Turning 100 & Calendar Neighbors

I am beginning to believe that "birthday neighbors" (people places and things that sit near each other on the calendar) make for interesting dinner party guests. Gropius, Breuer and Florence Knoll all have birthdays in the same week in May.
Philip Johnson and Michael Graves celebrate birthdays on sequential days in July, both infamous for their post modern architectural follies. The same thing seems to be true for things celebrating centennials.

A few things, very dear to me, turn 100 this year. 

As I write this on my father's 100th birthday (which he conveniently avoided being around for) I realized that he and another centennial celebrating institution, the Bauhaus, are together the reason that I'm an architect.

Millard Francis Biber never liked either of his first names. Attending the University of Virginia in the early 1940's he listed his middle name as Franklin, a joke I just today decoded. Millard Fillmore, and the then current president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, occupy opposite poles of worst and best presidents and he almost certainly was amused by this juxtaposition. Like my notion about the calendar adjacencies he seems to have invented the joke of the worst and best presidents preceding his last name. Everyone knew him as "Bib", so at least the last name was sacred. 

Bib was creative. He won drawings contests as a kid. Could paint signs, when that was a thing, after teaching himself to paint straight lines by practicing on newspaper columns. When Philip Johnson's Glass House was published in Life magazine, he and my mother called to make an appointment to go see it. [When my mother asked how Johnson could move the enormously heavy rug he used as a bed spread, he answered "well, I have a house boy to do that...doesn't everyone?".] 

Bib wanted to be an architect but his father, who with his brothers owned Biber Brothers office supply store in Yonkers, believed Jews couldn't be architects in the 1940's United States. It wasn't exactly Berlin in the 1930's, and Abramovitz, Neutra, Pierre Chareau, Kahn (both), Lapidus, Ain and others seem to have survived, but it might have been as closed to him as it was to women at the time. 

So he opened an office supply store in New Rochelle. And when he moved it to a former supermarket, a huge open plan dotted with skylights, corrugated glass and walls of dark cork, it truly was the closest thing to a 'Case Study Office Supply' in the east. Two of the most famous locals (and they weren't Rob Petrie and Carl Reiner) were Ezra Stoller and Dave Berg. I remember delivering office supplies to the Stoller house in Mamaroneck and meeting Ezra and Erica Stoller in the store. Richard Roundtree ('who's the baddest mother...') was a delivery driver for Bib before becoming John Shaft, but it was Dave Berg, whose "Lighter Side of..." in Mad Magazine was the real star. At summer camp I opened a new issue of 'Mad' to find my father in Berg's cartoons (rendered as a buff dude) and instantly became a camp legend. 

He managed to live his art adjacent life, bringing us kids to MoMA as 5 year olds and to Soho in the 60's and 70's, becoming fluent in whatever cool art was the thing of the moment. He took us to see Hair in 1968, and when in 1969, when the MIT Press published the landmark book Bauhaus he bought a copy for his cool bachelor pad coffee table. When I was a second semester freshman biology student in 1971 I borrowed the book and pored over it, page by page, for the entire extreme winter semester. When the semester was over I was ready to go to architecture school, which luckily was just a short walk from the bio labs. 

Because, in spite of the picture above Bib could be a bit of an asshole, he insisted I return the book that had completely changed my life! 

So the coincidence of the Bauhaus turning 100 just as my father would strikes me as another happy calendar coincidence. And, of course, dear to both my father and me, Barney Greengrass is also 100 years old.