This post continues my story of Roadkill brought us closer together but under a new title for this next part in the series. Rather than have the series get into the double digits when titling what "part" it is, I am starting again at Part one. The links to the previous installments are at the bottom of the post.

 ***

It should be noted that 1976 was the nation's bicentennial and everyone who was around at that time would have been familiar with the symbol representing the bicentennial.

I knew early on when the symbol was unveiled what the name of the design firm that had been hired to design it. Chermayeff & Geismar in Manhattan was the legendary firm that created the logo. As students in Providence in art school we were quite interested to find the daughter of Ivan Chermayeff, one of the firm's founders and principals was going to be a student at our school. It was the '75-'76 school year that she started as a freshman and would be a photo major just like Maria. Because Maria had taken the '75-'76 year off she didn't yet know her, but I had a friend and graphics classmate who was a mutual friend.

For me it reaffirmed that the school had a great reputation and moving forward a few years would find several of my classmates working for Chermayeff & Geismar in the city.

Jumping ahead to the early '80s found Ivan Chermayeff building a barn house in the next town to mine in the country and being featured in Architectural Digest later in the same decade.

Flash forward to September, 2010 and Salon.com which I was more than familiar with had featured the design firm as part of its Imprint "reprint."

Click on image for the full article:

***

In the previous installment of the story I had finished the narrative in early November and it is significant to remember the election from that month in which Jimmy Carter was the victor. Unlike the '72 election in which I handed out flyers in South Providence on election day for George McGovern, I didn't volunteer for the Carter office in Providence, but when it came to filling out my absentee ballot he certainly received my vote.

The table belows shows the Rhode Island vote for Jimmy Carter. It was a heavily Democratic state so no huge surprise in the voting results.

 ***

Most of November was unremarkable in terms of events, scandals, or other happenings, but about a week before Thanksgiving break Maria mentioned that she would love to see my part of New York State during the few days we had off. I hadn't seen that coming and it took me by surprise, but it was a pleasant surprise. 

My brother had mentioned to my parents that I had traveled to New Haven with Maria to hear the band earlier in the fall, but my letters home never spoke about her. I had not predicted that I would be in a relationship that fall and I had no roadmap as to where we were headed. I was partly worried about jinxing it should I start talking too much about it.

First off, I replied right away to Maria that I would love to have her come back to New York with me and we could stay at the house my grandparents lived in due to far more space and two guest bedrooms. I said I would have invited her in the first place, but had incorrectly assumed she would visit her brother for the weekend.

I knew in advance that my grandparents would agree to our staying in the house (in separate bedrooms) and a phone call the next day confirmed what I knew their answer would be.

Given that she was preferring to go with me rather than stay with her brother in Framingham, MA did wonders for making me feel less like I could somehow screw up the relationship.

The very talented and, unfortunately, 'late' Phyllis Hyman provides a musical interlude relating to how I felt at that point in time in an extended version of You Know How To Love Me that I uploaded to YouTube:

 ***

Above a photo of Providence I shot from the fall of '76 as seen from the RISD campus and a window on a high floor of "College Building" where part of the printmaking department was located.

Whenever I traveled to and from home I always took the bus due to its direct route. No trains traveled from Boston or Providence close enough to where I lived without making several connections that would take an entire day to complete.

Bonanza Bus Lines was the company that served that route and the bus station was just down the street from the Providence Civic Center that had opened the year both of us had been freshman in 1972.

A vintage postcard of the civic center I still have from college days:

Bonanza featured a circular logo that my teacher, Malcolm, had designed. The company was called Short Line Bus Company when he completed the logo and the "S" and the "L" can be seen in his letterform design. Riding on a bus with a logo by a teacher I admired added a positive spin to an otherwise long ride. (Note: the word "Bonanza" on the back of the bus and in the strange typeface is a creation of someone other than my teacher.)

The bus terminal from those days as seen on another postcard I have. The terminal was quite new when I started using it in 1972, but a few decades later it was razed which really surprised me when I heard the news.

I have only one song that relates to bus rides and it's a favorite of mine going back to the days when this famous Simon & Garfunkel tune first hit the airwaves. Substitute "Maria" for "Cathy," eliminate cigarettes from the lyrics and change the city names and you have a song that evokes the positive type of bus ride I was looking forward to that Thanksgiving weekend.

America...

I didn't take any photos that day, but from November, 1972 I have this shot I took near Hartford of the bridges that went "nowhere" at the time. I believe years later roads were connected and they are in use, but at the time of the shot the bridges were not part of any highway system. There were two RISD students on the same bus that day. In four years of bus travel I only had one other ride with another RISD student, with the exception of Maria.

After traveling across Connecticut with multiple stops along the way, including Hartford, we finally arrived late in the afternoon in Danbury for a total travel time of about five hours. For once the long trip seemed much shorter as we passed the entire time talking about most everything under the sun, as I recall.

Yesterday, standing in the spot where the bus stop was in the '70s I took a few shots under a gray sky. This stretch of sidewalk on White Street is also a bridge and shows the spot where Maria set foot for the first time in this part of New England.

My father arrived about 45 minutes after I called him from the bus station office pay phone just down White Street from the bridge.

His outgoing nature was a great start for Maria to meet yet another member of my family and put her at ease I had assumed, just in case she was wondering what my family was like as she traveled to this distant spot from her native State of Maine.

The Still River as seen from the bridge. The city looks a lot like any other New England town that has some history to it.

Just a block from the old bus stop was a street that would become a restaurant mecca a decade or so later in time:

Parts of Main Street still look quite similar to that day in November, 1976:

While I pointed out the Danbury Public Library as we left Main and headed west on West Street I didn't mention what a major asset the library had been as an aspiring art student in high school. The staff in charge of selecting books related to the visual arts had done an excellent job and 'as a story within a story' I will mention that in order to take the interior shot of the library yesterday afternoon I had to speak to the library director and I told her what a great resource the library had been to me starting in the late '60s as a high school student who then moved on to art school.

Below, more shots from yesterday afternoon of a favorite library of mine:

I believe I said "Welcome to Danbury" as we stepped off the bus, but we still weren't in New York State yet. There were a lot of stories coming out of that Thanksgiving Weekend to the point where I must divide it into an additional posts.

Previous installments of the series leading up to this point:

Part one

Part two

Part three

Part four

Part five

All black & white and color photos (except for the two post cards and photo of the Bonanza bus) and the text are © 2012 by B+Co., Inc.