Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano: A Story Of General Electric's North Woods Summer Festival On Association Island

Association Island

The Elfun Society, which was the management society of General Electric back in the day, used to hold their summer get-togethers on this island. In 1952 Kurt Vonnegut wrote about it in his first book, Player Piano. Here he talks about it in this excerpt from his 1973 interview with Robert Scholes:

RS: Yes, I've wondered about Player Piano. In particular one of the things that interested me was this great summer festival that the technicians hold somewhere up in the North Woods. I wonder if there's a real background to that.

KV: Yes, there is. There was a. . . called Association Island and it was owned by the (let's see, what was it) ... there was some association of electric-light manufacturers in the early days of the electrical industry and they were friendly competitors and they met to discuss business on this island once a year and this became sort of a Boy Scout festival

RS: Uh-huh.

KV: What the competitors did not know for quite a while was that they were all owned by General Electric.

RS: Ha ha ha ha.. .

KV: And that no matter what happened to the competition, General Electric won.

RS: Marvelous.

KV: But this became in later years a morale-building operation for General Electric, and deserving young men were sent up there for a week and played golf and there were archery contests and baseball contests and swimming contests and plenty of free liquor, and so forth.

RS: So the bizarre events in Player Piano are pretty realistic after all, are they?

KV: Well, Player Piano when it came out was not a widely read book except in Schenectady, New York. The island was shut down after the book came out.

RS: No kidding.

KV: It no longer exists.

GE sold the island in 1959, and it's now the Association Island RV Resort and Marina.

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