Jeremy Butler

Jeremy Butler (April 24, 1873-November 14, 1960) was a well-respected scholar of the works of Henry David Thoreau. He was known for a mean slice he perfected on Throw Park's tennis courts, on land that he donated to the City. His descendants studied motion pictures of his tennis technique and adapted it for pickleball in the 2000s.

Early life

Butler's first home, Brookdale Park, Bloomfield, NJ.

Butler was born on April 24, 1873 to an itinerant family who roamed the environs of Bloomfield, New Jersey. For several years, they lived on the tennis courts of Brookdale Park, which had been designed by the Olmsted Brothers. Once evicted from there, they squatted in a New Haven Quonset hut that had been abandoned by Yale University (now on view in the Quonset Hut Museum). Butler's affection for his time "at" Yale explains why he had its coat of arms sewn into every pair of undershirts he ever wore.

Butler's parents were Wrestling "With the Devil" Butler (1845-1929) and Polly Butler (née Starin; 1850-1931).

Polly descended from an elite American family, the Starins, who could track their lineage back to Nicholas Starin (aka, Staring; 1663-1759) and who once owned their own island amusement park (Starin's Glen Island) which was serviced by their own steamship line. Alas, Polly's branch of the Starins suffered a severe economic reversal during the Bloomfield Tulip Panic of 1792. They never recovered their social standing.

Jeremy's father, Wrestling "With the Devil", insisted the younger Butler be raised in a sect of wrestling Christians—The Church of the Sacred Sleeper Hold or Nomroms—who communed with their savior through strenuous Sunday morning wrestling matches. They wore masks, in the Lucha Libre tradition, because the Nomroms believed their true faces would offend God. Jeremy had the sect's equivalent of a bar mitzvah when, at age 13, he and his father tag-team wrestled two Nomrom deacons. Upon pinning one of the deacons, Jeremy was declared "a man." The Nomroms disbanded soon afterward, but Jeremy kept the mask.

Butler began his schooling at Tulip Lane Grade School, in Bloomfield, but the family moved again when he was in the sixth grade. Having served as a Union spy during the Civil War (code named "Dancing Otter"), Polly was entitled to a small pension and heard rumors of free land grants out west. And so the family relocated to land in Winesburg that would eventually become Throw Park and Butler became one of the Fightin' Servals at James A. Garfield Middle School. Butler attended Louis Althusser High School, which was later renamed David Émile Durkheim High School, and graduated in 1901.

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  Yale's coat of arms, which was emblazoned on Butler's undershirts. Lux et veritas = "light and truth."
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  Butler during his Quonset hut days.
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  The island amusement park of Polly Starin Butler's ancestors.
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  Artist's representation of the Bloomfield Tulip Panic—when fields of blooms (hence the origin of Bloomfield's name) were trampled by soldiers.
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  Wrestling "With the Devil" Butler (in blue) wrestles with a devil during a Nomrom service.

College

Butler was a defiant student at Defiance University and Stump-grinding Institute (Slabtown, Indiana), which, despite its name, did not tolerate defiance among its student body. To this day, students still talk about the pranks engineered by Butler—including stealing boxer shorts from Dean Pappas's dresser and using them to spell "G-R-I-N-D M-E" on the University green, among the ground tree stumps. Butler prided himself on his record for senior-year expulsions (876), which is never likely to be matched. Dean Pappas was forced to repeatedly readmit Butler, because he was the only one of Defiance's 3,560 students who was paying tuition. The rest of the students were on tuition waivers due to a punitive law passed by the Indiana General Assembly that required Defiance to pay all but one of its students a $100 stipend for attending. During Butler's senior year, he was that solitary tuition-paying student—remitting $200,000 (roughly, $5 million in 21st-century money). The reason for the General Assembly's punishment of Defiance is lost to history.

Butler made loan payments to Defiance for the rest of his life.

Career

A rock pile marks the site of Thoreau's cabin and concealed the entrance to Butler's underground bunker.

After graduating in 1895, Butler quickly established himself in the lucrative field of interpreters of Henry David Thoreau's work. He claimed to have read Walden 3,459 times while living for two years, two months, and two days in an underground bunker on the the site of Thoreau's famous cabin near Walden Pond, not far from Concord, Massachusetts.

