#bucky fuller

Was certain this was already here, but apparently not: Ruth Asaway’s wedding ring designed by Buckminster Fuller and made Ruth Asawa’s and made by Mary Jo Slick Godfrey, 1949. (image via Artforum, see also Mondoblogo)

Bucky Fuller: “I wear three watches to tell me what time it is.”

My daughter is reading Life as Activism: June Jordan’s Writings from The Progressive, and she just sent me a photo of the first page of the first chapter, which opens with the following:

On a cold night, more than twenty years ago, Bucky Fuller was explaining why he always wore three watches, simultaneously, on his left wrist. I remember two things that he said, “Man is not a tree,” he told me, and “All of America moves out of town every five years.“

I knew that Jordan and Fuller worked together on a project to redesign Harlem, and my daughter knows that am interested in both of them and have read a lot about them in the past, but I am sure she sent it because of the watches. I’ve likely read mention of Fuller’s watch habit before, but that was before I was into watches and it hadn’t sunk in, so I did some digging and found the photo above (Can anyone identify the two that are visible in the photo?) and some references to his three watches.

Elizabeth Kolkbert writes:

As the fame of the dome—and domes themselves—spread, Fuller was in near-constant demand as a speaker. “I travel between Southern and Northern hemispheres and around the world so frequently that I no longer have any so-called normal winter and summer, nor normal night and day,” he wrote in “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.” “I wear three watches to tell me what time it is.”

Sam Green says:

Buckminster Fuller is said to have worn three watches at all times! This is the lore about Fuller, that he traveled so much that he would wear one watch showing the time of the place he was currently, another watch would have the time of the place he had just been and the third watch would be set at the time of the place he was going to travel next.

Green is also quoted here:

“He was a great self-marketer,” Green affirmed, bringing up Bucky’s oft-mentioned habit of wearing three watches while he was traveling to correspond to the time zones of his past, present, and future locations. But Bucky may have been hyperbolizing a bit in order to create a legendary character for himself — Green joked that in all his archival research, he did not find a single picture of Buckminster Fuller wearing three watches. [Found one, Mr. Green!]

A post from Steffan on C6XTY contains:

Fuller was also prone to wearing three watches at a time: one with the time of where he was at, one with the time of where he was going, and one with the time on Bear Island. Modern watches have this feature built in.