A MEMOIR 1917–2017

A MEMOIR 1917–2017

E leanor Maccoby

A MEMOIR. Copyright © by Eleanor Maccoby February 2017

Contents

Foreword viii 1. Day Island 1

2. 407 North Yakima 11

3. Sisters: Together and Apart 19

4. Family Outings and Holidays 25

5. Two Grandmothers 35

6. Becoming Theosophists 43

7. Indralaya—The Theosophical Summer Camp 51

8. School 61

9. The Beginnings of Political Activism 67

10. My Last Orcas Summer 75

11. Off to College 81

12. Extracurricular Life at Reed 87

13. Sophomore Year at Reed 93

14. Leaving Reed College 99

15. University of Washington 103

16. Oregon State College 117

17. Wartime Washington 123

18. Our Jobs in Washington, D.C. 1940–43 129

19. Transitions in 1943 137

20. Leaving Washington 143

21. Graduate Work at University of Michigan 149

22. Life in Cambridge 157

23. Moving to California 177

24. Life at Stanford 187

25. Our Professional Careers 199

26. Professional Travel 219

27. Summer in Bogota 231

28. Building Our Vacation House 237

Epilogue 247 Professional Milestones 255

Foreword This memoir was initially written for my extended family, close colleagues, and long-term friends. It traces my formative years in Tacoma, Washington, my college years, the early years of my marriage to Nathan Maccoby, our lives through the years of World War II, graduate school at Michigan, the move to Massachusetts, the adoption of our three children, and the move to Stanford. I had intended to include only a very limited coverage of the professional work that absorbed me from then on. But some former graduate students and colleagues have urged me to add some kind of coverage of that work. So I have done so. In preparing the final draft of this book, I have relied extensively on the help of a fellow resident, Anadel Law, who had recently published her mother's memoir, and had developed skills in adding photos to a manuscript. I had not planned to use photos, but she convinced me that they would add greatly to the quality of the book. She has spent endless hours scanning old photos, using Photoshop to bring them to life, and preparing the print-ready text. She has searched widely for additional pictures. She has suggested very pertinent things that could be added to the text. I am very grateful to her. My warm thanks go also to Jean Doble for her help at an early stage in the manuscript preparation, to Trudy Niehans and Rina Rosenberg who spent many hours proofreading the text, and to Alec Glover, a friend whose apartment is just above mine, and who has run down the stairs countless times to help me with computer glitches. I know my memory is fallible. Talks with my two sisters, Helen and Joan, have helped to clarify and rectify some of my

memories of our childhood. Mainly, though, I have to rely on the images in my mind of events that happened long ago. I have found that as I write, a single memory suddenly triggers others—memories of people and events that I haven’t thought about for years. Often I’m not sure about the timing: no doubt my account has made the sequences of events more orderly and coherent than they actually were. And I know there are big gaps. So be it. That’s the way my elderly mind works these days. It has really been fun to write this. Love to you all— Eleanor January 2017

The Emmons Family

Viva, Sue, Gene Eleanor

1919

CHAPTER ONE

Day Island If you drive a few miles west of Tacoma, Washington, you come to the shore of Puget Sound. Just at the end of the road, and across a short bridge, lies a small island—Day Island—where my father built the house in which I spent my earliest years. The island was only about a half mile long. On its north end it petered out into a sand spit, and on the south end there was a small canoe factory. The island had a loop road, on the outer side of which were the better houses with water frontage and a nice view of Puget Sound. On the inner side of the loop were the more modest houses, like ours, which had space behind them for a garden and a woodshed. There was a narrow waterway separating the island from the mainland, where a small marina provided anchorage for residents’ boats. At the landward end of the bridge was a railroad crossing—the Northern Pacific ran along the edge of the Sound at that point. When we first moved to the island (late 1918), our family included Mother, Dad, my older sister, Sue (three years old), and me, aged 18 months. In addition, our maternal grandmother lived with us most of each year. We children began to call her Gaga as soon as we could speak, and the name stuck. We continued to call her Gaga (pronounced GAH-guh) as adults, even when we realized how ridiculous the name sounded to outsiders. I was born on May 15, 1917. Our younger sister, Helen, was born when I was three years old. In a year or so she grew into an adorable toddler whom visitors often wanted to pick up and cuddle. But Helen didn’t like being swooped up by strangers, and she would back up and say “Dahtoo!”—that was one of her earliest words, meaning “Don’t want to!” She found it a useful word for

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other situations as well, and Dahtoo became her nickname for a while.

Shortly after we moved in, Mother and I had come down with the severe flu that in 1919 had swept through our country and Europe as well. It killed thousands. Some people recovering from the flu contracted encephalitis, and I was one of those unlucky ones. My parents have told me very few details about that illness, except that I was in a coma for some time. Some people suffered lasting impairments of vision or hearing or the senses of taste and smell from this disease, but I escaped these consequences. I wonder: am I one of the surviving few who carry immunity to the current flu viruses that are said to be related to that long-ago epidemic?

Behind our Day Island house were several fruit trees, and a large kitchen garden where sweet corn, green beans, green peas, carrots, beets, radishes and green onions grew. We children were not supposed to pick or pull up anything without supervision, but Sue and I did occasionally sneak a green bean or a pea pod or a carrot. Mother did much of the gardening work—Dad was commuting daily to his office and millwork factory close to the Tacoma waterfront. But on weekends he worked around the house and garden, including splitting wood at the big chopping block behind the house. When we were old enough, Dad would give each of us little girls a few pieces of cut wood to carry proudly into the house. The kitchen had a large wood-burning stove for cooking, and the living room had a fireplace that was often in use and needed a store of chopped wood. I believe there was no central heating.

Eleanor

Day Island 3 At each outside corner of the house was a rain barrel that collected run-off water from the roof. As far as I can remember, there was no other source of water for the house, although there may have been a cistern where larger amounts of rainwater could be stored. But when I was about four, a piped water supply was installed for all the island houses, a momentous event celebrated by a parade. People who had a drum or a horn or a whistle—or just a pair of cooking-pot lids to use as cymbals—formed a raucous band that accompanied a march around the island’s loop road. What I remember most vividly: a man in the parade was dressed only in a rain barrel, celebrating the fact that residents could now discard them. We children had never seen a man’s bare shoulders and legs before, and we giggled uncontrollably. The parade ended at the new waterworks building where a large community picnic was held. I remember iced tea and lemonade. Of course, there could not have wine or beer: those were prohibition days. I don’t remember much about how we played. I know there was a swing that hung from a high branch of a tree in front of the house, and I loved to make it go as high as I could so as to see far away over the tops of neighboring houses. I often played alone, and my parents told me that I had imaginary playmates with whom I had extensive fantasy conversations. My favorites, they said, were Mr. and Mrs. Suddenly and their little boy, Tumor. We were trained never to go out on the road, where cars would sometimes go too fast. The road was paved with cement segments separated by strips of asphalt. When the street needed repairs, a tar truck arrived. The older children showed us younger ones that it was possible to pull up some little gobs of warm tar as soon as the repair crews had left. The bits of tar could be chewed like chewing gum. The taste was pungent but not unpleasant. We understood that adults would forbid this if they found out, not least because we were not supposed to be out on the street. So it was our guilty secret. The most serious injunction was: NEVER go down the winding path on the back side of the island to the marina. Therein lies a tale. My father’s mother, Grandmother Wright, from Denver,

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was coming for a visit. My parents had to go to the Tacoma railroad station to meet her, leaving Gaga in charge of us children. Gaga had recently had an operation on her foot, which was still heavily bandaged, so she stayed mostly in a chair. Sue and I went over to play with Grace, the little girl who lived next door. We realized that no grown-up was keeping an eye on us, and thought we’d just sneak partway down the path to the marina, to take a look at the boats. As we started down, we realized that little Helen (aged about two) was trailing behind us. We told her to go home, but she wouldn’t. So we ignored her, and as we started to go down the path the temptation to go all the way down and see the boats close up was too strong. When we got down to the float where boats were tied up, we saw that we could jump into a rowboat floating very close in. We jumped in, and then the boat drifted away from the float to the end of its rope. Then we noticed that Helen was still on the float—she was calling out to be taken into the boat with us. With some difficulty, we pulled the boat close to the float and got Helen on board. The boat drifted out to its rope’s end once more, and we played for some time, pretending to be captain and crew of a ship and calling out “Full Speed Ahead” and any other nautical things we could think of. Suddenly we remembered that our parents would soon be home from meeting Grandmother’s train, and that we had to get out of the boat and up the path quickly. But the tide had turned, and was pulling the boat strongly away from the float. It took all the combined strength that we three older girls could muster to pull the boat back to the float. We three jumped out, and the boat drifted out again, with Helen still aboard. She was leaning over the front of the boat calling out “Take me!” We tried to pull the boat back in, but the tide was too strong for us. We panicked. Sue ran up the hill to fetch Gaga, who came down the path faster than I had ever seen a grown-up move, bandaged foot and all. She got Helen out of the boat, yelling angrily at the three of us guilty ones, and warning about what would happen when our parents got home. I don’t know what consequences Grace suffered. But Sue and I knew full well what the worst punishment was that we could face in our house: a whipping with my father’s razor strop. I should

Day Island 5 say at once that my father was not in any way a brutal man: far from it. He hated to punish us, leaving it to Mother to administer the occasional whack on the bottom with a hairbrush. But somehow it was understood that serious physical punishment of a child was a father’s duty. Till then, neither Sue nor I had ever done anything bad enough to deserve a whipping, but there was no doubt that this was bad enough. Our parents and grandmother arrived soon after we got home, and Gaga told the whole horrible story while Helen was crying bitterly. Father immediately took Sue into the bathroom and closed the door. I sat outside the door with Grandmother Wright, who was watching me with a certain expression of righteous scorn. We could hear the sound of the strap and hear Sue’s cries, and Grandmother said, “You know what you’ve got coming.” I knew, and resolved then and there that I would not cry. When my turn came, I didn’t. In retrospect, I think it is possible that Dad would have ducked his responsibility somehow, if his mother had not been there. But he needed to show her that he was in charge of his family. There was another element of real danger in our life on the island. When we were old enough to go to school, Sue and I had to cross the bridge and the railroad tracks and walk up a long hill for half a mile or so to get to our school. On the first few school days, one of our parents walked with us, urging us, when we came to the railroad tracks, to listen and look both ways, to see whether a train was coming. We were NEVER to cross the tracks if we could see or hear a train coming, no matter how far away it looked. Another injunction was that we could not accept a ride from a driver who was going up the hill, unless he was a friend of the family. On one occasion a kindly man stopped and offered us a ride, and I said, “Do you know my father?” He asked, “What’s his name?” I told him “H. E. Emmons.” He said that, yes, he did know our dad, so we happily climbed in and rode up the hill. It seems he encountered our Dad shortly thereafter, and told him about what we had said and done. I overheard Dad telling Mother about it, and their laughing together. I didn’t understand what was funny about it.

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During that last year of our residence on the island, I was in kindergarten and Sue was in the first grade. Grandmother Wright had taught me to read when I was about four, so I had a running start in school, and loved being there. Walking to and from school, up and down that long hill, was another matter. On one occasion Sue and I were coming down the hill on our way home from school. I was riding my tricycle, and Sue was walking by my side. We came to the railroad tracks, and found that a long, slow freight train was chugging by. We waited impatiently—it seemed the train was endless. Then we spied the end, and just as the caboose passed us we dashed out onto the tracks behind it, only to see that a fast passenger train was coming the other way on the second track. It was nearly upon us, the engine looming over us and making a fearful noise. Sue grabbed hold of the back of my jacket and pulled me backward off the tricycle. The trike was blown into the ditch by the force of the blast from the huge engine as it flew past our very noses. We were both unhurt but scared to death. We hurried home, pulling the damaged tricycle, to tell our mother. We found her lying on the couch, fanning herself to recover from shock: Helen had just gotten too close to the fireplace and set fire to her dress. We were hugged and scolded. In spite of such a scary experience, we continued to feel perfectly safe about going outdoors to play and explore new places and things. One of my earliest memories concerned another household danger—the cook stove. Gaga was making scrapple, one of our favorite comfort foods. She would make a broth from left-over meat bones and scraps, strain it, and add small slivers of meat; then she seasoned it with salt and pepper and sausage-type herbs and spices; and finally, when the meaty broth was boiling briskly, she would add the corn meal gradually to make a thick corn-meal mush that could then be cooked, cooled, and cut into slices that would be fried to a golden brown. It’s a dish that I have often made for my own family. One time while Gaga was cooking the mush, Sue climbed up on a stool to watch her. When Gaga was nearly finished adding corn meal to the thick mixture, Sue fell face down into the boiling mush. Of course it stuck firmly to her face, and burned her badly. I was terrified by the screaming and the frantic reactions of

Day Island 7 the adults as they tried to clean her face and treat the burns while calling the doctor on our party-line phone. Sue’s burns healed gradually, but she had facial scars that showed for several years until they disappeared. I know that all these episodes must make it seem as though we had a very risky childhood, but we had no sense of that—we children all felt safe and well-cared for and protected by our parents. In retrospect I can only believe that there were indeed more household risks than we live with today when we no longer have open fireplaces or stoves that are hot all over to touch, or unprotected electric outlets, or open access to bodies of water or railroad tracks. We moved away from the Island when I was about six (1923). Soon thereafter, my father trucked in huge loads of gravel to the sand spit on the north end of Day Island, filling it in and adding soil to create three new lots, on which cottages were built. He kept the farthest one out on the end of the spit for us to use as a summer place. We spent most of the summer there for several years, up until I was 10 or 11. From that summer cottage, there was a perfect view of the Narrows, the passage through which all the Puget Sound water passes to get to Olympia and the lower reaches of the Olympic Peninsula. Yes, that is the place where the famous Narrows Bridge was built some years later—the bridge that collapsed into the water below on a very windy day. The water flowing through the Narrows and past our summer cottage was very swift and very cold—we were seldom allowed to swim there. Behind the cottage was a hook of gravel beach, enclosing a kind of little cove where driftwood logs accumulated. At low tide, the logs rested on a sandy mud flat, but at higher tides the smaller ones floated, and the water was fairly warm if the day had been sunny. We were allowed to climb on the logs when they were stably settled at low tide, but not when they were floating. One summer, the picnic that was held annually for the workers at my dad’s factory was located at a park where there was a pond. The men put on a log-rolling contest. What excitement! What skill! Of course, when we got back to our cottage, I could not resist hiding behind a

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big log while the tide came in, waiting till a smaller log floated so that I could try rolling it. It was hard to keep my footing, and I fell off—without injury, that first time at least. But I kept practicing and then told Mother about it and asked her to come out and watch what I could do. As it turned out, she had known all along and had been watching from the kitchen window, calling us in as soon as she saw that the water was getting too deep. In retrospect, I believe that our parents were surely aware of the dangers of an ankle getting caught between floating logs, but wanted us to be as adventurous and fearless as was possible at that time and place. They told us what was allowed and what wasn’t, and trusted that we would obey, which we didn’t always do. In 1923, my parents decided that we should leave the Day Island house and move into town—perhaps they wanted a safer environment for us, or a shorter commute for Dad, or simply had become prosperous enough to afford a better house. They bought a house on Yakima Avenue in Tacoma, but it needed a good deal of renovation. So they rented a house on K Street for a year, while our new house was being remodeled. The rental house was on a quiet, tree-lined street where there were many other families with children. During the school year, Sue and I would come home from school by about 3:30 or 4:00, and have a snack of milk and cookies or graham crackers. Then we would go outdoors to play— we were allowed to be out till dark. We marked the sidewalk in front of our house with chalk, and played hopscotch endlessly. I believe that may have been the year when I learned to roller-skate. We also had group games with a flock of neighborhood children—Hide and Seek, Steal a Step, Red Rover. When the child who was “It” had been found, someone would call out “Olie Olie Olson Free!”—a call that must have been passed down from one generation of children to the next for a very long time. I assume it must have originated as “Everybody Else In Free!” It was in that neighborhood that I first became acquainted with the arcane culture of jump rope. First I jumped by myself with a single rope. Then I joined with other girls, and learned the rhymes that the older children sang as two children twirled the rope from

