Recently someone posted a photo of this house on Facebook asking if anyone had any information about it. It isn’t the first time I’ve seen the house show up in my Facebook feed. It makes appearances both in Hot Springs history groups and on the feeds of Facebook friends from time to time. It makes sense why the house would attract attention and tickle people’s curiosity. I mean it’s a weird looking house. It would be weird enough in any city (save for maybe Miami?) but it’s especially weird to find such a strange structure in Hot Springs, Arkansas alongside of symmetrical ranch and craftsman houses. It makes people wonder - “what is the story there?” And with this house, like with a lot of things in Hot Springs, people have all kinds of stories. And since I’m a sucker for a good story, I wasted my entire weekend trying to figure out what the real story might be.
The first reply to the post on Facebook was the usual response - that this is a Frank Lloyd Wright home. This is a common canard in small towns acrossAmerica. Every unusual edifice is attributed to Wright for some reason. Perhaps he ends up in a lot of oral histories because he’s the only architect most of us could name. But in this case it’s a pretty easy one to debunk. Wright’s buildings are all well documented, so there’s not really a lot of debate on what he did or didn’t do. There is one Wright in Arkansas, though it wasn’t built there. The Bachman-Wilson house was taken apart in New Jersey and reassembled in Northwest Arkansas at the Wal Mart heiress’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. But honestly you don’t need to know much about Frank Lloyd Wright to look at this house in Hot Springs and doubt that it was designed by one of the world’s most renowned architects. Still, the error wasn’t completely out of left field. A previous owner of this house, a local dentist, had spread that rumor himself, and it had even supposedly been alleged in real estate listings for the house in the past.
The next person that the house was attributed to on Facebook was Fay Jones. And here is where the Frank Lloyd Wright thing probably comes into play. Jones was one of Wright’s apprentices, and he was an Arkansan who designed a number of prominent buildings throughout the state, including some homes in Hot Springs. His work is stunning, and he was absolutely a modernist, but his buildings were far different than the art deco style of this house.
Next the house was attributed to I. Granger McDaniel. Granger was the son of Irven Donald McDaniel, and both were architects responsible for a number of important buildings in Arkansas and particularly in Hot Springs. Granger was even involved in the design of The Vapors, as well as many of the hotels that sprang up during the city’s gambling boom years from 1960 to 1964. His style was very modern, very much in line with the art deco style seen in this house, and during that period in Hot Springs the construction boom that the gambling business fueled was reshaping the city into something that looked very different from the old victorians of the first half of the century. Old Queen Annes and elegant turn of the century buildings were being bulldozed to make way for space-age looking buildings like the new convention center (also a McDaniel) and other buildings with sharp edges, sloping roofs, and glass bricks.
It’s because of this period of time that Hot Springs sometimes feels like an architectural pastiche - at one point it was preparing to tear down the old and build something modern and new, but that project was cut short, and was followed by a long period of neglect. Some of the oldest buildings in Hot Springs have been preserved so well they look as beautiful as they likely did when they were built. But many of the buildings built in the middle of the century were left alone and now look older and rougher than buildings built a century earlier. Houses like this one pop up in the strangest places in Hot Springs, and stand out. Not quite new, not quite old. A missing piece of our historical memory. They were built to anticipate the space age. Today they just look like aliens.
The McDaniels and Jones often get confused in the minds of many in Hot Springs, and Granger is frequently erroneously said to have apprenticed with Wright. This is, in all likelihood, how the previous owners of this house may have been able to convince themselves that the house was connected to Frank Lloyd Wright. And the McDaniel connection is one that seems to stick. Granger’s daughter commented on the Facebook thread that her father designed this house. There is good reason to believe this. Some of the McDaniels’ work fits the same art deco modernist style of this house, particularly the Billings-Cole house in Malvern, Arkansas, which was built in 1948 and features some of the same design elements like glass bricks, corner windows and a sunning porch. Likewise the Cleveland Arms apartment building, which the McDaniels’ designed in 1945, was done in the art deco style.
A number of the McDaniels’ buildings are on the register of historic places. And even among those that aren’t, there is plenty of evidence and record of their design. But they were busy men, and not every house and building they had a hand in is easily attributable to them. Sometimes, like with this curious house, what we have is simply an oral history of the house - who lived in it, who those people said built it, who told who that they were involved in the design. This is how a lot of the history of Hot Springs is passed on - through stories told to successive generations. Stories that sometimes get garbled in the transmission and, when there’s no written history to go back and check, can never be corrected.
