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All his life, people asked him when he had first thought of becoming an architectural lighting designer. After all, growing up in Zanesville, OH, in the early years of the last century, there weren't too many role models. "Always," he insisted. He said that what drove him was the poor lighting in his mother's kitchen.
At Columbia College in New York City, he became involved with college theater, working the scenery and lighting for the varsity show. During and after college, he worked for a prominent interior designer and in the design department of a New York manufacturer.
In 1935, he opened his own office, "for designing and selling architectural lighting ideas and the equipment to make them work." But he found that trying to sell architectural lighting ideas to architects was hard going. When World War II created restrictions on sales, he went back to school to get a degree in architecture. He graduated with a B. Arch. from Yale School of Architecture in 1944, where he studied with Stanley McCandless, the master who had formalized the methods of theatrical illumination. It was during these years that...