BOX 1: getting started: Hamilton, NY/Colgate University

When I was 23, I bought my first camera: a little Kodak Instamatic, which had no controls other than a flash. It was the fall of 1965, and I was starting the second year of my first

teaching job. In those days I took pictures mostly of my surroundings—upstate New York, with visits to Manhattan—and of my family back in Ohio during holidays. I used the Instamatic until 1974, until it was stolen from my seat on the Istanbul Express. Its replacement was, to say the least, an upgrade: a Nikon SLR with detachable zoom and wide-angle lenses. I used the Nikon for some years, and took probably my best pictures with it, but I don’t recall why I eventually traded it for a simpler Canon camera: maybe laziness over lugging around the (to me) heavy equipment.

Around 2005, I bought a digital camera and started storing pictures on my desktop and later the iCloud. But up until that time, I was taking slide photos almost exclusively: well over 200 boxes of 20 or 36 diapositives, as I learned they were called. Feel free to shudder if you have bad memories of interminable slide shows—but I loved not only the format, allowing the projection of richly detailed landscapes and architecture onto a big screen, but the ritual of providing a show for friends or family, rather than just handing over a book of snapshots to be thumbed through.

For years I planned to digitize all my slides but couldn’t decide whether to use the equipment in my campus art lab or to buy my own. Finally last month, after endless dithering over online reviews, I bought an Epson V550 and have begun downloading the pics to my desktop.

I thought about writing a blog in which I would comment on the photos box by box: a sort of retrospective travel diary. This may be of interest to absolutely nobody besides myself, though I do think some of the slides are ok as photos, and some others have a bit of historical interest—you can be the judge. My goal is to display every picture that isn’t defective (blurry, too dim) or redundant, and I’ll also skip over any photos of other people that I think might make some viewers feel uncomfortable. The great majority of the slides are of places I visited, rather than scenes of my everyday life. Today I regret that I didn’t do more to “document” (as we say nowadays) good friends and daily hangouts; but like most people in the days before cell phones, I didn’t carry a camera unless I was “going somewhere.” (Exception: lots of family and pet photos.) So the few pictures I did take of everyday life are especially meaningful to me, as I hope to describe.

Here are the first four photos I ever took with my very own camera:

The scene is Hamilton, NY, where Colgate University is located. The first picture gives a sense of the charm of this small town, especially in the autumn. As for the cattle and the other rural scenes--a mere 5-minute drive from the center of town--these were exotic sights for somebody who had lived only in Cleveland and Manhattan. (Quite a different story today.) Hamilton is in the Chenango River valley, which stretches southward, as you see in the upper right pic. In the future I'll crop photos whenever I think they could be improved: for example:

But as I'm starting out, I wanted to show you some of the original Instamatic framings as well. As for the picture of the abandoned vehicle, that was my first “art photo.”

What was I doing at Colgate? I’ll explain in more detail than I plan to give for any of the later boxes of slides, since not too many readers (if there are any readers!) will know about this part of my life. In spring 1964 I was in the process of completing my Master’s in English at Columbia U., in NYC. A professor during one of my classes mentioned  that certain colleges—he named Colgate and Dartmouth—had a practice of hiring full-time instructors with only a master’s degree, for a limit of two years, with the assumption that they would be going on for their doctorates afterwards. A bit exhausted by the concentration of my master’s program, and eager to find out if I would like teaching as a career, I sent off letters to the department chairs of both schools. Dartmouth wrote back that no such policy existed there, but I got a letter from Joseph Slater, chair of Colgate’s English Dept., that began, “You have written opportunely.” He was planning to come down to Manhattan very shortly and could interview me at the local Chock Full o’ Nuts diner.

So in the fall of 1964 at the age of 22 I drove from Cleveland in my first car (a used '61 Ford) to my first teaching job—my first job of any kind other than clerking at my father’s grocery store from childhood through college. It was a year of firsts: my first apartment all my own (I’d had two roommates during my Master’s year); my first experience of a small and all-male school (Colgate wouldn’t go co-ed for several more years, except that their master’s program was already admitting women); my first exposure to minus-24-degree weather that winter; my first hearing of Indian music (Ravi Shankar was a guest of the Music Department, giving a talk/demonstration for students and faculty as well as a concert, three years before Monterey Pop); my first martini (served by Professor Slater at a dinner party for new faculty--I felt very grown-up and also dizzy, since I didn’t drink even beer or wine back then). Those were intense days, especially  as I made some lasting friendships among the younger faculty and the master’s candidates.

I’ll resist describing all the people, places and events that remain extremely vivid memories but lack photos to illustrate them,  but I'll share one story of my first day of teaching. When I walked into my first Freshman English classroom--several minutes early, of course--and sat at the desk, eventually a student in the front row said to me, "You better get up from there from there before the teacher comes in." I couldn't think of anything to do other than give a faint smile and wait in silence until the top of the hour, when I said to the front row, "Surprise, I'm the teacher," and started the class. Maybe not the best opening line for a career--at least it was spontaneous.

The campus was built on a hill, with the original buildings set around a quadrangle with the chapel at one end. I don't have a photo comparable to the drawing on the campus directory, so I'll reproduce that along with my photo of the chapel:

There was a small graveyard behind the chapel: I was startled when Joe Slater, a Colgate alumnus, remarked, "Some of my old professors are buried there."

Down below, a tree-lined drive wound its way up the hill to the older campus:

Scattered about were--and presumably still are--assorted buildings both older, like the gabled and turreted administration building with a cozy faculty lounge/lunchroom:

and newer, like the 1950s-looking yellow-paneled building below the hill in these winter/spring pictures:

For 1960s ultra-modern, one truly fantastic building opened during my second year: a Fine Arts building designed by Paul Rudolph in his "Brutalist" style: lots of rough concrete surfaces and jagged angles inside and out, but exciting to walk through, with a great theatre where I saw excellent shows. I wish I had better photos, but the Instamatic was designed to take pictures in strong light (preferably midday sun!) or else with flash. Many of my slides turned out to be splendidly moody when projected on a wall by a strong projector bulb, but simply dim when digitized and seen on a computer screen. Still, maybe the photos below give a slight sense of the building's daring design:

The campus was fine for walking, when the weather wasn't frigid; but the bare trees of winter allowed for grand vistas of the valley beyond the campus hill:

In my next entry I'll show pictures of my house and of places I visited during my second Colgate year, from nearby countryside to Manhattan and Princeton.