On October 10, Ann and I tooled around the Southern Illinois University campus a bit, agreeing that it isn’t the aesthetic experience that some college campuses are. Visitor parking proved hard to find, so we didn’t take a walk on campus.
We did spot the Wham Building on Wham Drive. Ann suggested that the donors were the British pop duo, now about 35 years passed their heyday. Though as a matter of style, it ought to be the Wham! Building. Their connection to SIU? None that we knew, but never mind. Maybe they decided they had enough money to fund a building on a college campus, and they threw a dart at a map to determine where it would be.
Not long after that conversation, we heard a local station playing “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go.” Coincidence or synchronicity? Coincidence, I’d say.
Not far from campus is a residential neighborhood with a fair amount of student housing, marked by some genteel seediness. Parking was easy around there, so we stopped for a short walk down a residential street.
Some of the residences stood out more than others. Some for their décor. It might be hard to see in the picture, but there’s a neon sign in the window of this Halloween-ready house: PALM READER.
Other properties stand out for more fundamental reasons. The R. Buckminster Fuller and Anne Hewlett Dome Home is at the intersection of two small streets in an otherwise unremarkable location in the neighborhood.
The dome is fenced off and closed. But someone used to live there. Bucky himself, as it happens. A sign on the fence says: “Buckminster Fuller is considered one of the leading visionaries of the 20th century. He patented the geodesic dome in 1954 and it is his most enduring legacy. In April 1960 he assembled this dome home (The Fuller Dome) and lived in it with his wife Anne until 1971.”
How long had it been since I’d thought about Buckminster Fuller? Before finding out about the dome, that is, which was a few days before our visit to Carbondale. A long time, that’s how long. I suspect much of the world can say the same. Whatever Fuller’s contributions to civilization, and I’ll be the first to say geodesic domes are pretty cool, he’s headed for obscurity as surely as Ernie Pyle.
Reading about Fuller made me think of Lucy Kulik, a sixth-grade teacher of mine. She taught us math and I believe also led our participation in Man: A Course of Study almost 50 years ago. I hadn’t thought about her in a long time, either, and checked to see whether she was still among the living. Possible, but not likely, though it turned out she died only last year at 97, and now has a stone at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery next to her husband, an Air Force lieutenant colonel — something I didn’t know about her.
RIP, Mrs. Kulik. The details have faded after a half century, but I remember you were a good teacher.
In class one day Mrs. Kulik mentioned Buckminster Fuller as the fellow who invented a dome made of triangles and who wanted the world to give up the words “sunrise” and “sunset.” I’d never heard of him at the time, or if I had, I’d forgotten.
Fuller suggested the words sunsight and sunclipse to replace sunrise and sunset, arguing that the common words reflect an incorrect understanding of the way the Earth and the Sun move. You could argue that they do, of course, and the words he suggests are perfectly fine, but to object to sunrise and sunset on those grounds itself reflects an excess of literalism in understanding language. That might be a reason his suggestions didn’t catch on.
His domes might be cool — you can’t stand in front of the Expo ’76 Fuller dome in Montreal and not feel a little awe — but I also have to add that a few of them go a long way. In the case of Carbondale, one is probably enough.
