The photographs on contact sheet #54 were at the graduation ceremony of Cornell College in May 1979.  I drove up to Mount Vernon from my home at the co-op in Iowa City to see Dan Caldwell and a few others in that class before they left for good.

I had met Dan Caldwell his freshman year.  He lived in Rorem Hall.  My fiancé Janet had a work-study job covering the front desk of Pauley/Rorem Halls for a few hours a week.  We traded her typing my papers for my doing her front desk job.  The person at the front desk operated the switchboard, transferring calls up to the sole telephones on each floor.  They also distributed mail to the mailboxes, checked out the vacuum cleaners, and kept an eye on the place.  Dan walked in with his friend Gary ‘Moe’ Moore and we started chatting.  They remarked that the woman who usually worked there was frequently unpleasant, though they used a single-syllable word.  I said that I had heard that from others, too.  Then Janet walked in, acting as though she were my fiancé and I was doing her job.  It was funny, later.

The last I heard, Dan was a physician near Houston.  I should look him up. 

There is a photograph of Freya Brier getting her diploma.  For Halloween 1977, Freya and Chris Dewey dressed as Russian revolutionaries and went trick or treating in Mount Vernon.  Back in 1977, no adult would trick or treat.  Few kids over 12 would because it was juvenile then.  They chanced upon the house of our philosophy professor, Bill Debbins’s, mother-in-law.  She had fled Russia before World War II and was very unamused by Freya and Chris. 

There are photographs of Bill and Laura Chin.  Bill was in Altoona.  He lived on a different floor and was in math and physics so we seldom spent time together.  We did rendezvous years later, 1987, in Seattle when Chris Dewey had invited me and my partner, Vicki Rush, to visit.  Vicki was entranced by Bill and would have swapped me for him if she could.  I knew Laura, Lori?, slightly.  We had a fencing class together.  When this photograph was taken, their mother Leeann Chin was about to become famous for her restaurant chain in Minneapolis.

Sue Taylor is among the people getting their diploma in these photos.  We met when she was a freshman, the fall semester that Janet was in England.  She was young for a freshman, having graduated high school early.  She was then fascinated by botany.  I was amazed that she could identify every single plant during a hike at Palisades Kepler park.  This interest developed into switching her major to Latin.  She already knew so much from the scientific names of the plants.  Her father was not happy with that.  Our friendship grew to where I saw it colliding with my love for Janet, and we went our separate paths.  I wonder what the rest of the story is for her.

And there is my favorite picture of Professor Debbins, looking with pride on his student Barb Bloom as she walks to get her diploma.  Barb was a smart quiet woman whom I wish I had known better.  Barb and Sue Mohler were in the same philosophy of art class as I.  Professor Paul Gray mentioned something about symmetry in art, and someone else said that it would be unlikely that asymmetry would become fashionable in women’s make-up and face design.  A day later, Barb and Sue came into class wearing asymmetric make-up.  They never wore make-up before, as far as I remember, so it was doubly jolting.  That look has yet to take hold, but we may see it yet.

The photographs described in this essay can be found in the “Photo by number” section of the website under the gallery, 00054.