Day Island 9 its ends while one or more children jumped. One of the chants I remember is this: Your mother, my mother, lived across the way Fifteen sixteen south Broadway Every night they had a fight and this is what they’d say: Icka bicka soda cracker Icka bicka boo Icka bicka soda cracker OUT GOES YOU! At which point whoever was jumping would run out of the twirling rope and give another child a chance to run in at just the right moment. Over the next several years we learned more jump-rope rhymes, and worked on more difficult jumping: red hot pepper, double rope (now called Double Dutch, I understand), high rope (rope kept six inches or so above the ground). Our K Street house had no fireplace, which created a dilemma at Christmas time. Where would we hang our stockings? My recollection is that we hung them over a steam radiator. I worried that Santa wouldn’t know how to get into the house, but Mother and Dad invented some kind of story to explain how he would manage it. But it didn’t make sense to me, and that was the year of my disillusionment. Sue and I were careful not to spoil the Santa Claus myth for our younger sister, however. The most memorable thing that happened that year was that Sue contracted pneumonia. In those days before antibiotics, it was a very dangerous illness indeed. We all had to be very quiet when she was sleeping, and if I remember rightly, Helen and I were not allowed to go into her room to see her, for fear of infection. Then I contracted measles. The doctor said that it would endanger Sue’s life if she caught them from me, so I had to be sent to the county hospital for contagious diseases (sometimes called “the pest house”). It was a bleak place, and I was as forlorn as a six-year-old who'd never been away from home could be. I did, however, have

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the consolation of story books. I was a fairly good reader, and I had already developed quite an appetite for books, and my parents made sure I had a good supply. I don’t know how long I had to stay there, but it was an enormous relief to get home. I learned that Sue was recovering and starting to eat again—at first she would eat nothing but Gaga’s scrapple—and was soon walking around the house and coming to the dinner table in her bathrobe. Here is an incident I remember about life in the K Street house. After school, I had gone over to see my little friend Ruth who lived across the street. I knocked at her door, and her mother told me that Ruth was upstairs and would be right down. She showed me where to sit and wait. I found myself sitting next to a little table, on which lay a single penny. I can’t imagine why I suddenly felt an irresistible impulse to take the penny, but I did, and I grabbed it and put it in my pocket. Then I called out to Ruth’s mother that I had to go home. I went down their front steps and back across the street, and as I went in our front door Mother called a greeting to me from the front parlor where she was sewing. I answered her with a single hurried word, and she said “Come in here a minute.” I came and stood just inside the door, and Mother said, “What have you got in your pocket?” I answered “Nothing.” She said: “Come over here,” which I did, slowly. She reached into my pocket and found the penny, and asked, “Where did you get this?” (In those days, children of my age never had pocket money.) I hung my head and confessed. She took me by the hand and led me across the street and up Ruth’s front steps and rang the doorbell. When Ruth’s mother came to the door, my mother said: “Eleanor has something to tell you.” I blurted out what I had done, and Ruth’s mother said: “Oh, thank you for bringing it back. I was wondering where it had gone.” Then she invited me and Mother in, and told me that Ruth was ready to play now. The two mothers chatted for a few more minutes and then my mother went home. I never stole anything again.

CHAPTER TWO

407 North Yakima

We moved into our “new” house at the end of the summer

of 1924. Mother and Dad had done extensive remodeling. It had two main floors, plus an attic, a basement, and a new double garage that was entered from the alley behind the house. Dad built our new double garage about five feet longer than it needed to be, and

407 North Yakima after a rare snowfall

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made the added space into a long narrow room facing into our back yard—this was our playhouse. The roof of this building sloped slightly toward the back yard so that its edge was only 7 feet or so from the ground. We could get up to the roof by climbing either the apple tree or the pear tree next to the garage. It was scary to jump off, but we dared each other and some of the neighbor kids to do it. On the first floor were the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, and a back porch with supplementary toilet. The living room had a new oriental rug, a new sofa, a glass-fronted bookcase containing a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and tall windows facing the street. Next to the windows stood Mother’s prized new medium grand piano, behind which was a cabinet with drawers for Mother’s extensive collection of sheet music. She used the music there for her students, who would come to the house for their singing lessons. We three girls took piano lessons, and did our daily practicing there. Thinking back on it, I realize that our new residence was considerably more up-scale than anywhere we had lived before. Dad’s business must have become quite prosperous, though this was something I didn’t think about at the time. The dining room was a cheerful place with windows facing out to the side garden. Mother was a skillful and enthusiastic gardener. She loved the dark, rich, loose loam that surrounded our house. She soon had climbing roses growing up to cover the fence along the length of our yard, and five-foot beds of many varieties of flowers, very pretty to look out on. She set aside spaces for each of us girls to have our own garden, and as we grew older we learned more about different species of flowers and became increasingly interested in choosing what to plant. The dining room and living room both had fireplaces. The back door led from the kitchen out to a back porch, where our icebox was, along with a shelf for boxes of apples or other produce, and a corner for garden tools. The ice man came weekly, and carried a large block of ice on his shoulder and upper back. He held the ice in place with a large sturdy pair of tongs, and wore a kind of leather vest to protect his shoulder. He joshed with us children as we watched him unload his heavy burden.

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The second floor had three bedrooms. The front bedroom, our parents’ room, ran the full width of the house. One end held a cherry-wood four-poster bed and highboy—the only furniture my parents had brought with them from Indiana at the time of their marriage in 1911. Mother’s sewing machine, originally operated by a foot treadle, stood under the front window there. Some time soon after we moved in, Dad installed an electric motor to power the sewing machine, and the whir of that machine was a familiar sound when we came home from school. The larger part of the room was a sitting room, with a big desk, books, a day bed, and a window seat with a hinged top, inside which Mother kept her sewing materials. Her rocking chair sat before the fireplace, and the room had a cozy feel. If any one of us children was staying home from school with a cold, we might be tucked up in a blanket to rest on the day bed. On some Sunday mornings, I would get into bed with our parents to read the comics in the Sunday paper while Dad read the news. One of the back bedrooms was Gaga’s. That left only one bedroom for us children. In the remodeling, dad had added an extension to this room over the back porch, big enough to add an extra bed to the twin beds in the original bedroom. He had added a new closet, too, with built-in drawers, and a washbasin, which helped considerably to relieve the pressure on the single bathroom. The only bathroom was centrally located between our parents’ room and Gaga’s room, and had one door leading into our parents’ bedroom and another into the hall. Needless to say, privacy was hard to come by in that household, and Dad was the only one whose privacy was rigorously respected. Initially all three of us girls slept in the back bedroom, and we were all sent to bed at 8:00. When we weren’t sleepy, Helen and I sometimes got in bed with Sue, and she told us continued stories, based (she said) on her dreams. As we girls got older, our shared bedroom began to feel crowded, and our parents remodeled the attic into an acceptable bedroom. That was Helen’s bedroom for most of her childhood.

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The third stair on the attic staircase was hinged, and under it was the laundry chute—you could look down the galvanized iron chute all the way to the basement. And of course a favorite form of mischief was to throw things down the chute that weren’t supposed to go there. Once we dropped our kitten down, and raced down to the basement to rescue the frightened creature from the soft pile of laundry it had fallen into. Gaga allowed us to use her balcony to rig a line down across the back yard to the playhouse, and we rigged a pulley system to send a little box with secret messages back and forth. The kitchen, of course, was the locus of a good deal of family activity. That’s where we had breakfast, and lunch on days when we were not in school. Sometimes breakfast was just cereal and milk, but dad often cooked hearty breakfasts, serving creamed tuna fish or kippered salmon or chipped beef on toast, or pancakes, or scrapple, or (on Sundays) waffles. Dad, with his degree in electrical engineering from Purdue, loved new-fangled electrical gadgets and equipment of all kinds. Sometime during the 1920s he bought one of the first electric waffle irons. We used to love watching its top cover rise up slightly as the waffle swelled when it began to cook, and to see some batter run out the side if a bit too much batter had been used. That waffle iron is still functioning perfectly, with its original wiring, eighty years later! Gaga baked all the bread for our family—originally only white bread, but more frequently whole wheat as mother became more and more interested in nutrition. Next to the nice electric stove there was a tall narrow cupboard that backed up against a chimney and was nice and warm most of the year (when a fireplace or the furnace would be in use). It was a perfect place where Gaga could put her bread dough to rise. It was a common sight to see her kneading dough with floury hands and muscular arms— occasionally she’d pull off a piece of dough for me to flatten out to the right thickness to cut into biscuits with a round cookie cutter. I felt full of accomplishment when I would pull out my flat pan of

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nicely browned biscuits from the oven. The house smelled delicious on baking days. The basement was an intriguing place. Dad had a large workbench there with a vise and an array of tools nicely arranged. I sometimes was tempted to grab a screwdriver or a pair of pliers to use in some enterprise of mine, but I didn’t dare. Dad’s tools were sacrosanct, and he wouldn’t tolerate having any of them displaced. I did sometimes follow him around to watch him work. On Saturdays he would put on his carpenter’s apron, with loops or pockets for various tools, and move from one household task to another. He seemed to know how to fix anything—a torn window screen or door screen, electric wiring, plumbing, or anything that needed skilled carpentry such as fixing a stuck window that operated with sash weights inside the wall. Our furnace was initially coal-fired, so there was a coal bin. At one point, Dad substituted a sawdust burner, hoping to save money on fuel—there was an endless supply of sawdust always accumulating in his millwork factory. I was assigned the task of filling the sawdust hopper after school. I had to swing the heavy bucket up over my head to dump the sawdust into the hopper. It was hard work. I hated doing it and sometimes “forgot.” I was saved by the fact that the furnace turned out to be poorly designed. Sawdust sometimes gathered into clumps that would get stuck, blocking the narrow outlet through which sawdust was supposed to feed evenly into the furnace. Dad struggled to get it working properly, but finally gave up, and an oil furnace was installed. Of course there was a big woodpile in the basement—firewood was needed for our three fireplaces. Chunks and pieces of wood of various sizes were delivered through a basement chute and some of this had to be chopped into smaller pieces. The easiest pieces to manage were the mill-ends from the factory. When I was old enough to be allowed to use Dad’s sharp axe, I liked to split these pieces into narrow strips that were perfect for kindling. The weekly laundry was done in the basement. We had an electric washing machine—a very advanced appliance for those days—but it had to be filled by hand with a hose, and it drained

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into a grate on the floor. Its attached wringer had to be turned by hand. On the rare occasions when I was home on laundry day, I took a turn at this, but found it was really hard work to run large sheets through the wringer. An easier job was to load the wrung-out pieces into a basket and carry them up the basement’s outside stairs to hang on the clothes lines in the back yard. Sometimes when everything was almost dry a rainstorm would come up, and everybody who was home would rush out to bring in the damp clothes and linens. We girls would help to hang them out again when the weather cleared. And we’d always help to bring in dry clothes and fold them ready for ironing. I don’t remember feeling burdened by these activities—it was simply taken for granted that it was everybody’s business to get them done. The sun-dried sheets smelled wonderful. The ironing—mainly sheets and shirts, but also our school dresses—was usually done on Tuesdays, and we had help with this from Hilda, a Swedish woman who came in for a half-day every week. I was fascinated by Hilda. Her hair was pulled back so tight into a bun at the back of her head that Mother used to say she was afraid Hilda’s face would crack if she smiled (which she seldom did). But she did tell us about the large harp that had been built on the side of her father’s barn in Sweden—different lengths of piano wire were stretched tight, and you played it by striking each string with a hammer. At the foot of the basement stairs was the fruit closet. On its shelves were Mason jars filled with the fruits and jams and jellies—and a few vegetables—that Mother and Gaga had “put up” at the end of the summer. The canning season was a very busy time. There would be a large copper vat on the back of the stove with boiling water in which the jars and lids were sterilized while the ripe fruit was being prepared. If it was peaches, these were scalded to loosen their skins, skinned, and cut open to remove their pits. Meanwhile a large pot of light sugar syrup was being boiled down to the right consistency. When the one-quart jars were fully packed with fruit, the boiling syrup was poured in to fill the jar up to the very top. Then the rubber sealing rings were fixed to the top of the jar, and the hot outer top was screwed on. The kitchen was very hot and

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steamy, and I remember how red Mother’s and Gaga’s faces would get, and how any loose strands of hair would stick to their cheeks. There was considerable risk of getting burned while handling hot jars and boiling syrup, so we children had to stay out of the way until we were deemed old enough to help safely. We were recruited, though, for the preparation of Mother’s famous sun-cooked strawberry jam. On sunny days, ripe strawberries were cut up and heated to a boil in a light sugar syrup, then spooned out onto large flat pans, which we carried out to card tables set up in a sunny spot in the back yard. The pans were covered with mosquito netting to keep the yellow jackets away, and left to cook in the sun. As the sun waned, we brought the pans in and dumped the contents into their cooking pots, where they could be reheated and set out on successive sunny days until the jam was ready for canning. I shared in the satisfaction and pride that Mother and Gaga felt as they surveyed the neat rows of jars in the fruit closet at the end of the summer, and counted the jars of peaches, pears (from our own tree), sometimes cherries, applesauce and apple butter (from our apple tree) and, of course, strawberry jam. As far as I remember, we never had store-bought cans of fruit or vegetables in those days, and jars of homemade jams and jellies were prized for gift-giving from one household to another. At the foot of our basement stairs was a large ceramic crock. During several winters it held home-made sauerkraut for snacking. I used to lift the heavy lid and reach in for a pinch of it when I went down to the basement for a load of firewood, or to fill the sawdust burner. One year it held delicious pickled cherries. And one year “candled” eggs—eggs that had been treated in some way so that they wouldn’t spoil. I didn’t especially like them and was glad that they never reappeared—we got plenty of fresh eggs from the milkman, who came down our alley every morning with his horse-drawn milk wagon. He delivered bottles of fresh milk to our back steps. The milk was not homogenized, and cream would rise to make up almost a quarter of the bottle’s contents. Milk with lots of cream was thought in those days to be especially nutritious. On one or two occasions, when the temperature had dropped below freezing during the night and the milk was delivered early, there

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would be an inch or so of frozen cream rising out of the top of the bottles when we brought them into the kitchen. We were allowed to sprinkle sugar on the frozen portion and eat it as make-believe ice cream.

CHAPTER THREE

Sisters: Together and Apart There were three chores that had to be done in connection with dinner: the table had to be set, the dishes had to be cleared from the table and washed, and they had to be dried and put away. Mother divided these chores among us girls, and rotated them: initially between Sue and me, later on among the three of us, so that on Monday evening, Sue might set the table, I might clear the table and wash, Helen might dry and put the dishes back in their cupboards. Then the next evening the line-up would shift, so that it would be my turn to set the table, Helen’s to clear and wash, etc. There was a swinging door between the dining room and kitchen, and Mother posted a list on the kitchen side of the door, specifying who was responsible for what on each evening, and also listing the things that needed to be on the table for it to be fully set. (All of us remembered that list when we were grown and managing our own households.) In addition, there was a rotating morning schedule for our piano practice: one of us had to practice between 7:00 and 7:30, one between 7:30 and 8:00, and the third for a half-hour after school. We each had preferences as to which were the more desirable chores and the more convenient times. Of course we all wanted to avoid the 7:00 piano practice slot. “I’ll set the table for you if you’ll take my 7:00 piano time.” There was considerable squabbling over these trade-offs: “You’ll never take my 7:00!” But if I remember correctly, we were left to settle these things among ourselves. If one of us felt someone was being unfair, there were always ways to retaliate without having to call on adult backup. My sisters knew, for example, if they wanted to get back at me for not doing my share, they could always find the book I was reading and throw it down the laundry chute.

