On Bruce Goff’s Ford House: Sidney K. Robinson Interviews Don Tosi

In his early 70s, Don Tosi returned to the Ford House he had built some forty years earlier. The present owner, Sid Robinson, had belatedly realized that Tosi may still be around and that his story needed to be recorded. In the spring of 1995, Robinson invited Tosi to sit down in the house and have his memory stimulated by being in the building he had built when he was 26.

The recording of that conversation that was transcribed and then edited by Tosi is a unique record of the Ford House’s construction. Historians often have the clients’ and architects’ stories of such architecturally significant examples, but you do not often get the contractor’s side of things. Construction is a critical contribution to an unusual architectural design.

Tosi was in Goff’s Berkeley, California, office in 1947 when Ruth Van Sickle Ford commissioned Goff to do a house in Aurora, Illinois. Goff and Tosi knew Ruth from their days in the 1930s as teacher and student at her Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago.

In 1949, after the first contractor disappeared, Tosi stepped up and said he would build the house. The extraordinarily fine construction is the result of Tosi’s dedication to his mentor’s vision, his knowledge of Goff’s design, and the commitment by Sam and Ruth to skimp on nothing in construction.

Sidney Robinson: Didn’t you work with Goff in California? Tell me about that.

Don Tosi: I started with him in Chicago, at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art. In my senior year of high school I decided to take a drafting class. I breezed through it, so the instructor asked me, “What the hell have you been doing all of your life? How come you haven’t taken drawing classes?” I said, “I don't know. I used to design automobiles, nothing other than that. I never realized that I had any talent.” The instructor said, “You ought to continue.” I then decided to go to the Academy of Fine Arts. I enrolled, and I worked my way through the school. After I was there a short time, Bruce took me under his wing and introduced me to architecture. From that time on there was a gradual change from industrial design to architecture. I was apprenticing with him and going to Armour Institute, which is now IIT. I did that for a year, and then Bruce went into the Navy, and I went into the Army.

SR: Sure.

DT: When I got back in 1946, Bruce was already out in California; he got out of the service before I did. Bruce was out in California, and so I went back to IIT. I got out of the service in January and the semester had already started, but they allowed me to start. I spent another semester at IIT. I just couldn’t stand school anymore, and I joined Bruce out on the West Coast and started apprenticing with him again. I was there for about another year and a half, then Bruce went on to the University of Oklahoma, and I came to Chicago to do some theaters that we were doing for Stran Steel. We tried to find a contractor to build the first Ford House design, but the contractors in this area didn’t want to build it and didn’t want to bid on it. We decided to do a second design. I think we did the second design while I was still in California, and then the third design while I was still in California. Anyway, I had all three designs, and I was trying to find a contractor in this area to do it. In the meantime, I opened an office in Elmhurst and I started a house, along with working on other designs for small houses.

SR: As a contractor?

DT: Yes, as a contractor on speculation because lumber was difficult to get and tradespeople were difficult to get. Every time we went to get a bid, nobody wanted to bid on anything because the material market fluctuated greatly.

SR: You couldn’t control costs or estimates.

DT: Yes. The market was so good that they’d just build a house and sell it and make whatever profit they could on it. The simpler the house, the better they liked it. Contractors didn’t want to bid on anything.

SR: Sure.

DT: In self-defense I started this contracting business, and I built a very unusual house in Elmhurst and did some remodeling work. In the meantime, I was working on these drawings for Stran Steel.

SR: For these theaters?

DT: Yes, for the theaters that we were doing for Stran Steel. In the meantime, I don’t remember how it was that Morvay got in the picture, but we found Morvay and he said he would take the contract for the Ford House. I think at that time he had bid somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000. We had agreed to that, so we advanced him $4,000 as per agreed contract. He started the building, and I came out to see how they were doing and whether they had located it properly, and so forth. I would come out about every three or four days. And finally, one day I got a call from Bruce, and Bruce said, “Don, I don’t know what the problem is. I’m going to be out that way shortly, but Morvay doesn’t want you on the job. You’re interfering.” I said, “Interfering? I don't understand it. I haven’t done anything but just look and check the dimensions and the location of the building. If that’s the case and Mrs. Ford wants it, fine, I won’t go back out.” He said, “Well, wait till I get there. Don’t go back. Wait till I get there, and we’ll get it straightened around.” Another three or four days went by, and Mr. Ford called me and he said, “Can you come out, Don?” I was living in Westchester at the time. I drove out, and they told me they had advanced Morvay another $8,000 to pay for the concrete and to pay for the labor, and one thing or another, because the business agent refused to send any other carpenters out or form-setters out because he hadn’t paid the last workers. Morvay owed $2,500 on the concrete. The Fords advanced Morvay another $4,000, and he disappeared. He had the one-bedroom foundation in and about half of the main circle unit formed; that was it. The Fords asked me if I would take over.

SR: Pick up, yes.

DT: I said, “Well, I feel I can do it. I feel confident that I can do it. I haven’t had that sort of experience, but I feel confident that I know the house, I know what has to be done to create Bruce’s design, and I can do it.” I was an electrician in the Army for three years, and so I was familiar with construction. Anyway, when I got to Aurora, I called the business agent and went over to him. He recommended a couple of carpenters to call to get a good foreman. Elmer Anderson was the one I selected, and from there we just went on.

SR: Who was Corbett?

DT: He was the business agent.

SR: Oh, Corbin, sure.

DT: He helped me get qualified workmen.

SR: Approval.

DT: Eventually, we got some other carpenters who were all qualified people and union people.

SR: Leo Lakeman was the name you mentioned as a carpenter.

DT: I don’t remember him as being here too long. Who else have you mentioned?

SR: Well, Holman for copper work, Chuck Arnold for steel erection, Elmer Anderson as foreman, and Leo Lakeman.

DT: We had an Indian, I can’t remember his name. We used to call him “Chief.” He lived in the area and was a full-blooded Indian; he was an excellent carpenter.

SR: Now, what you have said about the three proposals for the house being done in California, that meant Ruth Ford contacted Bruce when he got out of the Army and was set up in Berkeley.

DT: Oh, yes. We designed the first one in California when I joined them.

SR: In other words, this one.

DT: This one. We worked on this one when I was in California.

SR: On Haste Street in Berkeley?

DT: Yes, 2027 Haste Street. I lived on the first floor, and he lived on the second floor. I lived there with two other fellows: Russ Kersey and Claude Oakland.

SR: And the request came from Ruth?

DT: Yes. I don’t know how it came about, but I know that when I got there Bruce was starting the first design for the Ford House.

SR: Starting to work on it. And the reason for the alternative designs was?

DT: Because the first design was going to be too expensive with the shape not being so radical. The others were Quonset shapes—the modified Quonset—and then they were covered with various surfaces. I think you saw them at the Art Institute of Chicago exhibit.

SR: At the show, yes. Did that mean that someone did a cost take-off on this first design, to say that it was too expensive, or was it just suspicion?

DT: Every time we’d get somebody to bid on it or estimate the plan.

SR: So bids were taken?

DT: Oh, yes. Every time we’d talk to somebody about it who was in the construction business, they’d say “No.” It was going to cost a couple hundred thousand dollars, and this and that, without even submitting a bid or complete estimate.

SR: Sure. And those were California contractor estimates.

DT: No, no. Local people.

SR: Oh, they were here. So you went that far.

DT: Sam knew a couple of people that were contractors. Sam was with the gas company, so he knew a couple of contractors. As a matter of fact, he used to play golf with one out at the country club, a young fellow, and he asked him to bid on it. For a while I thought he was going to take it, and then he said no.

SR: What finally resulted? What happened that you went back to the first and best design?

DT: Only because Morvay wanted it, Morvay said. “If I’m going to build any of them, I want to build the first one.”

SR: Oh, really! So he had some sensibility, he just couldn’t quite follow through.

DT: Well, he was odd. Now that I think of it, I introduced him to the Fords, but before he disappeared, and after that, we couldn’t find him anymore. Previous to the Ford contract we had two contracts in the office in Elmhurst. I got involved with a fellow who was with Page Co. Page was the name of the efficiency company; R. G. Page, or something like that. They would go into a plant and scrutinize the entire operation and then make suggestions. Those suggestions would improve the efficiency and the profit, and they would take a portion of the profit. That’s how good they were. Stran Steel had hired them to oversee this project. Morvay came in after that. LaCrosse, Wisconsin, was going to buy one of these Quonset theater units, and we went there to to bring illustrations with and to sell the unit. We went to LaCrosse, the three of us, to sell the unit, and while we were there, my job was just to illustrate the presentation or to demonstrate the illustrations that we had. Then, shortly thereafter, Stran Steel decided not to go ahead with the project. It got to be too involved for them. All they wanted to do was to produce steel, and they were going to discontinue the Quonset ribs anyway. The Army wasn’t buying any more, and there was a big surplus of Quonset ribs. You could buy them from the Army for next to nothing, and so they just put two and two together and said, “Well, how in the hell are we going to gain anything? All we’re going to do is to help the Army get rid of their Quonset ribs.” And so, Ray Page called me in one day, and he said, “Don, I don’t think we’re going to go ahead with the Quonset project. As a matter of fact, I’m getting ready to retire, and we’re going to close down the office.” They got rid of one of the top executives, and he and I opened this office in Elmhurst. He thought there was a good market for housing now, and he was handling housing with another fellow, and they represented a prefab house company. I believe Morvay came to bid on the prefabs.

SR: A lot of those.

DT: Yes. They were selling the prefab houses, and if there was a drawing that had to be done, then I would do the drawing for them. They sold one to a bowling star, Buddy Bowman, and never did complete it. Anyway, the whole operation ceased. In the interim Morvay got involved. I used to go downtown to Chicago to Morvay’s office, and I couldn’t see him. I’d go down there, and he was either busy, or he wasn’t in, or something else. I decided that I would get there somehow; I was a young, single guy, about twenty-three years old or twenty-four years old. I got to know the girl that answered the phone, the receptionist. I took her out to dinner a couple of times, and I would call in and if he was there and he didn’t want to talk to me, she would tell me that he was in and he wouldn’t talk to me. On the pretext of whatever it was, I knew somebody else’s name or something and get to talk with him. But I would know that he was in then because she would call me and tell me that he was in.

SR: One way or another.

DT: Yes. On several occasions I got to talk to him when I didn’t expect to talk to him. Anyway, that’s how Morvay got in the picture. I got to talking to him one day about the Ford House.

SR: You had contacted him because of the house or because of these other reasons?

DT: No, for other reasons. He was involved in some sort of an operation that the other fellow in my office was handling—building houses or something. Then, I happened to ask him if he would be interested in bidding on the Ford House. We had the drawings in the office, and his representative came in, saw them, and said, “Let me take these back to Morvay and talk to him about it.” That is how he got interested, and that’s what happened. Anyway, that was the long and the short of it. He disappeared and they never did find him. The Fords never heard anything about him or found him. This was in October of 1949 that he disappeared. As I say, they had just started the outside rim and we were laying out the balance of it and continued to completion.

SR: Now, was this Quonset rib from Stran Steel or from the Army? Do you remember?

DT: These came from Stran Steel. They were brand new ribs. Before I could get the permit, the City of Aurora insisted on having an engineer’s certification on the plans. They wouldn’t accept just an architect’s certificate. They wanted an engineer’s certificate. The engineer questioned whether Stran Steel’s ribs were going to be strong enough to be embedded into the foundation at the base.

SR: And that’s when the wide flange H beams came in.

DT: Bruce suggested that we run a cable around the middle of the circumference.

SR: That’s what that hole is. Yes, right.

DT: And I said to him, “Bruce, what the hell am I going to hold with a cable?”

SR: “Be reasonable.”

DT: “How am I going to put tension on it? There is no way I can pull it.” I said, “You’ve seen too many bridges.” Anyway, as it turned out we welded steel in between, as I recall. There is a steel purlin that connects each one of these H beams together, and then you’ve got the reinforcing bars in the exposed screened area. They are all welled together so it ties the entire sphere as a unit. Then, the plywood sheathing on the ribs and purlins is nailed into the Stran Steel, again, reinforcing the dome. We had the inspector out several times and made a mock-up rib section, and he accepted it.

SR: This was from the City of Aurora?

DT: Yes. But we had to do all that first, and then we had to get pockets all the way around as we poured the foundation. As I recall, we poured the wall with pockets for the H beams, and then we set the steel on the wall and poured the pockets full of the H beams in place.

SR: Yes, because it looks like it goes into the foundation.

DT: Yes, the H beam is embedded in the concrete. There was no way I was going to try to get the H beam in the form while pouring the foundation. Then we got the center column made up, with a tension ring at the top and midpoint. I think the first column was a ten-inch and the second one was a five-inch.

SR: Yes, that’s right. How did the H sections get rolled?

DT: With a simple device.

SR: Onsite?

DT: No, no, up in St. Charles. There was a steel company up in St. Charles, and I got to know the old guy [the owner]. He said that he could do it. They had two pins in a jig, and a hydraulic pressure piston. They push the H beam in the center of the jig with the piston and then they move the H beam and then push it again.

SR: Oh. Yes, you can see the increments as you look at it.

DT: That’s how they were shaped. We didn’t have a roller to form the arc. We would have to send off to Pittsburgh or someplace to get them rolled. The freight time and one thing or another were excessive. The company in St. Charles could do them for X number of dollars, which was very reasonable as I recall.

SR: One by one, inch by inch. Where did the materials come from?

DT: The coal?

SR: Yes.

DT: I sent a truck to St. Louis for the glass culls. The Libby Owens Glass Co. in St. Louis was the only place that had cleaned their kilns out and dropped the molten glass right on the ground. Most of the glass companies dropped the molten glass into a container, and when they dropped it in the container it broke up into real small pieces. We found out Libby Owens in St. Louis had an old plant in which they still dropped the residue onto the ground and got these big chunks. We were buying our lumber from Michaels Lumber Company in Aurora, right next to the river, and old man Michaels was really good to me. He liked me, and he had a coal yard and lumberyard, and he said, “I’ll send a truck down.” They sent a truck down to Southern Illinois to get the cannel coal and sent another truck down to St. Louis to pick up the glass culls.

SR: So the coal is Illinois coal. I didn’t know we had hard coal in Illinois.

DT: I believe he got it from there. I don’t even remember, but I know he sent the truck in and came back with a whole truckload of the cannel coal, and we dumped it on site here. The same with the glass. The glass was dumped right here. The hardest thing for me to do was to find the marbles, though, for the mortar joins.

SR: Tell me. What did you do?

DT: I remember trying to find the marbles. That was hard. Bruce wanted green ones, clear ones. He didn’t want red ones for some reason because the red wasn’t the right color.

SR: There are a couple, though.

DT: I think there are. I think I snuck them in anyway.

SR: Yes. And there are blue ones, too.

DT: Yes, blue ones and green ones to match the culls. And then I got an old mason; all these people that got real excited about the building were older people.

