Loren Pope | Education consultant, 98

Loren Pope, 98, an education consultant whose best-selling books advised students to look beyond the Ivy League and who as a $50-a-week journalist persuaded internationally regarded architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design a home for him, died Tuesday at a retirement home in Falls Church, Va.

Mr. Pope was the original owner of Wright's 1941 Pope-Leighey house in Fairfax County, Va.

A man of self-professed "egalitarian instincts," Mr. Pope was a copy editor at the old Washington Evening Star in 1938 when he was transfixed by a Time magazine cover story about Wright.

The architect, who expressed hope of bringing the idealism of Emerson and Thoreau to the design table, said he wanted to combat the "stifling little Colonial hot-boxes" in which most families counted out their lives.

In August 1939, Mr. Pope sent a six-page letter to Wright's Taliesin estate and workshop in Spring Green, Wis.

"Dear Mr. Wright," the note began. "There are certain things a man wants during life, and, of life. Material things and things of the spirit. The writer has one fervent wish that includes both. It is a house created by you. Will you create a house for us? Will you?"

Less than a month later came Wright's response: "Dear Loren Pope: Of course I am ready to give you a house."

Supervised by Gordon Chadwick, a Wright apprentice who became a prominent New York architect, the house features Wright's signature cantilevered roof, clerestory windows, high ceilings and large fireplace.

Mr. Pope later sold the home to another couple, Robert and Marjorie Leighey, after his family outgrew it. Threatened with demolition in the 1960s during the planning of Interstate 66, the house was donated to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, dismantled, and reassembled at Woodlawn Plantation near Mount Vernon, Va., where it stands today.

Later, Mr. Pope was an administrator at what is now Oakland University in Michigan before starting his College Placement Bureau counseling business in 1965.

Running the bureau well into his 90s, he urged students to attend small liberal arts colleges and tried to steer them away from what he considered impersonal, elitist schools.

He was the author of education guide books, including Looking Beyond the Ivy League (1990) and Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools You Should Know About Even if You're Not a Straight-A Student (1996).

- Washington Post