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Actually, we didn’t quarrel very much. We seldom tattled on each other. There were occasions when one of us had committed an infraction—swiped a piece of cake that was supposed to be saved for dessert, or broken some household object. We might all know who had done it, and would each deny it without pointing the finger at anyone else. For a while, Mother would line us up and tell us to stick out our tongues. She would examine each tongue in turn and identify the guilty party. For a while she was infallible, and we all believed our tongues were betraying us and that mother had some special powers of detection. But then she slipped and picked the wrong girl. After that, she had to find new ways to deal with our conspiratorial silence. We played together in the playhouse and in the backyard, and went up to the attic to use our collection of props and costumes to put on little plays. But actually we didn’t have a lot in common. At home, I had my head buried in a book much of the time, and would hide away from everybody in the house in order to read. (Sometimes I pretended not to hear when mother was calling me for some chore.) In early grade school I read through the series of Oz books and Doctor Doolittle. A series of adventure books featuring a fearless girl heroine was a favorite. Later came The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and other favorites were The Secret Garden and Understood Betsy. When I finally got a bicycle, I rode down to the Tacoma Public Library (a little over a mile away) every Saturday morning, returning the past week’s books and taking home a new batch in my bike basket. When I discovered an author I liked, I would read through everything the library had by that author. By the sixth or seventh grade I was reveling in Dumas and the Brontës and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In my mid-teens, the book that had the largest impact was Les Misérables. Helen spent more time in Gaga’s room than Sue and I did, learning from her how to crochet and make braided rugs. (I enjoyed recognizing in one of Gaga’s rugs the last vestiges of clothes that I had worn out.) Helen also went down the alley to visit Mrs. Early, who was teaching her to knit. These were things I never learned. Sue had artistic interests and talents that I simply lacked. Sue and

Sisters: Together and Apart 21

Helen spent more time with girlfriends, but I was a tomboy and growing less interested in girls’ games. I didn’t have a close girlfriend the way my sisters did. My nickname at home during those grade-school years was “Bobby.” I used to cross over to the boys’ side of our school playground to play marbles with them during recess. Helen told me years later that this had embarrassed her horribly, and that she pretended I was not her sister. I liked jumping off the garage roof and Sue and Helen didn’t, so I usually did that with one of the neighbor boys. Reading Penrod and Sam inspired me to try some of the things that they did, notably, trying to use the clothesline as a tightrope. Sue and Helen watched, warning me that I was going to get hurt. They wouldn’t try it themselves. They were right: I did fall off and got a severe bump, but no bones were broken. On the occasional Saturday morning when Dad had to go back to the office, he sometimes took me along. I would go into the factory to see Vic, the glazier. Most of the big, lumber-working machines were idle on Saturday, but Vic was usually there, next to his vat of warm putty, carefully cutting pieces of glass to fit into window frames. I would scoop out handfuls of putty and shape them into patties for Vic to grab and squeeze out into a thin strip to paste along the edge of a set-in piece of glass. When dry, it would hold the glass in place. He showed me how to use his glass cutter to make a perfectly straight cut. Although I wasn’t allowed to cut pieces for the windows, I could cut thin strips of glass to use as icicles for the Christmas tree the factory workers put up every year for the factory floor. They used curly wood shavings for tree ornaments, and cut out wooden stars. I loved the smell of the warm putty and the sawdust, and was fascinated by the shriek of the power tools that came alive on work days and ripped into the long clean boards to make grooved moldings. When I grew older, Dad taught me to read blueprints. I must have been bitten deep by what my parents called “the bug of curiosity.” On one occasion I hopped on one leg all the way home from school and twice around the block, carefully never touching the other foot to the ground. I hopped through our front door and threw myself, exhausted, onto the living-room rug.

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Mother heard me panting and came in to find out what was wrong. I told her about the hopping, and of course she wanted to know why I would do such a thing. I explained that I had seen a man with only one leg, and I wanted to find out what it would be like to try to get around with only one leg. I must also have had a skeptical turn of mind, which sometimes led me into trouble. It was the first Christmas after we had moved into 407, and Grandmother and Grandfather Wright were spending the holiday with us. I had been complaining that the only dolls I was ever given were soft-bodied dolls with unbreakable heads, while Sue had been given a doll with a beautiful china face. I was known to be simply too hard on toys to be trusted with anything so fragile. But that year, Grandfather Wright, who had probably heard about my complaint, did give me a beautiful china doll. We were all out on our porch with its tiled floor, and I was holding my new doll. I asked, “Is it really breakable?” and was told, “It certainly is!” I remember holding it out carefully and dropping it, and feeling satisfied when its head broke. Of course everybody was outraged. We all dearly loved Grandfather Wright, and I can’t imagine why I was so unthinking about what his reaction would be to my treatment of his thoughtful gift. Thereafter, I had to be satisfied with my old unbreakable doll, Charles. I once scalped him when I was playing Indians, and buried him, but I dug him up later and continued to play with him with his damaged head. It rained often in Tacoma, and we wore raincoats and galoshes to school. I used to love to splash in the puddles on the way, which meant that I often got muddy splashes on my clothes, which my sisters seldom did. We were required to wear dresses to school, and mother made ours, usually with matching bloomers. I sometimes slid down the grass slope in front of our school, getting grass stains on the seat of my bloomers, to the despair of whoever had to do the laundry. It was taken for granted that I would wear Sue’s hand-me-down clothes when she had outgrown them, but Helen never inherited clothes from me—they were too worn out by that time. When mother made a dress for one of us, it would have a generous hem so that it could be “let out” as the wearer grew taller. Then, of course, it could be shortened again for the next girl

Sisters: Together and Apart 23

down. I remember many sessions when Mother was making a dress for me, or fitting something of Sue’s that she was making over for me. I would fidget, and she would say in an exasperated tone of voice (and with pins in her mouth): “Bobby! Stand still!” She finally got me boys’ jeans to wear on weekends, which I was delighted with. Across the alley behind our house was a large house occupied by five or six young bachelors who worked downtown. They had a wonderful big St. Bernard dog named Jerry, and one of the high points of the week was when they gave him a bath with a hose in their back yard on a Saturday morning. I would go over to watch, and sometimes got wet when Jerry shook water off, or when the men’s horseplay led them into spraying each other with the hose. They would sometimes let me take Jerry for a walk down the alley. I would ride him like a pony, and loved him dearly. He liked to lick my face. One time Helen followed me when I went across the alley to play with Jerry, and after licking my face he went over to Helen to lick hers. In the process he knocked her down, and of course she was terrified and screamed when this large creature stood over her as though trying to devour her. I tried to pull him off but he was too strong. After that I wasn’t allowed to go over to Jerry’s house if Helen was nearby. After I got my blue jeans, I was allowed to get a boy’s haircut, and I walked Jerry in the Boy and Dog parade that was held every year in downtown Tacoma. I also caddied on the golf course for my dad. I don’t know whether the other caddies ever took me for a boy, but I liked being involved in a male culture (very few women played golf in those days). I felt somehow free of the constraints of being a girl. In retrospect, I’m surprised that my parents let my tomboyishness go so far. I suspect it had something to do with the fact that my dad had wanted a boy so badly when Helen was born. When our little sister Joan came along a number of years later, he sent out a birth announcement that said “Four Queens Makes a Full House,” signaling that he had given up hope for a boy. Meanwhile, he seemed to have chosen me to be his boy.

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Our youngest sister, Joan, was born when I was eleven and Helen was eight. (I believe Mother was 46 at the time.) Dr. Hopkins, our family doctor (and brother of Harry Hopkins, FDR’s close deputy), teased Mother endlessly about the fact that when she went to the midwife’s house to give birth to Joan, she carried a book under her arm to read between labor pains. It was G. B. Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. I don’t believe I was ever asked to do any baby-sitting chores, nor did I ever help mother bathe or change baby Joan—Gaga was always available as an extra pair of hands for baby care. I did sit nearby sometimes, in front of the fireplace in our parents’ bedroom, talking with mother while she breast-fed the baby. There was a comfortable milky scent in the room.

CHAPTER FOUR

Family Outings and Holidays Dad loved fireworks, and when we were little, for the Fourth of July he would always bring home sparklers and strings of small firecrackers for us to set off. As we got older the fireworks were more powerful and more exciting. I believe that in the earliest years Tacoma had no restrictions on the use of fireworks, but ordinances forbidding their use within the city limits came into effect and it was harder to find any for sale. Dad somehow accumulated a supply, and we would go out into what he deemed a safe open field outside of town to set them off. One memorable year we drove some distance to a riverbed that was flanked on one bank by a wide expanse of rocks and gravel. Here Dad could set up flares and rockets that were aimed up above the river and never traveled far enough to create a fire hazard. We waited till dusk to set them off, and I loved the whoosh of the exploding rockets and the beautiful shower of sparks and swirling colored lights. Then Tacoma began to have an elaborate fireworks display every Fourth of July in the stadium next to Stadium High School. It was only a few blocks from our house, so we could walk over with a picnic basket and sit on the lawn above the stadium among other families till dark, for a perfect view of the fireworks. Tacoma was surrounded by interesting places to go for family outings. At least once every winter our parents took us up to play in the snow on the Paradise side of Mt. Rainier (or Mt. Tacoma, the Indian name that we Tacomans clung to). I think it was about a 50-mile trip. We had practically nothing in the way of equipment for cold, snowy weather. It snowed in Tacoma only about every four years or so, and then usually lightly, so we just had the jackets we usually wore to school. But Mother kept a supply

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of wool mittens, socks, caps and scarves for our excursions to the mountain. Dad rented sleds for us when we got there, and we went sliding on a hill where skiing was not allowed and there were lots of other children. We got quite cold and our noses got red, but we played as long as possible and then got partially warmed up on the ride home. We girls were usually asleep by the time we got home. Our car was an old Mitchell. I don’t remember that car very well, but it seems to me it had to be hand-cranked to start it, and had leather curtains, no heater, and a loud horn that went “ahOOOga” as we approached turns on a narrow, curvy road. Those were the days before “balloon” tires, but we still occasionally got a flat tire on one of the rough roads. Dad always brought a spare, of course, and he was usually able to change a tire quite quickly, with occasional profanity if the jack slipped. There were all kinds of places where we could go for a picnic on a Sunday. Usually we found a place on a meadow next to a stream, and the fruit and sandwiches and cake always tasted especially good. On rare occasions we took camping equipment and stayed overnight. If I remember rightly, we had a heavy old army surplus tent—very cumbersome to put up and take down, but we children loved crawling in and out of it. We didn’t have air mattresses or sleeping bags in those days. We slept in army surplus wool blankets, which could be spread out on cedar or fir boughs. On one occasion we had brought meat for our camp-stove dinner. Dad put it in a tightly lidded pot and climbed down to the stream where he set it in a shallow spot to keep cool while we went for a hike. While we were gone, a sluice was opened and the level of the stream rose by four or five feet. When we got back to our campsite, we could see the pot sitting way down beneath the surface of the clear water. I remember Dad standing on the bank in his long underwear, ready to dive in and retrieve our food for dinner. The water was icy cold, but in he went. At least once during the summer, we would drive to the ocean. That was a longish drive—perhaps a hundred miles, which took a good three hours on the narrow, curvy roads, where it was an adventure to pass the slower cars in front of you. There were no stop lights, though, even when you passed through towns. We

Family Holidays and Outings 27

drove through Olympia and Aberdeen, and then out to the long, wide beaches of gray sand. The ocean was very cold and we didn’t actually swim in it, but we’d be bare-footed and bare-legged and would race into the water as a wave receded and then try to beat the next one back to the beach. We sometimes made playhouses out of driftwood, or found a place on the beach where there were rocks that we could turn over to watch the little crabs run out from underneath. Mostly, we played in the sand. If the tide was going out, there would be a wide swath of damp sand that was perfect for building walls and rooms that would be washed away when the tide came in. Once a year, when the cherries were ripe, we’d drive up to Dad Hampton’s farm. He was the father of Dad’s business partner. His little farm was near a remote town called Randall, in the foothills of the Cascade mountains. The last segment of the trip was on what was called a “corduroy” road—made of planks or small logs or railroad ties laid close together across the road. This surface made an otherwise impossibly muddy road passable. It was a very bumpy ride, but as far as I remember we never got a flat tire on it. Dad Hampton was a crusty old bachelor living alone. Mother always brought along some of her strawberry jam or other home-canned fruit as a treat to give Dad Hampton when he came out to greet us. We were all shocked by the unkempt condition of his farmhouse—there were chickens going freely in and out! But he had a wonderful cherry orchard, and we could eat as many as we could hold while we picked several boxes’ full to take home. There was a patient old workhorse called Villa. She had a broad back and no saddle, but we could get up on her and cling to her mane as she walked around the farmyard. That was our first northexperience riding a horse. After all these activities, we would spread out our picnic under a cherry tree. In the fall, the onset of the holiday season began with the preparation of the family Christmas card. Dad assembled recent snapshots of family members, pasted them onto a master card as part of a holiday theme, sometimes writing a little Christmas verse.

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Then he took a picture of the card, and rigged a darkroom in the basement where he printed out multiple copies—over a hundred. He brought them up and spread them out on the living room rug to dry. No children allowed in the living room for most of a day! When each of us girls developed sufficiently respectable handwriting, we helped Mother address the envelopes. When they were mailed, we felt the holiday season had begun. Christmas and Thanksgiving were important holidays for us, and we usually shared them with our parents’ friends, the Lambs. Jimmy Lamb had been Dad’s roommate back at Purdue, and when Jimmy traveled out West to see whether he could find a good job opportunity, he wrote to Dad, telling him about the town he had found—Tacoma, in the state of Washington. He had found a good job himself, and thought Dad could too. Dad had just become engaged to my mother, and they agreed that he would go out to Tacoma, and as soon as he was situated in a job, and found a place to rent, he would send for her. After several months he wrote that he had found a job teaching manual training in Tacoma’s high school, and that he hoped to be able to move into a business opportunity from there. So she took the only cross-country train that went to the Pacific Northwest—its terminus was in Portland, Oregon. And it was there that dad met her train, and where they had a brief, justice-of-the-peace wedding. After a year or two teaching manual training at Stadium High School, Dad established his own business, a small millwork factory making doors, windows and cabinets. They built their first house with the help of a few of Dad’s most promising high-school students, whom he hired during their summer vacation. Jimmy Lamb had a job with the municipally owned street-railway company, and moved up the ladder until he became CEO. He married a local school teacher, who was a wonderful cook and became the head of the school lunch program for the Tacoma public schools. Jimmy and Ermanie Lamb were our parents’ closest long-term friends. They had no children of their own, so they became favorite “uncle” and “aunt” for all of us Emmons girls.

