Unknown farm; Diana Powell and Craig Murrin; Keith Stroup; Craig Murrin, Chuck Schuetze, Pushkin the cat and wine - Spring 1976

I don’t remember everything that I’ve photographed from looking at the photographs.  I don’t remember the farm on contact sheet 34 or where it was.  Almost certainly Iowa.  Possibly Wisconsin.  I was always looking for something fun to photograph.

I have a few pictures here of Craig Murrin and Diana Powell.  Craig was in his senior year at Cornell College.  Diana had graduated a few years earlier and had returned to Cornell as an admissions counselor.  She went out to seek new students for the college.  They had met that year and become a couple.  They were to marry at the end of the year before Craig went to Stanford law school and Diana went to Boalt Hall/Berkeley law school.  You'll see those photos and hear that story later.

As I was taking this photo of them Diana expressed reservations that I should be shooting photographs.  She noted that I had shot a lot of candid photos of Craig over the two years I’d known him. Why?  What was I going to use them for?  She was ambitious.  Craig was ambitious.  She warned Craig that I could use these photographs against Craig sometime in the future when he got powerful.  Craig was unconcerned.  I stopped taking photos of Diana.

A few blog posts earlier I mentioned that I had met Keith Stroup, national director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) at a lecture and movie at Cornell College.  He was a childhood hero.  He had been an acolyte of Ralph Nader doing product safety public interest law.  I forget what his broken part issue was.  Playgrounds?  When a friend of his got busted for a small amount of pot and faced a felony, Mr. Stroup got interested in marijuana as public interest law.  I had seen him appear in the alternate press over the few years before, and here he was at Cornell!

Before his lecture on marijuana law and history, and the presentation of the movie, Reefer Madness, I met him in the back hallway of the library’s theater.  I told him that I lived in the men’s honor’s residence, that we had a few people going on to law school, and that we’d all like to discuss the issues with him after his presentation.  Would he like to come?  He looked at his Iowa contact, the man who ran the Iowa chapter of NORML (whose name I forget) and then said OK.

Here are photos of us hanging out in Altoona talking marijuana law with Keith Stroup.  The room was Craig’s because his dorm seniority drew the largest room and thus the best place to convene.  We had a few non-Altoonites there too.  I recognize David MacKinster in the shadows.

In the shadows because it was an extremely dark room late at night.  These photos demonstrate the limits of the technology and of my ability at low-light photography.

There are a few photographs of Congressman Bella Abzug’s speech at Cornell College’s King Chapel and a few still life photos in Altoona.

The contact sheet concludes with a few photos I shot of Craig, Chuck Schuetze, and Pushkin the cat as we drank a bottle of red wine in Altoona.  Craig is from Cedar Rapids.  Chuck is from Columbus Junction, Iowa.  I am from Muscatine, Iowa.  We all grew up in a cheap beer culture in high school.  We each instead got interested in the many varieties of wine.  There wasn’t much to choose from in 1976 in Iowa, when these photos were taken.  We seldom drank beer in the dorm.  We occasionally had a good bottle of wine.  We occasionally had a nice glass of Scotch or bourbon.  Our dormitory, Altoona Hall, was a good place to relax and talk philosophy.  All three of us were philosophy majors in three successive years of Prof. William Debbins’ tutorials.  It made for interesting conversations.  I learned more within the walls of Altoona than in any other building on campus.

Pushkin was then a kitten.  Mark Schulz was nominally his human but Pushkin wandered second floor Altoona as his own.

You can see the photographs referred to in this essay in the section, Photographs by Number, in the gallery 00034.