SR: That’s interesting.

DT: They were all older, yes. They were at least forty years old, and I was twenty-four or twenty-five at the time. I had just gotten out of the service two years before that.

SR: Where did things like the cypress and the rope come from?

DT: The cypress was a special order. It was all number one cypress. In those days, that was the only cypress siding we could get. I think we got it from a mill house that specialized in furniture lumber.

SR: Very nice.

DT: And it is all number one select cypress. Then, we wanted it to look somewhat natural, and so Bruce said, “Well, find out what we can put on it.” After inquiring, I got a formula from the government, and it’s copper quinolinolate and then you add a little bit of white to it to get the bright color. That’s all that we put on, and it has held up beautifully over the years.

SR: Oh, it has, yes. And the rope?

DT: That was a war surplus. They had ads in the paper all the time for war surplus, and I singled one out and we bought a large amount; we had bales and bales and bales of it. I think we bought a truckload of the rope.

SR: I had heard it was from Milwaukee. Do you remember?

DT: It could have been. I don’t remember those details. I was too busy laying the coal walls. The cabinets were made by Gustav Sipple, a German craftsman, and he also did the doors and other things. We took doors in and he covered them with cypress.

SR: He was here in Aurora?

DT: In North Aurora, down by the river.

SR: Was that Supreme Millwork?

DT: No, no.

SR: Or Mann Sash & Door? Tom Thumb Mill, North Aurora, on the dam.

DT: No, it was Sipple. The other one in North Aurora was a mill house; what the hell did we get from them? Probably the doors, and then we covered them with the cypress. I think that’s probably what we did.

SR: Corbin remembered the piano being enameled over there, right?

DT: Right over there, right where it’s at.

SR: That is actually a replacement piano, by the way.

DT: That’s a replacement?

SR: Yes, it’s not the original.

DT: Oh.

SR: You can tell by the picture in the Life magazine that the legs are different. There is a slight difference. Someone bought another piano and had it enameled.

DT: That must have been Ford, because nobody else would do it. It was painted by hand, not sprayed. It was hand-painted. The painter that did the painting here was Houdiska, and Houdiska had done the painting on Mies van der Rohe’s [Edith] Farnsworth House.

SR: Farnsworth, really!

DT: At the same time.

SR: Was all of the steel painted in place?

DT: It was primed and no, it was painted on the ground. I was astute enough to do that. I had a good training with Bruce. One of the first things he taught me, if nothing more, was to be very practical. He said, “Flashing. Just think about it. It is to keep something from leaking, and so when you are working with areas on the outside, just think; about how the water is going to react to the condition and how it is going to be diverted to prevent it from entering the building.”

SR: How it is going to be shed.

DT: “What you have to do to prevent leaking.” I’ve encountered carpenters today that don’t know how to flash things.

SR: Was it hard getting the big pieces of glass, the window glass?

DT: It was all wire glass for the skylight.

SR: Really! Because what we broke out was not wire glass. I’ll show you a piece of what was broken out.

DT: I thought we got wire glass throughout the whole thing for safety reasons.

SR: That’s what was in there.

DT: Maybe we didn’t. I know for a long time we were considering wire glass because we were afraid it might break and fall through.

SR: Sure. Well, when we replaced it, of course, we really did have to get the safety factor. What is there is laminated. There is a clear-pebbled laminated to a blue-gray because we couldn’t get the color and the obscurity in the same glass. We had to laminate, and that solved the safety factor problem.

DT: In those days we didn’t have to worry about safety, but I was concerned about it.

SR: What about the big sheets in the bedrooms, those six-by-twelve sheets?

DT: Those were just either quarter or three eighths. I don’t remember now. I think they’re all quarter inch. Now we use three eighths and a half and heavier glass, but back then it was all quarter inch.

SR: Jim Corbin, the young kid, remembered how much you contributed to the details.

DT: Oh, yes.

SR: He said, for instance, the rope pattern was not worked out. In other words, you had to decide how to make the turn.

DT: Yes. The ceiling. Bruce had a design that started at one end and continued unbroken in one diagonal direction to the top circle.

SR: A spiral. Yes, I heard that.

DT: This board went straight up, you know. I got to thinking about it one day, and I said, “How in the hell are we going to do that?” I think those pieces are only six inches exposed, seven inches wide pieces. I started to experiment. We laid some boards up, and we could only go three ribs across or four ribs across with a relative lap exposure. I sketched a pattern, and when it came back together, it would form a herringbone pattern. We made a section onsite—I think I’ve got a photograph of it somewhere where I’ve got this section made up. I called Bruce and I said, “Bruce, there isn’t any way on God’s earth that I can use one board and get it to go all the way up.” He said, “Well, can’t you get wider siding?” I said, “Not wide enough to do that.” And so, “What do you suggest doing?” I said, “I made up a herringbone pattern, and I think it looks pretty good.” He said, “Send me a picture of it and I’ll let you know.” I sent him a picture, and he called me back a day or two later after he had received it and said, “Fine. Go right ahead.” Yes, all the details on the building and the drawings were, by no means, complete.

SR: They weren’t complete.

DT: There was no way that we were going to build this house without improvising. I worked out all the details as we went along. These little windows that were over the coal wall. The detail was just indicated on the drawings.

SR: You mean the little ones on the floor?

DT: No, the ones up above.

SR: Oh, yes, this opening here.

DT: The ventilating ones.

SR: The ventilating, yes. What about the fact that there is glass and screen? Was that indicated for this neon, or for the light?

DT: One time we had a heavier valance through at the top of the coal wall and we had fluorescent fixtures in there. The fluorescents we had in those days weren’t very efficient. I started inquiring, and I had enough electrical knowledge to know that the ballasts, you either put them all together in one place and wire them back to the light fixture, or you would have them all the way around at each fixture and they would resonate as they aged. The more I inquired, the less I wanted to use them. I had them purchased. I had enough to do the whole house, because that’s what we had specified. For some reason, I went down to the sign company and asked them what to do, and they said, “Well, use neon.” I, said, “Will neon hold up? Will it last any length of time?” They said, “Sure. It will probably outlast the fluorescent.” I said, “What about noise?” He said, “There won't be any noise from there.” So we put the neon in. That’s how that happened. Bruce was only out here during the construction a total of three times.

SR: So, you did have responsibility to fill in the gaps.

DT: Right. He was only out here three times, and I don’t think I called him more than a dozen times. The only reason I called him was to get his approval aesthetically, not structurally but aesthetically.

SR: Can you remember an instance of an aesthetic decision somewhere?

DT: Well, the siding was one of them. There were three fireplaces. There was a fireplace up there in the loft, and I told him there was no way I was going to get the chimney in.

SR: Another flue, right?

DT: Yes. I couldn’t get another one in there, and so we eliminated that one.

SR: Yes, that’s in the section.

DT: There were numerous things. But I just kept going, like it was my house, I guess. I never thought of it any other way.

SR: Sure. What was the original floor surface? You said white terrazzo.

DT: You’ve got the original. It was just painted black, but somebody put terrazzo on the drawings.

SR: Yes, white.

DT: But we didn’t have enough money to put terrazzo down. We would have preferred terrazzo floors, but there wasn't enough money to do it.

SR: Black like the tubs. And those were packed and shaped in place?

DT: I put those in. I formed those myself, and I had one of the apprentices grind them. He ground them by hand. You couldn’t get a tool in it and work with it in the shape it was in, so we ground it by hand.

SR: I think you may have noticed that the bubble skylights are gone.

DT: Those were from surplus bomber blisters.

SR: They really were! You looked in the paper and there was war surplus.

DT: War surplus, yes. Those were war surplus bomber blisters. When I was over in England, I must have destroyed thousands of dollars’ worth of those. I was an electrician at an Army air depot. We had twenty-three thousand GIs on it, and we had assembly lines and we had machine shops and we had hangars with all the planes that had come over came into one of these rear echelon depots. There were two of them. We were BAD number II, and there was a BAD number I. They would fly the planes in and land in Scotland, because that was as far as they could fly with the gasoline that they had. They would land them in Scotland, and then they would fly them down from Scotland to either our depot or one of the others. When they got to our base, we would have to put the armament on. When they built the planes, they didn’t know what theater they were going into, and the armament in each of the theaters was different depending on whether they were opposing Messerschmitts or zeros or what. The Messerschmitts used to come in from below so that we had heavy armament along the bottom of the B-17s and B-24s. Anyway, they used to come in, so we’d get new ones in, and we would have to adjust them to the theater they were going to. Then, when a plane had a hundred hours, or thereabout, it would come in for a new engine and for its hundred-hour check. Another electrician and I were in charge of this one hangar. It had to be, oh, I’d say, a good five to seven hundred feet long and about five hundred feet wide, in which we had a carburetor shop, we had a degreasing shop where all of the parts came into this one section of the hangar, and then they were put in a degreaser and taken out so that all of the grease and goop was taken off of them. It didn’t make any difference whether it was a motor taken out of a plane here or whether it was one that crashed and they brought it in. We had a section in which they would take it apart. Then, it would go through a degaussing machine to see if parts were cracked and check for tolerances of wear. If they were within tolerances, the various components would go down the assembly line, like the engine block and the crankshafts, and then all of the cylinders and everything else would be added and we would produce another engine. We would turn out twenty-four Ellison engines a day and twelve Rolls-Royce engines on the other assembly line. My job was to keep the assembly lines electrically oriented so that they would have electric drills and whatever else they needed. Then some bright lieutenant would get an idea that they were going to change this position to that position, and this position to that position . . .

SR: And you would have to rewire.

DT: We would have to rewire it all and work through the night. We were working seven days a week and ten hours a day. In 1944 or 1945—I think it was January 1944 or 1945—they sent out a request for additional GIs to go from one of the other divisions to the infantry. Our plant maintenance corporation had no TO [table of organization] or rating schedule. We didn’t belong to the Air Corps. We were engineers, and we didn’t belong to the Air Corps or Army Engineers, so consequently we didn’t have any ratings. The regular A. Force GIs would come over with sergeant’s ratings and everything else because they were technicians in the Air Corps. But because we didn’t belong, we didn’t have a TO and so consequently, I was a lowly corporal but I had this responsibility of keeping the assembly line going.

SR: Running, yes!

DT: I worked hard. Finally, I just got fed up with it because in the Army a job like that has a lot of responsibility and you do a lot of work. Consequently, the Army is full of guys who just goof off. We had a staff of people that only fifty percent of them worked. The other fifty percent would sleep or do something else—goof off someplace—and you couldn’t force them to do the work. They would do whatever they had to do to make sure that they didn’t get chastised every day. They would do a little bit of work and then they’d disappear. We had a crew in our barracks that every night they would go into town. We were about twelve miles from Blackpool. Now, Blackpool is a resort town in England, and it’s got an Eiffel Tower up on the Woolworth Building, it had a Riverview Park—a Coney Island-type park with all of the rides and all—and it had a boardwalk and piers going out, six dance halls, theaters, and indoor swimming pools. It was just a big resort town. It still is, I guess. Anyway, these guys would go into town every night. I’d get into the barracks about six or six-fifteen, and these guys had eaten and they were already going to town. They would get on the bus and into town they went. Every night. When this call came in January of 1945 to get more people in the infantry, they started getting all the goof offs transferred. I volunteered to go into the infantry. I figured I would get to go home earlier. D-Day was in 1945, so this was shortly after the D-Day anyway, and they wouldn’t release me. They said I was essential.

SR: That’s what happens when you do a good job, right?

DT: They wouldn’t release me. Anyway, the cessation of hostilities ended, and they shipped me down to southern England. We went to depots there in which they had Quonset huts, and these were the warehouses that all the parts came into. Every day, we would get a new form as to what we were supposed to destroy. We destroyed eighteen northern bomb sites, and at the time those were at least twenty thousand dollars apiece. And bomber blisters—you know, the real big ones—would come crated up and we’d break those up. But it was on the list to destroy, and every day you would get a new list. I had master sergeants, and I had a whole slew of people working for me because the war in Germany was over—the cessation with the Germans had ended—and so consequently we had all of these excess GIs around. From day one, I worked hard, and so they put me in charge. I think I had seven or eight master sergeants working for me.

SR: Did you and Bruce ever talk about his war experiences?

DT: He was in the Seabees. He was up in the Aleutians, we used to correspond, and I think he enjoyed it there. He liked it there because of the landscape and the scenery.

SR: Yes. A little exotic in its barrenness.

DT: Yes. He wasn’t there too long, though. I don’t think he was in the Aleutians more than eleven or twelve months.

SR: Yes, I think you’re right.

DT: Then, they shipped him back to Camp Parks, and when he got to Camp Parks then he started designing all of the buildings there. He was a privileged character in Camp Parks until he got out. I was in England twenty-seven months, and one day I just went to my CO, and I said, “Hey, either I get home, or you’re going to have to look for me, because I’m going to get home some way. I’ve just had it.”

SR: “I’ve done it.”

DT: Yes. “I’m sick and tired of it. I’ve worked hard, and I want to get the hell out of here.”

SR: And that meant coming back to Chicago?

DT: Yes. Through the Red Cross, they got me home. I was all ready to go. I had fifty-two points, and they were up around sixty-eight or seventy or something like that. You get two points for every month you were there, and if you were in the war theater, you built them up faster. So consequently, I would probably still have been over there. Anyway, the Red Cross got me home. I got my “Dear John” letter, and boy, that just tore the hell out of me.

When I got home, I started school again, and I went out to the West Coast, and I spent my time with Bruce. All we did was work. That’s all we did: work and listen to music.

SR: In fact, Corbin tells a story about Rubinoff—the violinist—coming out here and playing.

DT: Ruth called and she said, “Rubinoff is here, and I would like you to meet him.” I said, “Sure.” I lived down the street then. I lived in the second house north of the Ford House.

SR: Edgelawn?

DT: Yes. I lived in the second one with my parents. I came over, and he introduced himself, and we started talking. He asked questions about the house and one thing or another, and then he went up on the balcony. He was looking around and looking around, and he came down and said, “Do you mind if I go and come back with my violin?” He had his friend drive him back up to St. Charles or Geneva, wherever he was staying, and he picked up his violin and came back. He stood up there and he played for I don’t know how long, but he said that was the first time that he had played and he could hear himself playing. The acoustic of the arc directed the sound right back at him.

SR: Sure.

DT: He just stood up there and played, and played, and played. It was tremendous.

SR: You worked and listened to music out on Heast Street. I did the essay in the catalog on music.

DT: Is that right?

SR: Did you get a catalog?

DT: No.

SR: I’ll give you one.

DT: Okay. When Bruce went into the service he had a collection of records.

SR: What happened to it?

DT: I took it home. He asked me if I would take it home for him, so I had it. I had to come up twice because my car, loaded with boxes, wasn’t large enough for all the records.

SR: Up on Howard Street?

