Postcards

Aviators, architects, and actors

They had come for the same reason pyromaniacs and mayhem's apprentices flock to stock-car races. Don Quinn, proprietor of the Don Q Inn, or simply "The Q" to the natives in Wyoming Valley, Wisconsin, had purchased a massive 1952 Boeing 367 Stratofreighter. Converted to military configuration, she was a C–97: 180,000 pounds, 100 feet long, with a wingspan of 141 feet. Four giant 28-cylinder Pratt & Whitney piston radial engines could propel her to 280 knots at 25,000 feet. Normal approach speed: 140 kt.

Quinn had bought her from a bankrupt company in Long Beach, California. The airplane had once served as actress Farrah Fawcett's backdrop in a Mercury Cougar commercial. He thought the airplane would make a dandy novelty once parked in front of his motel here along Highway 23, just north of Dodgeville, Wisconsin. Quinn planned to make the airplane into a coffee shop and purchase six more airplanes and convert them into "fantasy suites" for intrepid honeymooners.

On that crisp October day in 1977, one thousand local residents and curiosity-seekers lined up near the lone paved 2,700-foot runway at the Dodgeville airport, next to The Q, and waited for Capt. Dick Schmidt to bring her in. Schmidt, an experienced Air Guard KC–97 driver, did so in most impressive fashion. Straddling both mains outside the narrow runway edges, slamming the props into full reverse, and standing on the brakes, he emerged from a huge dust plume and stopped with runway to spare.

Today, the C–97 sits alone in The Q's front yard along the highway. She's faded and discolored. Vandals have smashed the cockpit windows, and the giant rudder flaps aimlessly in the breeze. You can board her and check out the largely intact and ancient instruments and radios, sit in the massive crew seats, and linger over all manner of framed Stratofreighter memorabilia.

Quinn's dream of parking a flock of derelict airplanes in front of his motel died. The Q has new owners now. The "fantasy suite" concept remains indoors.

One such suite is called "Tranquility Base." It features a hot tub below a replica lunar landing craft. This is definitely not what Neil Armstrong had in mind when he radioed back from the moon's surface, "The Eagle has landed."

Wisconsin's Wyoming Valley, a 40-minute Skyhawk flight northwest of Oshkosh, is an exhilarating and eclectic place to spend a weekend. This geographically and culturally rich place is where legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright did his best work and lived most of his life; where pilot and dreamer Alex Jordan built a sprawling house atop a towering chimney rock and then became a maniacal collector of everything; where Robert Trent Jones designed one of his finest golf courses; and where, on a summer evening beneath the stars, you can take in the immortal works of William Shakespeare at America's second-largest classical outdoor theatre. From Dodgeville to Spring Green, here is a community of naturalists, artisans, and counterculturists; where Haight-Ashbury meets Little House on the Prairie; where the Wisconsin River gently undulates in the shadow of the expansive Baraboo Bluffs, and great masses of galena limestone rise from the forest's floor. In other words, a very American place.

In 1832 Sauk Chief Black Hawk was defeated and surrendered here at the Battle of Bad Axe. A Caucasian influx followed, and the ancestors of perhaps the nation's most important architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, were among them.

As a boy Wright worked the fields here at his uncle's farm, toil he found disagreeable. He would often flee the fields to lounge beneath the summer sun on a hillcrest in the shadow of a great burr oak. In 1911, at age 44, he would build his principal residence immediately below this spot. Wright called the house Taliesen, Welsh for shining brow. The sprawling main house is built into the brow of the hill and measures 37,000 square feet. It was one of six buildings on what once was a 3,000-acre compound (now reduced to 600 acres). Wright made significant additions to the house practically up until the time of his death, which occurred just short of his ninety-second birthday in 1959.

The main living room of Taliesen resembles the cab of an air traffic control tower, giving a panoramic view of the valley below. You sense that you are flying over the landscape. In 1953, Wright's wife casually remarked that she wished to be able to walk among the treetops and the birds that were visible beyond the living room windows. Steel beams salvaged from the World War II aircraft carrier USS Ranger were used to construct Mrs. Wright's "Birdwalk" and it remains one of the house's most dramatic features, jutting into the tree canopies.

