A contact sheet with a grab-bag of negatives.  Denmark June 1973, Chris Dewey in October 1975; and a few single shots from others ~

The photos of Chris Dewey in a dress were meant to be publicity pictures for his run to become the Cornell College homecoming queen.  In those times it was unheard of for a man to compete for homecoming queen.  Chris was following up on the previous year’s homecoming queen who was controversial because she, Dee Slattery, wasn’t a conventional cheerleader beauty.  There was blowback at her win from the cool kids, the (male) athletes and their supporters.  She just wasn't pretty enough from their standards.  So Chris stepped into this dialogue with his own statement and request – vote for him as homecoming queen. 

The contest was close.  There was credible evidence that some votes had been lost or tossed and allegations of ballot stuffing.  Rather than pursue the controversy, Chris stepped out of the competition and conceded.  It was supposed to be fun and it stopped being fun.  I don’t remember who got Homecoming Queen that year – 1975.

The photos of Denmark are rather prosaic.  Interesting little things I saw when I was 16.  Architectural details.  Train differences from the US.  A few rotting VW engines.  A few of the inside of a windmill.  There are more photos of that windmill elsewhere, and I’ll elaborate on them. 

The photo in this group that strikes me the most is that of my college dorm room in Altoona, taken around September 1975.  I can date the photograph because I am in that particular room and I still have my Yuri Gagarin poster.  The year earlier I was the only freshman in the dorm because I occupied a room vacated by an upperclassman who contracted a serious, though non-communicable, disease.  Thus I got an upperclassman’s large corner room rather than this sophomore narrow interior room.

My poster was destroyed in the fire of October 1975.  The fire is depicted in other photographs and will be discussed in that context.  But, the fire was in the room directly above mine, Bob Seaholm’s, and the water used to douse the flames ran down through the ceiling destroying the poster.

The poster says, in Russian, We are the New Constellation!  I bought it at a Soviet space exhibition in Aalborg, Denmark, a few years prior.  There was no way that I could replace it. 

The room has some other details I’d forgotten.  I had posted some historic maps on the walls as art.  There is a watercolor by my younger cousin, Shelly Weston, who now owns a framing shop outside Milwaukee.  Janet Paige wove the macramé hanging in the window.  Back in the early and mid 1970s, macramé was a thing.  My stereo is on the right top shelf.  It was my parents’ high school graduation gift.  The summer before I had put together two speaker boxes – each with a 12” Utah woofer, a 6” midtone that I’d salvaged from a car speaker, and a horn tweeter that I’d bought from Radio Shack.  I soldered in a resistor to the tweeter and called it good.  I put this into a box I’d made from ¾” plywood.  Allan Six dubbed them The Hideos. 

My father made the coffee table in front as his high school shops project, from walnut felled on his parents’ farm.  That table is now in my living room.  The antique camera to the right of the stereo is now on a bookshelf in the dining room.  The frisbee is in a box in the utility room.  Things have followed me even from then.

The lens hanging in the window is from a photographic enlarger, the tool in the darkroom that projects light through the negative onto the photographic paper.  It is called a condenser lens because it condenses the light from the lamp bulb down onto the negative.  I learned from this window not to put a curtain behind the lens on a south window.  This lens, this window, and the sun carved a neat arc across the back of a non-flammable curtain.

David Richmond recently gave me a beautiful, large large-format photographic enlarger.  It is missing one thing – the condenser lens.  The condenser lens that I’ve been carting around for the past 50 years will finally leave the window and find a new home in an old enlarger.  This proves that, for all the stuff that’s followed me around for the past decades, there might be something to be done with it.