Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

31. WILLOW WAY

116 +- +31 + WILLOW WAY I WAS I N San Antonio a couple of weeks ago and saw a notice in the paper about an estate sale at Willow Way, the former home of architect O'Neil Ford and his wife, Wanda, so my wife and I drove out there and spent the morning wandering around the old stoneand -brick house and its grounds, picking our way among boxes of Mexican pottery and tables full of knick-knacks. It was a bittersweet visit. When I lived in San Antonio in the 1960s, Willow Way was the creative vortex of the city. The Fords gave wonderful parties there, with colored lights stringing the garden and Jim C ullum's Happy Jazz Band playing away until dawn. Every wacky and eccentric person in San Antonio found their way there, as well as a few geniuses. The Fords had a pet monkey who lived in a hot water heater closet next to the kitchen. The closet door had a sign on it that said "Please Close the Door or the Monkey Will Get Out." It seemed that the monkey was always out at the Fords' parties . Ford was a man of genuine talent. He was born in the little Grayson County farming community of Pink Hill in 1905, and he always claimed that he was the last architect in Texas to become an architect through apprenticeship, rather than by going to architecture school. He was a maverick in every sense of the word. Although he became one of the most prominent architects in the United States, he was a lifetime enthusiast for indigenous architecture -buildings built without the services ofan architect. He loved the adobe buildings along the border, the little limestone houses of Castroville, the big stone German farmhouses of the Hill Country. Although most of his work was done in an era in which new synthetic materials were the choice of most architects, he passionately believed that natural, locally available materials were superior, and his best work was done in limestone and brick. He was flamboyant in his dress and personal manner. He always wore a fresh red carnation in his lapel, and for a while, he drove around San Antonio in a huge right-hand drive 1925 Bentley. Ford first came to San Antonio in 1939 to supervise the restoration of La Villita, the neighborhood of little stone houses along the river just south of Commerce Street, and he remained a fixture in the city until his death in 1982. When he married Wanda Graham in 1940, they moved into her mother's house at Willow Way and it quickly became the intellectual center of San Antonio. Ford's brother Lynn, a talented woodworker, built a studio in the garage and produced hand-carved doors and panels there for twenty-five years. Various members of Ford's architectural firm lived in spare bedrooms. When 1was going out there in the '60s, Tom Stell, who had been a friend of Ford's since the 1920s, was a part-time resident . He was a muralist and a mosaic artist who wore frayed tweed suits and affected the type of short beard and pointed mustache that one associates with Parisian artists of the 1890s, and he was given to delivering two-hour monologues on subjects ranging from Renaissance painting to the virtues of eating cabbage. There was also a menagerie of peacocks, chickens, dogs, and birds in outdoor aviaries, in addition to the monkey. The house had been built in the early 1930s by Wanda Ford's mother, Elizabeth Graham, in a large pecan grove between San Jose Mission and the San Antonio River, and the grounds ran all the way down to the river. Much of the building material was stone taken from the mission ruins. There were no blueprints; Graham just drew lines on the ground with a stick when she wanted to add a room and her Mexican laborers started laying up walls. My wife and I wandered through those haphazard rooms, marveling at the detritus of seventy years of intense living. (Ford died in 1982, but his widow stayed on at Willow Way until her death two years ago.) +- 117 118 +There was a shelf of bizarre-looking ceramic wall sconces cast in a backyard kiln by Tom Stell; a table full of copper bowls and tin lanterns designed by the Ford's friend Jean Byron; piles of...