Kurt Vonnegut’s Little-Known Carnegie Mellon Connection
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“Then you’ll do it brilliantly, darling. You’ll get to Pittsburgh yet.” ― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., "Player Piano"
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. took the stage in Pittsburgh to crescendoing applause on Nov. 17, 1971. Inside the freshly unveiled Heinz Hall, adorned with plush red velvet accents and tall marble columns, the renowned American author began his address to the International Poetry Forum by reciting one.
“This poem is not original with me, but what interested me about it was that after I speak it tonight, it will probably never be heard in the universe again. Incidentally, it’s one of the three poems I know by heart,” Vonnegut said.
“Dear Old Tech, Carnegie Tech … ” he started.
Recording courtesy International Poetry Forum/Carlow University(opens in new window)
Applause and laughs sound out from members of the audience quick to understand Vonnegut’s game. He proceeded to read the rest:
“You're the best of all the schools I ever knew.
Dear old Tech — Carnegie Tech,
Where every fellow is true blue,
When I go a-strolling out through Schenley,
Tech's the only place to catch my eye,
And when I'm far away from Pittsburgh,
I'll remember you, Tech, till I die.”
What made the school cheer so memorable to Vonnegut, that for decades he’d be able to recite it by heart?
In the summer of 1943, the Carnegie Institute of Technology(opens in new window), precursor to Carnegie Mellon University, transformed its grounds into a training school for the U.S. Army as America ramped up its engagement in World War II. Obscure among the thousand-plus young men taking engineering courses while preparing to enter the conflict, Vonnegut would go on to become one of America’s great writers. His prolific work, which drew upon his time in Pittsburgh, would influence literary and robotics research at the university for decades to come.
Special training at Carnegie Tech
Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis on Nov. 11, 1922. After graduating from high school in 1940, he studied at Cornell University until dropping out his junior year. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in November 1942.
A month later, on Dec. 12, 1942, The U.S. War Department announced the formation of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). The Carnegie Institute of Technology was among its member universities.
In an open letter to soldiers under consideration for the program, Col. Herman Beukema, the director of the ASTP, outlined the goals of the program:
“In 1775, raw courage, a musket, and the ability to use it were considered enough to qualify a man as a defender of his country. Today’s soldier needs everything that Washington’s veterans of Yorktown could boast — plus vastly more training and equipment. Rapid advance in the mechanization of armies has multiplied the demands made on our modern soldier and the standards established for him … Two out of every three men in uniform today are specialists in one field or another. In many lines there have been serious shortages. The Army Specialized Training Program is designed to fill this gap.”
From life-saving medical devices to next-gen AI to performances that encapsulate the human experience, Carnegie Mellon University’s legacy can be found in every corner of the globe and in every part of our daily lives. Made possible by a longstanding commitment to innovation, collaboration and creativity and a willingness to embrace the power of possibilities, CMU’s milestones have brought the world to where it is today.
The WWII Army Specialized Training Program at Carnegie Tech
As Carnegie Mellon looks back at its 125-year history, files from the University Archives detail the transformation of campus into a World War II training school.
Student-soldier
An ASTP training roster dated Nov. 24, 1943, is the only mention of Vonnegut’s name inside the Carnegie Mellon University Archives(opens in new window)' ASTP records.
In alphabetical order, between Daniel W. Von Hagen and Richard E. Voris at the very end of the V section, appears: Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. Adjacent to his name it reads: B42. This designates that Vonnegut was a member of B company, section 42.
Vonnegut's name also appears in the 1942-46 Student Directory, which is kept separate from the ASTP files.
The entry shows that Vonnegut resided in Welch Hall, which is now called Welch House(opens in new window) and still part of Carnegie Mellon’s Pittsburgh campus. It lists his home address as Ridge Road in Williams Creek, Indianapolis, where his family had moved in 1940.
Much of the Carnegie Tech campus remains today, including Doherty, Hamerschlag, Porter, Baker and Margaret Morrison halls; as well as the College of Fine Arts. The old Skibo gym has been modified into a field house in the new Highmark Center for Health, Wellness and Athletics(opens in new window).
