This is Bar Harbor, Maine, or nearby. I was with a group of literary scholars in search of lobster and salt water. We were participants in a conference being held a good hour inland at the University of Maine in Orono. It was the summer of 1986--a summer I mostly spent with friends in Sheboygan and family in Ohio, except that I did get to the Maine conference and to a sort of conference on wheels in Illinois and Iowa, as I'll show below.
But the slide box at hand starts earlier that year in Sheboygan, on a day when trees were barely showing any leaves but people were dressed for late spring. I was attending an auction at the architecturally distinguished headquarters of Acuity (then called Heritage) Insurance. The building had opened only two years previously, and I regret that I didn't
take any good photos of it on this occasion--it seems that my goal was strictly to take pictures of friends. I'm posting the shot of Sallie to the right even though it's shamefully out of focus, since it provides a glimpse of the main corridor. I don't recall what was being auctioned; the event may have been invitation only, and I would have been there thanks to Sallie's husband, Craig, who worked for the company. In the cluster of photos below you can see, first, Ellen Luebke and Arnie Gesch, fellow members of the Sheboygan Symphony, arriving; then Ellen and Sallie; me and Ellen; me with a goofy expression; Sallie; Sallie, Arnie and Ellen seen from a balcony; and finally, another balcony view that takes in the larger crowd, with Sallie and Craig in the middle left. Would it be safe to say that people used to dress up more for such occasions than they do today?
The three-day conference in Maine at the beginning of June was on H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), the poet and novelist I'd written my dissertation and a couple of articles on. Though H.D.'s career spanned from 1912 to her death in 1961, this was the first conference devoted exclusively to her life and works. I was excited to be part of it--to meet other H.D. scholars, to give a talk at the conference and in general to share our enthusiasm for an author too long neglected. I didn't take any photos at the conference itself, but I did take several when a group of us traveled to Bar Harbor one afternoon, probably at the end of the conference. I remember a few names and could guess at a few others in the pictures that follow, but I'll just show the photos without ID'ing some folks but not others. If any H.D. scholars happen to discover this post, please fill in all the names! The photos do, I think, convey the comradery and high spirits of the group.
I took a few additional photos of the misty scene at the dock or nearby:
After the conference was over, I rented a car and stayed in Maine for a couple of days more, driving along the coast and staying overnight in a b&b, in Camden if I recall correctly. It was much sunnier those days, as you see from the following photos. The first two show the harbor at Camden but I can't identify the other places.
Back in the Midwest I see from my slide box that I was in Chicago with my friend Dave at one point. As usual when I was with Dave, a film student, I played around more with the camera. Here are two photos of him standing in front of the Biograph Theatre, one with the marquee more in focus, the other with him:
The next photo must have been taken on Lower Wacker Drive, but I don't know how I got the red streaks without more of a blur of a car beyond them:
And I couldn't resist another photo of my 6000, this time under city streetlamps:
At some point back in Sheboygan I took this crazy photo of Dave leaning over the back balcony of my house, at a time before I had a fence put around it. I'm guessing somebody is holding his legs, or maybe he just had good balance.
I was back in Chicago later that summer to join Foster and his partner Kristofer at another conference combined with a bus tour. It was organized by the Theatre Historical Society of America, and consisted of several days exploring historic movie palaces of Chicago, its suburbs, northeastern Iowa and Milwaukee, with guided tours of the interiors. I joined the group after they had already visited theatres within the city limits; the second day, my first, started with the Pickwick in Park Ridge, a 1928 Art Deco/Aztec/Mayan landmark:
The interior must have looked strikingly modern the year the Pickwick opened. In these shots our tour group is the 'audience.'
Here's a close-up of some decorative detail, plus another photo of the exterior. (I think that's Foster standing to the left.)
Our next stop was the Paramount in Aurora. Sorry that these photos are too dim.
From there we went to the Loop for a tour of the Chicago Theatre. There was renovation going on, so we all had to wear hard hats.
With no tripod or control of lighting, not to mention leisure time for setups, I could only get soft-focus and dim photos of interiors--I include them here simply as a record or notation of my travels, and because they give at least a suggestion of the magnificence of a place like the Chicago. Here are two shots of its interior:
That evening we had free time, and went on our own--maybe with a Chicago friend--to the far south side for an architectural tour of our own devising. The Historic District of Pullman is where the Pullman Car company in the 1880s built a model village for its employees. We saw the famous clock tower and the Greenstone Church (and I think we had dinner at the restaurant of the Hotel Florence):
The next day, back on the bus, we were off to Joliet, IL, to see the palatial Rialto Square Theatre. Here are some partial glimpses:
Then it was across the state to Rock Island, one of the Quad Cities on the Mississippi, where we visited a 1921 vaudeville house, the Fort Armstrong, now the Circa '21 Playhouse, with beautifully preserved decorative elements:
Across the river, in Davenport, Iowa, I took this shot of the interior of the 1920 Capitol Theatre:
And these photos are of another Davenport theatre, the 1931 RKO-Orpheum, now the Adler:
Both those theatres with their 2000+ seating had shown movies up until the 1970s and were now being renovated as performing arts centers or awaiting restoration. From Davenport our bus took us to Cedar Rapids, where we spent the night. At twilight I took this shot of the marquee of the Paramount, which we were to visit the next morning:
And here is a shot from that morning visit, along with another photo of Foster and Kristofer:
From Cedar Rapids it was up to Dubuque and the Majestic Theatre, with its French mansion exterior and box seats inside--you can see part of the tour group in one photo, me in the other:
As I recall, the tour ended in Milwaukee with a visit to one of the great still-operating movie palaces, the Oriental Theatre; then the bus returned to Chicago. I didn't photograph the Oriental, maybe simply because I had been there for movies a great many times before. But somewhere between Dubuque and the Oriental I took other photos of a pretty spectacular theatre. I haven't yet identified it--or possibly them:
The only other trip I took that summer other than to Ohio--at least that I remember and have a photographic record of--was to South Carolina to visit friends formerly of Sheboygan. I'll show those photos in my next post, which will be mostly family and friend in Ohio and Wisconsin, before I begin to show scenes from a 1987 trip to Spain.
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