DOMES SPUR CROSS-COUNTRY TREK.

Byline: Thomas Swick Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

Wyoming's was the last. 1995. Cheyenne is way up there, you know, not as far as Olympia, but more remote.

You try to imagine Wallace Bright, the retired advertising salesman from Sunrise, driving over the plains like Patton advancing across Belgium. You can almost see him in his burgundy Corn Palace cap entering the city limits, making his way through unfamiliar streets, finding a parking space and then stepping calmly, victoriously, out of his rental car and snapping a picture of his 50th state capitol.

It all began, as obsessions often do, innocently enough. It was in October 1988; he and his wife were visiting her hometown of Jackson, Miss. His sister-in-law insisted that they all go down and look at the capitol building. So they did, and Bright took a picture of it.

Heading back to South Florida they stopped in Tallahassee. ``I took a picture of the capitol,'' Bright says, sounding like a man who, after trying a cigarette, gets a puff on a cigar. ``In the car on the way home I said, `You know what would really be fun? Taking a picture of all the capitols.' ''

The following year, he set out in earnest, driving up the East Coast. Atlanta, Columbia, Raleigh, Richmond (where he also got a shot of the old Confederate capitol), Annapolis.

Then came Dover, Trenton's modest upturned bowl gilding the banks of the Delaware River, the ornate chateau of a capitol in Albany, Boston's red brick mass capped by a burnished gold dome, like a washerwoman in a jeweled tiara. Someone had asked Bright why he didn't just take a picture of one state capitol since they all look alike. That person had obviously never been to Baton Rouge or Lincoln, Neb.

Bright, of course, got to both - saw the bullet holes in the wall that came from the gun that killed Huey Long and gazed up at the stark domed tower, like the backdrop from a Fritz Lang movie, of the Cornhusker State.

Most of the capitols offer tours and Bright took them all. Vermont's was his favorite - ``It's great for anybody who's interested in the Revolutionary War'' - although Texas was perhaps the most memorable.

``There was a guy in the crowd - hair down to his shoulders, not too clean, a beard. The guide was telling us about Sam Houston and he asked, `Is that the Houston who made movies?' ''

In Pierre, S.D., his wife got out of the car and asked a passer-by if it was safe to walk around. The man laughed, and asked where she was from. ``South Florida,'' she said, and he laughed even louder.

Bright got Juneau and Honolulu on two separate cruises. Cruising for capitols. ``If you watched Hawaii Five-O,'' he says of the latter city's legislative house, ``you saw McGarrett going in there now and again.''

He met two governors - Wyoming's and North Dakota's. ``I was proud of what I was doing and wanted everyone to know about it.'' His goal is to write to all of the governors, telling them of his accomplishment, in hopes of getting letters in response, to match with all the pictures in his album. ``In other words, to get every governor's signature.''

He is also thinking now about Canada, photographing the capitols of all of the provinces. Although you get the feeling that this project doesn't inspire him with quite the same sense of excitement, romanticism, usefulness.

``Do you ever watch Jeopardy?'' Bright asks. ``I love it when the category is `State Capitals.'''

CAPTION(S):

Photo

PHOTO State capitol domes, like California's in Sacramento, are the passion of dome photographer Wallace Bright.