BOXES 44-45: fall in NY, Christmas in Ohio.

Donya has been showing up in lots of family photos so far, so she really deserves her own top-of-the-post picture. Here she is amidst my sister's doll collection next to the Christmas tree in 1970. This will be a much shorter post than the previous one, in anticipation of a longer one showing a trip Out West I took in the summer of 1971.

One of my favorite activities in New York during all of my graduate student years was working as an editor of The Little Magazine, a literary magazine created in the tradition of Poetry and many other "little magazines" (as they were called), publishing new poetry and fiction on a monthly or quarterly basis--a tradition that lasted into the digital age, though threatened earlier by rising postal rates and dwindling distribution networks. There's a long story behind the creation and continuation of The Little Magazine (ask me about it or look here), but what I need to say now is that David Hartwell was the chief editor and organizing force behind the magazine, and that we had weekly meetings at various editors' apartments to discuss (i.e., vigorously debate) the merits of the latest fiction and poetry submissions. Many of my best friends were fellow editors at various times, including Max Westler, Estie Stoll, Lyndall Gordon, Foster Hirsch, Geoff Nulle and second-in-command Tom Beeler. I wish I had taken more photos of all of them (one photo does appear in "BOXES 18-21"), but in those days friends (or at least my friends) didn't pose for photos unless they were on a vacation trip. In the fall of 1970 I did have my camera at a meeting, with the following mixed (ok, pretty inadequate) results. The first photo shows David presiding and Geoff hiding his face (deliberately?) behind a book. The second, the only posed photo, shows David and Estie and features Estie's favorite winter coat at the time, she recalls. The third includes Foster in the yellow shirt and Geoff evidently trying to lean out of the picture, plus a woman I haven't been able to identify. She wasn't a regular editor, so was she a special guest, maybe a poet? The fact that I took a separate photo of her might hint at the latter possibility.

But I have no trouble identifying the subject of the next photos: he's the great Canadian tenor Jon Vickers, the special guest at another American Berlioz Society meeting. He was warm and generous interacting with fans who attended the meeting. We played excerpts from his Berlioz recordings and he commented frankly on them; I remember him wincing upon hearing one high note that he hadn't nailed to his satisfaction. These photos capture him pretty well, I think, despite the shadowy backgrounds; Mike Bavar must have taken the one in which I appear on the side.

That winter vacation in Ohio I took some Christmas-y photos, including the one of Donya at the top of this post, plus several more. I like the one of Dad and Ellen with Donya and some of her dolls, and the one of Ellen, Sue, Judi and Keith standing in the snow:

And here you see Jim and me with Donya and one of Jim's dogs, Donya and me, Donya and Mom, and Donya alone, plus one of Ellen in a sort of Eleanora Duse pose for some reason, and Keith, Judi and Ellen playing a round of Life. (We always played board games on holiday afternoons.)

The next photos I took are from the summer following, when I went to visit Tim Tulloch, another friend from college and also a roommate in my first year at Columbia. Tim's family was from Utica, but his parents were currently living in Lakewood, NY, on the shores of Lake Chautauqua, in the westernmost part of New York State, very near the historic village-resort of Chautauqua. I don't recall whether I rode up and back with Tim or borrowed the family car (it was less than a 3-hour drive), or what concert or play we saw at the Chautauqua Festival. (I can say with more certainty that I'd visited Lakewood two summers earlier, because--though I took no photos of that trip--we watched the first moon landing on Tim's parents' TV.) Anyhow, in 1971 I did take note of parents' house, a dock at the lake with the family poodle, and Lake Chautauqua itself:

On this visit we took a side trip to SUNY-Freedonia, a bit west of Lakewood, to see its new campus with buildings by I.M. Pei. As you can see, I was still admiring of Modernist campus designs--i.e., stark, futuristic spaces like science fiction book covers (cf. several earlier BOXES posts).

Driving back we caught the Chautauqua sunset:

A photo looking in at the gates of the Chautauqua Institution is hardly worth including, but I'll add it for the record. This was a short visit; the bigger trip of the summer was to see Gary Gordon in Minot, North Dakota. Blog readers may remember that he too was a fellow student at both Case Western Reserve and Columbia; that I was best man at Gary's wedding in Madison, WI in 1966; and that in 1969 I visited him and his wife at Franklin College, IN, where they had found teaching posts. Very sadly and abruptly, after they both lost their jobs in a budget cutback and he found a new position at Minot State College (as it was then called), he sought a divorce and moved out there alone, while Mary and their children moved back to Madison. In June of 1971 I met up with Gary in Cleveland, and we made plans for my visiting him in Minot and taking a driving trip to Yellowstone and Mount Rushmore. So later that summer I got on a train in Cleveland to head westward: my first time west of the Mississippi River. But first, from my parents' front porch, one more Donya photo: