STAFFORD JAMES was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1946. Evanston, Illinois is a city that was created in 1863, and was also a city created with an anti-racist philosophy, quite unique for a suburb of Chicago at that time. Although I attended a segregated primary school, my Junior and Senior High School years were of an integrated class system. I started playing the violin at seven years of age. 
The principal problem for me at this time was that I was left handed. Although left-handedness is more readily accepted today, it posed quite a problem in 1950's America. My teacher at the time, Mr. Skinner, went out of his way to try to make me feel comfortable being a left handed person that he suggested to my mother to have the instrument set-up in the opposite direction, string-wise, to compensate for my natural left-handedness. He never once tried to change my natural way of approaching the instrument. I will always hold him in the highest regard for this, as he for some reason pops up again in my life as you will see later.
The problem of being a left-handed string player is that you must always be at the back of the section because of bow direction. It would not, I assume, be aesthetically correct to have a left-handed concert master. With time, I decided that I would take on the so-called right-handed world by learning how to play from a right-handed perspective. Piano and cello studies turned out to be the key to facilitate the change for me. 
At age 13 I had the fortune to meet Mr. Barry Byrne. Mr. Byrne was an architect who had designed among other things the "Fish Church" in Deluth, Minnesota. He was a contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies Van der Rohe and Ero Sarinen. 
When he designed the "Fish Church" in 1948, he designed it to be, not only in the shape of an angled salmon or trout, but also to be ecologically compatible with "solar" heating . I was blessed to have gotten the job of Mr. Byrne's tracer at age 14. It was the first time that I had seen, at that time, a mechanical "T-Square". It was truly 
a revelation. He even set it up for me from a left handed perspective. 
I would work after school and during summer vacations. I also would cut his grass on Saturdays. He had a giant of a house on Ridge Avenue in Evanston with an even bigger yard and a no power lawn-cutter. It would take all day to cut and when I would finally finish he would give me five dollars (which I thought was a lot of money in those days), a glass of lemonade and tell me never to start the job unless you truly plan to finish that job. He encouraged me to read and to always stay informed. 
Through him I read a very interesting book by Ayn Rand called "Fountainhead." I continued with Mr. Byrne until I was 16 years 
of age. He was a very important person in my life because he 
instilled in me a certain sense of commitment in life and growing
up without a father image, I feel that I was very fortunate to have had good images to inspire me in my youth. 
Also at age 16, I entered my first house in the Northern Illinois House Design Contest. As I liked very much what Frank Lloyd Wright had designed with his" Taliesen West", my design was a home in an arid environment with solar heating and man's oneness with the environ-ment. In 1962, to say that all of those minds that were thinking like this at that time were" laughed" away, would be putting it mildly. 

Courtesy from
Stafford James

Official web-site: http://www.staffordjames.com