Carillon soon after World War II, a memorial to Ernest Hubble Hiscock. He was a Tarkington graduate who at the age of 21 was a nose-gunner on a Navy bomber whose pilot crashed his plane with a full load of bombs onto the flight deck of a Japanese aircraft carrier in the Battle of Midway during World War II. I would have given anything to die in a war that meaningful. ME? I WAS in show business, trying to get a big audience for the Government on TV by killing real people with live ammunition, something the other advertisers were not free to do. The other advertisers had to fake everything. Oddly enough, the actors always turned out to be a lot more believable on the little screen than we were. Real people in real trouble don’t come across, somehow. THERE IS STILL so much we have to learn about TV!