Epilogue
2On July 4, 1976, America celebrated its two hundredth birthday. That day mayors were reading proclamations, church bells were ringing everywhere. From coast to coast, militiamen were firing muskets, sailing ships were swooping up rivers, fife and drum corps were beating out ‘‘Yankee Doodle’’ as Americans re-created the past.
3 At the bottom of the Western Hemisphere, voices whooping loudly broke the still, white silence of Antarctica. American scientists who had come to study the polar region were taking a holiday, too. They slid in hair-raising toboggan runs down the curve of the huge geodesic dome which sheltered their colony.
4 Under the hot Florida sun, thousands of people poured through the gates of the Kennedy Space Center to see the new exposition, ‘‘Third-Century America.’’ The logo, or emblem, of the fair showed a person with outstretched hands reaching into the future. The future was symbolized by a geodesic dome at the top of the round badge. Crowds moved from one display to another. Huge geodesic domes, fifteen in all, covered the displays.
5 In Philadelphia, the President of the United States opened the celebration with a speech. Firecrackers kept popping while sudden showers soaked the marchers in the day-long parade. A steady stream of people, young and old, poured into a dim, hot auditorium. The crowd waited patiently as the stage lights were adjusted one last time, the microphones tested for sound. The seventh annual World Game was ready to begin.
6 A small, chunky figure walking with a slight tilt was escorted on stage. His escort draped the wire around the speaker’s neck and clipped the pocket microphone in place. There was a still, expectant silence.
7 ‘‘I’d like very much to excite in you an awareness … and a compunction to act… ’’ Bucky Fuller’s voice picked up speed.
8 While so much of America was looking back at the past, Bucky Fuller typically talked of the future. The demands from students, businessmen, educators to hear more never stopped coming in to his office. Somehow, the stresses and strains on Bucky seemed to balance out. New improved hearing aids helped him, as did his grandson Jaime, who often accompanied him. When Bucky did not quite hear a question, Jaime at his side would carefully and clearly repeat it for him. At eighty-one, Bucky’s body tired more quickly and he sometimes spent as much as six or seven hours in bed. Even then, his mind would come jokingly awake as numbers poured through his brain, pushing him to the edge of another discovery.
9 Students continued to discover in Bucky an optimism and faith that inspired them. Freshmen coming on the Wesleyan University campus in September of 1976 saw posters announcing his speech at Crowell Concert Hall. Anyone who missed that speech could catch another the next week at Town Hall in New York.
10 Running from October of 1976 through February of 1977 was a special exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York. The title was ‘‘Man Transforms.’’ Leading architects and designers from all over the world had been invited to demonstrate the ways in which man transformed his environment. Bucky Fuller designed the exhibit in the handsome library of the old Carnegie mansion, home now of the museum.
11 School children trooping through the exhibits stopped short at the entry to the library. Where to look first? At the posters? At the geometric solids with rolling strips of cloth that danced over their heads? Or at the models displayed out in the open, inviting one to touch them? Through the small doorway in the little room off the library, a ten-minute film unrolled. Bucky Fuller himself was on the screen talking directly to them, unfolding his search for Nature’s single system of structuring.
12 He confidently predicted that anyone who studied the exhibit and read the book, Synergetics, would come to agree with him about the cosmic significance of Synergetics. In the papers that a visitor could take home to read, Bucky noted, ‘‘…so, too, will a very surprised body of academic scientists.’’ With typical Fuller enthusiasm, he urged the reader on:
1314And you, too, as I have, can have the fun of beating them to it. The Synergetic bridge spanning the chasm between the humanities and sciences is now open for traffic, no toll to pay and a glorious view all the way.
15 Born in the nineteenth century with deep roots in America’s past, R. Buckminster Fuller has kept his face turned firmly to the future. He is a living, visible link between America’s past and her hopeful future. In his passionate, lifetime commitment to helping all men everywhere, he represents the best of the American dream.