"From an early age he precociously sketched buildings for fun, and later seriously for Sonoma Valley friends and neighbors, but there was no money to send him to architecture school.So he entered the profession in the old way -- old-fashioned even in 1925 -- by going straight from high school to an apprenticeship in the San Francisco firm of Alexander Cantin and Dodge A. Riedy, who had worked on the great Pacific Telephone Building with Timothy Pfleuger.