Vonnegut thinks he’d have grown up faster if he’d hung out with the Independents instead of the frat boys. He also wishes someone would have told him that getting drunk was dangerous and stupid.
What I have become has almost nothing to do with Cornell, where, on the bad advice of my brother and father, I was attempting and failing to become a biochemist. It has everything to do with the absorbing adventure of writing for and editing The Cornell Daily Sun, a quite separate corporation.
Advice? Somebody should have told me not to join a fraternity, but to hang out with the independents, who were not then numerous. I would have grown up faster that way. Somebody should have told me that getting drunk, while fashionable, was dangerous and stupid. And somebody should have told me to forget about higher education, and to go to work for a newspaper instead. That is what a lot of the most promising and determined young writers used to do back then. Nowadays, of course, you can’t get a job at a newspaper if you didn’t have a college education. Too bad.
My experiences at Cornell were freakish in the extreme, as have been most of those which followed, mostly accidents. So the advice I give myself at the age of 71 is the best advice I could have given myself in 1940, when detraining for the first time in Ithaca, having come all the way from Indianapolis: “Keep your hat on. We may wind up miles from here.”