Whippoorwills call
And evening is nigh
I hurry to… my blue heaven
LINDBERGH IN PERIL AS WAVE TRAPS HIM IN
CRUISER’S BOW
Down in the Tennessee mountains
Away from the sins of the world
Old Dan Kelly’s son there he leaned on his gun
A thinkin’ of Zeb Turney’s girl
ACCLAIMED BY HUGE CROWDS IN THE STREETS
Snaps Pictures From Dizzy Yardarm
Dan was a hotblooded youngster
His Dad raised him up sturdy an’ right
ENTHRALLED BY DARING DEED CITY CHEERS
FROM DEPTHS OF ITS HEART
FLYER SPORTS IN AIR
His heart in a whirl with his love for the girl
He loaded his doublebarreled gun
LEADERS OF PUBLIC LIFE BREAK INTO
UPROAR AT SIGHT OF FLYER
CONFUSION IN HOTEL
Aviator Nearly Hurled From Auto as it
Leaps Forward Through Gap in Crowd
Over the mountains he wandered
This son of a Tennessee man
With fire in his eye and his gun by his side
Alooking for Zeb Turney’s clan
SHRINERS PARADE IN DELUGE OF RAIN
Paper Blizzard Chokes Broadway
Shots ringin’ out through the mountain
Shots ringin’ out through the breeze
LINDY TO HEAD BIG AIRLINE
The story of Dan Kelly’s moonshine
Is spread far and wide o’er the world
How Dan killed the clan shot them down to a man
And brought back old Zeb Turney’s girl
a short, partly bald man, his face set in tense emotion, ran out from a mass of people where he had been concealed and climbed quickly into the plane as if afraid he might be stopped. He had on ordinary clothes and a leather vest instead of a coat. He was bareheaded. He crowded down beside Chamberlin looking neither at the crowd nor at his own wife who stood a little in front of the plane and at one side, her eyes big with wonder. The motor roared and the plane started down the runway, stopped and came back again and then took off perfectly
Architect
A muggy day in late spring in eighteen eightyseven a tall youngster of eighteen with fine eyes and a handsome arrogant way of carrying his head arrived in Chicago with seven dollars left in his pocket from buying his ticket from Madison with some cash he’d got by pawning Plutarch’s Lives, a Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and an old furcollared coat.
Before leaving home to make himself a career in an architect’s office (there was no architecture course at Wisconsin to clutter his mind with stale Beaux Arts drawings); the youngster had seen the dome of the new State Capitol in Madison collapse on account of bad rubblework in the piers, some thieving contractors’ skimping materials to save the politicians their rakeoff, and perhaps a trifling but deadly error in the architect’s plans;
he never forgot the roar of burst masonry, the flying plaster, the soaring dustcloud, the mashed bodies of the dead and dying being carried out, set faces livid with plasterdust.
Walking round downtown Chicago, crossing and recrossing the bridges over the Chicago River in the jingle and clatter of traffic, the rattle of vans and loaded wagons and the stamping of big drayhorses and the hooting of towboats with barges and the rumbling whistle of lakesteamers waiting for the draw,
he thought of the great continent stretching a thousand miles east and south and north, three thousand miles west, and everywhere, at mineheads, on the shores of newlydredged harbors, along watercourses, at the intersections of railroads, sprouting
shacks roundhouses tipples grainelevators stores warehouses tenements, great houses for the wealthy set in broad treeshaded lawns, domed statehouses on hills, hotels churches operahouses auditoriums.
He walked with long eager steps
towards the untrammeled future opening in every direction for a young man who’d keep his hands to his work and his wits sharp to invent.
The same day he landed a job in an architect’s office.
Frank Lloyd Wright was the grandson of a Welsh hatter and preacher who’d settled in a rich Wisconsin valley, Spring Valley, and raised a big family of farmers and preachers and schoolteachers there. Wright’s father was a preacher too, a restless illadjusted Newenglander who studied medicine, preached in a Baptist church in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and then as a Unitarian in the middle west, taught music, read Sanskrit and finally walked out on his family.
Young Wright was born on his grandfather’s farm, went to school in Weymouth and Madison, worked summers on a farm of his uncle’s in Wisconsin.
His training in architecture was the reading of Viollet le Duc, the apostle of the thirteenth century and of the pure structural mathematics of gothic stonemasonry, and the seven years he worked with Louis Sullivan in the office of Adler and Sullivan in Chicago. (It was Louis Sullivan who, after Richardson, invented whatever was invented in nineteenthcentury architecture in America.)
When Frank Lloyd Wright left Sullivan he had already launched a distinctive style, prairie architecture. In Oak Park he built broad suburban dwellings for rich men that were the first buildings to break the hold on American builders’ minds of centuries of pastward routine, of the wornout capital and plinth and pediment dragged through the centuries from the Acropolis, and the jaded traditional stencils of Roman masonry, the halfobliterated Palladian copybooks.
Frank Lloyd Wright was cutting out a new avenue that led towards the swift constructions in glassbricks and steel
foreshadowed today.
Delightedly he reached out for the new materials, steel in tension, glass, concrete, the million new metals and alloys.
The son and grandson of preachers, he became a preacher in blueprints,
projecting constructions in the American future instead of the European past.
Inventor of plans,
plotter of tomorrow’s girderwork phrases,
he preaches to the young men coming of age in the time of oppression, cooped up by the plasterboard partitions of finance routine, their lives and plans made poor by feudal levies of parasite money standing astride every process to shake down progress for the cutting of coupons:
The properly citified citizen has become a broker, dealing chiefly in human frailties or the ideas and inventions of others, a puller of levers, a presser of buttons of vicarious power, his by way of machine craft… and over beside him and beneath him, even in his heart as he sleeps, is the taximeter of rent, in some form to goad this anxious consumer’s unceasing struggle for or against more or less merciful or merciless money increment.
To the young men who spend their days and nights drafting the plans for new rented aggregates of rented cells upended on hard pavements,
he preaches
the horizons of his boyhood,
a future that is not the rise of a few points in a hundred selected stocks, or an increase in carloadings, or a multiplication of credit in the bank or a rise in the rate on callmoney,