When I was writing The Vapors, I wrestled with this problem over and over again. So much of the written, recorded history of the town has been lost through the years. Police records, newspaper archives, personal and professional correspondence, legal documents. Some of it didn’t survive because the people that possessed it didn’t understand it’s historical importance. Some of it was destroyed intentionally to hide misdeeds and crimes. Some of it fell victim to fires and floods and the like. What was left was people’s memories. Or, worse still, people’s memories of other people’s memories. And at times that was the best I had to go on, though I did my best to dig deeper and confirm whatever I was told. Often it felt like trying to solve some great mystery, and it was intoxicating. My editor told me more than once that most of the small mysteries I was excited to solve weren’t as compelling to the average reader as they were to me - someone who was neck deep in Hot Springs lore. Most people didn’t care to know the identities of the people who burned the Roanoke Baptist Church, for example. It was enough to know simply that it wasn’t an accident, and I should move on and finish the damn book. Most people were content to know that Granger McDaniel designed this little bungalow on West Grand, and I should have probably left it alone and spent my weekend paying attention to my kids. Dear reader, you will be pleased to know that I let my kids have extra screen time.
Granger McDaniel was a lot more than just an architect. When he was a teenager he dropped out of high school, went to Canada, forged some documents and joined the RAF in the summer of 1941 so he could fight the Nazis, several months before the United States joined WW2. He had taken some flying lessons in Hot Springs, so he was made a co-pilot and flew in several bombing missions. Eventually he was made a pilot, and during his first mission in the captain’s seat he crashed his plane and, after being rescued by a fisherman, was handed over to the Germans and sent to Stalag Luft III in Poland. This was the prison camp made famous by the book and film “The Great Escape.” I have read that McDaniel was a participant in the plans to escape, acting as a forger of documents. I’ve also read that McDaniel made many preliminary escape attempts as part of the effort. And I’ve even read that McDaniel was a part of the Great Escape himself. I’ve seen accounts that McDaniel escaped on his own after the Great Escape and made his way to Russia, and I’ve read that he remained in Stalag Luft III until the conclusion of the war. In Hot Springs, many people claim that McDaniel was given the nickname the “Cooler King” by his fellow P.O.W.’s for his frequent trips to solitary confinement, and that because of this he was partially the inspiration for Steve McQueen’s character in the film.
Some of these stories are easy enough to debunk with written records. McDaniel was definitely not one of the prisoners who participated in the Great Escape. At least, he isn’t one of the escapees, who are all recorded. He may very well have helped with the effort, as it required several hundred people to construct the tunnels and make the preparations for the escape. There isn’t any record of him having escaped the prison and been reunited with Allied forces, later, either. This may be complicated by the fact that he was an American posing as a Canadian to fight in the RAF. There is no doubt he was a P.O.W., nor that he was held at Stalag Luft III during the Great Escape. As for him being the Cooler King, it’s definitely possible. But he’d be one of at least four other people on two different continents who have laid claim to being the real Cooler King. It’s fascinating to imagine all of these families, all over the world, passing down stories of their parents and grandparents as real life Steve McQueens, completely oblivious that other Cooler Kings exist.
As with all oral histories, those stories are likely all rooted in some bit of truth. Each of these Cooler Kings were real life prisoners of war in Stalag Luft III. Each of them likely played a role in the plot or plots, since they involved hundreds and hundreds of people to pull off. Each of them probably told similar stories to their loved ones, so it is no wonder the stories all ended up sounding the same at the other end of the chain, especially with the benefit of a blockbuster Hollywood film to aid the memories along a parallel path.
Hot Springs is beset with myths, legends, and lore like this. There were so many larger than life figures who populated the town during that period of time. There were so many powerful people and world events that were entangled into the goings on of the town. More than fifty years on, every fantastic story I hear about people from Hot Springs is equally believable and not. It’s just as likely that the stories are myth as they are to be absolutely true. More often than not they are a little bit of both.
Historians and scholars for many years were dismissive of oral histories and local lore. They preferred to trust accounts that were written down at the time, so as not to be tarnished by faded memories, exaggerations both unconscious and intentional, or misunderstandings and miscommunications. This may be why there is so little solid history of the gambling business in Hot Springs - so much of what we have is simply folklore. So little is actually written down. And of what was written, so little still exists.
The strange little house, like the Cooler King, is not the only one of its kind. There are versions of this house all over the United States. Some are built with different materials, some have different dimensions, but in every case the basic layout and structure of the house is identical. The reason so many of these houses exist is that they were all built from plans available in the Garlinghouse Home Plans catalogue for $20. For historians who prize written record, these particular plans can be traced back as far as 1940 and they are credited as being the design of a woman named Iva Leiurance. At least two of the houses built with these plans are on state historic registers. The design, which was listed as number 578 in the catalogue, was the only Garlinghouse offering in the Art Deco Streamline style, which later proved unpopular among the American mainstream home plan purchaser.