Of the seven residence halls used for ASTP soldiers, five still exist: Boss, McGill, Scobell, Welch and Henderson houses. All designed by Henry Hornbostel, the dormitories were all named after alumni of Carnegie Tech who died during WWI. Welch Hall, where Vonnegut was housed, was built in the mid-1910s.
In a playful letter written in 1999 and published in “Kurt Vonnegut: Letters,” Vonnegut referred back to his time at CIT: “I flunked thermodynamics at Carnegie Tech, and then the University of Tennessee(opens in new window), courtesy of the United States Army.”
Into the slaughterhouse
After leaving CIT, Vonnegut did additional training at the University of Tennessee and at Camp Atterbury in Indiana. He became an intelligence scout, and traveled with his unit to Le Havre, France. He was captured on Dec. 19, 1944(opens in new window), during the Battle of the Bulge and taken as a prisoner of war by train to Dresden, Germany. Of the battle that led to his capture, Vonnegut wrote after his release in a letter to his family, “Bayonets aren’t much good against tanks.”
As an American POW, Vonnegut was forced to labor while sheltered in a slaughterhouse, Schlachthof 5, which would become the setting for his seminal work.
Between Feb. 13-15 of 1945, a combined strikeforce of over a thousand U.S. and Royal Air Force bombers attacked and destroyed Dresden. Vonnegut survived the attack, which killed an estimated 25,000 people. As a POW, Vonnegut was forced to retrieve bodies from the destruction left in the aftermath of the attack.
On May 8, 1945, hostilities in Europe ended with Germany’s unconditional surrender to the Allied Forces. That month, Vonnegut and the other survivors in Dresden were liberated by the Russian army.
Vonnegut’s own feelings about the ASTP were published decades later in a letter to Jerome Klinkowitz, an author who wrote extensively about Vonnegut. “The ASTP was a scheme for stockpiling college kids, with no hope of promotion or getting into OCS (officer candidate school), until they were needed as riflemen,” he wrote in 2002. “I studied calculus and mechanics and thermodynamics and so on, for which the Army had no use, God knows, at Carnegie Tech and then the University of Tennessee.”
Chief Electrician William Filler Welch
Aug. 25, 1892-Oct. 10, 1918
United States Navy
The son of a mining engineer, William Filler Welch, for whom Welch House is named at Carnegie Mellon University, was born in Delaware, Ohio, in 1893.
Welch enrolled in the School of Applied Science at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he was well regarded on campus as an offensive lineman on the football team and for his work in the classroom.
He enlisted in the U. S. Naval Reserve Force two years after graduating and began active service in October 1917.
While on leave in October 1918, Welch returned to his hometown, where he died just a few days later from complications brought on by the Flu Pandemic of 1918 that ravaged much of the world that fall.
The voice of a writer
Vonnegut published his first novel, “Player Piano,” in 1952. In the story, Pittsburgh is the largest East Coast production center of machines that have largely replaced human workers. The work borrowed from reality, as Pittsburgh was home to production facilities like Mill 19 — built circa 1943 by Jones & Laughlin Steel Co. to produce munitions for the war — which employed more than 5,000 employees during its heyday.
His breakthrough came in 1969 with the publication of “Slaughterhouse 5.” The novel tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, a soldier experiencing the firebombing of Dresden who becomes unstuck in time. One of the story’s main characters, Roland Weary, hails from Pittsburgh.
When International Poetry Forum invited Vonnegut to speak in 1971, tickets sold out in a day. The event had to be moved from Carnegie Lecture Hall to Heinz Hall due to the author’s popularity.
In fact, there are multiple documented occasions where Vonnegut would sing Carnegie Tech songs to Pittsburghers, like in 1992 when he appeared at the Fulton Theater, later renamed the Byham Theater. He was quoted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette after the event saying “Every time I come to Pittsburgh, I sing this song. I hope you don’t mind me repeating myself.”
