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My first CAC tour experience was so long ago it was still the “CSAF”- the Chicago School of Architecture Foundation. This was around 1977. I was in college when I joined my mom on a walking tour of the near west side (UIC/Little Italy), which was close to her birthplace. One homeowner saw our group and invited us in!

In the fall of 1982 I heard a PSA on the radio, looking for people to take docent training. I memorized the number and called but was told that the PSA was stale: the training class was full. “But we’ll call you next year.” And the next fall they did. I interviewed in 1983 and was accepted into the Saturday class of 1984. There was also a Monday class.

At that time, docent training prepared three tours: Glessner House, Clarke House, and The Loop. The first weeks of training were at Glessner House, and the later weeks were downtown and at the ArchiCenter in the Monadnock Building. One week we met at the Pleasant Home in Oak Park, and we were invited to also learn the Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park walking tour, which I did. There is one other 1984 docent still active, Kathy Maynard, and she also does the FLW tour.

In those days, the area around Glessner House was pretty bleak with a lot of vacant lots. The upside was that street parking was easy and free. Except… on the days of Bears home games, and the Bears hosted a number of playoff games in the mid-‘80s. On game days, Bears fans would park in the area and take a footbridge over the IC tracks to Soldier Field. Entrepreneurs would direct people into the vacant lots and collect a parking fee. One playoff day I told the “attendant” that I was a docent on Prairie Avenue and yes, I can and will park on the street.

My first DAN was a buffet-style dinner at Glessner House. Food was served in the kitchen, and we had to scrounge for someplace to sit. I think my wife and I sat on one of the staircases.

There was one Loop tour, a two and a half-hour walk. It started at the ArchiCenter and ended at the brand-new State of Illinois Center. It covered everything from the “Chicago School” to the emerging “post-modernism”.

We’d interpret Carson Pirie Scott and the Reliance Building on State Street, both pre-renovation. The Reliance was particularly decrepit. I would position my group on the east side of the State Street Mall where a bus shelter obscured the first few floors; they were especially unsightly. The upper floors, more intact, were not very clean.

Once I took the annual all-day L tour that used several branches of the L. One of its highlights was the “Paulina Connector” – a part of the L not used in revenue service but allowed what we now call the Blue Line to connect to the network. I was eager to be a docent for the tour, and there was a run-through the weekend before… the very day I was slated to be in charge of my 3-year-old daughter. So, I asked if she could come along on the run-through, and little suburban Madeline had the time of her life, riding all over Chicago on seven different L trains.  The first time Madeline saw Geoff Baer on a WTTW special, she said, “I remember him from the practice L tour!”

I volunteered to take photographs at a Prairie Avenue event. The event was coordinated by Dick and Judith Spurgin, now Emeritus docents. Dick suggested I develop a “Loop Photography” walking tour, which I directed into the late 1990s.

I served on Docent Council from 1988 to 1993. I was on the Tour Committee, and the Standards Committee, which I chaired for a year. In those days, staff did not do the tour recordkeeping: that was up to the Standards Committee. Docents tracked their hours in notebooks at Glessner House and the ArchiCenter, and it was up to Standards to tally them and verify that docents had met their requirements.

Standards’ other big job in that era was to run DAN. The Docent Council persuaded the CAF Board to support DAN financially, so instead of a low-budget affair at Glessner House, we were able to use nicer facilities. I emceed DAN in 1992, at the Hotel Florence in Pullman.

I was Docent Council President 1992-93. At that time, some of us had intra-company email at work, but not personal email or any kind of internet connection. Sometimes I would send the “president’s letter” to the Docent News editor via a dial-up modem and Telnet. Docent News, of course, was printed and mailed.

My second daughter, Emily, was born in June of 1993, and I chose to step back from docent administration later that year. I ensured that status by volunteering for the Election Committee whose members were, and still are, ineligible to run in the election they supervise.

By 1994, I was an early adopter of home internet. Once I had a personal “home page,” I offered to set up an internet presence for CAF. The staff planned to get on the web eventually, and Kelly Jones snagged the domain “architecture.org”. But it would months before any official web site would be ready to roll. With the staff’s blessing and cooperation, I assembled the first CAF web presence. That presence is long gone, but I have an archive of its contents.

Being a docent has given me so much enjoyment. Giving tours is deeply satisfying. It’s been a privilege to be able to give back with docent administration, as a tour director, coach and certifier. It is an honor to be a part of such a distinguished group: CAC docents