A Baptist Meets Bucky By Al Gowan It was October, 1959. R. Buckminster Fuller, rumored to have been thrown out of Harvard twice, would be arriving any minute to give a lecture. My design classmates and I waited on hard drafting stools in the room we had just partitioned with Homosote on the second floor of the library, the spartan new quarters of the Design Department at Southern Illinois University. I had returned to school to finish a degree interrupted by marriage and two children. Five prior years in the design field had given me the mistaken idea that design was style; white walls, glass and steel furniture, awards in Art Directors Club exhibitions. My first year had been in advertising, but I just couldn't see spending my life pushing one brand of potato chips over another, so I went to work for a Baptist publishing house. But three years of advertising baptismal hip boots, anodized offering plates, and pocket knives stamped with "Jesus Never Fails" had sent me back to SIU. I knew that I wanted to teach design and that finishing school would be a requirement. The music we designers liked was the hip harmonies of Stan Kenton and Miles Davis. Rockabilly Elvis Presley was for the pink Ford and lava lamp crowd. I wished I could afford one of the new Corvairs; metallic brown. As we waited for R. Buckminster Fuller, I wondered why a sophisticated Easterner would come to "lower Illinois," as one of my classmates from Chicago called Carbondale. The room grew quiet. You could have heard an X-acto blade hit the concrete floor. Moments later, a filmmaker came in and snapped on his bar lights. A short guy bounded into the glare. Could this little man be the famous designer? His thick glasses with their elastic band marked a black equator around his bald head. R. Buckminster Fuller looked like a salesman, of brushes or maybe tin siding. Without notes, the stubby man started right in. His blue eyes looked astonished and huge behind his Coke-bottle horn rims. He spoke rapidly-a cross between Casey Stengel and Dave Garroway. He told us we must think first and design later. Fuller admitted

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