Family Holidays and Outings 29

For many years we alternated Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners—half the time they would be at our house, and half the time we’d be at theirs. The menu for Thanksgiving dinner would always include the traditional turkey with dressing. (We saved up stale bread for several weeks before Thanksgiving—there were no store-bought bread crumbs to be had in those days.) And then, of course, the cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes with turkey

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gravy. Occasionally there would be a supplemental sweet-potato

Father

Gaga

Mother Sue

Eleanor Helen

Joan

Family Holidays and Outings 31

casserole. At Christmas time the menu was much the same, except that there might be a molded tomato-aspic salad with watercress, for seasonal color. At our house, Christmas dessert was a steamed “pudding” similar to English plum puddings except that ours was a carrot-cake mixture, with raisins and currants and spices, served with a hard sauce. (In other households, hard sauce would be enlivened with cognac, but not in ours!) When a holiday dinner was at our house, Mother and Gaga strove to make a dinner as good as the delicious ones we had at the Lambs’ house on alternate years—quite a challenge. Before Christmas dinner at our house, Dad and Uncle Jimmy would disappear down the basement stairs. About a half hour later, they’d come back up, pink faced, noisily laughing and talking together, while Mother and Gaga sniffed and made disapproving “tsk, tsk” sounds. It took me quite a while to realize that this had to do with a jug or bottle Dad must have kept somewhere in the basement—very much against the tee-total rules of our household. A few days before Christmas, we would go out to cut a tree. In the earliest years, it was a simple matter to find a tree in a nearby forest or meadow—little fir trees sprang up everywhere. But as time went on, more and more of the countryside near Tacoma was fenced and marked against trespassing, so we would go to a meadow or farm where our parents knew the owners and had permission to cut a tree. By the time I was in college and came home for the holidays, Dad simply bought an already-cut tree. Christmas was a time for singing. As our voices matured, it turned out that I sang first soprano, Sue second soprano, and Helen first alto. We were joined by Mother’s deep second alto and Dad’s bass. Mother had directed a chorus at Purdue University, which Dad had been a member of—that’s how they met. By the time I was eleven or twelve, Mother had shaped us into quite a melodious quintet—our voices blended well, and we loved harmonizing. We would get up at about four or four-thirty on Christmas morning,

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dressing in our warmest clothes. We crept down the stairs, trying not to wake Gaga (or baby Joan, after she was born) and casting longing glances at the living room fireplaces where our stockings were hung—they were hidden from view by two large screens, and we had to wait till we came home from singing before we could see what was under our stockings. We had a light breakfast, and then got into the family automobile—by that time it was a big old seven-passenger Packard. Mother brought her guitar, which she could suspend with a cord around her neck to leave her hands free for playing. By the time I was about twelve, I had my own guitar and could chord well enough to join her in accompanying our singing. We drove to a series of friends’ houses to sing carols under their windows. It was still dark, and usually cold and clear and starry. I remember the music as sounding quite ethereal in the crisp air. Friends who knew we were coming would have a candle ready on their bedroom window sill, and would light it as soon as we started to sing. We would call out “Merry Christmas” as we left. Sometimes people would invite us in for a quick cup of hot chocolate. Our hands and feet did get cold, and a hot drink was wonderful. After we had finished with the houses of friends, we went to sing at the county jail, and then at the county hospital. It was about eight o’clock when we got home, and then we had the excitement of exploring our stockings and the gifts beneath them. I usually got a precious new hoard of books, but oh! wonder of wonders: one year it was a brand-new bicycle! After the stockings came a waffle breakfast (cooked by Dad). There was always a tangerine in the toe of each Christmas stocking—we never saw tangerines at any other time of the year—and we had those for Christmas breakfast too. And after breakfast, the tree. Dad handed out the gifts one at a time—mostly it was the things we had carefully chosen and wrapped for each other. Dad often wrote a little verse with his gifts. We three girls had each been given some money for Christmas shopping—I don’t remember now how much it was, but it was the same amount for each of us. Mother once told me when we were grown that she and Dad knew what to expect: that Sue would spend all her money before she got to the end of her list of people she wanted to buy for, that I would make it come out exactly right

Family Holidays and Outings 33

according to my prepared list, but would be stuck if there was someone I had forgotten, and that Helen would always have a little left over to use for that last-minute person. We always got a big box from Grandmother and Grandfather Wright, and there was sometimes tension as their gifts were unwrapped. Grandmother Wright was rather scornful of some of Mother’s tastes and preferences. In particular, Grandmother and Grandfather, who were part of a rather sophisticated social set in Denver, disapproved of Prohibition, while Mother and Gaga were both members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. One Christmas, Grandmother Wright sent Dad a silver cocktail shaker—she knew that it would be unwrapped in front of the whole family. Predictably, Dad was pleased and Mother sniffed and pressed her lips tight together. She disapproved, but didn’t want to say anything that would spoil the atmosphere of Christmas day. If you are beginning to infer that Mother was not outspoken about her feelings, you’d be right. Her way of expressing displeasure was usually to tighten her lips and say nothing, and perhaps even leave the room. In fact, none of us was outspoken—we were not a demonstrative family. Emotional displays of any sort were discouraged. We were taught to rein in any overt expressions of anger—certainly, no yelling or hitting was allowed. Dad would say: “If you can’t think of something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” And Mother explained to us that emotions could be like wild horses—we had to keep tight control of them or they would run away with us. These inhibitions applied to positive emotions too. We understood that it wasn’t ladylike to laugh too loudly, and there wasn’t much joshing or horseplay among us. I don’t remember that we girls ever put our arms around each other or walked “arm in arm.” Mother and Dad hardly ever pulled us into their laps for a cuddle. Although Mother and Dad would laugh together over some household episode, or something one of us said, I don’t remember any displays of physical affection between them. The only touching between them that I remember was that sometimes

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at the dinner table Mother would start to talk about some unwelcome topic—perhaps something about which they disagreed?—and Dad would run his hand up and down on her arm (with a movement like stropping a razor) and say “Now, Viva, I’d rather have fifty dollars than any trouble.” Perhaps it was all this reticence that explains why, during my grade-school years, I understood very little about how other family members felt. An example: Sue and I were in the same grade in school from second grade on. Sue’s schooling had been interrupted by her illness, and I had skipped a grade. To me, this never seemed to be an issue. But it was to Sue. It wasn’t until we were grown that she told me how bitterly she had resented me for being in the same grade, and getting better grades, even though she was a year and a half older. Looking back on it, I wonder how I could have failed to realize how she felt, but I simply didn’t notice it. We grew up, as I believe many others of our generation did, guarding our emotions and expecting others to do the same. We didn’t hug readily. I believe it meant that later entry into romantic relationships had quite a different flavor then than it does today.

CHAPTER FIVE

Two Grandmothers How could they have been more different? Gaga short and self-effacing. Grandmother Wright, tall and austere, expecting deference. She asked us to call her grandmère, with the French pronunciation. Grandmother Wright in fashionable clothes, Gaga in a dumpy housedress. Grandmother Wright world traveler; Gaga, who almost never left the house except to go to church on Sundays. Gaga a long-term widow, Grandmother Wright in a

fashionable second marriage. Gaga was born in Lafayette, Indiana, one of nine children. Her name was Mae Moore. The only story I know about her childhood was one she told me when I asked her about her painful feet—she had unsightly large bunions for which she had undergone unsuccessful surgery. She told me that at long intervals her father would bring home a large sack full of shoes in various sizes and dump them out on the floor. The children would dive into the pile trying to find a pair that would fit

and sometimes struggling with one another over a pair that two children wanted. Gaga lost out on more than one occasion, and ended up with a pair that were too small, which she had to wear painfully for at least a year—creating damage she never was able to outgrow. Her married name was Johnson. She referred to her late husband as Johnny, and the only thing she said about him was that he was “a wonderful man.” They lived on the edge of a small town

“Gaga” May Moore Johnson

36 Chapter Five in Indiana, with a barn and room for a kitchen garden. A stream ran next to their small house, and Gaga initially did their laundry in the stream. Her first child was only eighteen months old when her twins were born (Mother quite unexpectedly appeared forty-five minutes after her twin brother). I’ve tried to imagine what it must have been like to wash diapers for three children in a stream, before the days of washing machines or diaper services or Pampers. Johnny Johnson worked first as the manager of a general store, and then (after they moved to Lafayette) as an upholsterer, but his hobby was collecting musical instruments. Most of their seven children learned to play at least one instrument: Mother played the banjo and the guitar, her younger brother the cello. Her father was able to buy a set of Swiss bells—the first to appear in the United States—and each of the children, as they grew tall enough, learned to take a part in the coordinated bell ringing. Their father shaped these performances into an “act” with other instrumental numbers and sometimes costumes. Mother’s solo contribution was as a singer of folk songs and spirituals. The “Johnson Family” were in demand as entertainers at church socials, and as their reputation spread, they made out-of-town paid tours, constantly perfecting and amplifying their program. During all this, Gaga stayed at home managing the household and caring for any of their seven children too young to take part in the family musical career. By the time Mother was in her teens, she had become quite a skilled seamstress, so she and Gaga formed a division of labor when it came to household tasks: Gaga did all the cooking and baking, while Mother made the clothes for herself, her mother, her four brothers, and her younger sister. She remembers one occasion when her father brought home a large bolt of cloth—a cotton print of some sort—and Mother used it to make shirts for her brothers, and dresses for herself, her mother, and little sister Anna. It was natural, then, that the same division of labor prevailed when Gaga came to live with us: Gaga still did all of the baking and much of the cooking, while Mother made clothes for us four girls as well as for herself and Gaga.

Two Grandmothers 37

When Mother was seventeen, her dad died, leaving Gaga widowed with a large family of young children to raise. He left an insurance policy that yielded enough to buy their small house in Lafayette. But there was no longer any earned income. Their barn had been empty, but now they bought two cows, and the boys milked the cows and sold milk around the neighborhood, as well as delivering newspapers and picking up whatever other odd jobs they could. Mother had to become the major cash income earner, by going on paid tours (sometimes with Chautauqua) singing folk songs and spirituals, accompanying herself on the guitar. Mother took her high-chool final exams in absentia, working on them in hotel rooms or railway stations while she was on tour. Gaga may have sold some of her famous homemade bread to raise some money, but in those days most housewives did their own baking. As far as I know, she simply continued her role as homemaker for her children until they were all grown, then stayed with her children successively until she settled down to permanent residence with us. I have often thought how Gaga’s history tells the story of the generations during her lifetime. Gaga’s mother had nine children. She herself had seven. Her daughter Viva (my mother) had four daughters. Those daughters among them had eight natural children—on average, two apiece. I’m quite sure Gaga knew nothing about contraception, but my mother did. And therein lies a profound social change. How much did Gaga understand about sex itself? Mother has told me that when she was getting ready to get on a train and go out to Oregon to meet Dad and marry him, her mother took her aside, and said,“There’s something I must tell you about, dear. There are times when a strange sort of madness comes over a man. Don’t be afraid, he’s not trying to hurt you. Just lie still. Don’t struggle. It will be over quickly, and then he will turn back into the nice man you married.” Mother was startled. And my mother herself thought at that time that babies were born through the navel. How could these beliefs have prevailed? Surely people living in a semi-rural environment must have seen dogs or cats mating, and have seen kittens and puppies being born. I can only suppose that they had not learned anything about evolution in school, and

38 Chapter Five had learned doctrines at church that would stand in the way of thinking about humans as an animal species. Gaga never talked much to us. Her comments mostly took the form of aphorisms—if she saw any one of us primping before a mirror, she’d say, “Pretty is as pretty does.” Or if we didn’t finish the food on our plates “waste not, want not.” “A stitch in time saves nine” was another favorite of hers, along with “haste makes waste” and “a fool and his money are soon parted.” But these familiar phrases seemed to bounce off of us with no effect—I don’t believe we actually processed their meaning. It was very different with Grandmother Wright. For one thing she visited only once a year at the most, and when she said things to us we paid attention. She was a commanding presence, not in the least hesitant about criticizing things one of us said or did. We realized how much our father respected (feared?) her, and we felt as though we needed to be on our best behavior when she was around. When she and Grandfather Wright visited, they usually stayed downtown at the old Tacoma Hotel, Tacoma’s best hotel. They would invite each one of us girls individually to have lunch with them at the hotel. It was the only time we saw elegant table settings. I have a vivid memory of an occasion when finger bowls were provided next to our plates. I of course had no idea what such a bowl was for, so I simply drank the water out of mine and got raised eyebrows and a condescending response from Grandmother. I realized later that her intention was to expose us girls to some of the “finer” points of etiquette among the “better sort of people.” She felt our mother and Gaga simply couldn’t provide a refined social education for us girls. I believe she was concerned that we wouldn’t meet Grandmother Wright

Helen Cowden Emmons Wright

Two Grandmothers 39

the “right kind” of boys—and indeed, we didn’t. I don’t remember much about what she wore. She occasionally sent one of her cast-off dresses for Mother to make over for one of us, and these donated things were of very good material and beautifully made. I do remember a dress that we used endlessly for our dress-up play: It was a floor-length gown, made of a light weight ecru material and black lace, and it had a black lace parasol to go with it. We made a lorgnette to play “elegant lady” in that dress. Grandmother’s hats were imposing, and one in particular stands out in my mind: it had a large stuffed bird with its wings stretched out across the front. Oh, and she wore a fox fur stole with a dangling fox head with its beady eyes. I don’t believe she and Grandfather Wright were wealthy, but they must have belonged to some kind of elite social group in Denver, based on Grandfather Wright’s family connections. He was a direct descendant of George Washington’s sister, and had himself spent a small portion of his childhood living at Mount Vernon. They had some of the Washington family silver with the elaborate W crest on the pieces, a few pieces of which my sisters and I ultimately inherited. Grandmother’s maiden name was Helen Cowden, and her father was a physician. I have never known how she met Grandfather Emmons—she was only about 18 at the time of her first marriage, and gave birth to our father at the age of 19. Her young husband died when the little boy was only three years old. She left the young child with his Emmons grandparents in Indiana, and went to Denver to get teacher training, and take up a job as a school teacher. After her remarriage to Grandfather Wright, they sent for her son (then six or seven), but it didn’t work out. My recollection of the story is that he was homesick for his Indiana grandparents, and did not respond well to his mother and stepfather. Furthermore, he contracted several childhood diseases that year in Denver—measles and chicken pox, I think it was— making his care burdensome for his mother. In any case, back he went to Indiana. She always sent him a Christmas present, and therein lies one of the best-known family stories about her. Dad’s grandparents were desperately poor. They couldn’t afford to buy

40 Chapter Five him ice skates. He loved to skate, and when he was about eleven, whittled himself a pair of skates out of wood. They worked reasonably well but made a squeaking sound when he traveled across the ice, and the other children teased him about it. He wrote to his mother and asked her to please send him ice skates for Christmas. She sent an encyclopedia instead. When Dad became engaged to my mother, he proudly took her to Denver to meet his mother, but she was not impressed with the young lady’s beauty or her musical talent—Dad was pained to see that she did not meet his mother’s standards of good breeding. Incidentally, Grand-mother was a member of the DAR, and was deeply dis-appointed that none of her four granddaughters ever wanted to join. I never could understand why Dad wanted her approval so much when he was a grown man, and why he solicitously arranged for her care up until the time of her death at age ninety-three. I don’t know how much financial support he gave her, but I know that he provided something, and she never seemed to feel in any way grateful to him no matter how much he did. The fact remains that he was emotionally connected to her in some way. As you can tell, Grandmother Wright was by no means a figure of warmth and affection in our childhood. Did we admire her in any way? My sister Sue must have, for in adolescence she began to imitate certain of Grandmother’s verbal mannerisms. For example, she would say “inDEED” as a word of emphasis, with exactly Grandmother’s haughty intonation. And Helen, after all, was named for her—Helen Wright Emmons was her name, and I believe that did mean

Viva Johnson in her 20s

Two Grandmothers 41

something to both of them. It is the reason that Helen was the one to inherit Great-grandfather Cowden’s portrait, painted in oils, and a grandfather clock that presumably came from Grandfather’s estate. As for me, I know that she decided when I was four years old that I was ready to learn to read. So she taught me, and she must have done it skillfully for I have been a voracious reader from then until the present day. When Sue and I were in high school, she agreed to teach us and a girlfriend to play bridge—Grandmother and a woman partner were bridge champions of the city of Denver and she loved the game. But we girls giggled during the lesson, and she quietly laid down her cards and got up from the table, saying, “When you young ladies are ready to play bridge, I will return,” and stalked away. On one occasion, my husband was giving a talk at a national meeting of the American Psychological Association that was held in Denver that year. Amazingly, Grandmother came to the meeting. Amazing because she had never approved of our marriage—she got along with my husband well enough personally, but marrying a Jew was clearly not acceptable. However, there she was at his lecture. She swept down the center aisle, wearing one of her imposing hats, and stopped, standing next to one of the front rows. The seats were all full, but someone glanced at her and immediately stood up; in fact, several men rose to offer her their seats, something I have never seen happen at an APA meeting before or since. During World War II, Helen and I went to visit Grandmother in her little retirement apartment in Denver. Our husbands were both in uniform at that time. We were startled when Grandmother said to us, “I hope you young ladies are being faithful while your men are away.” I guess that’s how she saw herself—as a moral arbiter in our lives. I, for one, never ceded that role to her. I always believed she didn’t deserve it—I can’t guess whether she ever knew what my attitude toward her was. In any case, when she died she left what little money was left in her estate to us, her four granddaughters—$11,000 for each of us. She chose to do this rather than leaving it to Dad—one more unkind cut, which he confessed to me later had really pained him. Not a kind woman, but one who mattered.

