We completed the three Wright houses in 1954. After that, there wasn't much work left in the Kalamazoo area, so when a Circle Pines friend asked me to design and build a house for his family in South Chicago, I was delighted to accept the job. It was the first house I had the opportunity to design and build myself. My brother, Jim, who was just completing his education at the Illinois Institute for Technology, joined me whereas Louis decided to stay where he was . Jim and I had always been close. We influenced each other in positive ways. In our work, especially with regard to design, we came from different perspectives: Jim had a conventional architectural education; I, on the other hand, had no formal education in design or building, just experience with Frank Lloyd Wright construction. We learned to compromise in order to work together.

Jim and I worked diligently on our first building project together. I'm still proud of the design, which received the "Best Home Design of the Year" award from the Chicago Sun Times newspaper. The overall design was Wright-inspired— modular patterns, large fireplace, and lots of windows. We used a specially designed salmon-colored concrete block for the main walls and redwood for the exterior trim, including the doors. The garage was on a lower level than the living room. Using low-voltage electricity we devised a mechanism to turn on the coffeepot in the kitchen before anyone got up. The house cost about $40,000 to build, expensive in its day.

My brother and I worked together for four more years, building and remodeling houses around Chicago. Some of them were for other Circle Piners. Jim and I would take turns designing, but in the end our styles turned out to be remarkably similar.

Meanwhile, my family was growing with the birth of our third daughter, Carol, who had arrived while we were still living in Michigan. After we moved to Chicago, she became the model for the picture on the box of our toy creation—our first and only venture in the toy business. My brother had the idea of creating a large toy (we called it "Space Builder") based on Bucky Fuller's concept of "energetic geometry." It was designed to teach children the principles of three-dimensional geometry (somewhat like a "tinker toy"). Using wooden cubes and 16-inch dowels you could build different geometric forms (such as the icosahedron or tetrahedron) and domes as high as six feet. One day Bucky himself arrived at our door, having accepted our invitation to come and see what we were doing. He spent the whole day helping us with design problems and explaining more about his ideas. It was a great experience, but the toy never made it on the market. We discovered that a big toy sells well only around Christmas; unless you have smaller, less expensive toys for year-round sales, it's hard to succeed. We had fun, though, and my brother is still working on the concept. He has now perfected a small toy that he thinks can be marketed through schools and educational organizations.

Marj and I continued living outside of Kalamazoo, Michigan, near the Circle Pines camp after I took on the contract to build in Chicago. Jim and I began a period of commuting to Chicago. We rented a small apartment, where we stayed during the week, driving back to Kalamazoo for weekends. This didn't work well for the family. Finally Marj, the kids, and I moved to Chicago, near the University of Chicago on the South Side. We felt reasonably comfortable there, with many friends from Circle Pines nearby, as did my brother, who had lived there while studying at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Marj kept busy with social issues such as housing segregation and discrimination. Although we built several houses and did a lot of remodeling work, it wasn't the ideal location to practice Arthur Morgan's concept of the small community.

My brother, Max Davis (who worked with us), and I moved with our families into three apartments, one above the other. Among us we had nine kids. Sharing meals and child care worked quite well for several years.