So it would seem that the written history has upended the oral history of this house. What started out as a Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece has ended up a $20 cookie cutter once the records were checked. But after spending years researching Hot Springs history, one lesson that served me well was to never rest assured on a written account. Yes, it’s true that something written down contemporaneously doesn’t suffer from the withering of memories over time. But neither is something that is written down absolutely true. Plenty of written records, from police reports to newspaper stories, are riddled with inaccuracies or out and out lies. If anything, we should treat written history and oral history together as co-equals, each helping support the other to guide us closer to the real story. And we should always keep digging, even when the kids screen time is over and they are begging for a snack.
Iva Leiurance went to work for the Garlinghouse company in Topeka, Kansas at the age of 17. She had dropped out of school in the 8th grade. She had no formal architectural training. This, as well as the fact that she was a woman, made it that much more remarkable that she would eventually become Garlinghouse’s chief designer, and she would be credited with many of the company’s over 1,500 designs. Those designs lead to the construction of well over a million American homes. They shaped the outlines and composition of countless American communities. Her work created buildings and whole neighborhoods that are still standing to this day, an entire century on. She’s an unsung hero of American architecture.
But she didn’t dream these plans up at her drafting table. According to the grandsons of Lewis Garlinghouse, the founder of the company, Iva’s job for the company was to travel around the country looking for interesting houses, then photograph them and measure them and try to replicate their design plans for the catalogue. She would literally count the bricks in the photos to try to guess the dimensions. The catalogues would feature a rough sketch and a photo, but they never drew up the actual plans until an order arrived.
For number 578, we know a number of orders came in, because there are duplicates of this home in state after state. And we don’t know which of the 578s around the country were the original 578. For all we know, 714 West Grand in Hot Springs was the first, and Iva Leiurance found it during one of her scouting trips and snapped photos of it to produce her bootleg plans. Perhaps all the others are copies of the one in Hot Springs. For all we know, Granger McDaniel, or perhaps his father, or both of them, really did design this little house, and Iva Leiurance spread the design like Johnny Appleseed all across the country. Or maybe the original 578 is somewhere else, and the Hot Springs home is a copy of that one.
Whichever is the case, we can surmise that Iva Leiurance probably didn’t dream this design up all on her own, despite what the written record of her company catalogue my say. In this instance, the oral history was contradicted by the written record which was then upended by yet another oral history. The real designer is forever a mystery - except of course to those who live in these homes and tell their versions of the building’s origins to their friends and families and communities. To them, there is no mystery. To them, the story is the truth.
Both Iva Leiurance and Granger McDaniel lived fascinating, admirable lives. One day someone should write a book about both of them. Those books would teach us a lot about our history and culture. Those books would be filled with stories of risk taking, barrier breaking, and individual actions that had a ripple effect through time and history greater than either of those people could have imagined. Those books would also, in all likelihood, include some details that weren’t exactly true. But we’d be no worse off for believing them.
Telling stories is important. Sometimes the stories we tell can be powerful, particularly when they inspire others, and sometimes those stories are more powerful than a simple accounting of the facts. Sometimes the stories we tell take the place of the actual facts because there is no other record of what happened than the story, so the story becomes the truth. Sometimes there is no story, and nobody remembers, and it disappears from history, and it may as well have never happened at all. Sometimes they bulldoze the prize-winning architect’s bungalow to build a townhouse. When that happens, it’s good to know there’s another bungalow somewhere out there just like it, carrying on some other family story in parallel. There is more than one bungalow 578. There can be more than one true Cooler King.
Truly yours,
P.S.
If you’re a Goodreads member, they are having a giveaway of advance copies of The Vapors right now. If you don’t win one, perhaps you will consider pre-ordering one from this link at bookshop.org and support your local independent bookstore during this time when they need it the most.
And if you’d like to read more things Granger McDaniel and the quirky and fun side of Hot Springs, I recommend checking out McDaniel’s daughter Diana’s website Hot Springs Love.
Would love to know if any other owners of homes like this contacted you. My grandfather built a house like this in Ky. In 1956. His son had seen the plans for it in his high school geometry book. I enjoyed your letter and enjoyed the two pictures you posted. My nephew and his wife now live in the house and would love to see more like them.
How could one obtain the actual plans for House 578? I can see the simple floor plans in various copies of the vintage 1948 catalogue but these aren’t the detailed architectural drawings. Surely the builders of the time used the detailed drawings from somewhere? Are these available online?