Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 55

Section 5 (Dlicaso (Tribune Wednesday, February 17, 1993 Frank Gehry designs an ark for L. A. Bob Greene Disney Concert Hall sends a message to a besieged community A champion defeats the silence By Blair Kamin Architecture critic ANTA MONICA, Calif. A driving rain of near-Biblical proportions is washing over Southern California, and the radio crackles with the latest developments of the deluge: Mudslides halting traffic on freeways. Flooding in nearby Tijuana.

Million-dollar homes slip-sliding off their foun was sitting at a departure gate at Midway Airport not long ago. The flight was late and I was killing time, and I looked over at some of the other people waiting, and one of them was Bob Love. dations, straight into the mouths of gaping canyons. Altogether appropriate, then, that celebrated architect Frank Gehry is talking arks. In fact, as Gehry gazes at a model of his $200 million Walt Disney Concert Hall, he's likening its saddle-shaped interior to the wooden craft that saved Noah and his two-by-two zoo from perishing.

"It's like a big ship in dry dock," says Gehry, 63, who will See Gehry, pg. 5 Pirn tn mnn wtvk A model of architect Frank Gehry's $200 million Walt Disney Concert Hall to be erected in Los Angeles. It's easier to build than it looks, Gehry says. AS ltl' Hoover nearly a missing person at FBI By Glen Elsasser We had a long, pleasant conversation. Nothing we said was as meaningful as the fact the conversation could take place at all.

I first met Love almost 20 years ago. Before Michael Jordan came to Chicago, Love was the highest-scoring basketball player in the history of the Bulls. He was voted to the National Basketball Association's All-Star team on three occasions, and was one of the leading players in the sport. I met Love after I wrote a column in the mid-1970s about a young man named Tony Williams. When the youngster was 15 years old, he was walking home from a game of playground basketball on the West Side.

Someone shot him. The police speculated that the assailant was just a person firing from a window, for fun the shooter didn't know Tony. Tony was merely a target. The bullet lodged in Tony's spine. He was paralyzed permanently from the chest down.

He spent every day in his wheelchair, in front of the television set in his mother's tiny apartment. She was not strong enough to carry him downstairs, and his old friends from the playground courts had stopped coming around. After I wrote about Tony, he was invited to go to a Bulls game as a guest of the team. This was in the Love-Norm Van Lier-Jcrry Sloan era. On the day after Tony's trip to the Stadium, Bob Love showed up at his apartment, alone.

He visited with Tony and his mother, and tried to encourage the young man. Love, as many people know, had a severe problem of his own. 7 I Hit ASHINGTON In-11 side the FBI headquar 0 ters that bears his name, J. Edgar Hoover the myth, who 7 TJ reigned as FBI director for 48 years, has become Hoover the nearly invisible. Tourists still come daily to the headquarters for a backstage peek at its crime-stopping apparatus and trophies.

Inviting tourists to visit was a gimmick of the legendary FBI director, part of his campaign, begun in the 1930s, to enlist the public in the war on crime. Last week, Hoover was both the subject of a harshly critical PBS "Frontline" documentary and a just-released book by Irish journalist Anthony Sum 4" The Ingalls family, on whom the "Little House" books were based: "Ma" Caroline (from left), daughters Carrie and Laura, "Pa" Charles, and daughters Grace and Mary. It is often referred to as a stuttering disorder, but that is too bland a term, and does not come close to describing how awful and closed-in Love's world was because he could not speak. On the basketball court, his grace was fluid and beautiful to behold. But sitting with another person, trying to talk, it was not un- a Mm All-star Bob Love: Courageous off the court.

usual for a minute, even two minutes, to mers, Otticial and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover." Both painted him as corrupt, abusive and homosexual. During a regular FBI tour last week, Hoover, who died in 1972, received scant mention from a young guide, who was in the regulation attire of the Hoover era: spotless white Hoover seems to have become just another FBI director. Scholar ignites 'Little House' fans by suggesting Laura Ingalls Wilder had a ghostwriter: Her daughter By Lynn Van Matre Hunt, shirt, dark suit and spit-polished cordovans. Inside the massive FBI building easily the ugliest edifice on the downtown section of Pennsylvania Avenue Hoover seems to have become just another FBI director, as well as a persuasive argument for mandatory retirement in the federal bureaucracy.

"I don't know much about Hoover," said a visitor from suburban Maryland who was waiting for the tour to start. he start the FBI?" Her only glimpse of the fabled Hoover came minutes later in a photo lineup of FBI directors: his bulldog visage looking down benignly as he clutches a book with well-See Hoover, pg. 4 tle House" manuscripts with the' published versions. "What Rose accomplished was nothing less than a line-by-line rewriting of labored and underdeveloped narratives," he writes. "Almost everything we admire about the 'Little House' books the pace and rhythm of the narrative line, the carefully nuanced flow of feeling, the muted drama of daily life are created by what Mama Bess Lane's affectionate nickname for her mother called Rose's 'fine as shining fiction is made from her mother's tangle of fact." Not surprisingly, Holtz's controversial conclusions are causing a stir among "Prairie" partisans, few of whom are in sympathy with his sentiments.

