00051
Contact sheet #51 contains photographs of Muscatine, Iowa, that I shot in October, 1972.
I was not happy to move to Muscatine in the summer of 1966. I had a good circle of friends in Winnebago, Illinois, from where I was moved when my father took a new job. In my old neighborhood in Winnebago, you could safely leave your bicycle outside for the night. In my new neighborhood in Muscatine, at the bottom of Roscoe hills, you could not because it would be stolen. I asked my neighbor kids why they would steal a bike that was left out and their answer was, ‘If they didn’t want it stolen, they wouldn’t leave it out.’ Years later I learned this again as the basis of legal ethics.
The one thing I really liked about Muscatine was its history, and in particular its architectural history. There were a lot of 19th Century houses and buildings still around in October of 1971 when I took these photos. I was particularly enamored of the 19th Century houses on the west hill neighborhood, up the hill from downtown Muscatine. And there was one house in particular, up on the hill, with a commanding view of the Mississippi River flowing into town from the east and out to the south. I wanted that house! I wanted a house like that.
I continued my interest in 19th Century architecture. From 2005 until 2010 I had a series of dreams in which I was living in a 19th Century house in a neighborhood of Victorian houses. It took a while to realize that this house in my dreams represented myself in my life. When the dreams began I was living in the dream house attic, under a leaky roof. In the daytime I was depressed, having just gone through my third divorce and working for a very poorly managed public defense agency in Seattle. (For example, I was replaced as manager of the felony unit with a woman who had tried only one C level felony case on her own.) As time went on and my mental health improved, my dreams of that house included more and more rooms in better and better shape. I never saw the outside of my dream home.
In 2021 Cathy’s contract with the Raymond School District was not renewed. Superintendent Tom Holland had told Cathy that for so long as he worked there, she had a job, and then he retired. The City of Raymond contracted with the county for their municipal court and I was out of a job, after being reassured by the city clerk Gretchen Sagan that they would keep me on as judge. Every time she told me in private in her office, I repeated it to the clerks outside her office and told them I didn’t believe it. After my contract was not renewed, Gretchen said ‘I never told you you would stay on.’ Cathy and I were ready to move.
I asked my dreams if I should actually move into a 19th Century house in a neighborhood of similar houses and they said, “Duh! What have we been trying to tell you?!” My dreams were, in part, telling me that I should exteriorize my life some – don’t live entirely in my thoughts. So I began looking on the internet for a house at least 100 years old on more than an acre. And bought the house in Bonaparte, Iowa, in which I live.
This contact sheet also includes photographs of the two oldest houses in my old Muscatine neighborhood near Weed Park. The prettiest is the Weed Mansion, then owned by the Howe family. They were all good kids. We occasionally played in the yard but I never went inside the house. The other old house was directly behind the house I lived in on Parkington. It was owned and occupied by Mr. Conklin. This house predated the Weed mansion. Mr. Conklin confirmed the rumors that there was a tunnel between this house, the Weed mansion, and the bluffs to the river. When these houses were built, the Native Americans were still around and still unhappy about being displaced. There were also former slaves coming north out of slave-state Missouri.
I really like the photograph of the cop car driving by, a Dodge Monaco. They had a distinctive tail light pattern and there were only three Dodge Monacoes in town – two were cop cars and one of those was unmarked. We could usually see the unmarked cop car before they saw us.
The photographs described in this essay can be found in Photos by Number, # 00050, or in the gallery October 1972.
