Word: stone
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Birdhouse for Bluebirds. The man who created this U.S. showcase was born and reared in the Arkansas university town of Fayetteville (pop. 18,069). First member of the Stone family to go to Arkansas was Ed Stone's grandfather, taciturn Stephen K. Stone, who managed to amass such a fortune in real estate and merchandise that he was known as "the Richest Man in Washington County." His sons, including Ed's father, Benjamin Hicks Stone, were raised in Southern comfort, so well off none of them troubled to work very hard...
...mother, an English teacher at the University of Arkansas, who was the dominant artistic force in his family. She encouraged Ed in his talent for drawing, gave him an upstairs bedroom for his carpenter shop. There, as a boy of 14, Stone designed the structure that won his first architectural contest-a birdhouse for a contest sponsored by the local lumberyard. Budding Architect Stone's entry and first-prize ($2.50) winner: "A modest shelter for bluebirds, covered with sassafras branches...
Birdhouse Builder Stone was no go-getting boy. A slow, sweet talker, he loved to hang around all day at the soda fountain. After his mother's death, in 1920 he ambled onto the University of Arkansas, where he was immensely popular and immensely relaxed. "I guess all the boys were lazy," recalls a college chum, "but Ed was more than ordinary lazy." Arkansas' U.S. Senator James William Fulbright, then a lowerclassman and later president of the university, gives Ed full marks as a storyteller and cartoonist. Beyond that, Stone seemed content to remain a lady...
...Boston, Ed Stone opened his Arkansas eyes wide. "Buildings like the Boston Public Library and Trinity Church, well, they made quite a dent in a kid from the Ozarks," he says. There were bigger dents on a trip to Manhattan and Washington, D.C. on the way home. Hicks...
...Stone landed on his feet, with a $100-a-week job designing interiors for the new Waldorf, including the romantic trellised ceiling of the Starlight Roof. Within two years he had moved over to the new Rockefeller Center, where in the presence of "the prophets," Architects Raymond Hood and Harvey Corbett of the Rockefeller Center team that included fast-rising young architect Wallace Harrison, Stone was put in charge of the working designs for Radio City Music Hall, then as now the world's largest movie palace (6,200 seats...