DT: Yes, on Howard Street, and I took the records to Broadview. We put them in boxes, up on two-by-fours so if we ever had any problem, it wouldn’t hurt it. I took all the records and stored them. Then, when I went out to the West Coast, I drove them with me to Berkeley.

SR: That’s amazing.

DT: He was out on the West Coast when I got out of the service, and I took them all back out there when I went to Berkeley.

SR: You went on and did a lot of houses. We know the two here. There are a couple on Rosedale, aren’t there?

DT: Oh, there are a whole bunch of them in Aurora. I worked here for nine years, and we just couldn’t find any more lots, you spin your wheels without land to build on. There weren’t lots to build on, so we went elsewhere from Aurora. Aurora didn’t have any lots available, and so consequently, many of the executives from Barber-Greene that I built houses for lessened. They preferred staying in Aurora. I even redid Mr. Greene’s house. He lived in the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Aurora [William B. Greene House].

SR: Sure.

DT: I had just built a house for the president of the Barber-Greene overseas company who lived next door to me on Buell Avenue in Aurora. I built his house next door. Mr. Greene called me up and said, “Don, I’d like you to come over to my house. You know I live in the Frank Lloyd Wright house. I under­stand that you’re fond of Frank Lloyd Wright.” I said, “I’m very fond of him.” He said, “I want you to come over, and I want some advice.” All right, so over I went. There is a porch on the back of this house, and this porch is sagging because Frank Lloyd Wright had these four-foot overhangs with spill tubes and spill blocks below in the ground, with a hole in it and a French drain. The water would run down and out. Needless to say, there is a corner post right next to this spill block, and over the years the two posts were moving and this porch was sagging.

SR: They were driving themselves in the ground.

DT: Right. And they had big, heavy, concrete block posts there, just to support a little porch, but they had to be substantial-looking. Going out of the house onto this porch, the screen door—because the porch only had a seven-foot ceiling—had to be cut so the screen door on the top was angled to clear the sagging ceiling. He said, “Don, I’m embarrassed every time I entertain dignitaries from all over the world, and oftentimes they sit out here and talk,” because the house wasn't air-conditioned. He said, “And I’m embarrassed by this door. What can you do with it? I understand you’re quite ingenious and you have a lot of talent. What can you do with this door so it doesn't look like this?” I said, “I don't think there is much I can do with the door. Why do you want to fool with the door?” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, let’s put the porch back where it belongs. Let’s jack up the posts.”

SR: Because that’s what’s making the door look funny.

DT: Yes. He looked at me, and he said, “Can you do that?” I said, “Sure!” We got out there, and we jacked the deck level to its original height. I mentioned that Wright intended to have either rope with knots in it, or a chain, from this downspout tube down to the spill block so the water doesn’t splash all over.” He said, “Yes, I remember something like that.” Anyway, I did that, and we put a new screen door on. His wife called him, he came home, and he opened and closed that door, opened and closed that door, open and closed that door, and he was just like a little kid.

SR: Just so fun!

DT: Yes. He was just like a little kid. This guy is a multi-millionaire and had big companies all over the world. He said, “Now, see that trellis? That’s got to be replaced.” There was a trellis going from the house all the way to the garage. And he said, “The guy that put the garage in was supposed to have the eaves at the same height as the eaves on the porch, and they’re a foot lower. I was so mad when they did it, and we put this trellis in and it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t look right, and it doesn’t come in right.” He said, “Well, anyway, now it’s got to be replaced. What can we do so the posts don’t rot out?” I said, “Well, instead of burying the posts in the ground the way these were, we’ll just put two angle irons and put those in concrete, and then bolt the posts to the angle irons so they are not in the ground.” He said, “Fine!” We started doing that and getting the whole thing laid out, and I mentioned to him, “You know, there are posts that are going to rot out.” He said, “Yes, but you have to treat those with creosote.” I said, "No, there is a process known as Wolmanizing.” This was just coming to effect. “Wolmanized posts are supposed to last forever.” “Wolmanizing, huh?” he said. “Where do you get them.” I said, “The last time I heard there was a company in Wisconsin or in Minnesota.” He called me back the same day, and he said, “Don, I located a company, and I think we might be able to get the eight-by-eights we need.” I came back, and I said, “When are we going to get them?” Because now we’re putting in the concrete with the angles sticking up. “When are we going to get them so I can set up a time and take the rest of the stuff off?” He said, “They told me that it would take three to six weeks to get them. I don’t want to wait that long, so I bought the company.”

SR: You’re kidding!

DT: We got them in a week.

SR: What a great story!

DT: We got them in a week. He bought the company.

SR: “That's too long, so I’ll buy it.”

DT: He bought the company. Then I started out, and I raised the trellis in steps. I had three transitions. He was so pleased. Before, it came up and it was leveled and above the garage eaves. They wanted it leveled, but they didn’t know enough to step it. We stepped it, and I designed it so it corresponded with the way it was originally designed. He was so pleased with that. Then, he decided to put a new kitchen in the house.

SR: Once he got started and saw what you could do, he thought of more things.

DT: We put a new kitchen in the house; the kitchen wasn’t any bigger than 10’ x 12’. He and his wife had a dough mixer—a commercial-type dough mixer—and all sorts of gadgets. They had every inch of space in that kitchen earmarked for something; it resembled a ship’s galley.

SR: It could hardly work.

DT: I ripped out some walls and made the kitchen proper for what he wanted to put in there. He laid out the kitchen he wanted, and then they had St. Charles Kitchens put it in.

SR: The Ford House kitchen had linoleum, didn’t it?

DT: On the top, yes.

SR: Yes, on the surface. When we redid this carpet there was black linoleum on the surface of that. Do you remember what was outside? Because it wasn’t the same.

DT: I think it was.

SR: Okay. There was no evidence of it.

DT: Because we used battleship linoleum. That’s what they use on battleships, on the decks.

SR: Well, it’s still there.

DT: Yes, well, that’s what we used, battleship linoleum.

SR: But it had disappeared outside.

DT: I was sure it would. It’s been forty-five years. Even the ships had to replace it.

SR: Well, Jim Corbin said, as a kid you would come back, and you’d nail rope for a week.

DT: Oh, they nailed rope for a month and a half or two months, every day.

SR: Open?

DT: No, no, just the way it was. They’d drive a nail, and then you had to countersink each of the nails. They were all countersunk, and if I recall, we started off using copper nails.

SR: Yes, that’s what he remembered. He said all this cypress was block-planed in place.

DT: And it’s screwed. It’s all screwed. It isn’t nailed, it’s screwed.

SR: Really? What is it screwed into?

DT: We’ve got a wood piece on each one of those ribs. There is no way you could nail into those Quonset ribs. They’re that wide. You’d have to use a ten-penny nail.

SR: You mean the space between the two rails.

DT: Yes.

SR: They don’t look that wide up there.

DT: They wouldn’t hold a finish nail, anyway.

SR: Yes, okay, not a finish nail.

DT: These have tension on them. There is a lot of tension on those babies.

SR: Yes, that’s true.

DT: It took two men. We had the scaffolding up here, and we kept moving it, but it would take two men to apply the ceiling boards. The short one, fine, but as they got longer in the center, it was very rough. I came up with the idea of putting this rib in here rather than trying to miter them. Bruce came out after we had them up. I don’t think he came out any time in between. But when he came out and he looked at them, he just looked and looked and looked. He didn’t say a word. He just looked and looked and looked. When Bruce was happy and pleased, he was like a little kid. He’d bounce. He’d literally bounce.

SR: He must have, because everybody who has come in here has remarked on how carefully and well-built it is.

DT: I was surprised the other day when I was in it. It’s forty-five years old. I looked at the structure and said, “Gee, this doesn’t look any different than when we finished it.” The only think I noticed was that the wall of the carport out there is starting to show signs of weathering.

SR: Yes, we have to replace it.

DT: But it’s held up well.

SR: Yes, and it was done right.

Tosi: Yes, we did everything right. I didn’t cut any corners.

SR: And you said, how much did you think it cost?

DT: About $107,000 or $117,000.

SR: And you absorbed some of that?

DT: I made a total of $7,000 that year.

SR: Did Sam know that’s what the final cost was?

DT: He knew what it cost, yes.

SR: They paid you.

DT: They gave me the money. I’d ask them for some money and turn in receipts.

SR: Do you realize that I bought this house eight years ago for less than that?

DT: Well, at one time I could have bought it for $35,000. I was going to buy it.

SR: Were you? When you were living in Aurora, or after that?

DT: It was after that. It was about 1965 or in through there. I was going to buy it, and then I figured, with everything else I’ve got, and I was raising a family with five children, and my own company, and I was working night and day as it was. I figured all I was going to do was invest in it and get another burden. Then, a friend of mine bought it. He was a car dealer.

SR: Oh, yes. What was his name?

DT: I don’t remember. He wasn’t a friend of mine, but I knew him.

SR: You knew him, yes.

DT: I purchased a car from him. He was with a dealership in Naperville. I did a house for a fellow who became a good friend of mine, Sam Nicotera. He was a very ethical car dealer. Just as capable as I felt I was at building houses, he was just as capable of selling cars. He opened a Mercury agency in Naperville. This was in the sixties—1961 or 1962, or 1964, or something like that. He opened this Mercury agency, and they allotted him two hundred fifty cars for the year. He sold those two hundred fifty cars in a month and a half.

SR: Wow!

DT: They would have him speak at meetings. He was the only man in the history of Ford that opened a dealership and, from the first month he opened it, ran in the black.

SR: Amazing.

DT: His garage floor was as clean as this floor is. You’d take your car in there, and the service that they gave you was just unbelievable.

SR: You couldn’t beat it.

DT: You’d get your car washed even if you brought it in for an oil change. Your car came out washed, they would give you a loaner, or they would do anything. He sold Lincolns and Mercurys, and he’d have people come in and buy at least one or two Lincolns a year from him. People recommended his dealership to others.

SR: Yes.

DT: They would put $25,000 or $30,000 on a car. He would talk them into giving such a good deal, or one thing or another, that they traded it in. I had bought a couple of Mercury vehicles from him—a station wagon and another car for one of my workers—and I finally said to him, “What is it about these Lincolns?” “I don’t know,” he said, “but it’s an interesting car. Take one home and see if you like it.” I had the car for a month, and he said, “Don, what the hell are you going to do with that car? Either you’re going to buy it, or bring it back, will you?” I bought it.

SR: I bet he sort of knew that might happen.

DT: I never enjoyed a car as much in all my life as I did that 1968 Lincoln Continental. Anyway, I built him a house, and it had an atrium in the center. As you came in, it had an atrium. A beautiful house. It had a pit fireplace. It was just a short distance from his agency, and so he’d come home for lunch. He would start at 6:30 in the morning and make sure that everything was proper for opening. He would stay and clean up the place if it was necessary. Anyway, he would come home for lunch, take a nap, go back, and he would close the place at 9:00 at night. But Sam was just an excellent businessman. He had a five-year plan. In five years, he was going to buy a Cadillac agency in Miami, retire there, and just let the agency run itself. He had the agency all picked out and ready to buy. He had built three different agencies here. He wanted me to build a building for him, and I said, “Sam, I just don’t have enough time. I’m building houses.” If you’re building houses, you can’t build commercial buildings effectively and aesthetically.

SR: You can't shift gears.

DT: Yes. The way you build an agency is that you have to submit plans and a quotation, and you’re responsible for the whole thing from start to finish. I said, “If I get involved in it, I’m going to want to do an agency like you’ve never seen before, and I can’t handle that right now.” He got somebody else to do it. It’s still out there, and he ran that. Anyway, he’d go to work, come home and take a nap, and one day he wasn’t feeling too well so he went to the hospital. He told them that he wasn’t feeling well, and they put him in a room, told him to disrobe, and checked his blood pressure. He sat there and he sat there, and finally he just got tired of sitting and went home. The next day he went home for lunch, and he never did wake up again. He had a heart attack or a stroke of some sort, and he didn’t realize it. When he was in his coffin, at the wake, I said to his wife, “Sam looks like he is smiling, doesn't he?” She said, “Yes, like he just got through telling a joke.” He was always telling jokes. He was a great guy. I built him a house in Cress Creek in Naperville. I built a whole bunch of them in Cress Creek that are still there. When they sell one of my houses in Naperville, invariably it is one that is not a traditional design, and when they put it on the market, they will list it as a Tosi house.

SR: When I was trying to find you in Naperville, I would talk to people, and they’d say, “Oh, yes. That’s his stamp right there. We know that.”

DT: Yes, the orange door. The way that came about was, we built this house, and I wanted a burnt orange door. I told the painter, “I want burnt orange.” He came out and painted it, and it was pink.

SR: Coral-like.

DT: Not even coral, pink. I said, “That’s not what I want,” so he took the paint, and he got another batch and it came out coral. I said, “And that’s not what I want.” He mixed them together and put some black in it, and one thing or another, and it got a little darker. I said, “Put it on and let it go.” We got an orange door, right? They said it was orange. It was not quite as red as that vermilion out there.

SR: Yes.

DT: But anyway, I didn’t get the burnt orange. We had painted two doors and we still had a gallon of paint. The color of the siding on the next house we did was beige, and the orange went well with it. The next house I did was a green one, so we used the orange paint again. The next house—and these were models and spec houses—was sort of a beige color, and orange again. Then, the next one we did was, I think, a brown, and we used the orange again. We still had that paint.

SR: You couldn’t use it up.

DT: No, we couldn’t us it up. The kids used to say, “Oh, yes, we know him. He’s the orange doors guy. He likes the orange doors.” We capitalized on it. Every time somebody came in to buy, we would paint their doors orange, and then we’d tell them that if they changed the color of the door to anything else, their house warranty was null and void.

SR: Can you answer a question? Why is there a two-inch water service into this house?

DT: It’s lead, too.

SR: I know.

DT: Because that’s what they insisted, and I put it in.

SR: Why two inches though? What is the purpose?

DT: Well, I know why. Bruce liked wall-hung toilets, and the only wall-hung toilets we could get had Sloan valves on them requiring high pressure; the two-inch service gave this pressure.

SR: But you didn’t use the toilets.

DT: Yes, but he wanted two-inch service so he could use wall-hung toilets.

SR: And Sloan valves. Okay.

DT: And we had a two-by-four wall out there and didn’t know where we were going to get in.

SR: No.

DT: That’s what it was. I remember now. He liked wall-hung toilets that required a pressure to operate the Sloan valve. I can remember going to Oklahoma, and he did the house on the campus—Ledbetter House—for a young fellow going to school and his mother. I walked into the house in the evening, and they had the waterfall, or the water trickling down the wall, a ramp going up over the water tricking down the wall, and then the water went down and cascaded into a little stream with stepping stones you stepped over. They had subterranean water lights in the water. Oh, man. The effect of that was just wonderful; I can see it today.

SR: Someone said that the one thing this house is missing is water.

