Early Years at NU

      There were ups and downs, successes and failures, and a major foreign excursion packed into the late 60s and early 70s. The two notable items shortly before starting my long tenure at Northwestern were getting the job offer and getting my first child, Julie, who was born in Torrance Hospital in October of ’64. The three of us drove into Chicago in early June of ’65 and rented the house of an anthropologist away on a research site that summer. We shopped for a house and settled on one on the eastern edge of Glenview six miles from the university.

      I had heavy teaching assignments from the outset: over 200 students in a course in educational psychology and a like amount in child psychology, the latter a course of the Department of Psychology. I’d not taken either in my own academic work, so I really didn’t have much of a model to help my preparation. I was confident, though, that I would do fine in these two big lecture courses. In fact, I didn’t do fine. Not a disaster, but nothing to be proud of. This assignment was too heavy to lay onto a beginning professor and if I’d been less overconfident I would have negotiated something more reasonable, but there it was. This was the beginning of a continuous struggle to perform well in a big lecture course, an effort that had its hills and valleys throughout my career. I suppose that my initial mediocrity was tolerated mainly because the older colleagues who had been teaching educational psychology had gotten even worse reviews from students.

      I immediately began spending time where my heart was: with members of the Psychology Department. My colleagues there were welcoming, no doubt a bit surprised to find a guy whose salary was paid by Education hanging around  in their department much of the time. In Psychology, Ben Underwood was famous in the subfield called Verbal Learning. I knew nothing about that area, literally nothing, but saw this as my opportunity to redefine myself – – define myself, really, because this not only was a new venture for me but it also came at a time when Experimental Psychology was moving from animal research (the white rat) to a focus on human behavior. Verbal Learning was out front in that. So I sat about becoming a specialist in children’s verbal learning.