BOXES 101-102: Short Takes from Chicago to Connecticut and back.

Kids, cats, dogs, even chickens, plus a Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece, appear in this brief posting from the first half of 1976. Later in the year I'd be moving to a new place, but for now I was going back and forth between various familiar spots in the Midwest and East Coast.

Our travels start out in Ohio, where I returned after the visit to San Francisco (cf. previous post). My cousin Judi was now the mother of Jenny, and I took some pictures at her parents' home in Parma, a Cleveland suburb:

That's their dog Toby crowding the frame in the bottom two pictures. I still hadn't figured out how to use my new Nikon to get a sharp focus in natural light with moving figures.

Back in Evanston I had purchased a John Martin mezzotint of the "Fall of Babylon" from an art dealer in New York. Either Mike Bavar or David Hartwell had spotted it for sale and, knowing my interest in the artist, alerted me to it. It appears that I took this picture when it arrived in the mail and before I had it framed. Otherwise, the only other pictures I took in Evanston that winter were of the parking lot below my apartment window after a snowfall.

It had also been snowy when I visited David and Pat Hartwell and baby Alison in their new home in Pleasantville, NY (commuting distance from David's editorial office in Manhattan), but this must have been during my spring break in March:

I likely will have more slides in later boxes of that house, where I spent many a weekend on my visits to New York. I loved the way it was crammed to the gills with science fiction books, in teetering piles as well as on ceiling-high shelves: rare editions, proofs of new novels, everything else in between, plus original science-fiction artwork (for book covers) on the walls.

On this visit I reconnected with my old friends Toni and John Pepe (cf. BOXES 8-9): John picked me up from Pleasantville to take me eastward to their home in Danbury, CT, Here they are, along with their daughter, their cat, and assorted chickens:

Some months later I spent an afternoon with some friends in the Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park. I feel bad to say I no longer remember their names: I only remember that she was a professor of history with two children and he was her boyfriend (later husband, if I recall correctly), and they were delightful company. The pictures below were taken on the Midway Plaisance, at the southern end of Hyde Park.

Our main focus that afternoon was one of Frank Lloyd Wright's most celebrated houses, the 1909-10 Robie House, a few blocks north. At the time, it belonged to the University of Chicago but the interior was not available for tours.

Even though the house was used by the U of C for its own purposes, we could walk along the porches or verandas. My other photos had to be taken looking in through the windows:

In July of that summer I was back in Ohio for my nephew Jamie's first birthday:

He seems to have especially liked his Donald Duck punching bag:

Otherwise, his birthday was a good occasion for playing badminton or just hanging around the yard:

I had bought a car while I was in Cleveland (more on that in the next post), and on the way back to Evanston I stopped off in South Bend to see my friend Max Westler, a fellow Columbia graduate student who had also taught at NU and was now at St Mary's College. You see him with his new cat, Otto, and then his older cat, Sylvester. I can't tell which cat is at the window--possibly a mysterious Third Cat.

Then I was off to Sheboygan, Wisconsin, to begin a new teaching position in a new state.