DT: Yes, but only because of the climate. When he started designing it, I’d have a tough time with him.

SR: You had to remind him of things.

DT: I’d have a tough time with him. As a matter of fact, when we couldn’t heat this house, he accused me of not putting insulation in. He said, “Don, did you put insulation in?” I said, “Yes, Bruce, I put insulation in.” He said, “Well, it should heat then. According to the figures Wilson did, and all, it should heat with the temperature that we’re piping water in the floor. I know you’ve got them that close because you gave me the outline and the picture showing them,” and one thing or another. And I said, “Bruce, I did. I put insulation up there.” Finally, I looked around, and looked, and looked, and looked, and I found a picture of when we were constructing this, and the insulation showed. I sent him that, and he said, “Okay, sorry.”

SR: Because I have read letters from Sam to Bruce about how cold it was in here.

DT: Yes. It was cold.

SR: It is cold. Two years ago, in the winter when it was -20 ºF and the high was -11 ºF, I spent the day in that front bathroom.

DT: Is that right?

SR: The next year we put in the hot air furnace, and that actually does take. I mean, the house is fine until about 85 ºF or 90 ºF on the up side, and about 15 ºF on the low side. What that hot air furnace does is just soften those edges and pull them down.

DT: Yes. The houses built down Edgelawn, both of those had radiant heat in the floor. They’re smaller. I lived in one, and we could get the temperature up all right, because I didn’t have as much glass as the other one. The house is built more traditionally, and so consequently, I was able to heat it. But the lag. If it stayed cold out, the temperature was fine, but if you had mild temperatures outside, there would be a temperature lag.

SR: Bright sun.

DT: Bright sun, or you had cold from the evening before and then it warmed up to 50 ºF or so in the daytime, whew!

SR: My dad was an architect, and I grew up in a house that was built in 1951 with radiant heat. It worked fine except you had to remember to turn it on before you got cold.

DT: Anyway, that was one of the things that was suggested we do here; to get an outside thermostat that would work with a delay signal so that if the temperature was dropping outside the furnace would turn on to compensate for the drop outside. I don’t know if Sam ever did anything about that. But I had to go back, and I put a convection system in along with the radiant system in the houses I lived in.

SR: Were the electric space heaters in the bathroom original? Were those there to begin with?

DT: No. There weren’t any, but I think Mrs. Ford had them put in.

SR: Yes, because they are wonderful.

DT: Yes.

SR: They’re great.

DT: I built a solar house with Ken Woods, another architect, in 1981–82, and we heated a twenty-eight-hundred-square-foot house, and that winter was a record-breaking cold spell. It got down to -26 ºF. We heated that house for $156 that year. But the secret there was that we not only insulated the six-inch walls and filled the cavity full of insulation, but on the outside we had another inch of Styrofoam, and we had it wrapped like a cocoon with a plastic vapor barrier. A normal house of twenty-eight hundred square feet would have a heat loss of 120,000 BTU; a good house would have a heat loss of about 82,000 BTU or 84,000 BTU; and this one had 44,000 BTU. When we got through putting the shutters on the sliding doors and windows, we dropped BTU loss down to 22,000.

SR: Wow.

DT: I designed a shutter that was two inches thick, and it’s upholstered so that you have foam all the way around. The doors were bifold so when they would close they would each interlock, foam on foam, and then, when they came onto the frame, they again were tight on that. They were just tremendous. All the sliding doors on the first floor—and there were six of them—had these on, and then the windows up above all had them on. All the windows in the house had them on, and we dropped the heat loss down to 22,000 from 44,000.

SR: It’s amazing.

DT: As long as they kept them closed, we just had a completely insulated sealed box.

SR: With you living just two doors away, for at least a little while, did the Fords have you come in and help tune the house, so to speak?

DT: Oh, yes. They not only had me but we had the guy that laid the heating out; he was the only one I could find in Chicago that had any experience putting in the radiant panels.

SR: And it’s all copper, right?

DT: Yes. He was German and he lived in Oak Park.

SR: At what temperature do you run hot water in systems?

DT: I think the temperature that we had coming out of the boiler was about 120 ºF.

SR: Yes, that’s what it is now.

DT: That gave it a temperature at the floor of somewhere around 80 ºF. In the solar house we recorded the floor temperature, the hottest I could get the floors was 80 ºF with the sun beating right down on it. And I said to myself, “how in the hell do these guys with these solar theories expect to heat a house?” They’ve got a chamber in which they would get this sunlight in, and the sunlight is supposed to heat this chamber, either a solid masonry wall or something, and then they move this air and bring it into a cavity where it heats rocks or something, and then from the heated rocks they transfer this heat as the inside temperature drops.

SR: It’s got to be losing every time it moves.

DT: Every time you move it, you cool it.

SR: Of course!

DT: I put thermostats on the concrete, and I couldn’t get the concrete up over 80-82 ºF, with the sun beating right down on it. We had another seat built up in the bedroom section, and that had a five-inch slab on it covered with black ceramic tile. The floors in the main section had an earth tone ceramic tile on them, so they were dark enough to absorb the heat. The black ceramic tile on the seats in the bedroom would get up to 90-92 ºF. But at 82 ºF, I said to myself, “your skin temperature is 82 ºF. How, are you going to feel any warmth?” They said, “Well, you get out in the sand.” I said, “Sand probably gets a hell of a lot hotter, but it doesn’t get any hotter inside thishouse than what’s recorded. I never did put much credence in solar heat transfer.

SR: Well, up to a point. Let me get you a catalog.

DT: Yes.

SR: You know, just little things that you can think of—a process or problems you had to solve or anything that comes to mind. Maybe we could walk around and see.

DT: I don’t recall the refrigerator being in that place. I think we originally designed it for a small refrigerator.

SR: You mean a low one?

DT: I only found a refrigerator, and Bruce doesn’t do any cooking.

SR: Yes, right, so he doesn’t need a refrigerator.

DT: He doesn't do any cooking or food preparation, and so consequently he tends to neglect these requirements.

SR: He thinks of kitchens as minimal.

DT: Yes. Kitchens are just there to service liquids in. See this picture here?

SR: Yes.

DT: I took that with a camera I made.

SR: Really!

DT: When I was overseas, I got interested in photography, so I built a camera. I had a studio with an Englishman, and I built all the condenser lenses and spotlights, the retouch desk with the light underneath, and all of the make-up tables and everything else.

SR: Is this when you were working ten hours a day, seven days a week?

DT: Well, I’d get a day off.

SR: What I would like you to do is to read, particularly the music essay, the one I did.

DT: Yes, I will.

SR: And then we’ll maybe talk.

DT: He never talked much about it. He had a player piano in his studio, but we were so enthralled with music that we were listening to by other composers that we fulfilled our needs. You might want to play this.

SR: Yes.

DT: I’ve never heard it. The piano music at the exhibit was the first time I really heard Bruce’s music; I was very interested in hearing it. I just wish that I could have spent more time with Bruce. But he was at the university, and I would have just been an outcast there and I had to create. I would not have engaged in construction in Oklahoma.

SR: A loose wheel.

DT: Unless I would have attended the school there, I wouldn’t have been of any value to him.

SR: A part of the scene, yes.

DT: After I got out of the service I was fully indoctrinated in construction work and formed a company of my own. When I was building the Ford House, I bought the lots across the street; Anderson bought the lot next door from me, and I kept the one next to that. Then, down on the next block, I bought two or three lots and just kept going. I enjoy building as much as I do design work. I used to do all my own design work, so it was the same thing. The only problem I had was that if I was speculating, I would have to consider the market and it was difficult designing houses more sophisticated than conventional houses.

SR: Yes, right. You couldn’t use your imagination at full tilt. You had to rein it in.

DT: When I built the second house down the street on Edgelawn, my parents sold their house in Broadview and we moved into that one. Then, I decided I wanted to live by myself, so I sold it. We sold it to an old woman who was at least seventy years old—seventy or seventy-two years old—whose husband had been dead for a good number of years. She had a chauffeur and she had a companion with her and they lived in that house. She just thought it was great.

SR: That is so interesting, because you mentioned the generation of the guys who built it and got excited. You wouldn't expect that on the surface, but they were the ones who really enjoyed them.

DT: Yes. She was seventy-some years old at the time.

SR: And she thought it was great.

DT: Yes. I didn’t have any qualms about selling her the house or anything, because I had put in the old heating system, the convection system, along with the radiant panels, and it worked fine. The house is now owned by my secretary’s brother-in-law. My secretary comes in once a month and takes care of my bank book and correspondence. Her husband’s brother and his wife live there on Edgelawn.

SR: Oh, really! I’ve never been in the house.

DT: You should go to see the house. She called me up one day and said she wanted to redo the bathroom. It’s only got one bathroom, come to think of it. And I said to her when I went over there, “I’ll see what I can do.” She wanted a long vanity and a long mirror. I went over there, and I had put in a free-standing colored sink and a bronze tinted round mirror above a peach-colored square tub with grey glass vitrolite glass panels above the tub on two sides. At the time you bought “Vitrolite” colored glass, this was one piece, five by five, on this side and five by four on the other side.

SR: How wonderful!

DT: Then on the other side I have a glass panel with fluted glass, and a rail going up and a rail going across for the shower curtain. The lavatory is a peach-colored big China with the two legs —extremely elegant, you know.

SR: Yes. You had forgotten how nice it was.

DT: Yes. The rest of the paneling in the bathroom is all textured plywood where the manufacturer ran it through a roller and they embossed the texture on it—all the plywood in the bathroom, which is gray. Then, I have a round, peach mirror over the vanity. I said, “Why do you want to do anything with this?”

SR: Right, it’s too nice.

DT: It’s a handsome bathroom. I’d just leave it the way it is.

SR: Did you look at how we redid the skylights in the bedroom?

DT: Yes. That is rather clever with the brackets up there. How did you come about that? I looked at that and I marveled at that. I thought that was great.

SR: Because that was replaced with a wooden frame very quickly.

DT: Well, yes, because we just had it made as light as possible.

SR: Minimal, yes.

DT: Welded together and just the corner brackets on it.

SR: Yes.

DT: I told Bruce I didn’t like that detail; I suggested back then that we do something else. He said, “No, it will be fine. It will be fine. It will be fine.”

SR: It must have leaked immediately.

DT: “If it doesn’t work,” he said, “then we can go the other way.” But that’s the way he wanted it. What you have done is just tremendous. I like that.

SR: That’s half-inch plate up there, and those brass fittings.

DT: Where did you get those?

SR: We made them.

DT: Oh, okay.

SR: Those are all custom.

DT: I’ve never seen anything like that.

SR: No, no, no.

DT: They were tremendous. I was really pleased when I saw that finished more substantially.

SR: And talking about Wolmanized lumber, the back is two-by-four, is Wolmanized, that he doweled together to make the circle and then covered it all in copper, so it’s really well done.

DT: Yes.

SR: No question about it working.

DT: Those materials were not available to us at the time. Even if we had had it available, I don’t think there would have been funds enough to do it.

SR: Sure. And I told you what we did on this.

DT: Yes, I realize that.

SR: To lift that up.

DT: To lift that up so you could get a little flare on the end. We were limited, don’t forget.

SR: Oh, I know.

DT: I was under the gun all of the time.

SR: Well, when you’re running up a cost that ends up at that level—$107,000—I can’t imagine any house within a hundred miles costing that much. That was very expensive for that time.

DT: It probably was, but at the same time, Mrs. Ford often said, “I could have never gotten that much advertising or publicity with that much money.”

SR: For her school, yes.

DT: She had boxes of clippings from all over the world. Mrs. Ford had a clipping service that saved any article that featured this house or the academy school.

SR: I told you her daughter has visited here.

DT: Is that right?

SR: She and was actually at the opening of the exhibition.

DT: I didn’t see her. Her daughter has to be a little older than I am.

SR: Yes, mid-seventies.

DT: Yes, well, I’m seventy-two, see, so she’s got to be about seventy-five.

SR: Right, and she has the glass top table that fits the curve.

DT: I just got rid of them. I made two of them. I had one, and later on, I just kept moving them and figured, well, time to change.

SR: Well, I had my fingers crossed that she might think it a good idea to return it to the house.

DT: I just got rid of mine two years ago.

SR: You should have called me up. I would have bought it.

DT: I had it in storage.

SR: Was it the same size?

DT: I made two of them!

SR: Yes, exactly the same.

DT: I made two of them. I designed them.

SR: See, I’ve got to know stuff like that, Don. You’ve got to tell me stuff.

DT: I designed it because she said she wanted a table to go on there. Bruce had done one with copper tubes, and we had built it, and it just wasn’t strong enough.

SR: It didn’t work.

DT: You couldn’t use it. You were supposed to get around it, and the copper tubes were just not rigid enough. I designed the table with cypress curved pedestal supports and wood curved glass supporting frame.

SR: And this [the built-in seat] was originally linen or something, wasn’t it? It wasn’t plastic like this. It was a fabric, wasn't it?

DT: Yes, it was a fabric.

SR: That’s one of the things I’m going to redo. I’ve been fortunate to be able to do as much as I’ve done.

DT: Yes, it takes a lot of money and time.

SR: The replacing of that, it’s all new shingles on the outside.

DT: The wood shingle?

SR: Yes.

DT: I didn’t think they would last that long

SR: They did. And the skylight.

DT: Ray was asking me, “How come they’re starting to cup?” I said, “Well, all shingles will cup. Especially when you lay them in a circle like that, they’re going to cup.” He said, “You didn’t do it right.” “I don't know whether I did it right or not. The building is forty-five years old, and it’s still here. Don’t tell me I didn't do it right.” What can you do wrong with shingles, number one shingles?

SR: And the plants. Do you think the plants were supposed to get that big?

DT: No, he never intended them to be that big.

SR: I think they’re great.

DT: Yes, but at the same time the object was so that you could see through, and then the outside was supposed to have plants. You observed them from the outside. That was his theory. There is just a little planter there which would make it more interesting. He always has planters because you said there is no water in this house, so he missed that. If I had encouraged Bruce, you would have had water in there.

SR: Yes, right. But I have come to love the plants. Those are really quite marvelous.

DT: It’s amazing the way they’re growing. How do you keep them fertilized?

SR: Oh, I don’t do a thing to them. I don’t water them. I don’t do anything.

DT: They’re inside, though, aren’t they?

SR: I know, but the roots are outside. They have to be, because I don’t water them. I don’t do a thing.

DT: They can’t go outside. The foundation goes all the way down. They’ve living off of the gravel underneath there, the gravel and clay.

SR: It’s a mystery, Don, because I don’t do a thing to them except chop them back. I take armloads out every six months.

DT: The foundation went down four feet.

SR: The one that the glass is sitting on?

DT: Yes, four feet, and those go down eight feet where they are exposed like that. But where there is ground, they only go down four feet, and consequently, there is a wall in there and a wall out here, and we poured the slab between. Over there, where it is open, they’re down to the clay or whatever we have underneath the fill.

