Wright on a horse at the Hillside Home School, next to the Assembly Hall. Taliesin Fellowship member, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer took this photograph and dated it to September 1951. Fellowship apprentice, Joe Fabris, is wearing the t-shirt while Wright’s wife Olgivanna stands on the right.
I don’t mean “change Taliesin, draw pictures, and charge his clients too much money”.
a’course the part about money is a joke. At least in my opinion.
Remember I wrote the post, “Wright Was Not a Shyster“
Actually, Larry stated it best in his message to me:
I’ve never read anything about Wright’s interest in sports or games. Perhaps a future topic for your blog? Looking forward to “Yahtzee at Taliesin: FLW at Play.”
Love the title.
So, for this post I searched Wright’s interests to see if he liked sports or games.
But unfortunately, I haven’t found anything definitive.
As far as I know
the guy apparently didn’t follow baseball
Hard to believe since he lived at a time when baseball was king.
Plus, he designed a baseball diamond in his model for Broadacre City.
Read about “Broadacre” in the Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 4.
I put a scan below that shows the model. The baseball diamond is on the lower right, and the close-up of it is under the larger photo:
Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect, ed. Terence Riley, with Peter Reed (Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1994), p. 333.1
But I think Wright included that because he understood people’s interest.
Also, he didn’t seem to like Football/soccer (a.k.a.—football everywhere-else-around-the-world) or golf.
Plus,
As far as I can tell, Wright didn’t play cards or go bowling.
No slight meant at all on either of those; Dad taught us all to play Poker for pennies and my parents both played Bridge.
And
I’ve bowled enough to know that I should just eat fried cheese curds and drink beer while I watch anyone else bowling.
Srsly: MY TOP BOWLING SCORE?
A score that’s so bad it’s not even laughable.
So, let’s go back to Wright’s young years:
He did lots of boyhood things with his best friend, Robie Lamp, who he met when he was about 14. In the article “An Old Madison Boy” by historian Mary Jane Hamilton, she wrote that the two
Using their ingenuity, and salvaged materials, Wright’s scroll saw, and his father’s lathe, the boys built a pedal-powered boat…, a catamaran, fanciful colored kites with long tales, cross bows, bows and arrows, a double-runnered bobsled, and an iceboat. Much of their play focused on Lake Mendota and included rowing the family boat, swimming…, and ice skating.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Monona Terrace: The Enduring Power of a Civic Vision, by David V. Mollenhoff and Mary Jane Hamilton (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1999), 47.
Plus, we know
Wright’s amusements a year or two later probably involved musical evenings at their home in Madison (both before and after his parents divorced in 1885). Like a lot of young people at that time, both there and at the homes of friends, they’d play music on instruments they had and dance. After all, the phonograph wasn’t even invented until 1877.
His youngest sister, Maginel, wrote about their sister Jane playing music in the house in chapter seven of Valley of the God-Almighty Joneses. She describes these events that took place after their parents had divorced. She writes about them taking all the rugs off the floor to open up space for dancing.
Also,
Wright tried boxing for a time.
Which I didn’t know was “a thing” before.
But this web page told me that boxing became popular in the U.S. with the Irish during the 1860s and ’70s, and that the Amateur Athletic Union established a set of boxing rules in 1889.
Therefore, Wright wrote in his autobiography that
I had been eager to learn to box while at the University and had practiced a little with Jimmie Kerr who had a similar ambition…. I used to put on the gloves with Harry Waterman.
Frank Lloyd Wright. An Autobiography, new and revised ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), 75-76.
This ended after one time he had a bloody fight—no sporting venture—in the Adler and Sullivan drafting room.2
Wright continued
his love of music in his Oak Park home, where Maginel and her mother lived next door.
Maginel writes in Chapter 13 about the music he brought in with the children playing instruments:
Sometimes at night I used to lie awake, or wake suddenly, to the rolling cadences and thundering majestic chords of Bach or Beethoven issuing across the garden from Frank’s house.
Maginel Wright Barney, Valley of the God-Almighty Joneses: Reminiscences of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Sister (Appleton-Century, New York City, 1965), 133.
And that her brother also liked going to the theater:
[W]e’d take the train to Chicago to the little Studebaker Theatre where something by Gilbert and Sullivan was always playing. We would occupy one of the middle rows, and… it wouldn’t be long before the whole company was playing to us, Frank’s gay gargantuan laugh filling the whole theater. [A]nd late at night, spent with laughing and enjoyment, we took the train back to Oak Park.
“Valley”, 134.
Wright’s son John also talked about his father’s raucous enjoyment at the theater:
His laugh was so contagious it sent the audience into spasms. One night the comedian, laughing all the while himself, looked directly at him and bowed in tribute.
John Lloyd Wright, My Father Frank Lloyd Wright (1946; Dover publication, 1992), p. 28.
More amusement:
He definitely liked riding horses, which we know from photographs taken throughout his life. In the photo at the top of this post, Wright (then in his 80s) has just gotten onto a horse.
But while there’s a film made by then-apprentice Alden B. Dow with a horse race—with Olgivanna and their daughter, Iovanna—watching horse racing wasn’t a regular thing.
So, his amusements remained: music, theater, and movies.
All things that the Wrights brought into life at the Taliesin Fellowship, which usually included watching movies on Saturdays at the theaters he designed in Wisconsin and Arizona. Then, formal evenings with music usually happened every Sunday. One of these “Formals” took place on his birthday (June 8), which is when the photo below was taken:
This photo was also in my post, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Birthday“.
First published November 29, 2025.
The photograph at the top of this post is in the Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer collection in the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York), #6203.108.
Notes:
- My post, “Preservation by Distribution“, is related to how Wright got the money to build the model.
- The other, more established draftsmen in the Adler and Sullivan studio picked on him before the brawl. But, more than those details, Wright relates things about many of them that I found kind of shocking. I’m not used to seeing people mark the cultures or ethnicity of others, in capital letters. Here’s biographer Peter Blake on that part:
These passages from Wright’s Autobiography sound as repellent as a Nazi tract; but the man who is speaking is a rather primitive countryman by instinct, and this includes the usual run-of-the-mill prejudices.
Peter Blake. Frank Lloyd Wright: Architecture and Space (Baltimore; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 20.
If you want to read Wright’s statements (and don’t mind a little blood), read p. 94-101 of the 1932 edition of his Autobiography, or p. 95-102 of the 1943 version.