"I've looked at the same manuscripts and papers that Dr. Holtz has, and I think it's too simplistic and not quite fair to the two women to say Rose ghostwrote the books," says Anderson, the author of "Laura Ingalls Wilder Country" (HarperCollins) and "Laura Ingalls Wilder A Biography" (HarperCollins), a new children's biography. "Certainly, Rose helped Laura," Anderson acknowledges, "but to say she ghostwrote the books seems to rubber-stamp a monumental nine-book narrative. I would hate for children to get the idea that Laura Ingalls Wilder was some kind of fraud." "A cheap shot," snaps Norma See Wilder, pg. 2 For more than 60 years, young readers and some not so young have thrilled to the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder's growing-up days on the American frontier.

Pioneer life, as depicted in Wilder's nine-book "Little House" saga and later in the popular TV series "Little House on the Prairie," could be tough, what with hostile Indians, hungry wolves and devastating grasshopper plagues. But there was plenty of sunshine along with the shadows, and the good old-fashioned family values that Laura grew up with and later chronicled continue to strike a chord with contemporary kids. "Laura Ingalls Wilder's name is revered from coast to coast in elementary schools," says William Anderson, a composition teacher in Lapeer, and longtime Wilder authority. "She is an icon and a goddess to American children." Now comes word that the icon and grass-roots goddess, who died in 1957, may have had literary feet of clay or, at least, a good deal of previously unacknowledged help with the books that bore her name. William Holtz, a professor of English at the University of Missouri and author of the coming "The Ghost in the Little House" (University of Missouri Press), contends that Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, a critically acclaimed novelist and journalist, pass as he tned to get out a single word.

His mouth would move, his face would contort, frustration and anguish would fill his eyes and nothing would happen. Once I went to visit him at his house in Palatine before a Bulls playoff game. I don't think I will ever forget that afternoon. In a few hours people all over Chicago would be depending on Love to help his team win. In the living room of his house, he struggled to make me understand what he was thinking.

The long, painful seconds would go by as our eyes locked and he did his best to come forth with even a syllable. This was every day for him; this was what happened each time he tried to talk with a person. He knew that he would not always be a basketball star. He knew it, and it terrified him. It is no secret what did happen after Love became too old to play basketball for a living.

He found work as a busboy in a restaurant. It was as if his worst nightmares had come true from an NBA all-star to a man in his 40s clearing tables and washing dishes. He had the great good fortune to be helped out by some people who noticed his plight, and to receive expert and compassionate training for his speech problems. By all accounts he worked hard; those of us who knew just how bad his affliction was back when he was a professional basketball player might have worried that no speech therapy program could assist an adult with a speaking disability that severe, but it did work. He makes his living now as a community relations official with the Bulls, and one of his duties is to go around to schools and talk to the students.

He not only does this without fear he thrives on it. I hadn't spoken with him for a long time. But there he was at the airport I was getting ready to leave, he was waiting to greet a passenger on a flight that was due to arrive and for 20 minutes or so we sat and talked about nothing and everything. He was loose and casual; he made jokes and laughed easily and offered opinions, and if there was still an occasional hitch in his speech pattern, it was nothing major, no big deal. He's fine.

It's such a small and unexceptional pleasure, at least for those of us who take it for granted: to sit with someone you know, and pass the time in relaxed and unhurried conversation. He could never do that, not for his whole life. It was torture for him and it tormented him and often it made him weep. Now his old team is trying for its third world championship in a row. Love and I sat and talked in the airport, and he smiled as he told a story or two, and there are championships you'll never see in a record book.

Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter Rose Wilder Lane, an author in her own right. essentially ghostwrote all eight "Little House" books published during her mother's lifetime. (The ninth book, "The First Four Years," a raw, unfinished manuscript detailing the early years of Laura's marriage to Almanzo Wilder, was published by the Wilder estate in 1971, three years after Lane died.) "Laura Ingalls Wilder remained a determined but amateurish writer to the end," concludes Holtz, who spent 15 years researching Lane's correspondence and comparing her mother's original "Lit The front lines off love "If I told you you had a beautiful body" would you knock off the dumb pickup lines Tales From the Front, pg. 2. Lucci after dark Never mind the Emmy snubs: Susan Lucci of "All My Children" ranks as a major star of both daytime and prime time.

Soaps Watch, pg. 3. Shrines to J. Edgar Hoover are gone from the FBI tour..