BOX 219: Arizona and Wisconsin.

You're looking up at one of the towers of the St Xavier del Bac Mission Church just outside Tucson. (The saguaro might be a clue.) Anne and I visited it in the early summer of 2000 during a week when Anne was attending a conference in Scottsdale, and Becky, Michelle and I went along.

(I made reference to this conference in my post on BOXES 191-192, which opened with three photos of Scottsdale. That post had two errors: duplicating one of the photos instead of showing the third; and, more important, confusing the time of Anne's 2000 conference with my own 1994 visit to Scottsdale for a conference on Native American filmmakers. I've corrected the post, as you can see if you're curious.)

As for the present post, which is divided about equally between the Arizona trip and a slew of family photos back in Wisconsin, you'll soon discover that each half has a dominant theme: Frank Lloyd Wright, then our first grandson, Sam.

This slide box begins with our visit to the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, which at the time I thought had been designed entirely by FLW:

In fact, I've since read, he was a consultant on the project but the architect of record was Albert McArthur, who had in his youth worked for FLW. The stained glass window with a saguaro motif, which I took a photo of, was installed by Taliesin students in 1973 after a Wright design:

Here are Michelle and Becky in front of one of the pools, the Wright-looking elements doubtless a later addition:

I have no idea what took us to the location of the next shot: it's on Central Avenue, Phoenix, with two 1990s buildings: the Central Library on the right and the BMO Tower (formerly the headquarters of Dial Soap, and shaped like a bar of their product). The avenue divider does look like it was designed in homage to FLW.

But more fully and famously FLW is the Gammage Auditorium on the Arizona State University campus, which we visited mainly because Michelle was considering ASU as a possible college. (Followers of these posts may remember the several photos I took of the place during my first visit to Phoenix, 1978, BOXES 118-119.)

One day we left the girls behind at the hotel pool as Anne and I drove down to Tucson to see our friend Craig. I see that I took a photo on the way down, and again I don't know why, unless it was to register the vastness of the Sonoran desert and blueness of the sky:

Besides having lunch with our friend we visited the St Xavier Church shown at the top of this post; it dates from the 1790s and is thus one of the oldest colonial structures in Arizona. Here are the other photos I took of it:

I don't know where I took the next photo, of some lush gardens and flowers; possibly they were on our hotel grounds, since the next slide in the box is of the pool:

And now back to FLW. I'd been to Taliesin West during my 1978 visit, but it was Anne's first time there, and I found it just as exciting to tour again.

I took a couple of pictures of interiors as well, at the beginning and the end of the tour; you can see Anne in the first pic among the other visitors.

And just as I did in 1978, I took a photo through a window at the drafting room:

My last photo looks out of doors from the relatively cool interior, with an oddly posed tourist.

Back home Anne and I couldn't resist taking yet more photos of Sam. (Once again, apologies to later grandkids who didn't get so much photo attention!) That summer Aron and Tiffany moved up to Antigo, WI, for his first job in a fire department, but I see that we first took two pics of Sam in our living room:

Here he is looking cheerful in his new home in Antigo:

We also took a couple of pics of Tiffany: one with Sam, the other with a dessert she had made, posing as the waitress on the cover of Supertramp's Breakfast in America.

Her T-shirt with the fish cutouts, by the way, is another one that Anne's mother, Judy, sewed for us; I showed mine in an earlier post.

While in Antigo I attempted some action photos of Sam on a swing in a park near a lake; a third shot with Anne and Sam turned out better:

Back home in Sheboygan Anne's brother Jim and his sons, Eric and Adam, visited once again--putting on silly faces in some shots--and it looks like Tiffany and Sam came down to visit, since they're in the same wagon as Eric and Adam:

After that visit Anne and I made our fourth biennial trip to Hawai'i, on which I'll report in the next post.