power to decide just how to use the land, it stipulated that not even an acre of it could be sold. In its early years, Wellspring was isolated, an “Eden of learning” amid the arroyos and swaying grasses. And this was just how Josiah Reddicliffe wanted it: He had a vision of sturdy young males going out to round up cattle after a few hours spent reading Pliny the Elder. But then a few merchants and bankers, doctors and lawyers, opened shops and practices on the fringes of the campus. In 1920, the town of Wellspring was officially incorporated. Four years later, chiefly to appease certain members of the faculty who were getting weary of the commute from Pasadena, the board of trustees came up with the land lease scheme that obtains to the present day. These professors built the first houses on Florizona Avenue, including the one Nancy Wright was so determined to keep for her children.
Why did she care so much? Ernest certainly didn’t. Indeed, one afternoon a few months before his death, he came home and announced quite casually that he’d just put the house on the market, and put a down payment on a new condominium on Oklakota Road. Nancy’ outrage, he later said, baffled him. Why should they go on rattling around in such a big house, he argued, especially now that he was retiring, and Daphne and Mark were on their own, and Ben was about to start college? He was not the sort of man to understand the mysterious sensibilities that yoke some people to their homes. “I hardly even notice where I live,” he told me once. “Rooms, furniture. Intelligent people don’t care about these things.” Still, on this occasion at least, Nancy must have prevailed—whether through threats or pleading or bargaining, I shall never know, the secrets of that bedroom having died with its occupants—for a few days later, he withdrew the offer on the condominium, and stopped the sale of the house.
It was after he was killed, and she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, that Nancy began in earnest her campaign to keep the house. In this she was joined by Daphne and Ben, both of whom had by then moved back home, and who shared her obsession. Right out of college, Daphne had married Glenn Turner—principally, I think, because Glenn now had a position as an assistant professor at Wellspring, and therefore a shot at being able to buy the house. But then Glenn was turned down for tenure, and Daphne left him, landing on her mother’ doorstep with two small children in tow. Likewise Ben, for somewhat more obscure reasons, decided to return from New York to the family fold. The three of them, along with the two grandchildren, were living together in the house (only Mark—married now, and a lawyer in Toronto—had achieved any degree of independence) when Nancy arranged her famous meeting with the provost, the meeting at which he tried to explain to her, as calmly as possible, the university’ position, the consensus that, were the rule in question ever to be changed, or an exception made, within a matter of years, nearly every house on Florizona Avenue would belong to the child of a professor, and there would be nowhere for the professors themselves to live. Worse, some of those children might decide to try to profit from the situation by selling their houses to “outsiders” of the sort who were even then colonizing the rest of the community. Prices would rise to such a level that no faculty member could afford to live on Florizona Avenue—an argument against which, like all the others, she stopped her ears. Her opinion was fixed and passionate: That house, for her, was more than a house; it was a spiritual inheritance, her children’ birthright. As she left the provost’ office, she swore that she would never give up. If need be, she would die fighting.
After that she really got going. First she organized a petition drive, soliciting all her neighbors for support. Then she barraged the board of trustees with letters. Then she persuaded a reporter from the Wellspring Sentinel to do a story “exposing” a rule little known outside the university. Lastly, she threatened the administration with a lawsuit—all without success. The petition drive yielded only a few dozen signatures, the board of trustees rejected her arguments, the article in the Sentinel was buried near the back page, the lawsuit never got off the ground.