00053
I have been scanning the contact sheets in their chaotic disorder. It seems that the contact sheets with the lower numbers, like 53, are more likely to have negatives from a variety of situations. I may have put together these contact sheets last, with the left-over negatives I could find no other home for. These negatives are much like old school film strips, but cut in lengths of five or six exposures. Contact sheet 53 has six different strips of four or six exposures each from six different rolls of film.
The first strip of six is of Small House at the River City Housing Co-op, with Janet and David Richmond. The second set are portraits that I took of Randy Knudson at Cornell College. The third are photos on my paternal grandparents’ farm. The fourth are photos by Nita Scherrer Larson taken back in high school on a bicycle afternoon. The fifth are of parents’ day at Muscatine High School. And the sixth are architectural photos around downtown Muscatine.
The photos of Small House are obviously in the summer. By the summer of 1979, my wife Janet Paige had already moved out. I may have told this story before. In fall 1978, Janet and I lived in an apartment complex on the other side of Coralville while she attended graduate school in social work and I supported us working in a darkroom at the hospital. Janet took an assertiveness training course. She had to do a final project – be assertive in some area of her life. She got assertive and talked us out of our lease because the landlord wasn’t clearing the driveway sufficiently for her to get to her internship. We had to move somewhere. Her friend Rich Young (a fellow former resident of Cornell College’s Altoona Hall) said that their friend JoAnne Yount said that there was an opening in the River City Housing Co-op. We moved into Small House of the co-op that January in a spacious room taking up the south and west gables of the second floor.
By May, she wanted space for herself and space from me. She moved to her own apartment about a mile away. She swore me to secrecy about her having moved out. I kept it from her family and from my own that we were separated. We continued to see each other, and these photographs are from one of her visits.
Her ERA NOW shirt was much more incendiary then than it is now. People didn’t usually put slogans on shirts back in the 1970s. It was more of a novelty, and it was particularly pointed for a political message. As you can see, Janet was particularly pretty. She got a lot of attention when she was in public, most of it unwanted. She attracted controversy wearing the shirt in rural Iowa and Wisconsin. She met it with grace and wit. Many were unprepared to interact with such a very intelligent woman as Janet when all they saw was pretty.
I took portrait photos of Randy Knudsen at Cornell College for the yearbook. It was a tradition that seniors got to submit their own photographs. It was also a tradition that the yearbook photographers took many of those portraits. I don’t know how others did it, but I never charged for the portraits. They seldom wanted actual prints, being good 20-somethings of the mid-1970s. These photos of Randy are on the roof of Tarr Hall, a men’s dormitory. One of the benefits of living in Tarr, or several other dorms, was the ability to be up on the roof. Cornell College is on a large hill of glacial residue, and Tarr Hall is atop that, and its roof has a great view.
The set of four photograph on my paternal grandparents’ farm include my grandfather’s pride – his cows. Granddad Pat (nicknamed because his birthday is St. Patrick’s Day and he preferred not to be called Orval) was not just a farmer, he was a cattleman. His cows were his fortune in a Biblical sense. We always ate well, as did they.
I think it was in June of 1972 I went on a bicycle ride with Nita Scherrer Larson before she was a Larson. I loaned her my Yashica 35mm rangefinder camera and I took photographs with my own Pentax, as you can see. Nita shot photos of me and of Scott Stange, a mutual friend. It was a very pleasant summer afternoon together. My photographs and these can by found in the galleries of My Photo Catalog, June 1972. It’s one of those situations where my memories of that day are greater than the photos I shot. I can remember a house along the rural road. It was one that I only occasionally saw as I drove by – sometimes there and sometimes not. I remember the hot afternoon.
The photographs of Muscatine High School were taken during a parents day. Rather than go to parent/teacher conferences, parents instead simply substituted for their children during the kids’ school day. My mom said that if she had to go school, I had to cook dinner. I preferred going to school and taking these photographs. She stayed home. I don’t think that there was ever any communication between anyone in my high school and my parents. I think by then we had all given up on each other. I’ll save the Schagnogleeack Times story for later.
Finally, Muscatine Iowa has a very nice set of 19th Century architecture. They had more when I was a child and I was fascinated. The small brick building in the last few photographs was set immediately adjacent to the ramp to the old Mississippi River bridge. The old bridge was removed in the early 1970s. You can see it being blown up in the music video to David Bowie and Queen’s song, Under Pressure, at about the 1:10 mark. I heard the story that this brick building had once housed the printing shop and newspaper of Samuel Clemens older brother (Orion?) when the young Sam worked a few months there. I was always super impressed that maybe a hundred years earlier Sam Clemens had walked these same streets. Anyway, as you can see I was impressed by the neo-Corinthian columns to the stately rooming house near the waterfront.
As I go through these negatives I occasionally think, knowing what I know now, what would I have taken more photographs of then? Two major topics. One: more face pictures, portraits, of friends, of stray people. Second? The most banal, normal, everyday scene. It’s amazing how everyday becomes dated, obsolete, obscure.
My interest in 19th Century architecture predates our move to Muscatine in 1967. I remember on several instances going with my parents to relatives, or friends, or people they met, into Victorian houses. Nearly always the elderly owner also had a set of naturalist curios, or antiques. This would have been in the 1960s that I started noticing that certain houses had hitching posts from when there were horses to hitch.
This interest in Victorian architecture led me to buy the 1892 house I live in now. Strange to realize that my birthday is about halfway between now and the build of this house.
The photographs referred to in this essay can be found in the section Photos by Number in the gallery 00053. Thank you for your interest.