CHAPTER SIX

Becoming Theosophists My parents were seekers for some form of philosophy or faith they could believe in. Like many in their generation, they had become skeptical about traditional Christian theology. Although they sent the three of us children to Sunday school—first Methodist, then Presbyterian—during my early grade-school years, they then switched membership to the Unitarian church and we briefly all went there on Sunday mornings. But this too didn’t satisfy them. I have never known how they became interested in Theosophy, but somehow they were drawn more and more centrally into it. Throughout, my Dad continued to be active in the local Masonic lodge—he proudly wore a ring indicating his status as a 32nd-degree Mason. What exactly is Theosophy? It has very little in the way of official doctrine. It simply declares its purpose to be the study of comparative religion and “the latent powers in man” (now of course we would say “the latent powers in human beings”). More substance was given to the meaning of these objectives in Theosophy’s central writings, primarily the book The Secret Doctrine, by Madame Blavatsky, a Russian mystic. There “latent powers” meant primarily “occult” powers. The study of comparative religion was focused on Eastern faiths, in particular Hinduism and Buddhism. While there was no prescribed set of beliefs that Theosophists were expected to embrace, most of them in the 1920s and 1930s believed in reincarnation. Individuals were thought to progress through a series of rebirths, and in each incarnation they worked through the Karma they had brought with them from previous lives. It was this set of beliefs that were most satisfying to my mother. She had felt that Christianity did not

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properly embody a principle of justice. She asked: how could a just God allow a child to be born blind when it had not yet had a chance to do anything to deserve such a fate? The Christian idea that we were all born sinners and could be “saved” only through believing that Jesus had died to redeem us from these sins seemed empty to her. Theosophy’s answer was that the individual had earned good or bad Karma through previous deeds. For many Theosophists, the time of birth was thought to be in some way linked to the “fate” governing an individual’s present incarnation, so that astrology could be used to identify some of the forces in an individual’s Karma. A debt of bad Karma from a previous misdeed could only be discharged through good works during a new incarnation. “Good works” included many traditional virtues such as honesty and kindness to others, but also included tolerance for others’ views. Theosophists were strongly opposed to any form of discrimination based on other people’s faiths or national identity. Their belief in the universal Brotherhood of Man meant that they must not intentionally do harm to others, and so most of them opposed capital punishment. Kindness to animals—our “younger brothers”—was also a central imperative. During the intervals between rebirths, individuals were thought to exist on the “Astral plane.” Although Theosophists seldom used the word “soul,” they did believe in some sort of extra-corporal existence, wherein some aspects of individual identity were sustained. This belief of course entailed the possibility that one could get in touch with people who had “passed over to the other side.” For a subgroup of Theosophists, there was an intense interest in spiritualism, and a belief in the powers of “mediums” to assist communication between the living and the dead. These kinds of “occult” powers were part of the more inclusive category: “the latent powers in man.” Among these powers were also the capacity for extra-sensory perception and other forms of non-experiential “knowing.” Our parents joined the Theosophical Society when I was about ten. They joined with a few other families to establish a

Becoming Theosophists 45

Theosophical Lodge in Tacoma. They (I suspect mainly Dad) bought an old church on Tacoma Avenue, and meetings were held in the large main room where Christian services had formerly been held. There was also a large room on the lower level where meetings could be held. Theosophy had no official leaders comparable to the priests, ministers or rabbis who carried the official functions in other religions. Local group leaders emerged in each lodge, and speakers were invited from other lodges or from the National Headquarters in Wheaton, Illinois. My parents were closely involved in the leadership of the Tacoma lodge, and in liaison with other lodges in the Pacific Northwest. Much later, mother worked as a librarian at the Wheaton headquarters. Our way of living changed almost immediately after our parents joined. A major change was that we became vegetarians. We were not supposed to take life in any form, so we were not to eat meat, fish, or poultry. We could have dairy products, though, including eggs so long as they were not fertilized. We began to have lots of dinner dishes made with cheese—my favorite was cheese soufflé. I don’t remember that Mother knew about soy beans, but she was careful to include various kinds of beans in our diet, as well as lentils, nuts, cheese and any other sources of protein she knew about. She bought some kind of vegetarian meat substitute that could be formed into veggie burgers. The great exception to our vegetarian diet was the once-a-year Thanksgiving turkey. Dad would joke as he carved it: “What kind of a vegetable do you suppose this is?” I remember that it tasted more delicious than it ever had when we were still eating meat. I was terribly tempted by the leftover turkey. I knew it was being kept on the top shelf of our cooling closet, and once in the middle of the night I crept down the stairs to the kitchen and climbed up on a chair to pull off a few bites. I felt guilty afterward, but somehow anticipation of guilt never seemed to be strong enough to keep me from doing something I desperately wanted to do. And I undoubtedly would have done it again if the opportunity arose. Besides the prohibition against taking life, there was another reason not to eat meat: it was bad for your emotional well-being. Mother and Dad explained to us that animals were intensely afraid just before they were slaughtered. Their fear caused their bodies to be flooded with

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adrenalin. When people ate the meat, they ingested large amounts of adrenalin, and we were told that this fueled the “baser” emotions in human beings, making them aggressive and/or fearful, and swamping the feelings of love and kindness that were the desirable states for daily living. Dad took Sue and me to visit a slaughter house, where we saw the terrified animals waiting for their turn to be killed, and heard their agonized cries. Of course, all this made a deep impression, and I believe it did build up an aversion to meat eating. In my case, though, not a lasting one. One August, when I was about eleven, the Tacoma Public Schools issued a directive that children could not register for school that September unless they had been vaccinated for smallpox. Mother protested to the school board that she would not allow foreign animal substances to be introduced into her children’s bodies. The school board turned her down, and we were kept out of school while she appealed to a higher authority. During the two weeks when we were out of school, Dad took Sue and me on a business trip he had to make to eastern Washington. It was amazing to drive through the greenery of western Washington and over the Cascade mountains into the dry, dusty climate of the eastern part of the state. On our way to Spokane I saw and smelled sage brush for the first time. In Spokane, we stayed at the old Davenport Hotel, which was quite elegant in terms of the standards of those times. There were bird cages in the lobby with canaries that sang beautifully. Sue and I spent hours in the lobby watching and listening to them, as well as reading quietly, while Dad was making visits to his millwork customers. When we got back home, we returned to school, to my great relief. Mother had won her appeal. Perhaps the fact that she was president of the State of Washington Parent-Teacher Association helped. After I turned away from Theosophy during my second year of college, I felt vaguely guilty about being a “free rider”—reaping the beneficial health effects of almost everyone else having been vaccinated when I had escaped the discomfort of undergoing vaccination myself. I was not vaccinated until the age of 30, when we made our first trip to Europe and were required to have a certificate of vaccination. The nurse was astonished at my reaction

Becoming Theosophists 47

to the vaccine: my upper arm swelled up enormously, and she called the doctor to come and look at what she said was the most “beautiful” vaccine reaction she had ever seen. Theosophy was an international movement. It was most active in England, Australia, Holland, Java, and India. Its international headquarters were at Adyar, just outside of Madras. A number of Theosophical lecturers would tour from one country to another and one lodge to another, presenting and discussing some of the finer points of Theosophical thought. Several of them stayed at our house—thinking back, I wonder where in the world they slept, but suspect they may have been invited during Gaga’s occasional visits to one of her six other children, so that her room was available. A couple of our visitors were self-proclaimed clairvoyants in whom I was not much interested. But others were very fascinating indeed. One was an Englishwoman named Clara Codd. She had been a “lieutenant” in the Pankhurst Sisters’ women’s suffrage “army” in England. I spent one remarkable long evening with her when I was 12 or 13, as I sat literally at her feet before the glowing fireplace in our dining room. She told me about how the suffragettes had run out onto the race track at the Derby races, grabbing the horses’ heads and stopping the race; and about how the suffragettes were taken to jail, where they went on a hunger strike. This seemed to me heroic, especially since they had to submit to being force-fed. She also described how she and several other women rode around London on a horse-drawn cart, stopping at street corners to preach to passers-by about votes—for women. Sometimes people would shout back at them, or even throw things. She dodged tomatoes, cabbages and onions among other things. Sometimes after dark they would chalk the pavements or sidewalks with “Votes for Women” messages. I was amazed and fascinated about all this and my imagination took fire about what kinds of actions were possible in defense of a worthy cause. A visitor who came for dinner but did not stay with us was the international president of the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant. Besant was born in the 1850s. As a young woman, she

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became a socialist, and through her friendship with George Bernard Shaw became a member of the Fabian Society. As part of the nascent labor movement in England, she led the first strike of women workers—the London “match girls” were workers in the notorious match factories, where in addition to very low pay and long hours they suffered from the hazards of inhaling noxious chemicals. The factories were extremely dangerous workplaces. Besant attained a certain notoriety through organizing them to combat these conditions. After she became a Theosophist, Besant traveled to India, and there became involved in the Indian Home Rule movement. She joined the Indian National Congress, a group fighting for home rule, and during World War I was imprisoned due to her efforts to link Indian participation in that war with the home-rule movement. When she was released, she was greeted by large crowds all over India. She briefly became president of the Indian National Congress. When Annie Besant came to our house she must have been in her early eighties, a small, gentle, soft-spoken tanned woman with snow-white hair, who patted my face benevolently. But in the evening when she spoke to a crowd in a large auditorium (without amplification, if I remember correctly), her voice swelled and filled the room effortlessly. I do not remember consciously taking these strong women as models in any sense. The term “role models” had not yet entered people’s thinking. But I must have become aware at the time of what it was possible for women to do and be, beyond the familiar roles of home-maker and teacher that were ever-present in my daily life. As our parents became more immersed in Theosophy, my mother became a lecturer who visited other lodges in the Pacific Northwest—another model right there at home. I should note that Mother also became interested in astrology, another system of beliefs that attracted many Theosophists. Often, when I came home from school, I’d go up to her room to check in, and find her at her desk intensely absorbed in setting horoscopes, using one of the volumes that catalogued the positions of the planets as they moved through the minutes, hours and days of the calendar. For a person born at a certain hour on a certain day, there were risks whenever, say, Jupiter was “trine” to Venus (I never knew what these phrases meant). Mother was

Becoming Theosophists 49

contemptuous of the so-called horoscopes printed daily in the newspapers, which set forth warnings and predictions for people born on that day. She thought very little could be concluded from knowing only the day of a person’s birth—one needed to know the hour as well, because the relations of the planets to one another could change considerably in 24 hours. But she did give some credence to the month of birth, or at least to whether a person was a Taurus, or Sagittarius, or—Lord, I used to know them all and now I’ve forgotten. In retrospect, our entry into the world of Theosophy must have had a considerable impact on our family’s standing in the Tacoma community, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Before Theosophy, our parents were members of a three-table bridge club that met successively at the members’ houses. There was excited preparation when the gathering was to be at our house, and Mother and Dad dressed up somewhat to go to others’ houses on bridge night. Rarely, they attended formal occasions—Mother had a beautiful pale-blue taffeta evening gown, showing the perfect skin of her shoulders to great advantage, and Dad—tall and nice-looking—looked impressive in his tux. (I didn’t know at the time that he was actually something of a ladies’ man.) I remember watching mother arrange her hair and choose her jewelry for such an occasion—it was probably the first time I realized what a beauty she was. Dad was glowing with pride in her as they left the house. On one evening, they gave the cast party for a visiting musical company who were performing in town—all the wonderful, spirited young singers gathered around our piano and filled the house with song as we girls sat on the stairs to watch and listen. Mother and Dad were well regarded in town, but all social occasions of this kind dwindled away when they joined the Theosophical Society, which from then on offered a very different and much more limited social circle. Dad still did become the head of Tacoma’s Red Cross Drive for at least one year, and Mother continued to be active in the State Parent-Teacher Association, but those were civic rather than social functions. We saw less of the Lambs, but did continue most of the holiday dinners together. The number of singing lessons Mother gave in our living room

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gradually diminished, so that outside social contact was soon also gone. Gaga continued to go to the Congregational Church. If she felt critical about Theosophy, she never showed it. Later, I came to understand that Grandmother Wright was horrified and contemptuous at the turn our lives had taken. At the time, I had only a vague sense that we were thought to be “odd” by many Tacomans.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Indralaya—The Theosophical Summer Camp

My parents joined with a small group of Theosophists in other cities in the Northwest to establish a Theosophical summer camp on Orcas Island. The island is the northernmost of the San Juan Islands in Puget Sound, poking up into Canada but still in the United States. It has a land area of about 80 square miles. At that time, it could be reached only by ferry or other boat. The new camp’s site was a partially cleared tract of about 30 forested acres, with frontage on East Sound, the 3-mile-long inlet that penetrates deep into the center of the island. They acquired the land through Fred McLaren, a Theosophist who owned it—he deeded it to the Society in return for their payment of back taxes and overdue mortgage bills. The land had an old farmhouse, where McLaren lived, an orchard where many of the trees were failing, from neglect, and large stands of native trees—mostly firs, with some cedars, oaks and madrones. The agreement was that McLaren would be allowed to continue living in his house, but the rest of the property could be developed for a camp, which would be called Indralaya. That first year, people camped in tents and had their meetings outdoors in a lovely grove of trees—or in the McLaren house in case of rain. They were busy building a communal dining room and putting together a water system for the kitchen and communal bathrooms. Dad soon got to work building a cottage in the woods for our family. Several other cottages were being built by several families who also spent much of the summer at the camp. For the second summer at the camp, we left Tacoma with our old seven-passenger Packard heavily loaded, with bundles and suitcases on the running boards and baby Joan’s crib tied to the front bumper.

