Graduate School

     We’d been living in Chicago, Gaynette and I, for a year, in a Rogers Park apartment, on the northern edge of the city half a block from Sheridan Road, which ran north-south just in from Lake Michigan. Rogers Park, we were told, was an old Jewish area, safe, close to the El for travel downtown, a bit expensive but a good place to live for the year and a half that we would be in Chicago. Most days I rode down into the Loop on the El, but sometimes rode with Bud, who was the commanding officer of the U.S. Silversides, a WW2 sub that sat next to the Naval Armory, where I worked as a junior officer in the Naval Reserve Training Center. I was feeling pressure about my next step – – our next step, I should say – – but it was I who had to decide what to do when my Navy tour was up in just a few months. I had no connections for employment and no special talents or abilities.

      My major had been in Psychology. It was not my first choice of areas in which to concentrate but I really had no first choice, and psychology had seemed to offer an opportunity to figure out the mystery of me. Of course, it did not, and I remained confused about that for a long, long time.  Permanently, I suppose. But psychology it was what I felt drawn to. I recall thinking that a company might hire psychologists to help somehow with personnel issues. At one point I wrote to the Elgin Watch Company and asked about that, and an appointment was arranged. I recall driving to Elgin, Ill. to talk with someone there but I remember nothing at all about the interview, or about any other interviews I had or if I had any. What I do recall is  thinking that to pursue some career related to psychology I’d probably need an advanced degree, maybe a master’s. There was one area within the field of psychology that especially drew me: clinical psychology, with the goal of becoming a psychotherapist. My investigations revealed that this was a highly competitive field, that my chance of being accepted into a graduate program in that area were slim. In fact, my chances of getting into any graduate program were not great given my mediocre academic record until late in the game. I concluded that the best chance would be USC, where there were at least a few professors who might have formed a positive view of my potential. But even there getting into a clinical program seemed unlikely, so I thought that I would get into the door with some other declared direction, then I might work my way into the clinical program once my capabilities were revealed. The other direction was the program in Industrial Psychology, so I applied to it and I was accepted. Back to L.A.

The First Swerve

     I was on the USC campus hoping to meet the director of the Industrial Psychology Program, Floyd Ruch, but he was out of town, so I wandered around a bit then ran into a fellow I’d known earlier. Now this man, who was maybe a decade older than I, was a professor in the Educational Psychology Department at USC. Interesting, educational psychology had not come to my mind earlier. He talked about that program and that field and began to recruit me to it. Ignorant as I was, this seemed terrific, already knowing a member of the faculty in that area. Ah, he said, but the program is housed in the School of Education, not the Department of Psychology, which was in the College of Arts and Science. I’d have to fill out some application forms, but it would be no problem, he said. What did I care about details of where the programs were housed administratively?  So it was goodbye to Industrial Psychology and hello to Educational Psychology, my first swerve and a big mistake.

      This guy, who was not only friendly, but charismatic, would be my friend and guide, my advisor, and I would become a psychologist. A school psychologist, although I wasn’t quite sure what a school psychologist does, or even completely certain that it was a reasonable goal for me. On the other hand, what goals did I have, really? I supposed that school psychologists help school children using techniques so all that different than those of a clinical psychologist – – maybe exactly the same but in schools. It would be an interesting profession, very likely.

      Soon some complications popped up that I hadn’t expected and didn’t like. The dean of the School of Education required that all graduates of the school, whatever their degree, have a teaching credential. The easiest route would be toward elementary school. This would require certain courses, including a course called Art in the Elementary School, as well as two semesters of actual student teaching. So really there would be most of a year of undergraduate education work before I really got into the meat of graduate courses. My advisor, Professor M, was sorry for those silly requirements, but they will soon be over and should be viewed as sort of red tape that will slow me a bit but not constitute serious obstacles. He was looking after me.

