The photos from this contact sheet are from May 1977 and mostly of people moving out of Cornell College and Mount Vernon for the summer.

I had been wandering around the campus taking photos of the denouement of the academic year for the yearbook.  Dave Babcock was the editor.  I had my wedding the day before graduation.  Janet graduated the day after her wedding.  Most of my Cornell friends were in the class of ’77 and nearly all left that May.  Chris Dewey stayed around.  He had work with the summer chem research.  Dave was around.  He had to complete the yearbook.

Janet and I had moved to married student housing.  This was two sets of four apartments in a row, built to temporarily house the Naval meteorological students during World War II.  We were fortunate to have our apartment at the beginning of the loop for the steam heating system.  Our place was toasty.  The apartment at the end of the loop was not.

Dave had asked to say with us, sleeping on the coach, for a week while he finished the yearbook.  We agreed.  As his stay continued into the third week we asked him to wrap it up and he did.  I helped him lay out the pages but I forget which I did.  I know he took command of the architectural pages, as that was his focus for the book, and the mug shots, as that was so tedious.

This was also the beginning of one of my deepest and longest lasting depressions.  Janet changed the rules of our relationship shortly after the wedding as I’ve written about elsewhere.  I could find only one job.  The unemployment rate among young Iowans was then somewhere over 10 percent.  The one job was to sell water softeners.  The sales manager was a fat white man in a bad suit and a huge Cadillac.  He made the salesmen, all men, learn his script.  “This is not a water softener, but a complete home water conditioning system.”  I went with him for a few sales presentations, both successful.  I went out on my own sale alone and would have closed the deal, except that I couldn’t do it.  The customers were a nice young couple, struggling as school teachers and living on a farmstead with an old well.  The sales manager had taught me how to judge how much the purchaser would be willing to spend and to set my cost accordingly.  Naively I considered flexible pricing to be immoral.  At the end of my sales speech to these customers I demonstrated how the ‘water test’ I used was fraudulent.  I had taken a water sample from their sink and added another chemical to cause the impurities to fall out of suspension and sink to the bottom of the glass.  What was happening was that the chemical I put in had caused the impurities to become large and visible and detestable.  I quit.

I had no job.  Janet supported our family working a minimum wage job as a recreation therapist at the Linn County Home.  I hated my uselessness.  I disliked my life.  In quiet times a warlike man makes war on himself.  Perhaps I shouldn't have spent my idle time reading Nietzsche.

As you might expect, I have no photographs of my depression.

I do have photos of people packed and leaving.  I liked trying to get the interactions among parents and students and other students.

After I scanned the negatives, I figured out that photos # 9 and 10 are of volunteer firefighters rushing to the firehouse for a call.  They aren’t just random men running down the streets of Mount Vernon.

Years ago I scanned all my black and white negatives.  I’ve discussed this earlier in this blog.  I scanned them to a much smaller resolution because storage costs were so high.  I also didn’t think that such poorly resolved photos were so bad, because that was about the resolution of the digital cameras of the era.  Anyway I was contacted by some Black Cornell College alumni saying that they wanted to put together a slide show of their experience at Cornell and wondered whether they could use my images.  Of course they could.  They also wondered whether I had used race as a searchable term so that they could quickly identify the photos they wanted.  No.  It hadn’t occurred to me to use race as a searchable term.  I suggested that this was probably a good thing.  I haven’t used it again this time around.  Race is a social construct.  I wouldn’t necessarily identify someone the way that they would.  

Not all of my contact sheets contain fascinating stories.  

The photos referenced in this essay can be found in the Photos by Number section in the gallery “00040” and among the photos of May 1977 in my photo catalog.