SR: I don’t know how they’re doing it, but they’re having a good time.

DT: Unbelievable!

SR: Those plants are forty years old.

DT: If they’re the original ones.

SR: Oh, I think they are. I mean, who would replace such a thing?

DT: I don’t know. Unbelievable. I think of coming out here every day and working on this thing, it was quite an achievement to do it in a year.

SR: You mean from October to October?

DT: October to September. The moved in sometime in September.

SR: September of 1950?

DT: 1951. They were in in June of 1951.

SR: Well, it was actually March of 1951, because I have it right here.

DT: Was it March or June?

SR: March.

DT: I always thought it was June.

SR: And the pictures are taken in the fall. I mean, they aren’t taken in March.

DT: No, it was fall when he took the pictures. I remember that because he came out, and he had these girls and they disrobed when they got in the house. He had a big fur collar on when he came out. He had a collar that just wrapped around his coat. It was a trenchcoat with a fur that was that wide. Eliot Elisofon was the photographer.

SR: Yes. A big-time guy.

DT: Oh, yes. He had girls. There was a swing there.

SR: Yes, right.

DT: They were pulling the swing and posing on it.

SR: Oh, you’re kidding!

DT: No. On the stairs, off the railing, and they were lounging, on the balcony and sitting on it with the legs dangling. He took seven dozen pictures. None of those with the girls appeared in the magazine.

SR: No, I guess not!

DT: Yes, that’s the one. Was that fall as it came out?

SR: That’s one of the few pictures that shows the bedroom skylights without the wood.

DT: Yes.

SR: Was this cone a wire mesh spark arrester?

DT: Yes.

SR: When I restored it, I just did what a cone should be to resemble the photos taken.

DT: Cone, yes. I don’t know that you need a spark arrester.

SR: Well, there is one up there.

DT: You say that that piano’s legs are different?

SR: Yes.

DT: They don’t look different here.

SR: Yes, if you look real close, they’re different.

DT: You have to scrutinize the photo. Yes, this is a gold fabric. And then these things, I don’t know what ever happened to those hassocks.

SR: Yes, her daughter has one or two.

DT: Well, there are only two in here—two in the swing. There is one there and one here, and the swing was right where that light fixture is.

SR: See, because that gives the price at $64,000.

DT: Yes, I know. That was the original bid we had.

SR: Oh, I see.

DT: Bruce didn’t want it to appear larger for much of this house has built in items that would not be included in other homes.

SR: He didn’t want to publicize the fact.

DT: Well, yes. One thing that you do with a conventional house, and you still do today, is, the house is so much, and then everything else that goes in it is not considered real estate— the interior decorating and furnishing—is considered personal property, right?

SR: Yes.

DT: When they say so much a square foot usually you don’t know what it includes.

SR: It doesn’t include the personal property—yes, right.

DT: I’m doing a house for a fellow I do some work for, and he’s got ten thousand feet in it. It’s a traditional house. Without decorating, but with many items, we would consider extra cost items.

SR: Did you see, the centerfold in here is that big center—that picture.

DT: Yes.

SR: Isn’t that pretty?

DT: Yes.

SR: And that’s red.

DT: Yes.

SR: Somebody has changed that. I’ve got to get the carpeting off the steps. I mean, I got it off here. That was the first. But you see, there is one here, there are two upstairs, and there is the frame for the table.

DT: Right, but there was no way you could support it. We had glass, and the glass would break.

SR: Is that the copper one, or is that yours?

DT: It’s the copper one. I had it made just the way Bruce designed it, but there was only way that we could support it. We did have a railing around that edge.

SR: Oh, yes. I told you, I’m the eighth owner of this thing. It’s gone through a lot of hands where people aren’t just quite up to what it means to live here, and someone built a bench—a banquette—like this up there to keep kids from falling. Those fans have burned out, those two, so I’m having those worked on.

DT: I don’t remember how they exhaust now.

SR: Well, there is a thing that goes into the outside.

DT: Outside, yes. I remember now. I had to think there for a while.

SR: When I redid the roof, there were two things we did.

DT: How was the plywood underneath those shingles?

SR: Fine. The copper over the upstanding steel beams over the two windows and the carport had been painted red, and I remember Ruth Ford saying she was so angry because they were supposed to be copper-colored, they were supposed to be green. What had happened was that their function as flashing into the felts just wasn’t working anymore, and so they were just tarring it up and then painting the entire thing red. What we did was to box-in with plywood, run the felts over, take the copper and bend it the other way so it wasn’t painted, and plop it down on top of the felts. So now it’s purely visual. It doesn’t function in a flashing way at all. You know, and it’s important.

DT: Can you imagine what this house would cost today if you were building it?

SR: Oh, gee. I had two insurance people given an estimate on replacement cost, and they came up—I don't know if they talked to each other—approximately the same at $350,000.

DT: I don't think they would do it for $250,000.

SR: I don’t think so either.

DT: Of course, somebody asked me, “What would it cost to build today?” and I said, “I wouldn’t build it the same way today.”

SR: Yes. Well, for instance, the replacement of those cost me $27,000. And the skylights were $7,000 each in the bedroom. That was about $14,000.

DT: But this was done because the Quonset ribs were inexpensive.

SR: Yes, that was a starting point.

DT: That was a starting point, and it gave him a shape that he felt was interesting. Bruce liked to work with shapes.

SR: I haven’t been in the Bavinger House, but I have been in Joe Price’s house in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and one of the things that I really like about this wall, which is not true in either one of those later houses, is that it’s all random Ashlar horizontal bed. The glass is irregular, but the stone, the coal, is horizontal.

DT: Well, I made this one. That’s why.

SR: I thank you, then. Did he want it irregular?

DT: I don’t know. All I know is that he always had trouble with masonry walls, stone walls, because if he got a mason, the mason wanted to lay it so much like this. I had the same trouble. The mason started rock-facing the cannel coal, and I said, “No, no, no. I don’t want it rock-faced. I DON'T WANT IT ROCK-FACED!” So, I started laying it. I laid it up about 3 feet high, and I said, “This is the way I want it,” and he shook his head. He kept rock-facing that whole day. He kept rock-facing, and I’d take the pieces that he rock-faced and turn them backwards. I turned them all backwards.

SR: It drove him crazy.

DT: Yes. He wanted to rock-face them. Then, I put these marbles in. Some of them popped out right away in the wintertime. The frost would pop them out and the moisture got in there. I had to lay all of the glass and everything connecting to it. He wouldn’t touch it.

SR: Really!

DT: He said, “I can’t do that.” I said, “Why can’t you do it? You’ve got glass here, and you’ve got to be glass on the other wall the same way so that it shines through.” He said, “You do it.”

SR: It’s not that hard.

DT: No, but he didn’t want to do it.

SR: And that coal can’t be very thick.

DT: Oh, yes.

SR: Well, the wall isn’t very thick.

DT: It’s eighteen inches at the bottom. There are two walls.

SR: Well, at the bottom, right, but how much is the cavity?

DT: Oh, a good eight inches. They’re four-inch walls inside. When they get at the top and become one across it they interlock with mesh.

SR: Yes, right.

DT: But they start out as two walls. I know it. That I can recall very vividly, because I had an argument with the masons.

SR: You had to fight with the mason.

DT: I had a tough time with him, and then the white mortar became difficult.

SR: Yes.

DT: As a matter of fact, I don’t think we used silica sand in there. No, we didn’t. I laid up a wall like this in a summer place I had up in Wisconsin and filled it with vermiculite in the middle. When that house would get warm, nothing cooled it.

SR: It couldn’t get out.

DT: No, and you couldn’t get it hot in the summertime. We never had the air conditioning. But I filled it with sand and vermiculite. The wall was 16” wide. When I think back of all the things that I did, for a long time I used to go into Naperville and, not being a licensed architect, they decided that I would have to get a seal on my drawings. And so, I used to get a seal. Ken Woods would seal, and some of the other architects I knew used to seal them, and I had no trouble. But if it was something that the code didn’t cover, I would have to sign a document as being personally responsible for the item in question.

SR: Really!

DT: And my signature appears on all sorts of buildings out there. I went to the University of Chicago and attended a lecture on trusses, and I came back and I laminated a wood truss up for the garage door. It was a plywood, gusset-type truss with two-by-fours on the bottom and top, and the plywood in the center. I put it up over the Robinson garage door, continued my construction and finished the house, and called for a framing inspection. The inspector came out and took one look at the truss and, there was another story on top of the truss. There were bedrooms on top of it. He said, “I can’t accept that.” I said, “Well, why not?” and I showed him the literature from the University of Illinois, and one thing or another. He said, “I can't,” so he made me sign the first document that said that I would be responsible for it. The building was built in 1972 and is still standing, and not a sag in it or nothing. Every time he would come to something that he questioned, I would be called upon to become personally responsible.

SR: He turned it over to you.

DT: I thought that was extremely generous of you to have that big party for everybody at the Open House.

SR: Well, they contributed. I’m just getting the bill. Do you know how much that cost?

DT: I was going to estimate around $1,000, at least.

SR: You got it. That’s what it was. And they sent me a check for $600.

DT: These pictures were taken some time ago, weren’t they?

SR: Of this house?

DT: Yes.

SR: No, they were taken last year.

DT: How come there isn’t more foliage on the bushes? I guess that side doesn’t have as much foliage as the other side.

SR: No, it doesn’t.

DT: Okay.

SR: Yes, it was taken before I got the carpet off, which I am sorry about, and before I got the windows washed.

DT: Yes. Here, this thing here I did.

SR: The Bachmann remodel.

DT: Yes. I did that baby. That was a real job. I had to put corrugated aluminum over a whole building. You’d drive down the street, and this house used to just shine like a jewel among the other apartments and dwellings alongside—oh, radiate!

SR: Knock your socks off!

DT: Radiate like a ball of fire.

SR: Now, we have a question. We have a couple of little, tiny photographs we think are from that house where Goff did some decorative screens, using his piano rolls as the background.

DT: No, not Goff. If he did, I don’t remember them.

SR: He put sequins on.

DT: But he did do a screen, a folding screen, and he had sequins on it.

SR: Right. That’s what this is. I mean, it has stuff on it. But the base was a perforated roll.

DT: Was a piano roll? I don’t remember it being a piano roll.

SR: Yes.

DT: I don’t remember it being completed. I did all these drawings, incidentally.

SR: Of the Bachmann house?

DT: Yes.

SR: See, we’ve got to know that stuff, Don.

DT: Yes, I did all those drawings. Sure.

SR: In California?

DT: No, here. This was done in 1942.

SR: Right, before he left.

DT: Yes, in 1942. I did all that. If he hadn’t accepted the position at the University of Oklahoma, I would have stayed there.

SR: You said there were a couple of other guys working in the office?

DT: Yes. Russ Kersey and Claude Oakland, who became an architect. I don’t know if Russ ever became an architect. But Russ was with me in the service, and I used to talk to him about Bruce and how enthralled I was with architecture and he became interested. We were together when we arrived overseas, and then he was stationed somewhere else and we used to correspond. After the war, Russ joined me in Broadview; he was from Florida. His mother lived in Florida, and he came up to Chicago to live with me while I was going to school. When I finished that semester, we bought a car together, and we traveled around the United States and ended up in California.

SR: You weren’t lugging them records while you were traveling.

DT: Yes.

SR: Oh, gee!

DT: We bought a 1941 Chrysler New Yorker, and we drove it out to the West Coast. And then, we couldn’t afford it, so I sold it to the fellow who owned the building.

SR: Were you there when Bruce’s friend Rick San Joel was around?

DT: No. He had died before I got there. During the war, Rick was living with Bruce when he was in Chicago.

SR: Yes, right, on and off because the letters. He was back in Oklahoma, and then he worked in the Bay Area in the shipyards and would ship out on the steamers.

DT: Yes. I stayed over at Bruce’s a couple of times when it was too late to go home and was working. I’d get to Bruce’s house, or Bruce’s studio, about 9 am, and I stayed there till 2 pm, then I would head back to Cicero. I worked for Blakesley, which was a company that made dishwashers and stainless steel products for the Navy—dough mixers and dishwashers and things like that for the Navy—and I would work there until midnight, from three to midnight, then I'd drive home out to Broadview and get up and leave the house at 8 am and be at Bruce’s at 9 am at Howard Street and then drive from Howard Street back to Cicero.

SR: You do like burning the candle at both ends, don't you, Don!

DT: I have always worked. When I was studying with Bruce and when I was going to the academy, I was running an elevator at the Lawson YMCA. I would leave school at two o'clock and get down to Lawson. The Lawson YMCA was about two and a half miles from there, on Chicago Avenue. I’d walk from Madison Avenue to Chicago Avenue and the Lawson YMCA, run the elevator till midnight, then get on the elevated train and ride it all the way out to Broadview. Either my dad would pick me up or I’d run home. I was about a mile and a half from the station. I’d go to bed and the next morning go off to school again at 7:30 am. I did that so that I could buy some Japanese prints. I think I bought a kokomona, some prints, and a sport jacket—a jacket from Copper Copper. And I owed my mother some money for something. I did that until I had paid this all off. I had a girlfriend at the time, and I used to take her out.

SR: You still had money?

DT: On Saturdays I’d would work for the A&P, and they offered to send me to college. I worked all through my high school years. When I was a sophomore, junior, and senior in high school, I used to work forty hours a week at the A&P and maintained a B+ average. The supermarkets were just starting at this time. This was the first one in the Cicero area, and it was on 22nd Street and Austin Boulevard. It had been a bank previously, and then they made it into a supermarket. They were experimenting. My dad was always in the grocery business, and my grandfather was in the grocery business before him. My grandfather made enough money in the grocery business to buy some buildings and retire at fifty-two, went back to Europe, bought olive orchards, a villa, and presses, and pressed olive oil, and so forth. The grocery business was second-hand to my dad. When I went there for a job, I was in high school—Morton High School, a very progressive school. You could go to school from 7:45 am till 5 pm, 10 pm, if you wanted to, and some of the kids did. They took shop courses, so you could get your four hours of academic courses in the morning and then would have your shop courses in the afternoon. They don’t do that anymore. I wasn’t interested in that. I took a couple of shop courses, but they were just the introductory courses; the first year, you only got an hour or so of shop. After that, you got four hours of shop. I took a patternmaking course and then the drafting course. I’d leave school at 11:25 am, and at 11:30 am I’d start work at the A&P. I would eat my lunch while I was walking to the A&P, which is a block and a half away. I would eat my lunch and start working. We used to stack shelves with canned goods, and we’d have to mark all the canned goods. In those days, you had to mark each can. I did that, and finally I got so fast at it that they put me in charge.

SR: Again.