      As I write this, many decades later, I still wonder at my naivety, my willingness to buy into such a dumb-ass program. I am embarrassed. But there it is, I wanted to be taken care of, I guess, and here was my friend and mentor, Professor M (we’ll just say M) who would take care of me and after while I’d have a doctorate and be a psychologist with a job.

      Well, there was a question about “doctorate.” Of course I’d heard about “Ph.D.” and that’s what I thought I was aiming for. But in Education, there also was a Doctorate of Education, and that was the more common doctorate for education students. M explained that the Ph.D. required evidence of proficiency in two foreign languages, and many students settled for the other doctorate because there was no language requirement. I said that the Ph.D. would be my goal. Many of the candidates for that Ed. doctorate were school administrators from around L.A. County, where USC dominated. Fine folks, I guess, but doctorate? And job? Well, there was never then any mention of a job as a professor, only perhaps as a school psychologists, the duties of which I wasn’t sure of but it would be a job and in the field of psychology, so . . . The truth is that I had no idea of what the various options were, and I was willing to have someone who knew more than I did and who seemed benevolent, take over my life. 

      Much of that first year saw me taking those necessary Micky-Mouse courses, entirely unmemorable, that really didn’t constitute graduate level study. We had some savings from the past three years but would need some income to get me through graduate school. Gaynette got a job (I don’t remember just how) teaching elementary school in Inglewood, where we rented an apartment, and M found me a part time research assistant position at a research unit called the Youth Studies Center on the USC campus. I also spent a good bit of time with M, driving around L.A. County to schools where M evidently had consulting gigs that gave him income beyond his academic salary and gave me hands-on experience administering I.Q. tests like the Stanford-Binet, which counted as field work toward my degree. Through this M and I became friends, so that Gay and I socialized with M and his wife a good bit.

      It was time to get going on my Master’s Degree. M steered me toward what was essentially a sort of term paper focusing on the study of children of exceptionally high intelligence. This work was conceptually more M’s than mine, although it was not uninteresting and did result in a Master’s Degree for me. However, by my third year I found myself slipping away from M and my studies in education. One reason for the slippage was difficulty understanding what M had in mind for research. He talked repeatedly about getting a large grant for the study of bright children, but I never was able to understand just what would be the focus of such study or what the methodology would be. So when he talked about this I just listened and nodded through my puzzlement. Another thing had to do with the students and the course work in Education, both of were disappointing to me. These disappointments coincided with another development that changed everything.

The Second Swerve

      At the Youth Studies Center there was an Assistant Professor of Psychology, named Buck, who was spending a few hours a week there to supplement his salary, I guess. I don’t remember what he was doing at the Center but I do recall that we as we became acquainted we found that he had been in the NROTC like I was, just two years in advance of me, and that one summer we had been on the same ship, the USS Iowa for several weeks, never meeting back then. He had not gone on to active duty for medical reasons, so by this time he had finished his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa and was working toward tenure as an Experimental Child Psychologist at U.S.C. The Iowa Department of Psychology was among the very best for experimental psychology, and his classmates there were becoming noted in that field.

      This young man, just two years older than I but five years beyond academically (to say the least), became drinking companions, then very close friends. I began to think that I might be in the wrong department, and began to take courses in the Psychology Department. When I first mentioned to M that I wanted to take the main-line experimental course, taught by the Chair, Bill Grings, M cautioned me, saying that Education students have not been warmly welcomed and tended to be unsuccessful in such courses. I enrolled anyway, enjoyed it, and was at the top of the class. Whoa. Then I took Buck’s demanding course in Learning, and aced it. By then Buck and I were fast friends. We played basketball and tennis together, drank beer at the 901 near campus, and socialized, with wives, quite often.

