20:6.  I’m surprised by how many more of the one thing I’m counting there are than the other and also by how low both numbers are given that we’ve covered over 2,000 miles.

We are spending the night in Pepin, Wisconsin, a wonderful little lakeside town.  In fact, we had the best dinner of our trip so far at a restaurant called Harbor View Cafe. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is in this neck of the woods.

Also of interest is that Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of Little House on the Prairie, was born just 6 miles north of here in February 1867, 4 months before Frank Lloyd Wright was born, also in Wisconsin–in Richland Center–about 120 miles or so from here.  Laura became a school teacher at age 16 and was married at age 18.  She didn’t start writing until age 65 and was surprised at how popular her books were.  She continued writing until her death in 1957 at age 90.

As I was reading the historic marker about Laura and realized that she was born the same year as Frank Lloyd Wright, I couldn’t help but compare her with him. There were certainly many similarities from the start-both were born in the same year in Wisconsin, not far apart, and both were from families of limited means but which were very focused on education.  Interestingly, neither had formal training in their field of success. Frank never went to architecture school and Laura never graduated from high school.  Both were also very successful late in their careers. While Frank had had major successes throughout his career, he also reinvented himself several times over the course of his life. For example, he started thinking about and planning the Guggenheim Museum–considered to be one of his masterpieces–about the same time as Laura began writing her books at age 65 and the building was completed in 1959, the year of Wright’s death at age 91.

Of course, there were also significant differences in their personalities.  Laura was very surprised that anyone would be interested in reading her books, since she didn’t consider herself a writer and was not particularly well educated even though she had been a teacher.  Frank, on the other hand, was supremely self-confident, bordering on arrogant, and once suggested that he could rebuild the nation in an interview with Mike Wallace.  I wonder what they thought of each other.  They were quite famous, so I imagine they knew of each other and their common backgrounds. It’s interesting to ponder…