BOX 2: Hamilton and beyond

During my Colgate years I lived in a studio apartment that was a built-on wing of this icicle-dripping house, with my own entrance. (My very genial landlord, whose name I've forgotten, was a professor in the Education Department.) This photo from early 1966, looking north from my front stoop, must have been taken after a partial thaw. My side windows, facing south, provided a quintessential small-town view in every season:

Farther down my street were the gates to the campus, though my office was about a mile away and uphill. But in the opposite direction downtown Hamilton was less than a minute's walk. All the essentials were there: the post office (people wrote personal letters all the time back then!); a couple of dining establishments (a greasy spoon and, for fancy occasions like Sunday brunch, the Colgate Inn, which had great hamburgers); and a really excellent movie theatre, where I saw everything from IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD and THE PUMPKIN EATER to Kozintzev's spectacular widescreen DON QUIXOTE in Russian. (The campus had a smaller screening room where I saw Antonioni's ECLIPSE for the first time.) For farther excursions, I needed my car, a used '61 Ford. Here it is in front of my apartment:

(I just now noticed the front-bumper sticker for the Luray Caverns in Virginia. I went there with my college friend Ken Faulhaber soon after buying the car in summer 1964, just before moving from Cleveland to Colgate: an inaugural extended test-drive of my first vehicle other than a bicycle.) Below is another photo of the car, with two people I cannot identify. Clearly I knew them well enough to invite them to go on a drive and even pose (was it the landscape or the car I found most photogenic?), but I haven't the slightest clue as to who they were. Fortunately, I remember a number of good friends from those days vividly--and in later boxes of slides I've found only a few "mystery people." (Still, "only a few" isn't good enough!)

In any case, this photo gives good evidence of what I loved about the outskirts of Hamilton: the magnificent hills and valleys of upstate New York. Here's a springtime view from above the Colgate campus:

And a more summery view from farther afield:

As with those people beside my car, I've completely forgotten what the building is in the next photo: some kind of institute? And I couldn't tell you the exact locations (but so what?) of the other photos below--a rock face, a sleepy park presumably in Hamilton, a ski lift, an overlook:

I do remember the view below: it's Lake Skaneateles (locals pronounce it "Skinny-atlas," I was told), a Finger Lake the highway took me past on my way to or from Ohio during holidays:

On a drive back from New York City I photographed the fall foliage and morning mist from a rest stop on I-87.. Another time, a sunset was irresistible:

Life wasn't all rural: Syracuse and Utica were only an hour's drive (northwest and northeast respectively), and there were often plays and concerts at their universities and elsewhere. (Those interested in hearing about the great visiting-orchestra concerts I heard could write to me separately.) But I never took pictures of those cities. Nor did I document things like seeing a recital in the Colgate chapel by the great pianist Lili Kraus--a great conversationalist as well, as I discovered when I got to drive her to the Utica airport the day after the recital.

I made the longer drive down to NYC on occasion, but took only a couple of photos, looking down Fifth Avenue from the Guggenheim Museum. Here's the better of the two:

On other occasions I visited college friends who were now going to Harvard and Princeton. I have no record of the Harvard visits, but in my next post I'll show photos of a Princeton weekend.