This book tries to answer that question. I lived there and, with the occasional help from my four fine sons, kept this architectural gem standing while trying to restore it. Many people came to visit. “I’m just a housewife,” I said laughingly to Professor Spiro Kostoff when he came to film the documentary America by Design. “Oh,” he retorted, smiling through his beard, “but, what a house!” This was another man who urged me to publish all the information I had gathered and who later would inscribe his own book to me: “To the Enlightened Priestess of a Wrightian Temple.” Having entertained many guests and visited many a Wright house myself, even staying overnight in a few, I was fortunate to experience them through different seasons and times of day and night. I delighted in finding what Mr. Wright had carried over from previous work into subsequent designs, from Prairie House and Usonian, to west coast architecture and his later creations. At the beginning of my first marriage, our 1040 IRS form listed my husband as “medical student” and my occupation as “secretary.” Then, I was listed as “housewife/artist,” which later became “lecturer/ writer.” Now it says “retired.” However, I am far from retired, still “keeping house” and while cleaning up the attic I started to tackle more than six decades of diaries. I discarded some of them so my offspring had been on the National Register since 1970. The Tomek House became a National Historic Landmark in 1999, one of the few private homes on that selective list. However, This led to much reminiscing about my life and loves, and love in general. I edited and translated these observations for my four sons, who have been the delight of my life, and for my “Wright” husband, Carter, who himself had been an apprentice of Mr. Wright at Taliesin for a short time. He also saw and felt the magic of this very special prairie house that
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