Butler's chef-d'œuvre on Thoreau's work was a 765-page exegesis of a single sentence in Walden:

Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb, — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board, — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

Butler's monograph on this Walden sentence took 12 years to write and bore the ungainly title Insights Gained in the Walden Bunker: A Prolegomenon to Prefatory Thoughts Leading Us to Considerations of How to Beginning Critiquing the Positioning of Alburnum in Mr. H. D. Thoreau's Works Approaching Walden Pond. Butler's Introduction explains,

Quis novit quid pulchrum templi cherubin et vita: qui ovum defossum erit in saecula saeculorum sub enim plures stratis woodenness in mortui aridam vita societatis, deposita prima est in alburnum ex viridi et viventem lignum, quod successive vertitur in simile et eius bene-condietur sepulcrum: - auditis forsan edax et iam annis a lamberet attonitas erectis genere est homo, cum sedit per festivae quaedam tabula, - ut ex inopinato egrediuntur de medio societatis, in minimis et handselled supellectilem, ut comederetis fructum eius perfectum aestate vitae, tandem!

Butler's decision to write his magnum opus in Latin did somewhat curtail readership, but it gained him the academic respect he so clearly desired. And for an American public starved for information about Thoreau, the book became a cause célèbre—leading to ludicrously well-paid speaking tours and invitations to present what today would be called PowerPoint slides in bourgeois drawing rooms across Indiana during the 1910s.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria

Not surprisingly, the Winesburg Normal School and Polytechnic (WNS&P) aggressively recruited Butler for the Archduke Franz Ferdinand Endowed Chair in Crypto Ceramics and Thoreuvian Studies. On June 28, 1914, Dean Rotogravure managed to convince Butler to join the faculty. Most observers agreed that it was purely coincidental that the Archduke was assassinated—thus precipitating World War I—on the day that Butler signed his contract with WNS&P. The deed, as they say, was done nonetheless and Butler remained in the AFFE Chair until his retirement on September 1, 1939—the day that the Nazis invaded Poland and World War II began. Again, this timing was thought by most to be a coincidence.

Personal life

The Winesburg Public Library, Little Turtle Branch, Reading Room as it appears today. Butler's trap door is covered with acoustic ceiling tiles.

It was on one of those speaking tours of Indiana in support of Insights Gained in the Walden Bunker that Butler met Felicity Throw, the grandmother of Winesburg librarian Margaret Wiggs. Throw was a librarian herself and the daughter of Henry David Throw, another librarian.

Butler entered the Little Turtle Branch's Reading Room, as was his custom, through a trapdoor in the ceiling (it was part of the rider on his speaking contract and was often constructed at great expense by the venue). The ceiling was quite a bit higher than he anticipated, however, and the room was dark and, well, long story short, he landed right on top on Felicity, which was fortunate as she was a זאַפֿטיק (zaftig) young woman and broke his fall. After their mutual embarrassment subsided and Butler delivered his customarily brilliant talk, they bonded over their shared distaste for the inexpensive punch the Library had obtained from a disreputable caterer in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Felicity and Jeremy were married the following year, on April 15, 1912—the day the supposedly unsinkable RMS Titanic sank. They did not see this as a portent for their married life. They used the funds from Jeremy's touring to buy property in Winesburg that they would eventually donate to the city to create the Jeremy Butler Memorial Professional Pickle Ball Courts in Throw Park, where their descendants enjoy a hearty game of pickle ball to this day.

Descendants of Jeremy and Felicity Butler enjoy healthy pickle ball competition on the Jeremy Butler Memorial Professional Pickle Ball Courts, Throw Park.

Death and posthumous controversy

Butler died in Winesburg on November 14, 1960 of so-called "natural causes." However, on that same day, a railway accident in Stéblová in Eastern Bohemia, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) killed 118 people and injured another 110. Officials claimed there was no connection with Butler's death.

He had been dead and gone for many decades before a Latin scholar revealed that he had merely translated Thoreau's sentence into Latin and repeated it for 765 pages, which explains why it had no index.