May 1979, Cornell College graduation ~

A year after I graduated from Cornell College I went back up to Mount Vernon to watch the graduation of the next class.  I particularly wanted to see Dan Caldwell before he moved on.  Graduation is an amazing crescendo of energy with an amazing silence following, like the closing chord of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album.  All this interaction among the dear friends made over four years and then everyone moves off to their lives, perhaps never to be seen again.

Among those photographed are also my philosophy mentor Prof. Bill Debbins, Freya Brier, Rupert Kinnard, Louis Thompson, and Bill Chin there for his sister Laura.

In May 1979 I was living in Iowa City with my wife Janet.  We moved into the River City Housing Co-op, an offshoot of the University of Iowa, the previous January.  Janet was getting unhappy with living in the co-op.  She and I shared a large room in Small House, shared the upstairs with another couple, and shared the house with another two people who lived downstairs.  She had no space of her own.  She was also getting unhappy with the relationship and wanted space.

Soon after these photos she moved into her own apartment about a mile away.  She wanted no one else in the family to know so I went along with it and kept it secret.  

I was naive.  I didn’t know how close she was to divorce.  I went over to see her one afternoon spontaneously.  She had no phone.  After I knocked, it took too long for her to answer.  Inside was one of her professors, a chubby guy with orange hair and stubbly beard.  Mike?  I said that I had something that we needed to discuss immediately.  She said that everything I had to say I could say in front of her friend/professor.  Ok.  Well, I had crab lice, probably from a local taqueria, so she should get checked out too.  Boy did that professor look uncomfortable.

I had been working at the University of Iowa hospitals running the radiological darkroom for Orthopedics and the ER for the previous seven months.  I spent eight hours a day in a 2 x 3’ darkroom/closet.  When a radiology tech took an x-ray, they would bring me the cassette that held the film.  These were like hard plastic trapper-keepers that kept the film in the dark.  I would take the cassette, close the door, turn off the light, open the cassette, take the film out, put it into the processing machine, load a new unexposed film into the cassette, close the cassette, open the door and turn on the light.  Then I would wait anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes for the next film.  Over and over.  

All day.  Every day.  I started bringing books with me to read in 5- to 10-minute bursts.  I read through Janet’s reading list for her master’s in social work program.  I read through the reading list of Linda Tookey’s master’s of education to summarize books for her.  I read through the reading list of the graduate program in rhetoric, shared by my housemate Martin Pearson.  The head of the radiology department, Dr. El Kouhry (spelling?) started treating me extremely well.  I was the first photo tech who used Minor White’s zone system to create superlative x-ray duplicates.  I kept the processing machine operating flawlessly.   And I read the Bible.  He was a Lebanese Christian who respected people who read the Bible.

It was an extremely depressing time in my life, made more so because I would not be diagnosed with a major depressive disorder for another 15 years.

So it was nice to get out to see some friends at this graduation before they scattered.