From Pillar to Post: Leaves from a Lecturer's Note-Book

by John Kendrick Bangs

And as for the lecture halls, one now and then encounters a place where it seems as though it were a vain-glorious tempting of fate to enter it. I recall one marvelous hall in one of the most cultured sections of New England, in a town not more than seventy-five miles from Boston, the home of one of America's most famous schools, and the capital of a State that has produced men of worldwide eminence, which in any Court of Commonsense would have been indicted as a menace to the public welfare. It was reached by a climb of two flights of stairs, the first scarcely wide enough for two people to walk up abreast, and the second rising from the end of a dimly lighted corridor up six steps to a landing whence ran on each side two other sections of four or five steps each to a second landing, with still a third turn and another climb before the auditorium floor was reached; and all this in an ordinary brick building, erected long before fireproof construction was even thought of.

My lecture in this architectural device of Beelzebub was delivered before an audience of four hundred people, just one week after the terrible disaster at Boyerstown, Pennsylvania, in which I know not how many lives were lost in a fire started by the explosion of a cinematograph machine. As I stepped upon the stage I inquired of my escort if there were any fire escapes on the building, and was informed that a huge iron door at the rear of the stage opened upon one. I was moderately relieved until I tried to open the iron door, only to find it locked—and the janitor had left the key at home! I may add that if my memory serves me correctly—and it does—this ingeniously designed atrocity was pleasantly and appropriately known as Phenix Hall. Absit omen!

In the main, however, the lecture halls of America are rather fine affairs. In the State of New York and on the other side of the Mississippi River I have found splendid auditoriums, acoustically perfect, well ventilated, and as nearly safe as human ingenuity can make them. The high schools of New York and Massachusetts, and the flourishing educational institutions of the West, have set a pace which other communities would do well to follow: not so much for the sake of the itinerant platformist as for the "safety, honor, and welfare" of their own sons and daughters. In Houston, Texas, where there is a municipally owned free lecture and music course on Sunday afternoons, beginning in October and running through to May, is one of the finest auditoriums I have ever seen anywhere. It seats in comfort and safety an audience of eight thousand, and neither New York, Boston, Philadelphia, nor even Chicago, has anything comparable to it.

I have indeed had luck according to my own conception of it, on trains traveled on, and in respect to trains missed as well. I have been in two railway smash-ups, in the first of which the car behind mine was overturned and reduced to kindling in the twinkling of an eye, and miraculously without serious injury to any one; and in the other the engine directly in front of the car in which I was sitting, having endeavored to jump a frozen switch, succeeded only in landing upon its own back, leaving my car teetering to and fro for a moment as if undecided whether to roll down an embankment, or to remain poised on its offside wheels like a ballet girl balanced upon one tangoing toe. If the gentleman who sat beside me on that occasion had shifted his chewing gum to the other side, I think we should have gone plunging down that embankment into the river; but fortunately he was too paralyzed with fear even to do that, and we remained fixed, safe as ever was the intrepid Blondin when he essayed to walk across Niagara Falls on his slack wire.

As for the trains missed, it was only an over-prolonged discussion of the mysteries of golf between myself and a past-master of putting at Haverhill, Massachusetts, which caused me to miss by ten seconds a section of the Portland Express to New York that five hours later landed in a ditch somewhere in Connecticut.

In respect to perils by water there are the steamboat perils, and those more insidious dangers that come from too free indulgence in the only kind of beverage the wise platformist dares adopt as a steady tipple. These latter perils I have tried to reduce to a minimum by having a billion and a half typhus germs mobilized within to patrol my system, so that any skulking bacilli seeking to spread revolutionary ideas in my midst, and gaining admittance thereto through my taste for ice water, will be seized and duly throttled ere they have time to lay the foundation for an effective propaganda.

"If he had shifted his chewing gum to the other side, we should have plunged into the river."

But there is no inoculation against the perils of steamboats; although I have been in imminent danger only once in this way, and in its ultimate results even that was far more amusing than terrifying. I was on my way to Boston by the Fall River boat when the incident occurred. The night was foggy, and I retired early. The faithful craft kept steadily on her way, feeling her path through the dark waters of the sound. I slept only fitfully until midnight, when weary Nature at last asserted herself, and I fell into a profound slumber. At four in the morning, however, I was awakened rudely by a fierce shriek of the whistle, a seemingly quick reversal of the engines, a very decided shock as of an impact with some heavy body, followed by a grinding sound, and much shouting.