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At the camp that year, tent platforms were built for people who would come to the official two-week or three-week camp sessions (the length of the full camp session depended on water supply). Dad trucked lumber and other building supplies up from Tacoma. Our cottage was on a high bluff overlooking East Sound. The roof was quite steep, and I remember Dad throwing a rope over a tree limb and tying one end around the tree and the other around his waist, to keep himself from falling off while he was nailing on the shakes for the roof. He rigged a pulley system for dragging large rocks up from the beach below. With these he built our fireplace and chimney. He put in plumbing so

that we had our own flush toilet and running water to our sink. There was a largish room that was a combination living-dining-cooking area, with the big stone fireplace at one end. An

Gene Emmons, building the Orcas cottage

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upstairs loft overlooked this room, and this was where our beds were. The cottage was heated by the wood fire in the fireplace and the wood-fired cooking stove. For a number of years after the camp’s inception, there was no electricity on the property. A kerosene mantle lamp hung over the dining table, and that was the place for reading or the occasional board game in the evening. Usually, though, we went up to join other campers at the communal evening campfire in the grove. Adults sometimes carried kerosene lamps with them when they went out after dark. We children were not trusted with them because of the great danger of fire—we carried flashlights. Reasonably smooth paths were created between the cottages, the community buildings, and the campfire grove. The paths were soft underfoot, in some places having a carpet of fallen fir needles or moss, but on the less-used paths there were places with rocks or tree roots or steep spots that called for some careful walking. In the first few years, about forty to sixty people would come to the camp session, and a smaller group was there before and after camp to work on building cottages and restoring the orchard and planting a vegetable garden. At the morning meetings during the main camp session, there were visiting lecturers and discussion groups, and throughout the day a gradually increasing program of community activities. The attendance at the official camp sessions gradually increased, and the same core group of families returned year after year. This meant that for us Emmons girls, there was a group of children whom we came to know well—in a sense, we grew up together. During the second or third summer of the camp, I joined three or four other pre-teen girls in a tent that had been erected on a wood platform. We had narrow cots with coil springs and slept on canvas ticks that had been filled with straw. One year, we had a period of more than a week when it rained every day, and I learned an important lesson about tent living: if you touch the wet tent ceiling above you, water will drip straight down from the point where you touched it, and that same spot will leak whenever it rains from then on. So we learned to be very careful where we touched the top, so we wouldn’t have to be dragging our cots

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around to get away from the leaks. We were very glad to have a wood floor, though, since the paths were muddy and the haystack too soggy for sleeping. I did occasionally sleep in the haystack when the weather was dry, till I woke up one morning with both eyes swollen shut—my eyelids had been bitten by spiders during my sleep. After that, I was wary of the haystack. We children were all eager to join in any of the camp activities that we were old enough to undertake. We could join discussion groups, and of course went to the evening campfires where there would be announcements and discussion about our building programs, some-times a talk or poetry readings, and usually music. Often our mother sang folk songs or spirituals, accompanying herself on the guitar, and there was all-group sing-ing as well. During the day, much time was occupied with the various building and cooking chores, all of which were done by volunteer labor. Teenagers were allowed to earn their camp tuition by taking on a part-time job. Under the supervision of skilled adult volunteer vegetarian cooks, groups of teenage girls worked in the kitchen, set tables, served food, washed dishes, and helped with the cooking. The older teenage boys did most of the cutting and chopping of wood—there were many fallen logs on the property, and the men and older boys would set up a log on saw horses and cut it into rounds with a cross-cut saw. The rounds could then be split into firewood, which was carted in wheel

Viva Emmons

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barrows and piled in neat woodpiles beside the community kitchen and next to the men’s and women’s “solariums” for heating bath water. Wood was also placed at several places for the use of campers, as small wood stoves were installed in some of the new small cabins that were being built around the central clearing. After I was about thirteen, I began to join the men and boys in some of the building work. I learned how to split shakes from a fallen cedar log—we used a gadget called a “frue” (a long wedge-shaped blade with a handle, set perpendicular to the blade, that provided good leverage)—and how to lay flooring and nail up tongue-and-groove siding. And I sometimes took a turn chopping wood. But mostly, my duties were in the community kitchen and dining hall. The camp acquired a battered old pick-up truck for hauling materials from the ferry docks to the camp. It broke down repeatedly, but there were always people who could tinker with it and keep it running. The older boys also used it for collecting garbage and trash, and when it wasn’t otherwise needed, the boys were allowed to use it to drive us younger kids over to a spring-water lake on the other side of East Sound, to go swimming. I don’t think there were any legal limits in those days on how many people could be packed into a car, but we certainly exceeded whatever limits there might have been. We children filled the truck bed, and some stood on the running boards and hung on at the open windows. The lake was in a state park, so there were rest rooms where we could change into our swimming suits. The water was very cold, but there was a beach where sand had been trucked in to make a sandy bottom, and we could swim out to a raft where we could dive. As I remember, there was no life guard. Were there any adults who came along to keep an eye on our safety? I simply don’t remember, but there must have been. We had a wonderful time, and were pleasantly tired and hungry when we got back to the camp. Once each summer, there was a hiking trip up to the top of Mt. Constitution—this was a 3,000-ft. “mountain” on the east side of the island. There was a road part way up, and from the end of the road to the top we carried back packs with our blanket rolls and spent the night at the top. There was a cart that carried food and

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water and firewood—I think a horse was hired for the occasion to pull it. There was a fire pit where a grill could be set up across stones. If I remember correctly, no real cooking was done—we vegetarians of course couldn’t grill hot dogs or hamburgers, but casseroles had been brought, which could be eaten cold, and we could make sandwiches. The grill was used to heat hot water for hot drinks, which were especially welcome in the morning after we had spent a cold night sleeping on rough ground. A number of times during the summer, when the tide was right in the evening (not too high, not too low), a group of teenagers would build a campfire on “Far East Beach”—a gravel beach at the end of the camp’s frontage on East Sound. We would go swimming, come out shivering, and change out of our wet suits behind a clump of trees at the end of the beach. Then we could warm up at the fire and roast marshmallows and tell stories and sing. The water was very cold (around 55oF), but it was worth it. There were one or two times during the summer when the level of phosphorescence in the water was especially high. If you swam at night, the movement of your legs made glowing clouds of light under the surface, and your arms made sparks on the surface of the water. This was especially wonderful on nights when there was no moon—only millions of stars. A new building was built on the edge of the meadow: the “Tepee.” It was a round building with a pointed rooftop, open around the sides, with a sturdy wooden floor and a large stone fireplace and chimney at one side. This was a place where teenagers could gather in the evening. We would bring our sleeping bags, and build a big fire, and tell ghost stories before we fell asleep. We’d return sleepy-eyed to our parents’ cottages in the morning to wash and change clothes, and then go over to the community dining platform for break-fast. I don’t remember that there was ever a grown-up “chaperone” for these “overnights,” but none was needed. Of course there were “romances,” but it was understood that any physical displays of affection were to be kept strictly private. By present-day standards, our sexuality was incredibly muted. My boyfriend, Cyril Toren, was a shy, sweet boy about my own age, from Vancouver, B.C. We were intensely idealistic, and

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talked about the meaning of life and about utopian plans for a better world, wrote poetry to each other, exchanged photos, and day-dreamed about each other, but never got beyond the point of holding hands. Several couples who met each other at the camp married in later years—my

sister Sue was one of these. One of her boyfriends, Austin Bee, played the trumpet, and we all remember hearing the sound of his horn out in the woods where he went to play “Sweet Sue.” He was a very handsome fellow. They married and became the parents of two girls, Carol and Helen, who grew up spending summers at the camp. Helen Bee has played central roles in the camp’s

management and support up to the present time. She and her mathematician husband, Carl de Boor, have built a retirement home on the island and now live there most of the year. Looking back, I wonder about how the care of the younger children was managed at the camp. Adults were too busy with camp activities, not all of which could include the youngest ones. My youngest sister, Joan, who spent the summer there every year from her infancy on, has told me in recent years that she and Johnny Kunz (almost exactly her own age) went unsupervised much of the time as preschoolers, and did get into a good deal of mischief. Indeed, they were exposed to dangers that the adults were unaware of: e.g., they sneaked down the slippery path to the float where the camp’s sailboat was

The Teepee

Cyril Toren

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moored, and more than once got lost in the woods but managed to find their way out, in the process floundering into patches of nettles. It seems to have been the kind of unfettered early childhood that some reformers have thought to be ideal. I believe my parents must have thought that everybody in the community would keep an eye on young children and keep them from getting into trouble, a belief that has been shared in other communal settings; but in actuality it often turns out that when everybody is responsible nobody is responsible. As far as our own mother was concerned, I realize that she had long depended on Gaga’s reliable presence to cover her for child care, but Gaga didn’t go with us to Orcas (perhaps because the rough ground was too difficult for her painful feet). So Mother had complex logistics to deal with, what with her own children being of such disparate ages, and surveillance difficult given the nature of the terrain. In addition, she was intently focused on the camp activities themselves. Dad, of course, was there only on weekends for much of the summer and, when there, was very busy with building. Each year, I became more involved in the discussions of Theosophical thought that occurred at the camp. The intellectual leader was Fritz Kunz, who came every year to lecture and lead discussions. I asked a lot of questions, and Fritz patiently took time to talk with me. I respected him. More and more, I became a believer. By age 13, I had begun to read the works of Sir William Crookes, an English chemist, who made a careful study of spiritualism and concluded that his work supported some of the mediums’ claims that they could contact the dead. Arthur Conan Doyle also wrote in the same vein. There was a dense book by a German named von Schrenck-Notzing that I struggled through. It also recounted evidence in favor of the validity of spiritualist claims. It wasn’t until about age 16 that I began to have serious doubts (about which I’ll say more later) and began to read the work of skeptics who unmasked some of the better-known mediums and exposed the trickery whereby they created their effects. Although those years were a time of deep economic depression, I do not remember much in the way of political discussion at the camp,

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although many people were strong pacifists and favored the liberation of colonized parts of the world, especially India and Indonesia. At the camp, people lived very simply. They dressed in jeans and work shirts, and felt close to the earth. They had strong ethical principles about being good stewards of the plant and animal life that shared our acres (rabbits were plentiful, and gardens had to be

guarded from deer). There was no telephone at the camp, and I don’t remember anyone bringing a radio. You had to drive three miles into town to make a phone call or buy a newspaper. A number of adults sought out quiet places in the forest where they could meditate. In a way, it was a place of refuge from some of the harsh realities of daily life in the tense cities where we spent the rest of the year. It was certainly a benign place for teenagers.

Eleanor, age 13

CHAPTER EIGHT

School From my first day in kindergarten, I always loved school. Having already learned to read and quickly learning my numbers, I was soon skipped a grade. This means that I was always one of the smaller children in the class, and often was seated toward the front of the class. I liked to sit farther back, though, because then I could more easily deal with the major problem I faced: I was left- handed. In those days, teachers made determined efforts to train left-handers to write with their right hands. I tried, but it was very difficult, and I would switch hands whenever I thought I could get away with it. When I was writing at the blackboard no concealment was possible, so I did learn to use my right hand there—it was easier because the letters were larger. At my desk, I usually used my left hand, but to write comfortably meant turning my paper with a slant opposite to the slant adopted by all the right-handed children. I noticed, too, that the teacher would glance down the row of children and only come to correct me if my paper was slanted the wrong way. So I began to slant my paper in the right-handed direction, and write with my left hand across the top, pointing down. Of course if I was working with a pen, that could be messy, since my hand would slide over what I had just written. With considerable effort, I learned to be reasonably neat with my upside-down left-handed writing, and to write as quickly as the other children. I don’t know whether my teachers simply didn’t notice or just gave up, but throughout my schooling I continued to use my right hand at the blackboard and my left on paper. My handwriting was never

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very good-looking, though. I have always enjoyed receiving handwritten letters from my parents or my sisters—their handwriting was beautiful. In grade school, I seldom had a close friend. By third grade, the boys made it clear that I wasn’t welcome when I crossed over to their playground to play marbles. When I was old enough to ride a bicycle, I rode back and forth to school by myself. I spent my spare time reading, sometimes extra school books assigned by the teacher. In one of these, I read about the covered wagons the pioneers used as they traveled into the unsettled West. I was fascinated to read about the Pony Express, when a bag of mail was taken by riders who would ride about forty miles on one horse and then jump onto a fresh horse for another forty and so forth, till mail was carried vast distances across the West in a surprisingly short time. This fired my imagination, and I organized a game during recess where the largest girls would serve as ponies and the littlest girls as riders, and we galloped around the playground from one change-of-horses station to another. This game was exciting for about a week, as we tried each day to beat our time record from the day before. But after that we went back to jump rope, squares, and jacks. In about the sixth grade, I had one friend—a girl named Claire Geiger who lived in Old Town, and whose father worked in the smelter. The grass in their yard was brown and all their shrubs stunted—the smoke from the smelter’s smokestack badly polluted the air and soil for a large neighborhood around it. Claire was lonely, not being accepted in the cliques of girls from the better-off families who made up the majority of girls in our grade school. I felt sorry for her, and she attached herself to me as a kind of satellite. I resolved to teach her about Theosophy and wrote a short book for her entitled Living the Life of a Theosophist. Somehow Mother and Dad found this book—they laughed over it, and kept it to show to me when I was grown. Rather embarrassing. It was full of good advice for Claire—one item being that to maintain good health it was wise to have your bowels removed once a day. I got good grades in grade school, and was always proud to bring my report card home to my parents. Dad gave us 25 cents for

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every A. I remember he once looked at my card and said sternly, “What is this B doing here?” Although I certainly wasn’t pleased over getting a B, I didn’t experience Dad’s remark at the time as unwelcome pressure to do well—I think I simply assumed that I would always do the best I could. Junior high school was more interesting—a greater variety of subjects and teachers. One day my English teacher wrote a list of eleven topics on the blackboard, and our assignment was to choose one of the topics and write a poem about it. Perhaps you have gathered by this time that I was an over-achiever, so you can guess what I did. I wrote eleven poems, one on each topic! Looking back on this, I realize that doing this sort of thing could certainly not have been the high road to popularity among my peers, but I wasn’t thinking of what their reactions might be. I was not consciously trying to show off to them—perhaps I simply wanted to impress the teacher. Or else I simply did it because I could. I loved writing verses. Both Dad and I had a talent for rhyming, and we would write verses to accompany our Christmas or birthday presents to family members. I loved the great rhyming poets, and remember sitting on the school steps with several girls, chanting, “I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills,” and rocking back and forth to the rhythm of the words. Physically, I was a late bloomer, and remained one of the smallest kids clear through the ninth grade. So boys didn’t notice me. But I did experience my first serious crush. Two exceptional boys arrived at our school—boys no one knew. They were Hugh and Keith Thompson. Their father was the drama critic for the New York Times. His wife had died, and he had brought the boys to live for a year or two with their maternal grandmother while he reorganized his life. The boys had been going to elite schools and spoke differently than the rest of us. I now realize that it was a kind of Rooseveltian upper-class New York accent. They had beautiful manners. I thought Hugh was the handsomest boy I had ever seen. I went to the front office and looked up his class schedule so I would know where he would be walking from one class to the next. I managed to walk past him several times a day so that I could see

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him—of course I never expected him to notice me. He spoke to me only once—to tell me that the seams of my stockings were crooked and I needed to straighten them. I felt humiliated, but continued to daydream about him. At the time there was a popular song called For You—“Oh there’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t do, for you, for you.” I would sing it to myself, changing the words to “For Hugh, For Hugh.” High school in Tacoma included the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades. For me, it was a new and different and wonderful world. For one thing, I had begun to develop physically, though I was still short. Each year we put on a musical in the spring—one year it was the Vagabond King, one year Naughty Marietta, and in senior year, the Desert Song. Of course I loved the songs and was an enthusiastic singer. We dressed in period costumes, and for the first time I put on a long, feminine gown with a low-cut neckline and wore makeup. Mother said, “Bobby, we have to do something about your hair.” By that time I had let it grow out from its boyish haircut, and Mother helped me curl it. Boys began to notice me and I noticed them. I began to like being attractive and paid more attention to how I looked. I was asked out on dates by one or two of the more popular boys in school. One of them actually drove his father’s car, which was memorable since almost none of the young people at Stadium High had access to a car. With my sisters at home I practiced some of the current dance steps—we did the Charleston and the Tango among other things. Sue and Helen and I formed a trio, and began to practice renditions of some of the currently popular songs. For a brief while we had a little radio program on Saturday mornings on the local radio station. We billed ourselves as “The Emmons Sisters” and practiced to see whether we could emulate the Andrews sisters. But we quickly ran out of repertoire, and were too busy with our school activities to devote time to building it up. As far as dating was concerned, I wasn’t good at flirting and wasn’t ready for the “necking” that seemed to be what the boys expected. And I found the “popular” kids rather dull (they probably thought the same about me). So though I continued to enjoy singing in the chorus and in the yearly musicals, and did continue to take more care about my appearance, I drifted away from the popular crowd and soon found an entirely different circle

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of friends: the kids who were putting out the school paper. It was fun becoming news editor. My friends there were rather nerdish people who were skeptical about many things I had taken for granted. In particular they were scornful about some of my Theosophical beliefs. We argued about extra-sensory perception, and I told them that there was solid experimental evidence for its validity. They doubted it. So we decided to try some experimental testing. At that time a psychologist by the name of J. B. Rhine, at Duke University, had been publishing studies of thought transference and claimed considerably better-than-chance results. We decided to repeat some of his experiments. I wrote to him at Duke, asking for a deck of his Zenar cards, which he obligingly sent me. Each card had one of five symbols printed on its face. You were supposed to place the deck face down on the table between the sender and the receiver. The sender would pick up one card at a time, and think the image that was on it, attempting to “send” the image to the receiver seated opposite. The receiver had a record sheet for recording which of the five possible images he believed the sender was trying to project. If the receiver got only 20% right, that would be a chance score, reflecting no transmission of thought. Rhine claimed to have been consistently getting 10% to 20% above chance. Using several different senders and several different receivers, we too got somewhere between 10% and 20% above chance, and I thought I had made my point. But then one of the skeptics suggested putting the sender and receiver in different rooms. Immediately, the results dropped to chance level. I was startled. We speculated about what unintentional cues the sender might be providing for the receiver. We noticed that the backs of some of the cards had been faintly embossed by a kind of shadow of the image, probably because some of the images had been stamped on too hard. But no sender or receiver consciously noticed this. Another possibility was that the sender was watching the receiver record the message, and might have been giving faint body

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cues distinguishing right from wrong answers. Whatever the explanation, it was evident to me that the evidence I had thought was so “scientific” was nothing of the kind. That was the beginning of my gradual disillusionment about Theosophy.