DT: Yes, they put me in charge. Needless to say, I had six to eight boys my age that I directed and kept busy. I used to wheel a dolly with cases on to the shelves that were getting depleted. These boys would open them up and mark them and put them on shelves. I used to keep them busy, up to twelve of them. Anyway, they decided that they were going to teach me how to run a cash register. We had four girls that used to run cash registers on Saturday, all day long, and at night they’d cash out and they’d take in $1,100. $1,200 was a high amount for them to take on, and on occasion, one of the girls would take in $1,200. I used to keep the eight boys on the floor busy, wheeling stuff in and out, and when they’d get busy, I would run a cash register. I could run it so fast that I never took my hands off the keyboard. I just kept running it this way, you know [like a typewriter], and I could tell from the way the woman was going into her purse what sort of change she was going to give me and have her change ready for her. I could run a column of figures in my head without the register, and give her the money. I’d run $800–$900 on a Saturday keeping the stock boys busy for twelve hours.

SR: Wow.

DT: Invariably, on Thursday or Friday we would get a truck loaded with cases of half gallons of soda. There were six half gallons to a case, and our platform was 7 feet high, where we would store the cases. The truck would pull up at 5:45 pm, and at 6:30 pm we were supposed to leave work. We would have to sweep the floors and do other things. This truck would pull up at 5:45 pm and all you would hear was a lot of griping. I would put two fellows with a dolly and bring them off the truck; you would have a guy on the truck, helping put them on the dollies, and you would have these two guys bringing the cases of pop into me at the platform. I’d stand on one of the cases, and I’d take these cases, pick them up, and put them up on the dock, and we’d have two guys up there, stacking them. Within twenty minutes, we’d have that truck unloaded of a hundred and fifty or two hundred cases of pop, or four hundred cases of pop, or whatever it was, and I would just keep hoisting them up. I could run four miles without any problem. I had muscles in my back that were just unbelievable for an eighteen-year-old or sixteen-year-old boy. But we used to get that thing unloaded, the boss would come back, and he would just shake his head.

SR: He just couldn’t believe it.

DT: I think I was earning 32 cents or 35 cents an hour at the time. At the end of the day on Saturday, he would put in an extra 50 cents, and I would get to take home all the produce that we couldn’t keep until Monday, because they were closed on Sunday. I would get big bushel baskets full of all the produce and stuff. But at the same time, I used to price all the produce for the two Greeks that ran the produce department. I would ask my dad what the other grocers around were charging, because he sold canned goods and what they were doing and what they were getting. They used to have a sheet that the departments were supposed to follow, but they were also only allowed to run two percent in the red, so they were able to modify it. Running the register and pricing the items, I used to tell them what to price it at. We’d start out, and I somewhat knew what the leaders were going to be. When they would order, you would order three days ahead for the weekend. I would price the order with them, and if we were going to have a leader, then we had to follow that price because that was advertised. But the other stuff I’d price higher. Also, there were two grades of apples and two grades of potatoes, so it got to the point where we could sort it if we wanted to take the time and get the bigger ones and put them on the sides. That was too much time, but I taught them how to bag them. We started putting three pounds of apples in a bag, and potatoes in a bag, because these people would come in and pick through every piece of produce. This was in a Bohemian neighborhood, and the frugal Bohemian women would just scrutinize every piece. We had a policy. When we bagged everything, if there was a three-pound bag or a five-pound bag, we’d make sure we would put an extra one in, so that if they put it on the scale, it would weigh heavy. And they knew it, the women knew it, and we’d make it a point. We would also tell them that if they got it home and they had one that was bad, or something, we’d make it good and we’d give them an extra one or two, and this sort of thing. We won the confidence of all these people who used to shop there frequently, and they started taking the bags. The supervisor came one day, he looked at that, and he said, “How did you come up with that idea?” They took credit for it, and it became common place to by bagged produce. You buy things in bags now, right?

SR: Sure.

DT: But that’s how it started. Then, I used to go to the meat department, and they’d ask me questions. We used to confer, and again, we started doing things in the meat department. Each of the departments in that store ran in the black. The boys would put pricing on the canned goods, and when the sale was over, then they would have to change it. Well, needless to say, if we had that flexibility, I used to change a lot of the canned goods that wasn’t advertised. I would put it a penny or two higher, and we’d get the penny or two because we were still lower than anybody else out on the street, and we were able to do that. All the departments in this store were running in the black, and finally they realized why they were running in the black. Well, I had been there three years, and on Friday night, an old guy by the Orville used to come in and stock shelves. This night we had a thousand cases all over the store, and Orville would need help. I volunteered to help. We started at 6:30 pm when the store closed, and he would work all night until the next morning. We never had a thousand cases, but we had about five or six hundred cases. He would put them up on the shelves and leave what we didn’t finish. This one time we got in twelve hundred cases, so the boss asked me, “Don, will you give Orville a hand?” I said, “Sure.” I called my girlfriend up and told her I wasn’t going to be able to see her that night. She was going down to a basketball game in Champaign anyway, so I started in with him. We had the twelve hundred cases done by 4 am, and I went home. I loved doing it, you know. It was an exercise.

SR: Figure it out and do it.

DT: Yes. Then, when school ended, the supervisor came to me, and he said, “Don, we’ve been watching you for a couple of years now. What are you going to do now that you’re graduating high school?” I said, “Well, I’m going to go on to college.” He said, “How would you like to go to college on the A&P?” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “The school of your choice, we’ll pay your tuition, we’ll pay for your lodging, any college you want. When you get through you come back to work for us.” I said, “No, I’m going to artschool.” I had the same offer from Blakesley where I was working when I was waiting to be drafted. They offered to send me to school. I wanted to get in their engineering department, and so they said, “Well, we don’t have an opening in the engineering department for a novice, but we do need somebody out in the shop.” Needless to say, I started working in the shop, and within two months I had two guys working under me. We were bending stainless steel, and the supervisor made it known that if I made a mistake bending that stainless steel it was a lot of money down the drain. And so, I had these two guys. I was responsible for them working. I found out they were making more money than I was, and so I quit. When I quit, they came to me and offered to send me to school. They asked me if I wanted to go to night school and work for them days, and they’d get me up in the engineering department and I could continue to work for them. I wasn’t smart enough to take advantage of it because I had gotten a deferment to finish a semester at IIT.

SR: Would you drive up to Howard Street?

DT: I used to drive up there every day, all the time, until I went into the service.

SR: You were up there a couple of years: 1941–42?

DT: I was there in 1941–42, and then he went in the service late in 1942, and I went in in January of 1943.

SR: Was there much work? Was it busy? What was he doing?

DT: I was just studying. We had remodeled the Bachmann House, and then, when I came back—I don’t remember when, exactly—I remodeled it again.

SR: But he didn’t have a lot of work in 1941, did he? Or 1942?

DT: Well, he was teaching at the school.

SR: What would you do when you went up there?

DT: I was just a novice then. I’d say, “How do I go about this?” He said, “Is there something you want to design?” I said, “Well, my dad is looking to build a garage on the house.” He said, “Well, design a garage.”

SR: Okay, start there.

DT: He said, “This information you find in that book, this information you find in that book, this information you find in that book, and this information you find here or there or wherever you want, and start.” I didn’t know what the hell a lintel was, or a sill.

SR: Did you talk much about architecture with him?

DT: Oh, yes. Most of the time I spent with Bruce we were talking about something. He was always telling little stories of one thing or another. I was so enthralled with the architecture and his paintings. I’d leave the night before, and he was working on a painting. I’d come the next day in the morning, and he had worked some more during the night, and I was just fascinated at what he would do with his painting and so intrigued with it. No matter what it was, there was always something coming up. He would always save a little of this and a little of that, and little of this and a little of that. I was at the school maybe five months or so before he invited me to his studio. I was studying, and I wanted to become an automobile designer. I was studying rendering in various mediums, perspective drawing. For some reason, he thought I showed enough talent or ability they allowed me to do things that I wouldn’t have been able to do until I had been there two years, such as airbrush and various other things. Whatever I wanted to try, I could do. I didn’t have to follow the criteria. I thought that was great.

SR: Sure!

DT: I worked at my own pace, and then Bruce said, “We’re having music Saturday night. Why don’t you come up?” I came there with my girlfriend.

SR: Were there other people there?

DT: Oh, yes. On Saturday night, usually a group of people were there. The next thing you know he invited me over in the daytime, and he started showing me his architectural work and others. And his music. For some reason, I could never understand why it was that crooners didn’t appeal to me. I tried to listen to opera, and they didn’t appeal to me. I just couldn’t find a niche that I liked.

SR: A connection, yes.

DT: I just didn’t know why. All my life, I can recall I was active in sports, but other than that, I didn’t have many friends. As I got older, all my friends were at least twenty years my senior. I didn’t find anything in common with the younger fellows, and so consequently, I felt there was something wrong because I didn’t like crooners, I didn't like the music that was popular. I liked the “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and some of that ilk, and on occasion I would listen to Henry Busse and Cab Galloway. On occasion I have liked something. Duke Ellington. George Gershwin. I could find something I liked. But never until I got to Bruce and I heard his music did I find myself completely engrossed with music; the excitement was unbelievable to me.

SR: Say, “Ah!”

DT: Yes. I could walk in the room, and it just seemed like I was walking on a spring. The music so enthralled me that I just felt completely changed. Then, when we were in California, every night we used to listen to music, and I would sketch. I’ve got little three-by-five cards, and I’d sketch up a whole bunch of three-by-five cards. I’ve got them in a collection. Bruce said, “They’re pretty good, Don.” That’s where I was. See the world of paint?

SR: Yes, right.

DT: I’ve got an 8 feet by 8 feet painting that I am finishing up.

SR: Really!

DT: Yes. I think I’m pretty good. I’ve given away most of my stuff, to my kids and people I know. I decided to try oil. I used to work with tempera, and that didn’t seem to be permanent enough, so I decided to try oil. I’ve tried little pieces of canvas like this. They’re fine, the execution is fine, but my technique is such that I require surfaces to properly execute my work. In this house I lived in I had a basement, and I paneled it with flake board. It has a texture. I stained it, and then I decided I was going to highlight the texture that was created with the flakes and follow the pattern around and create an illusion. This got to be a lot of work. After I had done most of the basement, I singled out these two panels, and I started creating something more intricate and colorful, working, and working, and working, and finally I’m finishing it up.

SR: I’d like to see it.

DT: I called Ken Woods, an architect friend, up the other day, and said, “Ken, you are the only person I know that I can ask and whose opinion I value, so come on over.” He did. He looked at it, and he said, “Finish it. Go ahead, finish it.” Today I’ve got it almost finished. Tomorrow morning I’ll finish it. But I do a lot of work for this young fellow who has a construction company. He started in the construction business, working for me. When I had thirty-one employees, he sublet one of the carpentry jobs and did the carpentry work. He was a very inquisitive young fellow, so he kept asking questions, and asking questions, and asking questions. Finally, he evolved into being a contractor. He had been trained by Commonwealth Edison to do electrical work—high line work. Anyway, he was putting in all the services for the city of Naperville and ended up with a million and a half dollars. From that, it grew into something else. I designed some storage buildings for him, we did some residential work together, and did some more commercial buildings, and one thing or another. Then, he decided he wanted to get back into the housing business. I don’t want to get out into construction in the field. I’ll just do the architectural work, go in and get the permits, do the ordering, and that sort of thing. Now we’re out of work because they’ve got five foundations set in and they’re all ready to go, and my end of the job is done. He called today and wants me to come in to his own house. He is the one with the ten-thousand-square-foot house. I designed all of that for him, and now he’s got a fireplace man over there. I designed some special swans for it, and he wants me to come in and get the carpenter started on it. He’s got a deck out there that’s a hundred and twenty-five feet around that I’ve got to finish, and the pillars that go on it.

SR: Was it hard to get the guys that you have assembled for this house to get the spirit?

DT: No.

SR: They sort of jumped right in?

DT: They were good old boys.

SR: But they didn’t resist, except for the mason?

DT: The mason was set in his ways of masonry, and he felt more knowledgeable about producing these walls properly. I simply had an aesthetic feeling for the end result.

SR: Yes, but they sort of saw it as, I should think, a challenge.

DT: Well, the biggest thing is that when you present something to people who are craftsmen, it’s literally a challenge. At the same time, you’ve got to do it in a manner in which there is a certain amount of input that they are extending. When we started this, I wasn’t sure just how the walls were to go together.

SR: You needed to ask him stuff.

DT: Yes, but together with two of the carpenters, we elected to try this or try that. They would get up there and fiddle around and say, “Yes, like this, and I think maybe if we did this. What do you think about that?"

SR: See, that’s just how we did the skylights in the bedroom.

DT: Yes, that’s right.

SR: The glazier, the carpenter, and I were up there, working it out.

DT: Right, and that’s the way this whole building was done. But the problem that most people have is visualizing how it fits together and what the end result is going to be. Apparently, I have a very high mechanical aptitude. When I was in the Army, they give you all these tests. A perfect score would have been a hundred and sixty-five, and when I took the test you couldn’t erase. You put your mark down in a little box where it’s supposed to go. I knew that I had three wrong, and I couldn’t change them because I knew you couldn’t erase and change marks. I got a hundred and fifty-seven out of a hundred and sixty, and I finished twenty minutes before everybody else. They sent me to electrical school.

SR: Yes, right off. They could tell.

DT: I was supposed to go to camouflage training because of my art schooling, and after that I was supposed to go to OCS. Well, we were at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, and this was in January, February, and March. When I got there, I was in such good shape that I could run the obstacle course twice in the length of time that they gave us to run it once. And I could run it twice. By the time we finished the basic training, I couldn’t even finish the obstacle course once. I had contracted pneumonia. In each squadron we had a thousand GIs. There was ten percent in the hospital with pneumonia, and one percent died. We lived in tents that had a canvas top, and then they had wood siding on the sides. There was a quarter inch between each board, and in the center of the tent there was a potbellied stove. Filled with fuel, it wouldn’t last all night, and we’d cover ourselves up and wake up in the morning, cold. Whatever direction the snow came you’d have snow on your blankets. Then you’d get up and you’d go for roll call, put a coat on and jump outside and get roll call, after that you could come inside and try to get a fire going, if you could, and get dressed. Then you’d go off to the latrine and get cleaned up, and the latrine wasn’t heated. They had hot water, though.

SR: Oh, good.

DT: Then you’d go over to the mess hall, and the mess hall wasn’t heated.

SR: No wonder pneumonia appeared.

