FRANK SARGENT BORN NINETY-EIGHT YEARS AGO

FRANCIS W. SARGENT 

July 29, 1915-October 21, 1998 

64th Governor of 
the Commonwealth of 
Massachusetts 

(Republican) 

1969-1975 

The official profile, here; two obituaries, here and here. 

From an appreciation in the Boston Globe by David Nyhan (October 23, 1998, p. A27): 

No politician of his rank had more fun in office, as often at his own expense as at another's. He was not a complicated man, of twisted psyche, inner turmoil, or desperate ambition. Frank was Frank: a beautiful man, a solid friend, an able leader, an honest public servant. And a million laughs. What's not to prize in such a splendid fellow, now dead at 83? 

He was a product of distinguished and distinctive Massachusetts Yankee lineage, educated well, but not overly so, at Noble & Greenough and MIT -- hence the desktop motto: "Don't ask me; I didn't go to Harvard." Like a lot of his generation who survived World War II, he made the most of what he came back to. A skier-sportsman of the hardy New England variety, he wound up in the fabled 10th Mountain Division that trained hard in Colorado for Alpine combat, then was tossed into midsummer fury of the Italian campaign, where Captain Frank picked up two sets of wounds, a Bronze Star, and other medals. 

BUCKMINSTER FULLER, b. July 12, 1895

R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER, JR. 

July 12, 1895-July 1, 1983 

BUCKMINSTER FULLER 

at MIT 

How to describe "Bucky" Fuller?  "Bucking convention" comes to mind as one reads of some of his adventures.  "Engineer" and "futurist" seem to be two of the favorite standard choices. Stanford University, which acquired his papers, calls him (here) "an American polymath" with a "versatile career as an architect, lecturer, mathematician, writer, and social critic...."   The U.S. stamp which honors him (seen here) "shows the bespectacled Fuller, his bald head rendered as a geodesic dome, surrounded by some of his most famous inventions including the Dymaxion car, geodesic domes, and tensegrity structures." 

There is a Buckminster Fuller Institute available for further explorations of the master's life and work.  They refer to him (here) as "a renowned 20th century inventor and visionary...." 

A bonus of the Institute's website is a cheerful color photograph of "Bucky" in 1949. 

Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker (here) sniffs that "The fact that so few of Fuller's ideas were ever realized certainly makes it hard to argue for his importance as an inventor. Even his most successful creation, the geodesic dome, proved to be a dud." 

(Well, Harvard kicked him out -- twice.) 

I see (here), however, that Fuller's Dymaxion car has been recently recreated and shown off in the U.K., and found to fascinate. 

And finally, there is Stanford's description of the centerpiece of their collection: 

... the Dymaxion Chronofile, an exhaustive journal of Fuller’s trajectory from 1920 until his death in 1983. Fuller had been collecting clippings and artifacts since he was a child. But in 1917, he began a formal chronological file which he would later call the Dymaxion Chronofile. The Chronofile was a vast scrapbook that included copies of all his incoming and outgoing correspondence, newspaper clippings, notes and sketches, and even dry cleaning bills. Initially, the Chronofile was bound into handsome leather-backed volumes. In later years, to save space and expenses, the Chronofile was simply stored in boxes. By the end of his life, this exhaustive “lab notebook” of his life’s experiment amounted to 270 linear feet. 

There is even more, here, about the innovator Kolbert in the New Yorker calls "Dymaxion Man."