Blog

By Henry Kuehn, Class of 1974

Hard to believe that I have given my last CAF tour. It was an Architectural Highlights tour, on a bus filled with family and dear friends that had been arranged by my wife, Marti, unbeknownst to me. Having a bus full of well-wishers was a unique and memorable way to ring out my career as a docent.

It all began when I became a full- fledged member of the Docent Class of 1974. The CAF, or the Chicago School of Architecture as it was known in those days, offered only a handful of tours back then. Each new docent spent many hours giving tours of Glessner House, the then-home base of the CAF. I soon began giving the recently devised loop tour and signed up to become a docent for the brand new Highlights by Bus tour (HLBB). A year or two later I started giving the also brand new Graceland Cemetery tour. The HLBB tour and the Graceland Cemetery tour quickly became my favorites and I have given them each hundreds of times throughout my docent career.

There have been many memorable tours over the years. I was asked to put together a special tour of important basements in the Loop. It turned out to be so popular that several more of those tours were given over the years. I helped pull together a special one-day tour of the old Comisky Field that was featured on the front page of the Daily News and brought out a whole new audience of baseball lovers and White Sox fans, many bringing along their baseball gloves. We did the same thing at Wrigley Field and the old Chicago Stadium.

I have shown Chicago to many interesting people over the years including the Earl of Harwood, who was eighth in line for the British crown back then (we were chauffeured in a Rolls Royce). I helped arrange having Vincent Scully, the Yale architectural history legend, give a talk at the CAF’s facilities in the Monadnock Building on a cold and snowy Saturday afternoon. I have given bus tours where the bus was involved in an accident. I have given bus tours when the bus disappeared while we were disembarked. I have given bus tours where the bus never showed up.

One of my richest memories is of an older teenage girl on an Architectural Highlights by Bus tour. Throughout the early part of the tour she could not have acted less interested in what was being shown. She effervesced total boredom. In those days, the Robie House came at the end of the tour and I was curious what her reaction would be, since it had been so negative toward everything else up to that point. To state it simply, when she exited the house she was absolutely transformed by what she had seen. She had tears in her eyes as she told me how deeply the house had moved her. For the rest of the tour she was a different person. I am not sure what the rest of her life has had in store for her but she, and I, clearly had a memorable experience that Saturday morning.

It is that energy from the people who have been on my tours that has made every tour seem fresh and exciting. Without question I will miss giving tours but I plan on staying connected with the CAC. I have watched the CAC grow over 100 times in size since I first became involved. It has expanded from a three-person operation housed in Glessner House into what is now one of Chicago’s major cultural/educational institutions. The docent program has become one of the top such programs in the world, growing from 50 when I started to 450 today. With such an exciting and ever-changing organization, I would be crazy not to keep it as part of my life.