May 1979 -- Calm Before the Storm

Upon pages created by tearing panels from a brown paper bag, I made my sketches to record our trip. Top: a view of our campsite. Bottom: Fellow campers Jafar (L) and Hamid. Jafar was lean and won our impromtu footraces.

On a beautiful weekend in the Carbondale, Illinois region at Giant City State Park in late May of 1979, I went camping with 8 other guys. All campers were Iranian except me. I had been invited to this outing by Mohsen with whom I had become a good friend having met him in a swimming class we had together at Southern Illinois University.

All of us campers that weekend canoed, trail-walked, savored food cooked over the camp fire and generally enjoyed the pleasant natural surroundings of the park. And we talked a lot of politics because it was the beginning of the Iranian Revolution that began with protests by students in Iran, followed by crackdowns by the Iranian Shah. The Hostage Crisis would not happen until later in November. So everyone of the guys was excited for the potential that the autocratic regime of the Shah was being challenged. Some were hoping for a Western-style democracy, some discussed an Islamic guided government, at least one hoped for a Communist regime. All possibilities seemed to be on the table at that point. No one could foresee nor imagine the troubled years that lie ahead.
It was a blissfully innocent time. 

I made sketches to record the event using a ball-point pen on paper from a brown paper grocery bag. I didn’t sketch every single one of the guys except for five of them --the ones who would sit for me and who were in scenes that I had time to sit and mark down. Although the sketches are sparse, I enjoy the glimpse they provide of a fondly remembered event. It was like a calm the ‘eye in the storm’ of a history that still remains to be written.

Hamid was the oldest of us. All the guys looked up to him. He had a motorcycle and reminded me of the actor Charles Bronson. I heard that he went back to Iran, married and started a family.

I can't remember much about what I learned of the region of Iran from where each of they guys originated nor their background. But I recall that Cyrus, above, had the air of a classic "Persian Prince". He was polite, yet calmly confident and aloof.

The sketch of Mohsen, my first Iranian friend, on the left, is made with pencil. Hossain (R) was witty, and joked a lot; quick with quips and would make us laugh.

More sketches of Jafar and Mohsen. These are made with pencil and might have been sketched prior to our camping trip. The paper is not the brown paper bag material.