“If I knew the way, I would take you there.”

Ripple, Grateful Dead

Tom and Nance:
Ascents of the Times

In high school I was a mediocre student and I first attended college at a small midwestern university that was lenient in its acceptance standards to get a more geographicly diversified student body. I was looking for something and did not have a clue to what it was or how to look so I was just another smart ass who thought being someone important in college was about drinking and being a jerk. It did not work out, I screwed up another person’s life as well as my own, left school and returned to the east coast.

Living in Connecticut, I worked full time days and later for one year attended a local community college full time nights.I relly did not know anyone there and on Saturday nights I used to drive down to Port Chester, NY where the drinking age was 18 and visit bars. One night at a bar called Rapson’s I met Tom in the middle of some kind of animated political discussion with a bunch of jocks, we formed an instant affinity and we became friends. I still had not found what I was looking for but I felt that we were both looking for somehting similar. At that time he worked at the Scott-Meridith Agency, I am not sure doing what, and he was writing poetry.

Later he quit SM, got a motorcycle, a job at a flower nursery and we shared an apartment in Westport right across from the police station. Tom was like a magnet to “freaks” and there a constant stream of interesting young people passing in and out of our apartment. We smoked a lot of pot and pre-1967 did Oswley acid in New York Cit. Later James,who was to become a lifetime friend of us both, came to live in our place also which is another story in itself

Our next door neighbor Maggie, an alchoholic, lived with her straight arrow daughter, about our age, who had a boyfriend, equally straight, or perhaps even more so, who lived in NYC, had a job where he wore a suit and tie and on weekends visited in his Porsche 356. One of our favorite pastimes was getting stoned and visiting them.

In 1967 I left Westport to become a student at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. It was a different place for me, why I went there, that's a personal thing long gone, but it doesn’t really matter. It was certainly an interesting experience and one I have never regretted.

Supposedly I was enrolled in the undergrad B-school. On registration day I appeared at the doors of the B-school and they would not let me enter due to the length of my hair. So I went back to the main registration in the gym, met Dr Palmer, Head of the Sociology Department, we had a conversation and I became a student of Sociology. Later I followed him to Toldeo as a graduate student.

While at USD I was studious, got good grades, often Saturday afternoons and evenings were spent at the library where weeknights I also worked the 10 pm to 2 am shift. I met a lot of people on that night shift, had some great conversations and one day I met Nance who was kind of different herself and we were friends though never romantically.

I was living under a honky tonk bar popular with students in Vermillion, a very small town with a main street of about five blocks. At some point Tom appeared, I introduced him to Nance, certainly neither one of them belonged in Vermillion, they got together and after a few weeks due to some local resident comments about their public behavior, they left to return to Connecticut, got married, got a VW van with a psychedelic paint job and later bought some land and moved to Maine.

This was in the late 1960s when there was a “return to the land” kind of feeling among many young people, looking for a simpler more meaningful life. A couple of years later I spent a few months with them and took some photographs, which make up this exhibit.

Tom was a very bright intellectual kind of east coast person, well read and educated while Nance, from a South Dakota town, not very intellectual oriented but very earthy, commited to searching for something missing her life and eager and willing to express her feelings about anything new.They both seemd to find a pleasure in behaving in a very uninhibited manner, but where it just seemed natural for Nance, it often seemed to me that for Tom it was pre thought intellectal choice.

All of us were searching for something similar, something not to be found in in the acceptance of the society. But Tom and Nance found something that they could both work towards together that was similar to that thing for which many of us were looking.

Looking back from here, the hopes many of us felt in our hearts, however poorly stated by ourselves or mistated by popular media, have not been fullfilled. So many of our generation who have had “succesful careers” in politics and business have not made the experience of life better except perhaps for themselves, and for the most part the world isnot a better place. To me it seeems as if its a broken record of the “King’s New Clothes” playing over and over again, the never ending dialectical.

But then again who is to say, there are no easy answers,and while I think that many people today who are considered “successful“ were not able find an another way and ended up choosing success in the old way as an easy way out, I cannot really say that my effort was any better.

And in marriage Tom and Nance too were not successful as they they were later to part. But It think these images, in a simple easy to feel way, reflect some of the things that they were going through as they were searching for that something that I too was searching for, and perhaps others— things that we hoped would generate a better experience of life.

Click on any image to see the exhibition.

Steve Naegele