DT: Then you would get back and you’d have an hour or so to get everything organized and get cleaned up and get all the clothes on and make your bed and get all ready to go back to the field where you marched. You’d have your boots on and woolen clothes. In Missouri it gets cold at night, and then it warms up in the daytime to maybe 35 ºF or 40 ºF. Then you start perspiring and the mud gets that deep, you get back for lunch, again you perspire, and you’d get cold again, and then you marched out again. It was just horrible. From there, they took us down to the train depot, and I was supposed to go to Fort Belvoir to camouflage training. They singled me out along with a group of other guys from our squadron and sent us back. We were short three days of basic training. All over the United States guys are going out here and there, and all over without basic training. They sent us back for three days of basic training. They took me out to the rifle range again, and they handed me a Thompson submachine gun. There’s a clip of twenty-five bullets. I got twenty-two of them in the target, and I qualified and made it with a Thompson submachine gun. I carried that thing overseas with the canisters for two hundred fifty rounds of shells. Never saw it again.

The Athlone Castle was our troop ship. It was designed for max 800 passengers and we had 2,500 servicemen on board. It took us fifteen days to get across the Atlantic in a convoy. I came back on a victory ship, and that took fifteen days, so I logged more sea time than my cousin who was in the Navy. Thirty days.

SR: Wow, on the North Atlantic.

DT: Yes. After arriving in NY, we were sent to New Jersey, Camp Kilmer, and they were going to send me back to Camp Grant to discharge me. I said, “Why are you sending me there, which is down in Southern Illinois? I said, “Why can’t you send me to Fort Sheridan? I live a short distance from there. Why do I have to go to Camp Grant, down two hundred fifty miles and back up?” He said, “Because that’s where we’re going to send you.”

SR: Because that’s the way it is.

DT: I had been in the service long enough at this point. I showed them my hash marks, you know. I had them all the way up my sleeve. I said, “Either you send me to Fort Sheridan or else I’m going right now.” I ended up at Fort Sheridan. That was something. And I got discharged from Fort Sheridan.

SR: They can do it.

DT: They wanted to send me to Camp Grant! Can you imagine?

SR: They can do it if they wanted to.

DT: I don’t know. But as I say, I just keep dwelling on this music because all my life I’ve enjoyed somewhat of a collection of records. I don’t even play my records anymore. I’ve got a new stereo system, and I’ve got a THX system with the big screen TV and with the six speakers. And you get a movie—same acoustics as large theaters—you can get the Pro Logic and it comes through the same multiple speakers, but not as definitive or as bright as it is with the THX recordings. When they get the sound effects, they turn the volume up, and it’s extremely effective.

SR: Who?

DT: It’s just like being the theater. And I have a big, fifty-two-inch screen. With the amplifier I have, and the pre-amp, I can play the LaserDiscs, or I can play CDs, or I can play tapes. I have been accumulating new music. I got married twice, and neither of the women I married enjoy the music like I do. I really enjoy the music. I often wonder why did I get married? I raised five kids, and they don’t enjoy the music I do.

SR: How interesting.

DT: And then I lived with a German woman and raised her two kids, and she enjoys music, mostly vocals, though, opera and R&B. The last one I married, I don’t know what she enjoys in music. I’ve just given up on finding someone of the opposite sex with similar music appreciation.

SR: It’s interesting, all those records—and who knows some of them you may have lugged around—are down in Joe Price’s parents’ house in Bartlesville. No one knows what to do with them. The Art Institute just didn’t have two hundred forty linear feet of storage, or whatever it would have taken.

DT: A lot of them are old 78s.

SR: Yes.

DT: He had an RCA phonograph, and it had a compensator. When they used to make 78 records, the range of the records, was such that they had to reduce the highs and cut off the lows when recording. The mid range was all that they would record properly. As they kept improving the recordings, they still cut them off because most phonographs wouldn’t play the range anyway. This RCA that Bruce had would override this cut-off, and it increased the range up and it increased the bass. It had a big, fifteen-inch woofer in it—it was either a twelve or a fifteen—and it had two mid-range speakers in it, and he used to turn the volume up

SR: So you could feel it.

DT: Yes. Of course, his studio was in this office building, this Flatiron Building, and so it didn’t bother anybody when he played it loudly in the evening.

SR: No one was there.

DT: But he also lived there. He had this upright piano, and on the upright piano was a bed. I remember one night I stayed there with him, and when you lay in this bed you could see out across. He used to tell me stories about the house across the way and the funny things that went on there, in those bedrooms. And laugh. He was a great guy for stories and jokes.

SR: One of the things I was particularly interested in for this show was to bring forward in a way that hadn’t been done before the paintings and the music.

DT: Yes. Do you know what I was disappointed in? That they didn’t have any indication that his paintings were downstairs.

SR: I know, and they’re rectifying it.

DT: They are? Because I went there, and the architectural department to me was always downstairs, so the first thing I did, I went down there.

SR: Was to go down there.

DT: And I saw his paintings and I walked through, and I said, “Where in the hell is the rest of the exhibit?”

SR: Right, “This can’t be all.”

DT: I looked, and I said, “There's got to be more than this. These are just his paintings.” I asked, and they said, “Well, no, his exhibit is upstairs on the second floor.” Then, after I got through, I went back to the paintings again.

SR: Were there some that you had seen before, or were they new?

DT: I wouldn’t have remembered.

SR: Yes, it’s a problem. In fact, I just talked to them today, and they realize it.

DT: Why did they put so many of his early paintings in there?

SR: Well, that’s really all that he kept, you see.

DT: What did he do with the rest of them? Oh, then Price has them.

SR: You’ve got it.

DT: I know Price had many, many more.

SR: Well, there are four hundred and fifty of them . . .

DT: Yes, I know that.

SR: . . . and we made a selection of thirty.

DT: Yes, but why didn’t they, instead of those early ones, show the later paintings?

SR: That was just because there was a range there.

DT: Yes, but even so. When I was studying with him, he was doing magnificent work, and that was back in the 1940s. How much farther back do you want to go?

SR: Some of that stuff is from the 1920s, I’m sure.

DT: I wouldn’t doubt it. That’s why I say, “why?” And that was when he was in the learning stage.

SR: Oh, yes.

DT: Why not exhibit his best efforts?

SR: The selection we had to work from I think is not the full range.

DT: Yes, that could be it.

SR: Because certainly the oils in the late....

DT: He did oils. I can remember this as one of the last things he was working on in California. He did a depiction of a musical score, and it had little, what looked like people. It was a depiction of the story, and I think he had six paintings to the set. I remember that. It was on the wall up in his section of the studio. We used to work downstairs on a big table that we used as a drawing board. Then we had another one upstairs, and he had a little chamber that he used to work in. He would come downstairs with us. I can remember writing specifications by hand on the drawings. We were doing some remodeling work. We designed the Kozak House, which was the other Quonset rib house that comes like a letter S in this shape. When I was doodling one night, I was sketching these Quonset ribs because we were working with Quonsets for houses at the time. I’ve got all those drawings, incidentally. I don’t think I have the actual drawings, but I have the prints. I came up with this rib idea of changing direction of the connecting arc section to not form a complete arc, but the opposing direction at the connection.

SR: And then the other one, right.

DT: Bruce looked at it. He didn’t say anything, and the next day he came out with the designs for the Kozak House, and it’s that. Same arrangement of connecting the ribs oppositely.

SR: He did that.

DT: I said, “Great!” We did all the drawings for that Kozak House, then I used to go out there. I designed a guest house for that Kozak House. I think I still got those drawings, if I can find them.

SR: Well, can I suggest that if you need to give them someplace, The Art Institute is the place to give them.

DT: Is that right? Well, I'm sorry I gave the drawings of the Ford House to Columbia University.

SR: Yes, so am I.

DT: They were going to send me a letter so I could get credit for them.

SR: For taxes, yes.

DT: They never did send me the letter. DeLong was supposed to send me a letter and never did, and I could have used the tax write-off.

SR: When I was doing the essay on music, since most of what I was writing about sort of ended just as he came to Chicago, there was really nobody to talk to. It was all from the archives.

DT: Yes. He didn’t talk much about the music.

SR: Yes, that’s what I understand.

DT: All I know is one day he was telling me about how he had composed these pieces on the player piano. He used to cut the little holes in with a razor blade. He said it was great because you could get a whole keyboard going at one time, and you can do things that you can’t do with your hand. I said, “That’s great, but how do you make it so that it sounds like you want to listen to it?” When I heard the music at the recital, I was very excited about hearing it because it’s the first time I’ve heard any music to compare with Bruce’s compositions.

SR: Yes, I think most people.

DT: Yes. He did a good job, I thought. He started right when he was just in his teens.

SR: Oh, yes, right. Well, we have a couple of—they’re actually in the book—a couple of piano rolls that are only in blueprint form; in other words, they’re not perforated. I have Xeroxed them, and I have the Xeroxes up there, and I just called a guy through the efforts that we got to get that tape made, who has a punch . . .

DT: And he can punch those out?

SR: . . . so he can punch them out. I was going to do it by hand, just to see what it felt like, right. Crazy idea. But anyway, there is a punch, and so he is going to send it to me. It only costs $20. We’ll hear pieces that no one has heard for a long time.

DT: After listening to music, we used to go out and walk for an hour or an hour and a half. We enjoyed the walking. And we’d talk. One night, Bruce wasn’t with us that night, but we decided to walk up the hills behind the campus in Berkeley. We walked all the way up to the top, and we got back at 2:30 am. You could walk down and smell pepper trees and gardenias and all sorts of flower trees. The eucalyptus was really prevalent.

SR: One of the piano rolls he actually wrote instrumentation on and connected the dots to say which notes each instrument was to play.

DT: Is that right? Oh, boy!

SR: In the next couple of years, one of the things that we’re going to do is try, because there are computers now where you can play these rolls in and it will give you a very rough scoring.

DT: I didn’t realize he had composed as much as he did because he never talked about it.

SR: See, that’s one of his pieces, or one page of it. That’s what we’re going to hear on Sunday.

DT: Because he had a player piano at home, and never did he play for us; well, of course, he was extremely modest.

SR: Yes, right. He just slept on it.

DT: Yes. He was very modest.

SR: Yes. He didn’t want to show off.

DT: Very modest and didn’t say much about his work. But he used to get awfully excited when he had something new to show you.

SR: Yes, oh, I’ll bet.

DT: When he had something new to show you, he allowed you to discover it.

SR: I’m just thinking in terms of the people that were here a couple of weeks ago, the fact that you worked with him, there aren’t very many people around who worked with him in 1941.

DT: No. There aren’t many people that worked with and that knew him as well as I did. I didn’t know him much in the later stages of his life.

SR: Right, exactly.

DT: B ut in his formidable years, when he was building up a reputation, that’s when I knew him. And this building. I just look at it and say that if I hadn’t been there, I don’t think it would ever have gotten built. I really don’t think so.

SR: I think you’re very right.

DT: I don’t think it would have ever gotten built. It’s my contribution, to whatever it’s worth.

SR: Oh, absolutely.

DT: I dedicated myself to a good year and a half to drawings and creating a work of art.

SR: To make sure this would . . .

DT: Yes, for the sake of art.

SR: Yes, exactly.

DT: As I said, I made $7,000, and if it hadn’t been for my parents living, I would have had to make compromises in my living habits. I didn’t sponge off them or anything, but that’s how I lived off of this $7,000. All my time was used working on this job and then doing other things—making drawings so that when I finished this I could start the others. I think I started the other houses while we were still working on this one.

SR: Yes. There are some aerial photos in the collection at the Art Institute that show this Ford House just finished.

DT: And the others down the street?

SR: And the other ones under construction.

DT: I thought we had started houses down the street, because after Ruth moved in here, we moved in there, and so the timing had to be very close. I can remember the woman from Life magazine, on the phone with me, at 10 pm, asking me questions after questions after questions about the house, specifications and various other things, none of which appeared in the article.

SR: I know.

DT: None of which appeared. I was here the day the fellow from Life magazine came out. He went through the house, and he said, “Boy, it’s an interesting house. I can understand why they had me come out here.” He said, “I'll take some pictures and send them back and see what they say.” I told him, “Unless you’re ready to put the house pictures in color, don’t even bother.” Mrs. Ford was standing there when I said it, and, she said, “It’s got to be done in color or we’re not interested.” He looked at me, and he said, “Well, what you’ve got to remember, we’ve got a circulation of three million or three-and-a-half million, or something like that, and the publicity for the house would be tremendous.”

SR: Is worth so much.

DT: Yes. “We can’t tell them what to do.” I said, “Well, I’m telling you to let them know that either we get it in color or not.” Bruce has said time and time again that color is very important to illustrate a house. He said, “Well, I’ll take the pictures and I’ll see what I can do.” He took the pictures, and three days later he called up and said, “Don, you’re lucky.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “The boss says we’ve got to have it regardless of what it costs.” The article was published in color.

SR: You bet.

DT: And each one of those pages was supposed to be worth $18,000 in color.

SR: Wow, and there are six of them.

DT: It’s amazing how quiet it is in here.

SR: Yes. People have remarked on that, too. It’s all that volume. I mean, air is a wonderful absorber of sound.

DT: Yes, but with all the glass you would think you’d get reverberation of some sort, or vibrations of the sound waves.

SR: Well, you can hear traffic sometimes.

DT: I haven’t even noticed that, though, and there is a lot of traffic on this street now. Of course, there is a twelve- or eighteen-inch wall up there that buffers a lot of it.

SR: It helps, yes.

DT: How is it on a rainy day?

SR: You can hear it. It’s fine.

DT: In my summer place that I built up in Wisconsin with 16” masonry heavy wall, you can’t hear a thing there either. I’ve been out there when the snow and the ice was going horizontally, and I couldn’t hear the storm. I had to look out the window to tell it was blowing. That is an interesting house. The windows in it are two pieces of quarter-inch glass, no frame on them. It’s got one frame around of 2x4s with glass grooves, and there are two pieces of glass that fit side by side and slide back and forth. It’s got a locking device that you turn in a slot on the bottom sill, and it pulls the two pieces of glass together.

SR: It cinches them up.

DT: If the glass gets wet it simply seals itself. It’s four pieces of glass forming two sash units. You’ve got a dual glazing with 1 ½” air space in between.

SR: And no middle frame.

DT: It’s just all glass. Made in Canada, and I used them for years. You’d be surprised, people changed them because it wasn’t orthodox.

SR: It didn’t look right.

DT: But I’ve got houses out here in Cress Creek where I’ve put them in. There is no way you can get a dollar bill through it; the two pieces of glass are touching each other. If you didn’t adjust the bottom plate and the screw got a little loose in there, then, of course, they couldn’t butt up against one another properly. People are too damn lazy to do that, so they say they leak air. Well, that’s the only reason, they leak air was because they didn’t have the adjustment screw on tight.

SR: They didn’t maintain them right. Was the water heater originally up front?

DT: Yes, I think it was.

SR: It sort of looked like it was up there. It’s now back here in electric so there is no vent.

DT: No, it was up there.

SR: And the washing machine, where was the washing machine? It’s now back in this closet. Or was it down there?

DT: I don’t remember. I thought all of the utilities were in there.

SR: You know, one of the problems, because the water heater is back there . . .

DT: It takes forever to get hot water thru the concrete slab.

