Contact sheet #52 - The marriage of Jim Fuller and Sharon Dahnke at St. Mary’s Church in Muscatine, 1974, and an end-of-year barbeque for Altoona Hall and friends of Altoona, May 1977.

Jim Fuller was one of the first people I met when I moved to Muscatine in June 1967.  His father was my father’s new boss.  We moved to a tiny house at the bottom of Roscoe Hills about three blocks from him.  He was a grade older but was open to a new friend.  We played army.  We played games.  But after that first summer we drifted apart.  I went to Jefferson Elementary.  He went to the Catholic Junior High/High School.

I met Sharon at Central Junior High.  We were in a few classes together.  She was nice to me.  We chatted but I have no memory of any particular conversation.  

I think she was a senior in high school when she asked me to take the photos of her wedding.  It was a small family wedding in the working class Catholic church in town.  I don’t think I had any contact with either Sharon or Jim after the wedding.  When I scanned the negatives I wondered whatever happened.  An internet search said that Sharon died within ten years of the wedding.  Jim died about 15 years after that.

Living in Altoona Hall at Cornell College was one of the best experiences of my life.  I had daily contact with very bright, very creative, very funny people.  We had our differences.  There was a different culture to the third floor, from the second floor, from the first-floor, and Jeff Courtman lived in the basement.  The tornado was much less likely to kill him there.  The differences were more a challenge course than any real friction.  On second floor, some of us routinely got together in the evening after studying and before bed.  We listened to music and we talked.  Chris Dewey, Dave Babcock, and Chuck Schuetze were all learning German.  They tried to incorporate German into their. conversation.  Years later Lois Holtz mistook my casual familiarity with beginning German for actual German.  Nein.  

This picnic was a last hurrah for Altoona.  At the end of the term the school closed the dormitory for subsequent demolition.  It had been built at the turn of the century as the town’s hotel.  It was extremely expensive to heat.  I wonder if current technology could have saved it.

There are a few photographs of Mary Blue.  Everyone I knew in Altoona had a crush on Mary.  (My plate was full.)  Mary was a biology/chemistry major and very good at it.  She later earned a Ph.D. and taught at Johns Hopkins.  She and her husband occasionally showed up at reunions.  At Cornell I traded photographs with Mary for batik.  She did a large batik of a THC molecule that hung in West Science Hall for years.  I wonder if she still has my photograph of the monkey in the tree branches.  I wonder if I still have the batiked canvas navy shirt that she did for me.  I know for sure I couldn't fit into it now.

I miss the easy affability of dorm life, the possibility of a new friend and the casual camaraderie of old friends.  Chris died in a climbing accident in 1989.  Dave died of cancer in 2010.  Chuck moved to Alaska.  All the others scattered to their new lives.

The photographs discussed in this essay can be found in the Photo by Number gallery 00052.