Neil was seventeen in 1981, the year the three Wrights landed in Massachusetts. They bought a three-room 1912 Craftsman bungalow in Framingham, where his stoical former-soldier father became a full-time cemetery groundskeeper and part-time barber; his soft-spoken mother got office work in the state court system. Neil, while attending Framingham High, worked afternoons at the Framingham Public Library, where he discovered art, architecture, and the Arts & Crafts movement and learned that the bungalow he lived in was representative of the American Arts & Crafts era, at its peak in 1912.

It was now that Neil also learned he'd not been named, as he'd supposed, for Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who'd developed the first nuclear bomb, but had instead been been named for Robert's lesser-known brother, Frank, inventor of the first interactive museum in America dedicated to art, science, and perception. Frank, born in New York City in 1912, had earned his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology and, after working on uranium isotope separation, had joined his brother on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. After the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, he'd been a physics professor at the University of Minnesota. In 1949, after harassment from the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era, he'd worked ten years in Colorado as a cattle rancher before becoming a high school science teacher, taking his students to used parts dumps to teach them the principles of mechanics, heat, and electricity. After the University of Colorado offered him a higher post in 1959, he received, in 1965, a Guggenheim fellowship, enabling him to pursue a different project. After prowling through the best of Europe's museums, he'd returned to America to propose his so-called "Exploratorium," opened in 1969 inside the then empty San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts.

The Palace had been built from drawings submitted by Bernard Maybeck, an eccentric architect who'd designed it after failing, in 1912, to win a commission for San Francisco's City Hall. The carefree Bohemian's pleasure in classical antiquity and German and English medieval motifs had made him one of the most colorful influences on the Arts and Crafts movement in America. As it turned out, the most popular building at San Francisco's 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition was Maybeck's Palace of Fine Arts and, though abandodoned prior to Frank Oppenheimer's opening his "Exploratorium" inside it, the Palace was the most enduring. It was the last Exposition building standing.

Neil, assigned the job of painting a huge sign out front of the Framingham Public Library, was contemplating all of this one day while working. Suddenly, he was knocked down by a passing pedestrian who'd been flung into the air from a nearby sidewalk after being struck by the inebriated driver of a silver BMW convertible. Though painter, passerby, and driver all emerged without injury, this highly unlikely collision got Neil to pondering his mortality and the nature of things.

It was a fateful time. Four days after being struck by the flying walker, Neil caught a library book just then falling from a shelf as he was passing by, an elegant little blue tome titled "Treasures of Lucretius: Selected Passages from De Rerum Natura" (London: Watts & Company, 1912) by a solitary vegetarian pacifist Englishman named Henry Salt who inspired Neil, nineteen, to feel he might himself like to lead a hermit's life. Neil packed a rucksack and departed Massachusetts.

He spent two months hiking and exploring in the wilderness around the village of West Yellowstone, earning some income doing odd jobs at the Madison Hotel there, then enrolled at Montana State University in Bozeman, taking up the study of astronomy while working evenings in the school library. He found a place to stay -- a cabin (a garden shed, actually) -- in the backyard of Professor John K. Sheen, then a teacher of philosophy at the university. It was Professor Sheen who told Neil his education would not come to him through the University but via the school of hard knocks. Sheen would have a heart attack at sixty-four, dying two years after Neil left Montana with a Bachelor's degree in Astronomy with a minor in Mechanical Engineering.

With a notion he'd someday open up a book shop or a toy store -- or a combination toystore-bookshop -- Neil returned east to take an assembly line job at the Whirlwind Toy Company in Batteryville, Vermont. His boss, Saul Mortenstein, thought it was from God that an astronomer should be seeking work in his toy factory. A squat round man with silver hair and a waxed moustache, Mortenstein loved to speak of the old times when, in his youth, in the 1950s, he'd lived in Manhattan and worked at the New York City Public Library where he'd fetched books from closed stacks on roller skates. Seeing how the piles of books acquired by Neil day after day were rising higher in the staff room -- Mortenstein pulled some strings, set up an interview, and the next thing Neil knew he was working at the Batteryville Town Library.

He went to work in the library's local history archives, organizing thousands of wildly strewn papers in dozens of scrunched boxes piled ten-high. He moonlighted two evenings a week as an astronomy teacher at the Arts and Science Center next to the library. Occasionally he got together with his former boss, Mortenstein, who, over beers, regaled Neil with stories of the New York Public Library and a year he'd lived abroad in Rome. It wasn't long before Neil was itching, like his namesake Frank Oppenheimer before him, to make his own pilgrimage to see the wonders and the treasures in the museums of Europe.

He took a boat to Rotterdam and went first to Paris, then to Florence. He rambled idly for most of the first year, then got work in an advertising agency in Milan, moonlighting evenings as an English teacher. In the village of Menaggio, on Lake Como, he met a Bavarian girl named Minna . Before the year was out, the two were married and living in a tiny one-room Munich apartment. A son was born, Mark Neilson Wright. Within two weeks of this birth, around the time Thanksgiving was being celebrated all across America, Neil came down with a hopeless case of homesickness. In mid-December, 1990, the three crossed the Atlantic to Boston, found a tiny two-room apartment, and celebrated their first Christmas as a family there.