<Begin Segment 6>

BN: You had mentioned earlier that you had built kind of strong bonds with some of the, your classmates also, you're class of 1960 at USC.

FS: Yeah. Well, the class of '60 was sort of unique because at graduation at USC, in the big quad outside of where the, I think in the library and so forth, our class all had top hats, and when they put that on, it would go, ponk. [Laughs] So that kind of... I think because there were several veterans, guys who were older, we had one woman who was the top student, and she's quite an artist, and she's succeeding doing very beautiful woodwork stuff. We had an interesting group of guys who... well, I didn't like this one guy that, he built a little... well, we helped him build a dome on the side of a hillside, got a lot of notoriety at that time, years ago. And he had a connection with the number one guy for Bucky, Buckminster Fuller, who everybody sort of knows the name. And it turned out that student, my friend, who recently passed away, he also came into architecture because his father, he gave me his memoir, was dean of the school in the east somewhere, or Midwest or East. And then I'm thinking, even recently, I got involved in Head Start. That's what Head Start means. There's some basis in which one can take what they learned early in life to another level. And I reflect on those army kids again, too. He and I and my buddies are studying architecture, well, this guy already has sort of a framework of what it might be. And so he took it in a different way for himself.

My best friend and I were very enamored with, for different reasons, with Frank Lloyd Wright, because that was something they didn't teach at school. Because Wright was a little bit out there, and it didn't quite fit into Sir Banister Fletcher's book, kind of stuff. And what I related to Frank Lloyd Wright most was that he had such a high respect for Japanese culture, which I didn't discover as a non-reader for a pretty long time. But it kind of came together for me because of his period in Japan when he did the Imperial Hotel. And ironically, that's the first building I went to see in 1964, when I first went to Japan. And it was also, I don't remember where we stayed there, friend of mine and I went. But that was a starting point of some of the more prominent architects today in Japan. So that whole situation -- I'm losing track of what I'm trying to get at -- see, when I talk about Wright and the Japanese prints that he always did, you know, what comes to mind is because of YouTube. I've been watching a lot of Steve Jobs and how he died, and one of the last images they present about his love affair with Japanese prints and going to Kyoto many times, to Ryoanji and sitting there meditating.

So I kind of feel a creative bond with discovery or with the creative side of the human mind. I'm not sure how to explain that, but it really, it kind of makes sense and I kind of respect a deep part of my cultural roots. But I didn't really know it, you know what I mean? It was within me, and I thought that way, I thought about nature and my relationship with Native Americans, all these things all kind of stem almost from a spiritual root, I guess. I don't want to go too deep into it, but it was a very natural part of how I continued to grow, if you will, or to survive in architecture. I mean, I don't like to use architecture as... it was only a vehicle for me as an architect.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.