      Pacific Oaks was pretty much in the heart of old Pasadena, occupying about half of an entire block, and dominated by beautiful old wooden structures between which were children’s play areas. The Children’s School was the centerpiece, and the buildings included administrative offices, a library, and a few small classrooms for students in child development courses. I was hired to teach a class about research methods and to carry out a study about PO’s graduates. My memory is vague about most of this. I do remember PO’s president, the wonderful and beautiful Evangeline Burgess, stricken with fatal cancer during that time. PO was founded by a small group of Quakers, mainly as  children’s school. A warm, loving sort of place for which I have the fondest memories and gratitude for the financial help it gave me then in my fourth year of graduate study. 

Up the Creek

      Backing up a bit, in my third year of graduate study I found that I was in the wrong program. It was too late to start over, to meet the requirements of the Psychology Department for my Ph.D. there and it was too late to repair the damage to my relationship with M and anyway I saw no future in that direction. What I wanted was to be an experimental psychologist, but there was no way that any department of psychology would offer a job with my half-assed training. Now I was at the point of my dissertation research, after which I would have a Ph.D. in Education and without proper training in anything.

      What would I do for my dissertation research? I had to do that work with Buck, I decided, and Buck agreed, willing to go to bat for me against M or anyone else. So I did that, an experiment with kindergarteners using an apparatus that Buck had designed and used. The theoretical framework was Amsel’s Frustrative Non-reward theory, which was the framework for Buck’s research program. How this got done, how M was led to step back and let it be done, I don’t remember and perhaps never knew. But it was done, my research was completed, my dissertation written, and my dissertation committee signed off on it. That was in the early weeks of 1965. I was set to graduate in the June ceremony with no idea about a job. Perhaps part time teaching at Long Beach State. I would have to scratch.

Buck’s Miracle

      I knew that Buck has been an undergraduate at Northwestern and I knew where Northwestern was and even a bit about its appearance. I knew those things because when we lived in Chicago we’d driven past NU along Sheridan Road as it bordered Lake Michigan northward passing within a block of our apartment.  That’s about the extent of my knowledge when Buck announced that there was a job there that he was recommending me for. It was an unusual job in that the opening was in the School of Education with a joint appointment into the Department of Psychology, where Buck had been in the undergraduate Honors Program. Buck said that Northwestern was a very highly rated university and that the Psychology Department there was regarded as tops. Later events confirmed that assessment. He knew virtually nothing about the Ed School there, but understood that there was an effort to establish a close relationship between the two units. There would be no chance at all for a regular appointment in Psychology but perhaps this sort of hybrid might work. My Ph.D. was to be in Education but I had more work in psychology than most such people and Buck knew important members of the psych faculty. Worth a try, he thought.

      A member of Northwestern’s Education faculty, and Educational Psychologist (he said) whose name I didn’t recognize phone me and we set up a trip back to Chicago. I was scheduled to spend most of one day with education professors and the other with members of the psychology faculty. Of course, I would meet with the dean of the ed. school and the chair of psychology, and I would spend two nights at the home of the guy who had phoned me.

     I tried to be acceptable to very different sets of faculty who were interviewing me. In the Ed School most of the faculty were older men who had a public school background. They were practitioners, not scholars. They emphasized knowledge about schools, teaching, curriculum planning, and so forth. That was not my strength and I think that the only thing that saved me was that the Ed School Dean wanted increased respectability that would come from scholarly work that would impress the Psych Dept. I won’t try to explain how that worked, but it did, so that dean was inclined to emphasize my acceptability to the Psychology faculty. There was my strength. I’m pretty sure that I was a bit of a pleasant surprise to those folks, talking theory and research, and they all treated me most pleasantly. And what a group they were, small in number, but very high in reputation. 

     Shortly after I returned home I got a phone call from the Ed. School dean, Bobby Joe Chandler, offering me the position. I would be Assistant Professor of Education and Psychology, administratively (and salary-wise) in the Ed. School with what was known as a “courtesy appointment” in the Psych Dept. My teaching would be divided about 70-30 between the two, it seemed. Low salary, even for those times. But fine with me. I was in, and we made plans to start at NU during that summer of 1965. Buck was and is my hero.

Professor Hall

      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.