U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [528]
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 per-fectly
-427-ARCHITECT
A muggy day in late spring in eighteen eighty-seven a tal youngster of eighteen with fine eyes and a handsome arrogant way of carrying his head arrived in Chicago with seven dol ars left in his pocket from buy-ing his ticket from Madison with some cash he'd got by pawning Plutarch's Lives, a Gibbon Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and an old furcol ared 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 col apse 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 archi-tect'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 thou-sand 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
-428-in broad treeshaded lawns, domed statehouses on hil s, 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 Wiscon-sin val ey, Spring Val ey, and raised a big family of farmers and preachers and schoolteachers there.
Wright's father was a preacher too, a restless il adjusted 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 final y 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
Viol et le Duc, the apostle of the thirteenth century and of the pure structural mathematics of gothic stone-masonry, and the seven years he worked with Louis Sul ivan in the office of Adler and Sul ivan in Chicago. (It