I’ve just read enough versions of the same story about Frank Lloyd Wright to know the story could be a myth. Each is set in the Wright house known as Wingspread, named by Wright for its pinwheel design, which stands near Lake Michigan in Racine, Wisconsin. One night it rained. To choose the version of the tale told by Brendan Gill in his biography of the architect, the owner of Wingspread got Wright on the phone.
“I know it does no good to complain, as you are an artist so in love with your work that nothing will make you change your ideas of what the two buildings ought to be, even though it works a hardship on your client. You would rather tell the client whatever comes into your head as to the cost and the time to construct, at the start, just to sell the job and give satisfaction to your art….Why didn’t you put me wise long ago as to the true costs and the time to construct? Would that be unreasonable to ask?”
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Instead, Wingspread hosts conferences. Sometimes the initiative is taken by some nonprofit or government agency concerned with an issue the foundation favors, sometimes by the foundation itself. Some 20 to 40 people whose oars churn the same waters come together for a few days to argue through their differences and begin thinking collaboratively. “Wingspread conferences are about helping ideas to have consequences,” the foundation says grandly. An emblematic conference was “Educational Radio as a National Resource,” convened in 1966 at the initiative of Jerrold Sandler, director of National Educational Radio and an intellectual heir to Edward R. Murrow. The conference encouraged Congress to include radio in the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, from which National Public Radio emerged in 1970.
Conversations From Wingspread was a radio program spun off from the conferences in 1972. The foundation offered it free to stations across the country, and at the program’s peak nearly 200 carried it. Early on, most were commercial, though eventually half the stations were public. Interviewers such as John Callaway drove up from Chicago to tape conversations with Wingspread guests. Eventually a Spanish-language version was launched for Latino stations, and a similar program, The Issue of Race, for black stations. But in 1988 a new president decided it was more important for the foundation to reach out to policy makers than the public, and the radio shows died.
The note of gentle reproach no doubt explains why Tapp’s memo mysteriously (and briefly) appeared on the WBEZ home page, to be chewed on by the unhappy faithful who’ve been complaining for months about the station’s recent programming changes. One of the first of these eliminated Tapp’s weekday-morning interviews. She became a “special correspondent” responsible for “long-form” reports, election coverage, and Live at the Library–an initiative of the Chicago Public Library, not WBEZ. “I guess I don’t feel every story can be boiled down to eight minutes,” she told me. “Even a long-form report at eight minutes is a whole lot less than an hour or six hours on a subject.”
Ideas with consequences don’t guarantee crackling radio, certainly not ideas that speak soft and humbly. Fortunately Wingspread rose in a spirit of untrammeled egotism. Brendan Gill recounts the time, after the house was built, when Wright lunched there and was stricken with indigestion. Assuming the worst, he lay down on a couch in the living room and beckoned to Herbert Fisk Johnson’s daughter Karen. “Come and watch how a great man dies,” he told her.
Stampfler is bitter. She preached truth telling during her four years at the Bulldog Express, and for her efforts the Michigan Interscholastic Press Association gave the paper top honors. Last year, when allegations of shoplifting marred an eighth-grade ski trip, the paper’s staff dutifully wrote and edited a report of the scandal. But a new principal who insisted on reviewing all copy before publication spiked the story.
