Everybody dies. Of course, we know that.
Still, it came as a shock to see the obituary in last week’s paper for Lyman Shepard, aka Frank Lloyd Wright. Somehow Mr. Shepard – decked out in his cape and what we vaguely called a “special hat” – seemed as eternal as the reputation of the man he portrayed.
He would sweep into a room, as only a man in cape can sweep, and pronounce, “I am Frank Lloyd Wright and I am the world’s greatest architect.” While there might be a spirited discussion of that point, there can be no doubt that The Master believed it to be true and that Mr. Shepard also would vouch for its accuracy.
Lyman Shepard, in his regalia, brought new breath to Wright for several decades before hundreds of audiences both local and across the world. He took the larger-than-life and often-too-big-for-his-own-good Wright and made him somehow real. As his friend Charles Chauncey Wells wrote in the Journal last week, after the bold declaration of Wright’s majesty, Shepard would speak extemporaneously for 45 minutes discussing Wright’s buildings and beliefs.
Mr. Shepard was no mere play actor. He was among the founders of the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation and served on its board. In 2010, we drive past the Wright home and studio on Chicago Avenue and take it entirely for granted. We assume the passionate preservation of Wright’s home and studio, and of his public buildings in Oak Park and River Forest. But in the 1970s, the Wright home and studio complex was a shabby, unsustainable rooming house. It was then, as we teetered on the fulcrum between a ’60s modernism that thought nothing of demolishing the past and the passion for preservation that took root in the 1980s, that Mr. Shepard and the architects of Oak Park’s future found a way to grab back 951 Chicago Ave. for posterity. Mr. Shepard and a generation of leaders now mostly gone saved Wright for Oak Park and the world.
Now Lyman Shepard has gone to history himself. With his passing, we’re a poorer and less colorful village.