CHAPTER NINE

The Beginnings of Political Activism In my junior year in high school, I joined the debating club. The other students in the club—as well as those on the school paper—were lively minded kids, and we had rousing discussions about current events. The year was 1933—the country was in deep depression, and Franklin D. Roosevelt had just become president. At home, we were listening to his fireside chats. At the same time, I was taking a course on civics, taught by one of the athletic coaches named Mr. Lowman. He was a storehouse of all kinds of lore about the U.S. Constitution and how it came into being. I developed something of a crush on Mr. Lowman, and listened to him avidly. We learned about the judicial, legislative and executive branches of our government, and about how these were intended to function together to serve the best interests of the citizenry as a whole. This knowledge merged in my mind with New Deal thinking about political and economic reform. Along with my school friends, I grew more and more fired up with indignation about the critical state of our nation and more and more interested in the political ideologies related to unemployment and other aspects of the deep depression. We decided to form a group that would meet outside of school hours. We called ourselves the Junior Progressive Club, and during my junior year, we began to meet weekly in the lower-level meeting room of the Theosophical Society’s building. The group expanded to include a few students at the local College of Puget Sound and some unemployed youths who were no longer in school. We set ourselves a reading agenda, including books by George Bernard Shaw, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Marx and

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Engels, Sinclair Lewis, Butler (the title of his book, Erewhon, invokes “nowhere” spelled backward) and muckraking books such as Merchants of Death. In discussing these books, we collectively drifted more and more toward a pacifist viewpoint, but also toward socialism as well. Were we naïve? Oh yes. We had heard about the National Socialist movement in Germany, and invited to one of our meetings two young English-speaking officers from the German goodwill ship, the Karlsruhe. The ship was making a goodwill tour of the West Coast at that time, and currently docked at Tacoma. Two handsome, articulate young Germans who spoke good English came to explain National Socialism to our club. As I remember it, we were quite confused about what they meant by their brand of socialism. It wasn’t until later that the real Nazi ideology became clear to us. In any case, we continued with our own explorations of left-wing thought, and in my senior year I joined the Young People’s Socialist League, becoming what was known as a Yipsel. During that year I spent a good deal of time after school with a “boy-friend,” Walter Griffith, who was one of the more active members of the club. He and his sister were members of the local tennis club, and they taught me to play tennis. We talked about the books we were reading and our reactions to what some of our fellow club members had said. Our relationship was overtly platonic—our secret thoughts about each other were just that: secret. These days, many people seem to think that strong anti-communist sentiments occurred mainly in the post–World War II McCarthy days, but

Walter Griffith

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the fact is that they sometimes got to fever pitch during the early 1930s. After all, the Russian Revolution had occurred in the relatively recent past, and there were fears that it would spread across Europe and even into the United States. In 1933, the Tacoma city council passed two ordinances. One forbade the display of a red flag anywhere in town. The second required that at any public gathering including three or more people, an American flag of at least two feet by three feet in size must be displayed. Several people in our little club walked around down town carrying flags of the requisite size, and signs that said: “I am prepared to meet two friends. Are you?” And of course, the Socialist Party flag is a plain red flag. As it happened, Norman Thomas, the socialist candidate for president, was scheduled to visit Tacoma in 1933. He sent a telegram to the city council, announcing that the Socialist flag would be displayed at the large meeting where he was to speak. All of us Young Socialists attended this packed meeting, and we watched with bated breath as Thomas entered the back of the hall and walked down the center aisle, flanked by two men, one carrying the Socialist Party red flag and the other a large American flag. They marched up onto the stage, and waited for several long minutes to see whether any city officials would arrive to arrest them. But nothing happened. Thomas spoke, and the ordinances were dead. In 1933–34 (my senior year in high school) there was a longshoremen’s strike up and down the West Coast. The leader was Harry Bridges, the head of the International Longshoremen’s Association, who was feared and despised by many conservatives, idealized by many leftists. A number of us from our little club went down to the waterfront in Tacoma to join the strikers’ picket lines. I believe it was on one of those occasions that I met a young man from Seattle—he was the editor of a small leftist newspaper. He invited me to a dance, and I agreed with considerable curiosity. Dances were not something that I associated with the radical movement. He picked me up in his shabby car. He told me that we had to stop on the way to pick up another couple who were also going to the dance. We did so, and it took me a while to realize from

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the conversation that the man in the back seat was Harry Bridges (his strong Australian accent helped to make it clear). When we entered the dance hall, all eyes were, of course, focused on him. When we danced together I learned a few things about him. First of all, he was a terrible dancer. But beyond that he kept looking over my shoulder and never even looked at me. In retrospect I realize there’s no reason why he should have been interested in a little sixteen-year-old high school student. But it soon became obvious, from the way he looked around the room to see how many people were looking at him and admiring him, that he had an oversized ego. I was naïve enough that I didn’t realize at the time what kind of event this was, but I learned later that it was a Communist Party dance. I might not have gone if I had known—we young Socialists were beginning to be wary and defensive toward Communists. They had a reputation for trying to take over any small leftist group they knew about. But our little group was too insignificant for their attention. We in the Junior Progressive Club were in touch with a group of leftish students at the University of Washington in Seattle. They let us know that they planned a pacifist protest demonstration on Army Day, when the American Legion was planning to have a parade in Seattle. Our Seattle friends invited us to join their activities. We responded with enthusiasm. In our weekly meetings, we had discussed two pacifist books—Peace with Honor, by A. A. Milne, and Merchants of Death, by Engelbrecht and Hanighen. Published in the 1920s, the Merchants book made a wide impact, partly because one of its authors was known to be a conservative, so the book could not be labeled as a left-wing polemic. It did document the political power that was exercised by the armaments industry during and after World War I. It became a central text for the pacifist movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Our little group had become fervently pacifist. Army Day was in June. It was an occasion commemorating the date, about 140 years earlier, when the new United States, in carrying out the directives of its new Constitution, had taken over the militias that had belonged to separate states, creating instead a U. S. Army. Army Day came at the end of the school year for those

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of us who were still in school. For us graduating seniors, it marked the last meeting the “Junior Progressive Club” would have before we departed for our first college years. So it was in the spirit of a kind of bittersweet celebration that we got ready for our adventure in Seattle. How were we going to get there? I asked my dad if we could use one of his (two?) company trucks—a moderate-sized one, which was like a large pickup that would accommodate 20 or so people sitting on the floor in the enclosed back. Dad agreed with two stipulations—it would have to be driven by his own company driver; and we had to have an adult “chaperone.” We recruited a young Unitarian minister who was a pacifist and had attended some of our discussion meetings. He was sympathetic with what our club was doing. After lunch on Army Day, a group of about 15 of us piled into the back of the truck, mostly sitting along the front and sides where we had back support, and set out joyfully for Seattle. We sang on the way, and there was a party atmosphere. When we got to the place where we were meeting with the Seattle contingent, they told us the plan for the afternoon, and what our role in it was to be. They had registered with the American Legion to enter two vehicles in the line of vehicles that would drive in the parade, passing the reviewing stand where a group of current high-level army officers and officials of veterans’ organizations would be seated. The American Legion organizers of the parade were especially delighted to welcome a group of university students who described themselves as patriots. At that time, University of Washington students—like students almost everywhere—had the reputation of being disputatious pacifists who were scornful of all things military. This event, the American Legion’s officials thought, would be an opportunity to show that there were students who were pro-army and pro-veteran. A large hall located at the end of the parade route was the place where all the participants in the parade, as well as the general public who had been watching it, would gather to hear patriotic speeches by some of the people who had been on the reviewing stand.

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The University of Washington students’ plan was that they would put two trucks in the parade, festooned on the outside with patriotic slogans. Then when they got close to the reviewing stand they would pull off the patriotic banners and reveal underneath slogans of a very different kind. One of these, as I remember, was “Billions for armaments, $l.20 a week for the unemployed.” Our Tacoma group’s role would be to position ourselves in the hall where people were expected to go after the parade. Most of us wore knee-length raincoats, under which we could hide our Peace banners and leaflets, and sneak them into the auditorium. We were to sit in the front row of the balcony. At the moment when the first speaker had been introduced and rose to speak, we were to roll our banners down over the edge of the balcony, and shower leaflets down onto the people seated below us. These leaflets invited people to leave the auditorium and come to a peace meeting a few blocks away. We got to the auditorium just before the parade was to begin. We found that there were two staircases up to the balcony, but they joined together at the top so that in fact there would be only one exit from the balcony when the time came for us to leave. At first, everything went according to plan. We in the Tacoma group of course didn’t see the parade, but heard afterward what had happened. When the student trucks in the parade pulled off their outside banners and revealed the slogans that were underneath, people in the reviewing stand were aghast and the American Legion organizers began to shout and surround our trucks, trying to move them out of the parade line. We had expected, however, that the parade vehicles would be too close together, and the crowd too densely packed along the sides of the parade route, for the trucks to move in any way other than going straight ahead to the end of the parade route. This proved to be the case. When the student trucks got to the end of the route, however, they were attacked by American Legion “troops,” one of whom, according to the heated reports of our Seattle colleagues, attacked our people with an axe.

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The crowd did pour into the auditorium where we were already stationed. I, as leader of the Tacoma contingent, was seated in the middle of the front row of the balcony, and boys from our group were sitting on each side of me. When the first speaker stood up, we all rolled down our banners and threw out our leaflets as far as we could over the heads of the crowd below. There was pandemonium. We heard feet pounding up the balcony stairs, and shouts of “Kill them! Kill the reds!” Legion men came rushing down the balcony stairs to the front row and began to grab some of us very roughly. They grabbed the two fellows on my right and left, but left me alone. I should explain that at age just seventeen, I looked younger, and always somehow looked like a nice, upper-middle-class young girl. I suppose they couldn’t imagine that I was actually involved in the nefarious activity they hated so. I shouted “Take me too!” as they dragged my friends away. One of the fellows they grabbed was a special boyfriend of mine, and I jumped up and followed up the balcony stairs to the point where the stairs going down began. Two Legionnaires were dragging my friend down the stairs by his feet, with his head bumping from stair to stair, and I was running alongside begging them to stop and trying to protect my friend’s head. All to no avail—things were happening very fast. Three of our group were arrested and taken off to the county jail. Some of us followed and, with the help of our “chaperone,” tried to see what could be done to get them released. But we were entirely naïve when it came to dealing with police and had no money for bail. We were told they would be held overnight and released the next day. The rest of us gathered at the place where Dad’s truck and driver were waiting and climbed in for the trip home. We were in a strange mood. We were partly exhilarated over what we had been through and by the feeling of being righteous martyrs, but we were also anxious about our jailed friends; we were tired and greatly sobered over the violence we had experienced. What we had thought of as a high-minded protest had turned ugly. Some realities had stung us. We were very quiet in the darkness on the ride home. There was no singing, and only a few

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short whispered conversations. Mostly, we were each thinking our own thoughts. The next day, two of our members and the Unitarian minister went over to Seattle to bring our jailbirds home. Meanwhile, I was interviewed by a reporter from the Tacoma Tribune, and the next day there was an indignant story on the front page about a group of well-meaning Tacoma young people who had been roughed up in Seattle. My name as an Emmons girl appeared, and Dad took some ribbing from his friends at the Kiwanis club, which met for lunch the next day. (I might mention that he ate meat at the club lunches, though never at home.) Dad was a lifelong Republican, and in looking back, I realize how remarkable it was that he continued to allow our little group to use the basement room in the Theosophical Hall for our meetings, and even more remarkable that he loaned us his truck for our Seattle adventure. Did he not realize how leftish our group had become? Of course, I hadn’t told him exactly what we’d be up to—I didn’t know myself—but he probably assumed we were simply going to have a joint discussion meeting with like-minded University of Washington students. He never said a word of criticism to me about our adventure, not even about my spreading the news through the Tacoma newspaper. As far as I remember, we never talked about it to each other. The Junior Progressive Club never met again. The members scattered for their various summer activities. Each of us was thinking toward the coming year, when several of us who had been the group’s leaders were heading off to colleges away from Tacoma. Some of us did keep in touch over the years, but clearly, after June 1934, a chapter in our lives had closed.

