More about Washington Irving ...
Still later, when I taught
college-prep juniors at Western Reserve Academy, I gave them a little “reading
guide” to the stories, a guide on which I defined for them words like inveterate, cognomen, supernumerary,
ferule, chopfallen, and numerous others. And, of course, I showed them the
Disney film that had terrified me. They loved it.
Joyce and I were also visiting
Irving sites here and there. Including Tarrytown. And Sleepy Hollow. The local
high school is called Sleepy Hollow High—and their mascot? A Headless Horseman.
It seemed a bit bizarre to me, having as a symbol of your educational
institution a guy with no head—and, obviously, no brain.
Irving’s gravesite is in Sleepy
Hollow Cemetery, located in, well, Sleepy Hollow. His is a modest stone that
mentions only his name, his dates of birth and death (1783–1859).
Not so the nearby site where lie
the remains of Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), who selected that cemetery because
he was an admirer of Irving’s work. (Hard to imagine that their lives
overlapped by some twenty-four years; the year Irving died, Carnegie was
promoted to superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Pittsburgh Division.)
I’d gotten interested in Carnegie about a decade ago when I began writing a
memoir about my life as a reader (and, in adolescence, a non-reader). I’d
planned to begin the work with a visit to my boyhood library, the Carnegie
Public Library in Enid, Oklahoma—but then I discovered (via my mom) that the
city had razed that gorgeous building in 1972 and erected some big and “modern”
and ugly structure. Oh well. Still, my research sent me off on an adventure of
discovery about Carnegie and his library program.[1] I published the book
myself on Kindle Direct. I’d recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer—a
disease that has appeared for a number of repeat engagements—and did not have
the energy (or, surely, the time) to commence a long search for an agent and/or
a publisher.[2]
Anyway, Carnegie’s gravesite had
once featured armed security guards—no longer necessary. It still features a
stone, a small grove, an obelisk—not so modest. But I wonder: Today, in 2016,
if you were to ask The Person on the Street, Tell me about Andrew Carnegie—and then, Tell me about Washington Irving— about whom would you hear more?
Might be a toss-up. Carnegie’s name is still on many libraries, on concert
halls. Everyone’s heard of (if not read) “Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip.”
By far our favorite Irving site,
though, is his former home—now open to the public—“Sunnyside,” in Tarrytown,
New York, alongside the Hudson River. We’ve visited quite a few times.
