plife

I come from a family of plodders.My father, Arthur Houlihan, was one of eight kids who grew up above a saloon on Chicago’s South Side. His father, an Irish immigrant, worked as a laborer for the street railway before marrying my grandmother, who inherited the saloon from her uncle.Five of my father’s siblings received college degrees. He went to the Armour Institute – now the Illinois Institute of Technology — for two years, where he took drafting classes. While working as a draftsman for an industrial district near Midway Airport, he was mentored as an architect . . .