00059

Contact sheet #59 includes photos of Peggy Pinder at Cornell College.  She was a senior when I was a sophomore.  She was the editor of the college newspaper and a philosophy major.  When I moved to Grinnell Iowa in the mid 1980s, her home town, I discovered that her father was the editor and publisher of the town’s newspaper.  He was a gregarious man with a quick wit and self-deprecating humor.  She was less outgoing, but quick and funny.

The fall of that year, 1975, was the college president, Phil Secor’s, second year, his sophomore year.  After getting a feel for the place, it was time for him to make his imprint.  One of his first acts that year was to stop selling Playboy at the school’s bookstore.  It wasn’t so much an act of Puritanism, but a recognition that the magazine made money by sexually objectifying women.  It got headlines.

Peggy Pinder pitched the story to Newsweek magazine and got a bite.  She needed to illustrate it and I shot a few photos.  We sent the package off to Newsweek and waited.

And waited.

Then Generalissimo Francisco Franco died.  Cue Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live.  This breaking news story pushed our story off the magazine.  The story grew stale and never published.  We did get paid.  I think I got $85 for the photographs and that was real money in 1975.

Years later Peggy graduated from Yale Law School.  I heard that she got on a commercial flight and was seated at an emergency exit.  This was in the late 1970s or early 1980s.  Then the flight attendant noticed that Peggy was blind.  They asked her to move.  She refused, saying that who could better manage an emergency exit in blinding smoke than a woman who was already blind?  They forced her out of her seat into another.  She used her law degree and secured both their respect and their money.

The photos also include a walk on the waterfront in Ashland Wisconsin with my aunt Sandy Weston.  Ashland should have been a pretty tourist town.  Maybe it is now.  Then it was a grimy timber town with a port to ship the logs and timber on out Chequamegon Bay, Lake Superior and the St. Lawrence Seaway.  It did have Northland College and the school was an early leader in integrating ecology into the curriculum.  I recently heard that the college was folding this year.  There is too much of a supply of higher education, and with the demographics, not enough demand by eager young minds.

There are a few photos of Dan Daly when we lived in the River City Housing Co-op, a commune of college students.  The Alaskan dog was not his, but belonged to someone in Middle House.  It is because Dan and Ruth Burch lived at the co-op that I met my circle of friends from 518 Ronalds, some of my best friends ever.  Dan shot the photo of Janet, my first wife, and me while I lifted her hair to show how beautiful it was in the sunlight.

I can’t remember who the trio was in concert at Cornell’s King Chapel.  If you know, please tell me.

There is a sole photograph of Emerson Goodwin.  I’ll write more about him when there are more photos to be discussed.

Finally there are photos of the upstairs of Sandy and Phil Weston’s rental house in Washburn, Wisconsin.  Phil let me borrow his super wide angle lens and I used it to explore the strange angles of this small house.  Back in the corner is the darkroom that he fashioned in a large closet.  I had been doing darkroom work for the previous two years with Phil helping me along.  Because I was bored in Washburn, I shot more photos there.  You can see them in the geographic section of the website.

And you can see the photos referenced in this essay in the section Photos by Number in gallery 00059.

Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.