Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with RetroPod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Every once in a while, I break free from the studio and visit some really cool places.

You like the birds? Love the birds.

Like the other day, when I found myself in northern Virginia, not far from the Pentagon,

standing in front of a Frank Lloyd Wright house.

The Pope Leahy House, as it's called, nestled into a serene and green background,

the kind of place you'd imagine on a postcard.

Nobody was home except for me and a man named Peter Christensen,

a long-time tour guide there. We have a single-story house on two slightly different levels,

because the house is designed to accommodate the hillside as opposed to excavating the

hillside to accommodate the house. It's left unpainted,

so it visually connects with the trees that surround us. Like many chapters in the life of the

temperamental and eccentric architect, the story of this nearly 80-year-old house is odd and even

a little sad.

But it's also a remarkable, revealing tale about a home that foreshadowed how many Americans

live today.

It begins with, of all people, a journalist at a now defunct newspaper.

His name was Lauren Pope.

Lauren's a copy editor for The Washington Star, and he's making $50 a week.

That's certainly not enough to afford a Frank Lloyd Wright House, at least the ones he had

been designing at the time, which would run about

$650,000 in today's dollars.

...