I was a fourth year student at OU when fellow students Jim Gresham and Bob Dennis and myself drove a clunker car without a heater to Los Angeles during Christmas break to see Lautner’s work. John had been one of the Wright’s original apprentices in the thirties and had gone to LA to supervise FLW’s Sturges house. He stayed on t start a practice about 1940. We were encouraged to visit Lautner because we had seen publications of his Sheets Apartments where he had circular living spaces at different heights on a sloping hillside. The roof was a single plane supported on columns that were free of the enclosed living spaces. It was a fresh organization of roof structure and floor plan. There was also a very original design for the Carling house in the Hollywood hills. This house also hade a free standing roof supported by splaying steel angled columns. The house featured a wall with built in seating that could pivot like a hinged door to open the house to the deck and pool. A very technical piece of architectural detailing for which John’s later work would be famous. One could see the influence of Wright but John was already very much developing his own approach to design in response to the climate of Southern California b from the Hollywood hills.

We also visited the Mauer houde and the Schaffer house. The latter had one of the most beautiful kitchens I have ever seen. Above a long counter John made a sloping plane of glass and horizontal wood strips. One looked out into overhanging tree branches. I have seen this interior use d as a movie set on two occasions. After returning to OU I wrote to John asking if I could come out to work for him and he replied to come ahead. I hitch-hiked to Hollywood at the end of the semester. John had his office in the lower part of a spacious two-story garage. Alvin Wylie another apprentice to John, who has been at Taliesin and I lived in an apartment above the garage. I had arrived at lunch time and John took me to a local restaurant where he ordered something with horse radish an I ordered the same. John chomped away at his sandwich while tears came to my eyes at first bite. John was a formidable physical specimen. Years later when teaching at the University of Kentucky, John came for a four day visiting architect session in March. It was cold and snowy. We put John up in the farmhouse where my family lived. John opened all the windows in his room. Raised in Northern Michigan or not, it was remarkable. I also remember John wading out into the cold Pacific for a swim. I could not wade in above my ankles. Later, John and his wife Elizabeth had property on a rushing stream just below Sequoia National Park where they would camp out in a small Mercedes bus John had refitted into a motor home. Again he would dive into the very cold water.

When I was with him, John lacked new commissions and was on the phone to stop the telephone company from disconnecting his service. Nonetheless, he and Elizabeth gave generously of their time to drive Alvin and myself around the Los Angeles area. He had a Dodge coupe with only two seats but with a long trunk. Seated in the trunk Alvin and I saw the sights with the trunk door held open with a wood post. John was brilliant at architectural detailing, suspending large sheets of glass with no connecting mullions long before it became a widespread practice. He spent about a day and a half per week at the building department trying to get approval fro his novel ideas to be realized. John also had plate glass cut to fit around boulders in several houses. I enjoyed the way he would collage a finely made kitchen cabinet with a large unpainted concrete column as in Silvertop, a large house on Hollywood hill. John disapproved of railings and devised unique designs to avoid them. The famous..Arrango.?...house on the Gulf of Mexico had a very large curving terrace bounded by an illuminated lap pool about four to five feet in width. The pool performed as a railing.

It was difficult to draw Lautner out on his experience with Wright or on architectural theory. After two sentences he would launch into tirades about bad business men in Los Angeles and how he disliked living in Los Angeles but it was the only place that he could find clients for his architecture. I remember an editor of Architectural Forum panning architects for meaningless stunts in theirs works. He used John’s design for a restaurant which had a folded roof plane with prominent sign letters spelling “Googies.” The photo did not show the site context. When inside the restaurant the rising folded roof allowed the customers dramatic visual access to a natural hillside. I thought the design was an excellent solution to the site and purpose of the building. The “Googies” style became famous or infamous.

Once I flew to Los Angeles with San Francisco architect Don MacDonald whom I had in class as a student at Oklahoma University. John took time to drive us to see some of his work. Lautner drove while MacDonald sat in the front with myself in the middle. I soon felt like two battleships were lobbing shells over me. The macho male competitive nature of the two had somehow ignited.

Elizabeth, John’s wife, who was a Christian Scientist, died and later John married his longtime housekeeper. He took her to Mexico to see her family. They visited in San Francisco twice and I prepared picnics when we met at nature preserves.