SR: Yes. I’m thinking of installing a little booster.

DT: Well, in the wintertime, though, you don’t have any problem with the heated floor.

SR: Yes, right. You can’t get cold water in the wintertime. I was thinking of putting in one of those little electric boosters right there.

DT: Have you got electric to connect it to?

SR: Oh, I think so, because the dishwasher has got it.

DT: People build new houses and they do the same thing. I wrapped the pipes in my house, and it just works great. I try to talk them into wrapping the pipes, the hot water pipes, and they won’t do it. You go from the basement where the hot water heater is, and up, and after the initial run off the hot water stays hot in the pipes for hours.

SR: Yes, it’s a ways.

DT: If they don’t care, it’s all right with me. I built myself a house, and it’s all trussed. The floor is all trusses and the rafters are trusses, and it spanned twenty-four feet with an eighteen-inch truss. It’s just great. You don’t have beams or columns and can place partitions wherever you want.

SR: That’s right.

DT: The exterior walls are six inches, and it’s got a hundred and eight running feet of window across the rear overlooking a large pond.

SR: Wow.

DT: It’s all with a dual-glazed outer window and a single-glazed inner window, and the sliding door is two dual-glazed panels. That we learned from our solar house. Triple glazing was the one thing that was cost-effective. We’re still not sure that the six-inch walls are cost-effective because you can spray them now with this insulation that is sprayed in and has a cellulose binder with an equal R-factor. It’s like gluing it in. They use paper, shredded paper, as a cellulose binder, and you blow it in. It has about thirty to thirty-five percent more insulation value than the batts do. Now they’re re-evaluating the batts, and they’ve dropped the rating on the batts. A three-inch batt is no longer eleven, it’s now down to seven or nine. It’s funny what they do. I’ve built a whole bunch of houses that had batts surface mounted. The odd thing was that I never had trouble selling them, and yet a year and a half ago we experimented with a couple of variations on the house we had been building. It was a little more contemporary design. The façade was a little more contemporary than the traditional one we had been building, and we couldn’t sell them.

SR: I’m interested in you saying that, because my sense is that there was a period where people were interested in experimentation, and somehow that just is not true now. At least, stylistically.

DT: Yes, right. You drive out here now and see houses I’ve built, houses on Western Avenue. I’ve built houses on every street in this immediate Aurora area, and now I see other houses that are in between the ones I built, and they’re contemporary houses. They’re contemporary designs. It surprised me. For some reason, I instilled enough contemporary design for it to carry through, in this area,

SR: Set a tone, yes.

DT: Yet, the houses I was building I was successful with because I executed them properly. Most of these fellows don’t really know how to execute a good design. They copy parts only.

SR: Which means they don’t really get it.

DT: They copy Frank Lloyd Wright or somebody, but I start out with a definite design. If I were going to use an A-frame, the A-frame becomes the dominate design factor. I started out and I designed some A-frame houses, low-cost houses. In the ’60s, 1965, there was a period in which the market was changing, and so I felt we had to get back down to lower cost housing. I designed an A-frame that had two bedrooms. It was expandable to more bedrooms. It was a very inexpensive house to build. It could be expanded easily and gave me this shape on one end with the tall windows and one thing or another. I even had the garage detached, because in Naperville, if the garage sits on the back half of the lot and is unattached, you can put it right on the lot line. I had the garage there, and I had a fence thing coming in and connecting with the house . . .

SR: Linking, yes.

DT: . . . and blended it all together. I’ve always disliked the fact that all these houses have garages up in front, and the predominant feature of the house is the garage. Yet, in Houston, that is the only way you can build a house. You have to divorce the house from the garage, and it had to be on the rear section of the lot. I also had a design for a Fort Hood house, a small house of thousand square feet. It can be put on fifty-foot lots.

SR: I don’t know if you know this guy, Alden Dow.

DT: Yes.

SR: I worked for him and did this book on him.

DT: Did you? Oh, yes. I admired his work.

SR: Yes, right.

DT: Yes, the one that comes down where the walkway and esplanade goes right into the water.

SR: It’s on the front cover, his office.

DT: Yes, that one. Oh, I’ve always admired that. They did that in the’50s.

SR: Well, that’s actually in the ’30s. That was built in 1934. I worked for him for two years and then went back to school and did this book. It was wonderful to go to work at that place for two years. That was pretty exciting.

DT: Oh, yes. He was one of the architects that Bruce and I admired.

SR: Yes. I knew they knew each other when I was working for Dow.

DT: If a new book came out or a new building was featured in some publication Bruce would find it.

SR: He wanted to know about it.

DT: Yes. He'd, for some reason, bring them out and show evidence of good design other than our little world.

SR: But you know it’s very interesting, Don, I have been working there for two years, and talk about music, I would take my violin in the evening and open those windows in that pond room and play. It was just glorious. But I went back, oh, maybe three or four years ago, after I had lived here, and I didn’t find this as challenging as this.

DT: Oh, no, because it really comes back to space and environment.

SR: Just generally, at one point, this was very important to me. My dad was an architect in Ann Arbor, and there was a Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit, the last one when he was still alive, in 1959. I was a sixteen-year-old high school student, and we went up there and I saw this building and I fell in love with it, and eleven years later I got a job there. It meant a lot to me.

DT: Oh, sure it would.

SR: And I will have to say that Bruce Goff was never interesting to me. I lived in this town for a year, I knew this house was here, I would drive by and I’d say, “I'm not interested.” And I walked through that front door, and I may have said, it was like Saul on the road to Damascus. I mean, I was converted like that.

DT: I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Ledbetter House, but I got a similar experience when I walked into the pond lighted foyer the first night there.

SR: I’ve been by it but I haven’t been in it.

DT: You go in there at night, and you see this water shimmering and lighting the ceiling, and reflections on the ceiling, and the water cascading down this wall with highlights on it, and the ledges on this wall. Oh, man! It’s impressive.

SR: We all know that photographs or drawings of a building are always incomplete. In other words, the experience is always more than that.

DT: Oh, sure.

SR: But I’ve come to the conclusion with Goff that it’s not just that it’s incomplete, I think most representations, most photographs, are erroneous. In other words, you come to conclusions about the building that are simply not true; I certainly did. It took an immediate, real-life experience, walking through that door, to convince me because nothing short of that had any impact on me.

DT: Yes. You drive by it and it looks interesting, and you may want to see it.

SR: Curious, yes.

DT: Curiosity may get the better of you.

SR: But there is nothing like walking in the door.

DT: Yes. That’s where I commend myself, and that may be erroneous, but I executed it exactly as I thought Bruce intended.

SR: So that would happen.

DT: So that would happen. I executed it the way I felt; I interpreted what he wanted it to be.

SR: Oh, I believe you, Don. I really do.

DT: When we got to these things, it was important to me to get this in the right perspective with something else, and this with something else, and something and something and something. Those doors could have gone right up through there instead of that little piece of glass.

SR: Yes, but that’s not right.

DT: Not according to Bruce. That’s the way it was supposed to be, and that’s the way it is. So much of this was a challenge only because we were limited to raw materials.

SR: Yes, what was available.

DT: We’ve got steel angle there that you’re using as a jamb.

SR: Yes, right.

DT: And it’s an inch of concrete, and it’s got to be perfectly plumb, all perfect, to hang a door from.

SR: Yes, right.

DT: We don’t get a second chance.

SR: I will thank Bruce and I will thank you, because I feel myself incredibly lucky.

DT: I have always felt that if I had stayed with him, I could have probably executed a lot more of his work and been responsible for a lot more of his completed projects. One of the architects that was here from Florida, from Jacksonville—I’m trying to think of his name—was telling me that Bruce had come down there or corresponded with him, and asked him to build a building that he had applied for in Jacksonville. He said, “Sure, I'll do it.” They had told him about some contractors, or some journeymen, that were carpenters, apparently, who were supposedly exceptional tradespeople.

SR: Craftsmen, yes.

DT: And they wanted these people to execute the carpentry in it. He said, “I don't care. Sure, fine.” Well, these people got paid, started, and disappeared.

SR: That sounds familiar.

DT: This is similar to the situation we had here. Well, even Frank Lloyd Wright always had somebody in his organization that executed the drawing.

SR: That would stick with it.

DT: I hired one of his people. I’m trying to think of the fellow’s name. He wasn’t a very good architect, but he ran one of the houses in Illinois for Wright. He executed the construction of it. And Wright had these perforated eyebrows—they weren’t arched, but openings in the flat trellis.

SR: Perforated soffits.

DT: Perforated eyebrow trellisor something coming out, right? And they extended out at least eight feet from the building. This fellow started to design it, he was using steel. Wright said, “No, no. They’re all going to be constructed of wood. You don’t use steel. You can do it out of wood.” He tried to do it with wood, and designed and designed it, and no way was he going to get it to stay out there without sagging. He built it and he used the steel. He had made the drawings with wood, but he used the steel and covered it with wood and Frank Lloyd Wright never knew it. Frank Lloyd Wright actually was on site when the building was completed, and he said, “See, I told you that it would work.” He never knew that they were held up with steel covered with a wood skin.

SR: Apparently that happened a lot, because there were stories of “what Mr. Wright didn’t know didn’t hurt him.”

Tosi: But Wright had one faculty that Bruce didn’t have, and that was if it ran over budget, he was always able to talk the people into doing it anyway. But Bruce didn’t have that. In almost anything that Bruce would have done it would have been over budget. That stands to reason that he needed people like Price.

SR: Yes, with deep pockets.

DT: Yes, or they just could keep going and going. But that was one of the problems we had here. Fortunately, the Fords were so enthralled with it and so dedicated to it that they advanced the money. But they didn’t want to in the beginning.

SR: No, I’ll bet not.

DT: They realized that I was executing it properly, and Sam would oftentimes come and say, “Don, I don’t know how you’re doing it, but you’re doing a tremendous job on this and that,” and kept complimenting me and encouraging me to keep going. But I wish they knew that I was doing it for $7,000.

SR: Yes, right.

DT: I couldn’t earn myself a living that way.

SR: But at least once in your life it was certainly worth the worthy cause.

DT: I built for nine years put here, though. I don’t think I really earned much money, because everything I did was basically to prove a point. I could design, and I felt comfortable designing and building the projects and trying to keep them within a budget and make them so they would be salable to somebody, but I also tried to do the more traditional things. I built some houses out here down on the east end of town. We bought some lots for $1,500 apiece. This was back in the ’50s when National Homes came out and was building a house here and selling it for $7,500; a little, two-bedroom house. It had exposed rafters with plywood on it, it was on a slab, and it was pretty shoddily built. But National Homes was putting these up, and you could move into it for $7,500. At that time, Mayor Egan was a radical mayor in this town.

SR: I’ve heard the name, yes.

DT: Paul Egan. He said, “Why can’t you build a regular house or a decent house for that much money instead of building this junk?” The wife of Anderson, my superintendent, was working for the mayor, doing something. Anderson asked me, “Don, why don’t you design a house?” We came up with a house, it had two bedrooms, it was about eleven hundred square feet, and it was with a block foundation. The lots we had sloped to the rear, so we had somewhat of an exposed basement area. They had on the outside a textured sheet finish that looked like a board with a sand finish on it. We had a decent overhang on the roof, about a two-foot overhang, then rafters were insulated. It had about a three-and-twelve pitch, which was a low pitch, but we couldn’t afford any more. It had a vaulted ceiling throughout, and the balance of the interior was drywalled, cabinets and floor coverings were complete. We sold that house for $8,500. The three-bedroom was $9,400. The two-bedroom was designed so that you could add on to it. Where the closets were, we simply made a hallway, and we put two more bedrooms in the back. Anyway, we built three of them. We couldn’t find people with enough money to put down. The downpayment was $1,200. I went to the savings and loans out here, and they said yes, they would work with us on it because the mayor wanted it. With the National Homes you could buy one with ten percent down. The savings and loans out here insisted on having twenty percent down, so the people had to come up with $1,600 to buy one. Interested buyers worked for All-Steel or for various other big companies out here, and their take-home pay was a $125 a week. We had trouble selling these, so we stopped. Can you imagine? From that I went to Naperville, and in Naperville I hit a different market. There, I built a house that had three bedrooms—again, I picked out some lots that slopeddown—and we had an entrance with a planter in it and some windows that wrapped around, and a flat roof on the garage and the entry, the house had a hip roof. The whole back end was two-stories high, and it had a deck on it with a balcony. Thermopane windows—double-glazed windows—and a door coming out onto the balcony. The same thing down below, the duplicate down below to a patio area. It was expandable to four bedrooms and two baths, and it sold for $27,000. Ken Woods said that somebody called him one time and said, “Ken, I want you to see this house this fellow is building. I’m thinking about buying it. Can you come over and take a look at it? He wants $27,000 for it. Can you take a look?” Ken came out with the guy, and Ken went through it and said, “Buy it!”

SR: “Buy it! Don’t hesitate!”

DT: “Buy it right away! There is no way I could duplicate that house for $37,000 thousand dollars.” Then, I built another one out there that had a wall, a brick wall in the entry, and we had made stone for treads coming out of the brick. We had a copper pipe through the stone treads for end support. I’m sure this has been done before, pipes coming down through the stones. We pinned it so that would support the end, and have a staircase, or half a staircase, going up that way. It had walnut cabinets in the kitchen, and the cabinets were such that had flush doors and no drawers. It had a whole bank of drawers. It wasn’t a drawer and a door, a drawer and a door. They were all one cabinet door for each cabinet, and then we had a bank of drawers here and a bank of drawers there.

SR: What about the fact that the drawers here are behind the door?

DT: Bruce wanted all the cabs to look that way. Mrs. Ford wanted drawers in there, so I talked to Gottlieb Sipple and we decided that the easiest way to do it was to put the doors on and then put the drawers behind it.

SR: There is a kind of restoration I have to do. The drawers in the bedroom closets are not openable unless the door is completely open.

DT: That could be.

SR: In other words, you can’t just open it part way because someone detailed it with the door open, you know, put it right to the edge. They’re not used.

DT: A lot of the cabinetry in here, of course, had to be specially done. I remember making drawings for a lot of it, but a lot of it was left up to Gottlieb Sipple. He was an excellent craftsman, and I wasn’t about to override him.

SR: Override him.

DT: If he did it one way, it was only because he felt with experience he was executing the cabinet properly. I had a budget, and that budget was very marginable. There weren’t any cabinets in here that didn’t serve their given function and design intent.

SR: And the flaps up above the roof deck in the bedrooms, there was only a curb of a couple of inches, and so those are sealed and the felts go up the slab. That had leaked. What had happened was that all that wonderful birch plywood on those cabinets inside of the closet were all just peeling away because the water had been running down for some time.

DT: Again, a lot of the details were such that I followed what Bruce wanted, and he didn’t want a curb showing.

SR: Oh, I know, exactly.

DT: He didn’t want a curb showing, and so I conformed to his design.