13 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
2Bucky Fuller talked to me just as freely after he knew this book was under way as he had before, and Naomi Wallace and Brendan O’Regan of his Carbondale office filled numerous requests for data and reprints. Bob Snyder showed me his film Buckminster Fuller on Spaceship Earth, lent me a soundtrack transcription to quote from and reminisced copiously. Mrs. Snyder (Allegra Fuller) lent me Bucky’s sheaf of family reminiscences, The Bear Island Story. Barry Farrell gave me transcriptions from the many hours of tape on which he drew for his Life story and his Playboy interview with Fuller. Bob Easton of Domebuilders, Inc., and Lloyd Kahn of the Domebook have been generous with help and insight; Lloyd lent me tapes of Fuller’s Big Sur discourses and a sheaf of student reports on design projects Fuller sponsored at colleges in the I950’s. These reports typify a large archive of mimeographed materials, duplicated for various limited circulations, of which I’ve seen only a fraction. The Architectural Library of the University of California, Berkeley, has more, three bound volumes’ worth, mostly bulletins of the 1950’s from the Fuller Research Foundation. The interlibrary loan staff at the University of California, Santa Barbara, deserves credit for extricating these from Berkeley’s security arrangements. Peter Pearce of Los Angeles and Ed Applewhite of Washington have been generous in conversations, Professors John McHale, Edward T. Hall and H. S. M. Coxeter in correspondence. Fred Siegel interviewed Kenneth Snelson for me. Dr. Robert F. Roeming, Director of the Center for Twentieth Century Studies, University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee), sent me issues of the Wisconsin Architect serializing a wholly unedited talk of Fuller’s. The Skeptic of Chapter 9 is an ideal composite; since some of the people who contributed to his remarks are known to me only by hearsay I’ll mention no names. Marvin Mudrick; Provost of the College of Creative Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, has supported this project since before it was really conceived. He sponsored most of the Fuller discourses I’ve been able to hear, saw to the availability of audio- and videotapes and made one brilliant suggestion which determined the organization of the book.
3 My wife, Mary Anne, and the personnel of the Montessori Center School of Santa Barbara helped with model-making and by telling me which expository tactics were and were not comprehensible. Anne Fuller, finally, by sharing her husband on what were officially days off, did no more than she’s done for the world this past fifty-five years---something indispensable.