At the age of seventy-seven Carl Sandburg began to write the second volume of his autobiography. It was about his years as a student at Lombard College (1898-1902). He was able to complete only fifteen chapters of  the book, Ever the Winds of Chance, before his health began to fail.

 

The title of the book is taken from George Ade's essay, “The Joys of Single Blessedness.” The sentence in the essay reads “We are all wisps, and the winds of chance blow in many directions.” Sandburg felt chance had affected many aspects of his life and led to his eventual success as a writer.

 

Lombard College students were required to attend chapel every morning at nine o'clock. Nehemiah White was head of the Ryder Theology School, which was one of the departments of the College, and he always gave the invocation. He had a soft voice and some students took the opportunity to catch a little shut-eye during that part of the exercises.

 

As the elderly white-haired professor was speaking, there was a crumbling and a crashing in the  roof of the chapel. Sandburg wrote “Those who looked up, as everybody did, saw an effigy, a dummy that at first seemed to be a live, wriggling man. There it dangled in mid-air. Nehemiah White had spoken his first invocation that never reached 'Amen.' As the dummy quivered and slowed down into quiet, a few students snickered. Others choked back their snickers. Still others kept straight faces though it wasn't easy. Serious-minded students joined with the faculty members on the platform in looking somber, troubled, shocked. The college president, Charles E. Nash, dismissed the student body and all walked out taking backward glances at the still-hanging dummy.

 

“Every male student was called, one by one, into the president's office and asked what he might be knowing about who had rigged the dummy and worked it. One by one they said they knew nothing. In the end it came out somehow that a daredevil acrobatic farm boy from Hampton, Iowa, Edward (“Ned”) Corning, had decided morning chapel services were too prim and proper and needed livening up. He had nothing against Nehemiah White, no grievance against any faculty member. He was a reckless Practical Joker. When a harebrained idea comes to the likes of him they go to work on it no matter who suffers, the theory being 'anything for a laugh.' As I recall Ned Corning was suspended, then later taken back because nobody could think of a faster and smoother fullback for the Lombard football team.”

 

Perhaps readers will also remember a similar event involving a beetle and a dog on a Sunday morning in Hannibal, Missouri. As Mark Twain wrote in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, “Tom went home quite cheerful, thinking to himself that there was some satisfaction about divine service when there was a bit of variety in it.”