Looking for Dr. Fuller :: Buckminster Fuller Essays

Looking for Dr. Fuller It's the next to next to last day of English 381: The Personal Essay. We're reading Annie Dillard's Teaching A Stone to Talk and I call attention to a blurb on the jacket by Edward Albee. A student notes asks about another quotation from Dr. R. Buckminster Fuller. She doesn't know who Fuller is, and no one else in the class does either, but the running speculation is that he's a fundamentalist evangelist, a sort of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. I fumble for an explanation of Fuller--architect, philosopher, voice of a generation like Dr. Spock. I joke that I should bring in my Whole Earth Catalog so I can illustrate my remarks. I explain that Fuller invented the geodesic dome and when some in the class aren't certain what that is, I scrawl a bad drawing on the board. Finally someone saves me by mentioning Epcot Center, and we go off awhile on that. I mention that another dome much closer is in Downs, Illinois, ten miles down the road in a one-tavern town. Here is an essay possibility, the connection between Epcot Center and Downs, Illinois. But that's not the road to travel in this essay. At the library I plug Fuller's name into the computer. Twenty books pop up, their call numbers ranging from C, to H, to P, to T, and I suddenly recognize a title Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, its publication place of Carbondale reminding me that Fuller taught at Southern Illinois University. There's a picture of his geodesic dome house in Carbondale, by the way, in the plates between pages 96 and 97 of Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure. For kicks I also ask the computer to find The Whole Earth Catalog, call number AP2.W5. My book search will take me, then, to five different floors. The Whole Earth Catalog is yellowing and brittle. Its publishers, the Portola Institute, probably didn't expect back in 1969 that the they would show up on university library shelves, and so they didn't bother with acid-free paper. When I flip through the pages I remember the day I bought a copy myself, a later edition, at least, in 1975 and, reading, through it, came upon a recipe for baking bread, from the Tassajara Bread Book. It was summer. Breaking bread sounded like a righteous thing for a college freshman to do and so in my mother's kitchen I measure yeast and molasses and water and whole wheat and salt and oil and kneaded out six loaves.