Some of the photos on contact sheet #56 were from my second month at Cornell College.  I was then still trying to find a circle of friends.  Among my first friends was Tom Carr, in photo #32.  He was from Virginia.  His father was career military, and according to Tom, was then head of education for the entire Army.  Tom had nothing military about him.  He had a quiet easygoing demeanor that went well with the Virginia in his speech.  I was interested in campus radio and joined my friend from the summer work crew at Monsanto, Chuck Schuetze, for the Friday 9:00 to midnight slot on KRNL.  This led to an interest in radio production which in turn took me to radio news.  Since no one else was interested in radio news, the station manager offered me the job of news director.  Tom got interested too and did a number of the Monday to Friday 6:00 to 6:15 evening news shows.  

The source of the news was United Press International, UPI, a former rival to Associated Press.  There was a printer in the radio station hooked to a telephone line that would periodically come to life and churn out news stories on a roll of paper out the top, an old timey teletype machine.  It was literally ‘rip and read’ journalism.  To do the show, we would pull out all the stories that were printed since our last look, read them through, rip the most newsworthy from the scroll, and tape them together into a new scroll that would take about fifteen minutes to read.  I would occasionally add things that I’d picked up from other sources.  I subscribed to an early version of ‘news of the weird’ and we would insert a story or two to fill out the time.

I smoked a lot of pot in college.  It took a lot because it wasn’t nearly as powerful.  It showed in my radio news work.  Tom told me that the staff at the General, one of three bars in downtown Mount Vernon, would put the news show on to entertain customers with the stoned silliness.  I remember reading through the news stories and suddenly realizing mid-way through the story that this was the same story I had just finished reading, but re-written for a later presentation.  

I produced an introductory tape for the show, using Mussorgsky’s Great Gates of Kiev as the theme music.  I called the show, “Mercury Theater News,” after Orson Wells’s notorious Hallowe’en alien invasion radio play.  (I was the only one in the audience who immediately picked up on the reference to Grover’s Mill New Jersey in the Buckaroo Bonzai move.)  This name also had the advantage that we could refer to it as the MT News.  Towards the end of my freshman year, and end of my tenure as news director, I would announce at the beginning of the show that one of the stories was untrue, and it was up to the listener to discern what was fake news.  If only this practice were more widespread.

In my second semester of news director, I heard that a kid from the local Mount Vernon High School wanted to do a weekly news segment for his high school news.  He was the son of a professor of music, Julian Bern, and the receptionist for the commons, Marianne Bern.  We had a chat and it seemed like he knew what he was doing.  Clearly it was the right thing to do to put him on the air.  So I had the privilege of being the first to give air time to a now somewhat famous musician, Dan Bern.  Except then he was Danny.  I should have shot a photo of him at the microphone.  

There are also photos of Bruce Montgomery and Pam Berg.  I had some very pleasant interactions with Bruce, particularly during our freshman year.  He was from the East somewhere and had a good sense of humor.  As I got involved with my new girlfriend Janet I grew distant from Bruce and Tom and many other people I’d been friends with early at Cornell.  By February of my freshman year, Janet was certain that we were going to marry.  I think that this certainty helped mend her cognitive dissonance that she was sexually active with someone to whom she was not married.  She was the daughter of a Methodist Minister.  I also moved into Altoona Hall from Rorem Hall in March, so I was physically distant from the old friends and tossed into a fascinating group of extremely intelligent men at Altoona.  

I ran into Bruce at our last class reunion at Cornell.  He had no interest in conversation.  I sat down with him and his wife, Robyn Moon Montgomery, who was also in our graduating class.  She didn’t make eye contact.  We were with some other classmates, I forget who.  They decided that it was time to go eat and made it clear that I was not invited to join them.

I’ve never figured out why I have not been cool enough.

Pam was a real sweetheart whom I spent too little time with.  She was bright and articulate and we had almost no overlap in our time together.

There is also a few photos of Allan Six, a friend from high school and Muscatine, who was visiting me at college.  He had gone to Grinnell College, a few hours west.  The photos are of him sitting on an external cross brace to the railroad bridge next to campus.  We had hoped to be there for the passing of a Chicago/Northwestern train, that would have been no more than six feet below us.  No luck for that time.  It was quite the show, particularly at night, to be on that bridge as the train roared underneath.  The engineers could see the college students waiting on the bridge and would blast their horn when they were underneath.  Cheap thrills in Mount Vernon.

I have no memory of shooting the photos of Chris Dewey clowning it up at finals in the library, with his Sigma Phi Nothing sign.  Maybe I did not shoot these photos.  They are more ‘centered’ in composition that I would usually do at the time.  But then perhaps I was too stoned to think through what I was doing at the time.  

There is also a few photos of the ‘first family’ of Cornell College - president Phil Secor and his family.  Unfortunately the photos do not include his daughter, Nanette.  I got to know Nan maybe six or seven years later when she briefly dated a friend, DJ Beard, in Iowa City.  I wish I could remember how those two met.  It was interesting to hear her version of what was happening with her father and family during their Cornell College experience.  She fell off my radar soon after she and DJ went their separate ways.

The photos referenced above can be found in the Photos by Number section in the gallery 00056.