The house's entryways have low ceilings that give way to much higher ones once inside. Wright called this technique "compression and release of space." It's like walking from the inside of a Falcon 10 into the main cabin of a McDonnell Douglas DC–10. It draws you into a room with urgency only slightly less subtle than explosive decompression.

Many homes that Wright designed had no real corners. Rather, stone pillars supported the roof structures. Wright called this "breaking the box," forerunner to today's overused expression "thinking outside the box." Even in rhetoric, Wright was ahead of his time.

Two-hour tours of the main house are limited and available for $40. A four-hour estate tour of the entire complex fetches $60. Advance reservations are required for both. More visitors trend to the less expensive two-hour $15 guided walking or $10 one-hour hillside tours. The latter tours are sold on a walk-up basis at Taliesen's visitors' center.

Wright's influence is ubiquitous throughout the Wyoming Valley. Many of the homes and commercial buildings are roofed in Wright's signature "Cherokee red." Wright's influence of a different sort can be found a few miles south down Highway 23.

Alex Jordan had designed a women's boardinghouse near the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison during the 1920s. He drove out to Spring Green to solicit Wright's opinion. Wright took one look at the plans and sniffed, "I wouldn't hire you to design a cheese case for me." Jordan fumed and swore revenge in the form of building a Japanese house near Wright's masterwork. But he didn't do it. His son did.

Alex Jordan Jr. was a college dropout, dreamer, and pilot. As a teenager he would come to the Wyoming Valley and scale Deer Shelter Rock. It towered 450 feet above the valley and measured 70 by 200 feet across the top. In 1945, he began building a 14-room Japanese house on the rock largely without plans. Word soon spread of the unusual structure. Annoyed by gawkers, Jordan decided to start charging 50 cents' admission in 1959. It only encouraged them.

Today, The House on the Rock is one of Wisconsin's most popular tourist attractions.

Jordan plowed almost all the revenues back into his house, constructing a labyrinth of 16 attached buildings below it housing everything from a replica of a 200-foot blue whale to antique guns, pneumatic music machines, enormous model ship and doll collections, and the world's largest carousel—valued at more than $5 million, it has 20,000 lights, 182 chandeliers, 1,740 square feet of mirrors, and 269 hand-crafted animals and figures. The carousel's footprint is 80 by 35 feet, and it weighs 36 tons. No matter how eclectic the tastes of your child (or spouse), there is an exhaustive collection of something here that will appeal to anyone. You could spend days here and not see it all. Adult admission is $19.50. It's a bargain, as are the performances of the American Players Theatre.

Located around the corner from Taliesen's visitors' center and across the street from the luxurious House on the Rock Resort (and the meticulous Robert Trent Jones golf course), APT has been delighting audiences in intimate (1,100 seats, all of which are more comfortable than the ones in your airplane) open-air splendor since 1979. To call APT summer stock is a disservice. It is much better. The preview performance I caught of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream was slick, riotous, and wonderful.

As good as the play was, a night at APT must be taken in context of the entire experience. Imagine a National Football League stadium tailgate party crashing London's venerable Old Vic theatre and you sort of get the idea. Concessionaires peddle all matter of libations, from the local favorite Leinenkugel's beer to something called New Glarus Spotted Cow. The gift shop sells sweatshirts featuring a likeness of Shakespeare above the caption "This Bard's For You."

Too soon a Wyoming Valley weekend ends, and I head for the avocado-colored Skyhawk parked at the Lone Rock airport. I lift off from the 4,000-foot runway not far from the site of one of Wisconsin's first medevac flights. In 1923, a traveling barnstormer was beseeched by the local doctor to fly her to several critically ill patients in nearby towns, separated by the uncrossable and flood-swollen Wisconsin River. Four years later, the barnstormer would fly across the Atlantic Ocean alone. His name was Charles A. Lindbergh.

For more information on Wisconsin's Wyoming Valley, contact the Spring Green Chamber of Commerce at 800/588-2042 or visit the Web site ( www.springgreen.com).