Bidelman had been the observatory director, three of Bidelman's graduate students, Craig Chester, Cynthia Irvine, and William Smethells, were part of a group from CWRU who wanted to begin their own observatory. The outlook for employment in research astronomy was bleak, so the group began a mail-order business and took part-time jobs to solve their "food on the table problem" while seeking to build an observatory in California, and Bidelman gave them their first cash donation. Other donations followed, and the Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy opened in 1984. In 1976, Bidelman headed an IAU working group on the proper designation for astronomical objects. At a 1978 symposium discussion following a paper Bidelman stated he wanted to make a slightly off-topic point about nomenclature, and asked whether the star under discussion, VI Cyg #5 is the same star as BD+40° 4220. Informed it is and another one of its names is V729 Cyg, Bidelman responded, "Well, I'd like to say, as a member of an IAU Commission concerned with such things, that one should adopt a consistent labeling for a star". After being seconded by Underhill, he added: "We don't all have encyclopedic memories". The Warner and Swasey Observatory in Cleveland, Ohio, suffered from light pollution, and was moved first to a better viewing site in Ohio, then later to Kitt Peak, Arizona, in 1979. By 1979, Houk had classified 69,000 southern stars. As she finished the southern classifications, Bidelman became responsible to oversee taking the northern plates at CWRU's new Kitt Peak observation site in Arizona. The Curtis Schmidt telescope that was used for the southern all-sky survey was a twin to the Burrell Schmidt used in the northern survey. When the telescope at Kitt Peak became operational in 1981, Bidelman continued his "early-results" research involving "systematic, but nonetheless somewhat cursory inspection" to classify stars for the northern hemisphere that had been given HD numbers, and published the spectral data in 1983. Bidelman identified 175 peculiar or otherwise interesting stars, most thought to be new discoveries. Bidelman was the first to identify the peculiar F str λ4077 dwarfs. As part of the "early results" program, in 1981, 1983 and 1985 Bidelman found 21 stars he identified as "F str λ 4077". Almost nothing was known about these stars other than Bidelman's spectral classification. Later researchers found evidence that about half are main-sequence counterparts of Barium stars. Bidelman retired