Excerpt from “Kurt Vonnegut: The Man in the Hole,” a bio-in-progress by Hank Nuwer
Kurt Vonnegut described his father as a gentle, soft-spoken pacifist. Even so, Kurt (Doc) Vonnegut, Sr. had his limits.
Two big dogs owned by neighbor Fred Wales, Sr., one day killed the Vonnegut family cat. According to Kurt’s Palm Sunday, Doc stormed down the block to confront their owner.
Fred Wales was a wealthy muscular man with an ornamental mustache, He and his socialite wife, Ethelyn Irine Brush Wales, had three daughters and a son named Fred.
Mr. Wales, like Kurt’s father, kept an arsenal of firearms at home. Doc threatened to shoot the wandering Boots and Beans the next time they invaded his property.
Mr. Wales told Doc he’d be shooting back in his neighbor’s general direction.
Doc wanted no reenactment of the shootout at the OK Corral. He headed home.
Next, an unknown neighborhood avenger poisoned Boots and Beans. Kurt insisted that his family had nothing to do with the execution.
“If we were going to poison anybody, it would have been Mr. Wales,” he joked in Palm Sunday.
There’s more to the story of Mr. Wales, and it may concern Vonnegut the novelist.
In 1931, Mr.Wales did escape becoming the victim of a shooting.
Here’s what happened.
An Indianapolis businessman named James C. Patten, president of the Metals Protection Company, tossed two rifles on a ledge atop his car’s front seat to take them to his factory to have them chromium plated. As Patten, a handsome sportsman with hooded eyes and coifed white hair, opened his car door, planning to visit Wales in his office, he accidentally caused the weapons to fall on the seat. The ejection bolt on one 30-30 hunting rifle caught on the trigger of the second rifle.
Bam!
The first rifle’s bullet pierced Patten’s head and tumbled through the East Washington office window of Mr. Wales, narrowly missing him and visiting M. L. Gould, manager of Patten’s company.
Patten, a former commander of the National Guard Air Squadron and a former Indiana University boxer, died at City hospital an hour after the shooting. He turned 54 that very day. Mr. Wales served as his honorary pallbearer at a well-attended funeral.
The accidental discharging occurred when Kay Vonnegut was 11. Despite the elder Vonnegut’s constant preaching about gun safety, young Kurt kept weapons in his boyhood bedroom.
In Kurt’s novel Deadeye Dick, 12-year-old Rudy Waltz foolishly fires a gun from his window and accidentally kills a pregnant woman.
It’s worth pondering if the memory of that shooting which drew headlines might have lingered in Kurt’s memory and surfaced as he wrote his Deadeye Dick.
Footnote: “Accidental shot from gun fatal to James C. Patten,” Feb 5, 1931, Indianapolis Star
