Summer is a great time to come birding at Mount Auburn at a more relaxed pace.  There is less diversity of species which allows for you to spend more time really studying the birds rather than just checking them off.   

Born Richard Buckminster Fuller Jr. in Milton, Massachusetts, "Bucky" Fuller's ancestors first came to New England in the 1630s and included several generations of clergymen and lawyers, including Timothy Fuller, a noted Massachusetts legislator, and Margaret Fuller Ossoli (memorial at Lot #2250 Pyrola Path), a distinguished feminist and transcendentalist.

From infancy, Fuller suffered from impaired vision and was unable to focus close-up until fitted with glasses at age four.  He later quipped that he was "born with the fortunate handicap of farsightedness." 

Forsaking the traditional four-year undergraduate experience at Harvard University - where he was dismissed more than once for "irresponsible conduct" - Bucky left college to work as a laborer, cashier, and export manager, prior to serving in the Navy during World War I.  On his twenty-second birthday, he married Anne Hewlett - daughter of architect James Monroe Hewlett - beginning a marriage which would last 66 years.

After the war Bucky worked for a trucking firm that went out of business and then for a Chicago manufacturing company that fired him.  Jobless and distraught over the death of his four-year old daughter, Alexandra, Bucky suffered an existential crisis - walking the shores of Lake Michigan he had an epiphany that humanity could be improved through innovations in mankind's environment.  He vowed to make this his life's work. 

Following more than a year of silence, Fuller launched himself upon a new path.   He began designing revolutionary structures later labeled "Dymaxion," a new word that combined "dynamic," "maximum," and "tension" to represent the ideal concept of "doing more with less." 

Perhaps best known for the invention of the Geodesic Dome - the basis for his United States pavilion at the Montreal Exposition of 1967 - Bucky also developed a wealth of other designs for every aspect of living and held 25 patents, including a Dymaxion Car (1933), a prefabricated Dymaxion bathroom (1938), and a Dymaxion portable military shelter (1941). 

Although recognition for Fuller's accomplishments wasn't immediate, it eventually came.  From the mid-1950s on, Fuller was awarded nearly 40 honorary degrees, more than 30 national and international awards, and in 1961-62 held the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry at Harvard (much of Fuller's writings are in verse).

Coining the phrase "Spaceship Earth" in 1951, Bucky was a generation ahead in calling for resource conservation and environmental protection. In the 1960s-70s, he lectured around the world to audiences who often saw him as the Leonardo da Vinci of his time.

In 1983 Fuller suffered a heart attack while at the bedside of his comatose wife; the couple died within 36 hours of each other.

His monument at Mount Auburn is carved with the words "Call me Trimtab," referring to the miniscule rudder attached to the larger rudder on ships, which, with minimum effort can change a massive vessel's course.  Fuller believed the role of the inventor in society to be analogous to that of the trimtab, producing big change while expending little energy.

Every year people - some calling themselves "trimtabs" - from around the globe travel to visit Bucky's final resting place, Lot 2669 Bellwort Path at Mount Auburn Cemetery (some photographed above in 2009).

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