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Susan Scott Schmidt is a free-lance writer.
In 1938, Ludd Spivey, the president of a tiny college in Florida, asked the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design him a campus.
There was only one problem: Spivey had no money. Florida Southern College in Lakeland was dead broke.
That didn't stop Frank Lloyd Wright. He and Spivey hatched a plan to use student labor and local materials to build the design he called "Child of the Sun."
During World War II, students such as Mary Dale, Class of 1944, were pressed into service to make bricks out of native Florida materials -- coquina seashells and sand. Dale remembers spending seven-hour shifts tamping the mixture into brick molds with a broom. Wearing a harness, she and her fellow students hauled bricks among the orange groves and mixed concrete for the floors using a hand- turned cement mixer.
At night, Spivey ordered the students to attend Wright's lectures.
"When I was 19, I thought Wright was crazy," laughs Dale. "When I turned 40, I thought he was a genius."
Spivey's enthusiasm for Wright's ingenuity and vision was typical of the architect's clients who commissioned his buildings. Always over budget and never on time, Wright was nonetheless a genius who changed his clients' lives. And from Oct. 30 to Nov. 4, Dale gave tours and told her story to 200 members of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, a nonprofit group dedicated to saving Wright's creations from the wrecking ball.
Like many Wright clients, Florida Southern...