My Architecture Period as a Kid

When my sister Anita, older than me by four years, got hold of a textbook on architecture some time in the mid-to-late 1960s (I'm guessing around 1967-68), she introduced me to the subject and I became fascinated with the different types of buildings...chiefly those of houses...and began to look forward to the weekly Sunday newspaper, not for the comics or sports but rather for the real estate section.  In it were always floor plans of houses that were for sale, and I would imagine myself living in them.  Soon I was drawing up my own floor plans, which...following my sailing ship, world geography, and star map periods, began the next "big thing" for me...in between collecting stamps and trading cards, that is.  At the time, as far as I can remember, I was in the fifth or sixth grade at Nova Blanche Forman Elementary in Davie...Anita's school was across the field at Nova High.   By the way, back then I was fascinated by the pictures of Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural works, and I had always thought that the house at the end of Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 masterpiece thriller North by Northwest was a Wright home.  But after just looking it up, I discovered that instead of being a real building situated behind Mount Rushmore, it was only a movie set creation in California, built to look like something that the famous architect might have designed.  It was my recent subscription to online newspaper archives that brought my architecture period back to the forefront of my memory as I once again scanned through Sunday paper home sections...the above clip is from the June 19, 1966 Miami Herald: check out the prices!  Nowadays I'm more interested in big buildings, impressed by the towering skyscrapers during visits to New York and Chicago (including the Windy City's fantastic Architecture River Tour)...while equally taken aback by those block-long, shorter office monstrosities in Washington, D.C. (shorter due to the city's height restriction for buildings).  As for houses, you might think I'd be a big fan of the Home and Garden channel...but alas, my interest in house designs is no longer what it was more than fifty years ago...