In 1982, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette writer Marylyn Uricchio had the opportunity to interview author and photographer Jill Krementz, Vonnegut’s second wife of 30 years, at their Manhattan townhouse. During the interview, when Vonnegut learned their houseguest was from Pittsburgh, he didn’t waste the opportunity.
“Vonnegut has just returned from the dentist, and hearing that his wife’s visitor is from Pittsburgh, he stands in the doorway and sings a lively version of Carnegie Tech’s alma mater — a school he attended that, he notes, ‘doesn’t exist anymore (In 1967, Carnegie Tech merged with the Mellon Institute to become Carnegie Mellon University),’” Uricchio wrote in the Dec. 14, 1982 Post-Gazette.
Jake Grefenstette presently serves as an adjunct professor in the Department of English(opens in new window), and as poetry editor for the Carnegie Mellon University Press(opens in new window). In 2022, Grefenstette took over as president and executive director of the International Poetry Forum. Its founder, poet Samuel Hazo, was behind Vonnegut’s 1971 invitation to speak in Pittsburgh.
“Carnegie Mellon has this incredible history in tech, the sciences, drama and art. The literary history is remarkable here too,” Grefenstette said. “Pittsburgh is one of the great poetry cities.”
A champion of free speech
Kathy Newman(opens in new window) saw Vonnegut deliver a lecture in the late 1980s while studying for her undergraduate English degree at UC Berkeley. In the speech, Vonnegut outlined the different shapes of stories by graphing them along an x and y axis.
“It was a message to me that stories have patterns. We gravitate to the same types of stories over and over again, and we can take an almost scientific approach to thinking about them,” said Newman, who is now an associate professor of English in CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. “What makes stories so important, and so powerful? That’s a valuable set of questions to spend one’s life answering, and what I’ve chosen to do with my career.”
Newman began teaching a class on censored text at Carnegie Mellon in the early 2000s. Since 2019, she has been amassing a collection of original research done by students on individual cases of book-banning, with over 150 examples documented. Two of Vonnegut’s stories, “Slaughterhouse 5(opens in new window) ” and “Breakfast of Champions(opens in new window)” are profiled in the project.
Students in her class spend a week analyzing the Board of Education/Island Trees School District v. Pico, the first supreme court decision to rule on how First Amendment rights were applied to school libraries. Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse 5” was one of 11 books that were the subject of the case, which was decided in 1982.
In the last six years, Newman said, efforts to ban books have occurred in more than half the states in America.
“There are school districts taking on lists of not 35, but 3,500 books. Thousands of books are being removed from school districts in one fell swoop,” Newman said. “So it’s not a historical problem from Vonnegut’s day. It’s happening today. Presently. Now.”
Students taking Newman’s class find the phrase, “books are powerful” at the top of her syllabus.
“Humans, as far as we know, are the only species that tell stories, and it almost seems like we need stories to live,” Newman said. “At the end of the day, we are screaming our heads off about stories — who gets to tell them? Who gets to choose them? Who’s allowed to read them? Who’s not?”
So it goes
Vonnegut’s final Pittsburgh appearance came on Nov. 9, 1998, at the Byham Theater. He again spoke with Uricchio for the Post-Gazette, who asked the author about his legacy.
“All I really wanted to do was give people the relief of laughing. Humor can be a relief, like an aspirin tablet. I’d be certainly pleased if 100 years from now people are still laughing,” he replied.
Perhaps they'll also remember "Dear Old Tech."
On April 11, 2007, Kurt Vonnegut died after sustaining a brain injury in a fall. He was 84 years old.
So it went.
In 1982, the newly formed CMU Robotics Institute(opens in new window) sought a group of intellectual fellows that could inform their research’s implications on society. Cyert sent invitations to Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, a French journalist; Samuel Pisar, an author and holocaust survivor; Carl Sagan, an American astronomer; Daniel Bell, a sociologist and Harvard professor; and science fiction authors Arthur Clarke and Isaac Asimov.
Daniel Berg, Jordan and Reddy asked that Vonnegut be included in the outreach.
Reddy recently recalled Vonnegut’s inability to participate was due to the busy writer’s schedule.