CHAPTER TEN

My Last Orcas Summer That was a strange summer. In the spring, a young man named Don had begun to appear at our Progressive Club meetings. He was somewhat older than the rest of us high school kids. No one seemed to know him, and he didn’t quite fit in. He did not have the same kind of intense political interests that the rest of us did, and he was not particularly attractive. But he was a “doer”—available and competent for all kinds of chores. It turned out he was interested in me, and though I didn’t return his personal interest, I couldn’t resist being attracted by one thing about him: he owned a sailboat! How he acquired it I have no idea, for he certainly didn’t have money. It was a sixteen-foot gaff-headed rig with no motor and one oar you could use to help with landing and takeoff from a dock. There was no cabin, only a central seating space, and space under the deck where gear could be stowed. It had a center board —you only had to pull up the center board to land on a beach in shallow water. It was ideal for sailing among the numerous Puget Sound islands and exploring the shores of Tacoma’s Commencement Bay. Don taught me how to steer, how to use the rudder to “come about,” how to

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avoid the swing of the boom, how to raise and lower the sails. When we sailed into the wind, the boat would keel over, and we both had to sit on the upward side of the boat and lean back, to keep it from tipping over. Very exciting. The boat was moored at the Tacoma Yacht Club. The yacht club was tucked in the lee of a long spit of what looked like volcanic ash, but I soon learned that it was a point of land being continually built up from molten slag. The huge Guggenheim smelter was smelting copper and other ore, and a by-product of the smelting processing was a thick fiery soup of molten waste that had to be disposed of. Dumping it into Puget Sound was the method of choice. A looped rail line ran out to the end of the spit, and periodically rail carts carrying huge slag buckets would run out to the end of the loop and dump molten slag into the cold water of the Sound. Of course there were great clouds of steam and loud hissing as the molten metal hit the very cold water of the Sound. At night it was a dramatic sight: from some distance, you could see the red glow of the hot slag as it poured out in a fiery stream to the water. On one occasion we were sailing in to the club dock at a time when slag was being poured. The wind was gusty, and we were having trouble controlling the boat. We got too close to the end of the spit, and the water began to boil around us. We got a favorable gust at the crucial moment that swept us away from the spit. When we got to the dock we discovered that the paint on the bottom of the boat was blistered from the intense heat we had sailed through, but we ourselves were unharmed except that our faces looked and felt slightly sunburned. Of course, I never told my parents what had happened because they were already uneasy about our sailing expeditions. When the time came for our family to go up to our usual summer residence on Orcas Island, Don decided to sail his boat up there, and he arrived there a few days after we did. He would take small groups of kids from the camp out for sailboat rides, and that of course was a favorite adventure for them all. I happily rejoined my favorite friends from camp, and Don became interested in a girl

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from Vancouver, so whatever personal tension there had been between us was quickly gone. At the end of camp, Don was to sail back to Tacoma, and to take his girlfriend with him. They invited me to go too, but my parents would agree only if we had an adult with us. Dr. Tomlinson, a professor at the College of Puget Sound, agreed to come with us, so we four set out, with sleeping bags and jugs of water and some food and a hatchet tucked away in the hold. Puget Sound has dozens of small uninhabited islands, crowned with trees—they look something like birthday cakes. Most of them have one or two gravel beaches, and are totally undeveloped because they have no water. We planned to bed down on one of these beaches on each night of our three-day trip. At midday the first day, we found a little town on a nearby island and got some lunch there. That night we found a deserted beach, found some chunks of drift wood and some brush wood we could cut into kindling, built a fire and heated some of our food in a pan we had brought along. We gathered some branches from the little fir and pine trees near the beach, and laid them out at the top of the beach where high tide wouldn’t reach them, to soften somewhat the gravelly surface we would be sleeping on. We talked till we were sleepy and settled down in our sleeping bags to a rather uncomfortable but beautifully starry night. The next day we spent most of the daylight hours in fairly open water, and began to worry whether we would find an accessible camping spot, but at sundown we did find a suitable island and beached our boat to get settled for another evening meal and sleepover. By the time it was pitch dark we had built our fire and finished our meal. Then we heard the sound of a motor boat coming toward us. It came closer, but it wasn’t running any lights. This was a suspicious thing—we were very close to the border between the United States and Canada, and we knew the islands had always been favorite hideouts for smugglers. The boat beached fairly close to our campfire, and by our firelight we could see several dark

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figures jumping off the boat onto the beach. We called out, “Where you from?” and a gruff voice answered, “Cross the border.” We talked softly among ourselves about whether we should take turns standing watch during the night. Then a man from the mystery boat came over to us—we could now see that he was an Indian (nowadays we would say “Native American”), who asked whether he could borrow our hatchet. We were startled at the idea of an Indian taking our hatchet, but gave it to him, and they cut brush for a fire and returned our hatchet. We talked, and it turned out that they were members of the Sanich Five tribe from Vancouver Island, and were on their way to compete in the war- canoe races that were held each year on Whidbey Island. The next morning we could see the beautiful long hand-carved war canoe tied securely upside down on the top of their boat. They asked us if we would like to see the races. If we did, we could go along with them. We explained that we might not be able to get there on time because of the unpredictability of the wind. They said their boat had plenty of power, they’d be glad to tow us. So we happily agreed, and sped across the water behind their boat at the end of a tow rope. As we got closer to Whidbey Island, we began to hear the beat of tom-toms across the water, “UMP-pa-pa-pa, UMP-pa-pa-pa”—the sound getting louder and louder as we got closer to the town of Coupeville, where the races were to be held the next day. The town was buzzing with a carnival atmosphere. There were booths with barkers, and shooting galleries, and cotton candy. There was also a clearing where young Indian women in native costume and one man with a chief’s feathered headdress were doing Indian dancing. My companions ate hot dogs, but I had to look for something vegetarian. I can’t remember what I found but I didn’t go hungry. We bedded down that night in a farmer’s barn. The next morning, the races began. The first was an event for fairly small two-man canoes. A course was marked off with buoys, and at the crack of a starting pistol the contestants began to paddle their canoes as fast as they could down the marked course. When the gun went off again, they all jumped out of their canoes

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into the water and rapidly sank their canoes. Then they began to lift them up, swinging the canoes side to side to spill out all the water, till the men could get in again. One man got in at the front on the left side, the other man got in at the back on the right side, balancing each other carefully to keep the canoe from tipping. Then they paddled on rapidly till the gun went off again. Three times during the course of the race they had to jump out, sink their canoes, get back in, and rush toward the finish line. There were eight or ten canoes in the race, and by the end they were strung out in a line with the men still all paddling with all their might. The next race was for smaller, one-man canoes. In this one, the contestant had to paddle as fast as possible toward a floating log, which was just barely visible in the water. They rushed directly at the log and the curved front end of the canoe would slide up onto it. The paddler then ran swiftly forward with his paddle so that his weight would tilt the canoe down over the far side of the log as the contestant frantically resumed paddling. The trick was, of course, to avoid tipping the canoe when it was balanced precariously on the top of the log. This trick, too, had to be repeated several times during the course of the race. The great event of the day was the war-canoe race. Each gleaming, polished canoe held ten men sitting one behind the other, alternate men paddling on the left side of the canoe while the others paddled on the right. The course for this race was quite long, and the crews were able to pick up impressive speed. We were stationed at the finish line, and were thrilled to be there to see our Sanich Five tribe take first place. We hung around to congratulate them, then took off on our journey home. We started off under the high bridge that connected Whidbey Island to the mainland. We had no idea, though, that we were entering feared Deception Pass, famous among yachtsmen and fishermen for its large powerful whirlpools. These usually appeared at the turn of the tide, and were thought to be capable of sucking down a small boat like ours. We went happily through, enjoying the fast flow of water that was rushing us along, blissfully

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unaware of how lucky we were to have hit the tide at just the right time. We arrived in Tacoma tired, hungry, and content.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Off to College

My parents and I had always had a tacit understanding that I would go to college. But during my senior year of high school (1933–34), my father’s business was on the verge of bankruptcy. I realized that if I were able to go to college at all the next year, it would obviously have to be at the University of Washington in Seattle, where low in-state tuitions would be available. In the spring of my senior year, however, recruiters from Reed College in Oregon came to Stadium High to recruit students. I heard from them about Reed’s rigorous academic program and high scholastic standards, and that there would be opportunities for individual studies with faculty members. I was fired up with an intense longing to go to Reed, and applied for a scholarship. I didn’t think I would have

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much chance because we were not really poor (at least, not yet), but lo and behold, I was awarded a full-tuition scholarship for one year. So Mother and I got busy assembling the things I would need—I actually got a few new clothes that were not hand-me-downs from Sue. That was a thrill in itself. And the prospect of living apart from my family for the first time was scary and wonderful at the same time. We packed everything in Dad’s car and he drove me down to Portland. The college was located in the Westmoreland district—the southeastern section of Portland, about two miles east of the Willamette River. We drove into Reed’s beautiful campus, which looked exactly the way I thought a good college ought to look, with a central greensward surrounded by dignified brick buildings. The student residence area had lovely established trees, both conifers and spreading deciduous trees, and also recently planted young firs. We found the building where we were to check in. I had no idea what kind of living arrangement to expect. We learned that I was to have a roommate, who hadn’t arrived yet, and that our room was to be in Anna Mann Cottage. Anna Mann was a nice-looking house that I believe had once been the home of one of Reed’s early presidents. It now housed about 16–20 girls. Someone escorted us over and showed us my new room—it was on the second floor, close to the top of the short flight of stairs that led up from the first-floor entry hall and social room. It turned out that my roommate and I would have a two-room suite—a living room and a bedroom. The living room had some bookcases, two desks, some soft chairs and a fireplace! The bedroom had two single beds, two small chests of drawers, and a closet. Our windows looked down on the soccer field, beyond which was a row of trees, a road, and still farther away, a golf course. It was a beautiful scene. Dad and I were both very pleased to see what my new quarters would be like. He helped me carry up my belongings and get them stowed away, and we put up a few decorative things on the walls. The next step was to go over to the campus bookstore to buy the books that had been assigned for my first-semester courses. For

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freshmen, Reed had two year-long required courses—one in literature and the other in history. Our history text was a large, dense book (by Rostovsev, I believe; we called it Rosty) that started a little before the Greeks and swept through the history of Western civilization up to the beginning of modern times. It was expensive, and I remember being worried as I saw Dad handing out the money for this and my other books. Dad started to chat with the student who was waiting on us. It turned out that he was a senior who was the manager of the bookstore, and Dad found out that he was from Tacoma. Dad of course said, “Oh, we’re from Tacoma too!” and he introduced me to the young man, who was a tall Swedish fellow named Ivar Hanson. To my embarrassment, Dad said, “I hope you will look out for my daughter and help her get settled”—to which Ivar agreed, though I couldn’t tell whether there was any enthusiasm on his side. (It turned out later that there was.) After Dad left, my roommate arrived. Her name was Frannie Miller, and we hit it off immediately. We had no trouble agreeing on all the arrangements—who would have which bed, which desk, which end of the closet. She had some keepsakes to put on the mantel and hang up on the walls. Our place began to look quite homey. We went over together that evening for our first meal in the Commons. As we went through the cafeteria line I was able to find an adequate meal, but when I talked with more-experienced students I learned that much of the time the main meal was going to be stew or spaghetti with meatballs, or fish or chicken, with very limited fare for a vegetarian. I talked with the kitchen staff the next day—they had never had a vegetarian student eating at the Commons before, and had no idea what to do. In fact they were irritated with the whole idea of trying to provide something special for me. They settled on giving me a scoop of cottage cheese every night, which I could supplement with potatoes or occasionally macaroni and cheese. Vegetables and salads and fruits were much more limited in those days than they would be today, but of course I made good use of any of these things that were available, so long as they hadn’t been cooked with meat. Occasionally I would walk six or eight blocks up a hill close to the college to a little shopping area where I

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could get a bag of apples and some crackers to keep in my room, but I had very little pocket money so buying my own supplements had to be limited. The next morning Frannie and I explored the academic buildings to locate where our classes were to be. We went into the library, and I felt awed by its high ceilings, its soft light and the quiet serene atmosphere. It had long polished tables in dark wood, and table lamps for reading. Most thrilling of all were the books, wall after wall of them. I had soaked up so many of the books of interest to me in the Tacoma public library that I had been having trouble finding new things I wanted to read. Now here was this wonderful treasure house of new things to browse through. I felt positively greedy over the prospect. When classes began, I learned more about what was expected of us in the Reed class system. For our history course, there was a lecture every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, attended by as many as 100 freshmen, and taught by the much-respected Professor Aragon, who was said by older students to be one of Reed’s really great teachers. Once a week, on Tuesday or Thursday, there were hour-long “conference” meetings, each composed of about ten students, led by either by Prof. Aragon or one of his assistants. In these sections students were questioned individually, and encouraged to speak up. The teachers strove to get discussion going, if possible, among the students rather than just between student and teacher. I, of course, was accustomed to thinking I knew all the answers and to speaking up confidently. It was sobering to be asked to provide evidence to support my assertions, and I began to realize that some of the things I thought I knew were really only opinions. I would bone up on such things after class to be readier next time. I began to have a much clearer idea about what would be satisfactory evidence and what would not. I also realized that there were other students just as accustomed as I was to being the smartest kid in the class—we began to listen to one another’s comments with wary interest.

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We had to write a long term paper for each class each semester, and we learned from other students that Professor Aragon would select a group of eight or ten students whose fall-semester papers he especially liked, and invite them to come to his house for evenings of talk. These would happen once a month or so through the remainder of the year. I slaved over my fall- semester paper and was ecstatic to be among the ones chosen for this privilege. Prof. Aragon had a nice house a block or two from the campus. I think his wife served us lemonade or some sort of punch, and cake or cookies. We would dress carefully and were certainly on our best behavior. I have wondered since whether they ever knew how much these social off-campus evenings meant to us. In retrospect, I realize that everything about this course was very well designed to capture the sustained interest and effort of achievement-driven students like me who had not been really challenged in their earlier student years. I know I was influenced by Aragon’s teaching methods later in my own teaching career. Part of Reed’s educational philosophy was that students should be led to work out of intrinsic interest in the material to be learned instead of just working for grades. So, no grades were given! At least not to us students. I learned later that there actually were secret grades, on a scale of 1 to 10, for each course—records of these were kept in locked files in the administrative offices, for use if a student transferred to another school and needed a transcript. On one occasion a student got a glimpse of all the grades for a given class at the end of a semester, and the excited whisper went around the dinner tables that Oscar Gass, a senior who had just been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, had gotten a 1 in a philosophy class, something the seniors told us was unheard of. (How would they know?) On the whole, though, we didn’t know our grades and didn’t worry about them. Thinking back, I believe we weren’t especially competitive in the sense of trying to show that we were smarter than someone else. We did care a lot, though, about what our teachers thought of our work, and tried hard to prove ourselves to them.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Extracurricular Life at Reed Reed had an outdoor swimming pool, nestled in a deep gorge where a stream flowed through the campus, and we were free to go there anytime during the day. It was fairly cold, and many students avoided it, but I was used to swimming in Puget Sound so it seemed about right to me. In Tacoma, I had begun to learn tennis under the tutelage of Walter Griffith and his sister, whose Tennis Club membership had given me opportunities to learn and practice. At Reed, there were several tennis courts very close to Anna Mann cottage, and I was eager to continue shaping up my game. One day I was watching two girls play, and it was clear that one of them had exceptionally beautiful strokes. I had never seen her at dinner in the commons, and wondered whether perhaps she was a guest. She came over to talk to me and I told her I would love to try my luck—I didn’t yet have anyone to play with, but was certainly not good enough to play with her. She said she’d be glad to coach me, and we began playing regularly. Her name was Muriel Nicholas, nicknamed Eentzie, and she was something of a recluse. She was one of the large group of Day Dodgers who came out to the campus daily from their Portland homes to attend classes, but seldom became part of the campus social life. It turned out that her father was a tennis coach, and one of his main goals in life was to make Eentzie into a world-class tennis champion. From about the age of seven, she had been required to spend an hour or so each day rallying with her father. He would put a handkerchief down on his side of the court, and she had to hit it with a well-controlled forehand drive. She did develop a beautiful game, but she found these practice sessions acutely boring, and resented her father

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because of it. The upshot was, she hated the game of tennis and became a Communist, where she could reject such a bourgeois activity. She liked my company because she hadn’t found anybody else who was willing to argue with her about politics. So for a number of months, she put up with helping me to improve my backhand and occasionally to play an actual game. Toward the spring of my freshman year, however, she dropped out of school, and my interest in tennis began to take second place to other activities. A big part of our social life revolved around meals in the commons. At first I would usually go over with girls in my dorm, but Ivar Hanson began calling me to join him and his friends for dinner. This happened more and more frequently, and he took me to the first dance (a few months into the school year) and before long it was evident that we were “going steady.” Ivar was well known around campus—he was president of the student body as well as manager of the bookstore—so I met a lot of upper classmen and got many tips on what electives to take and other campus lore. And, I had to come to grips with what it meant to be the girlfriend of an older fellow who was becoming more “serious” about our relationship than I was. We went home for Christmas break. Ivar’s family were first-generation Swedish country people who lived just outside of Tacoma, in a tiny town called Fife. They had a tiny farm where they grew vegetables and fruits, and fodder for their cow. In a cool annex to the kitchen Ivar’s mother had a churn, where she

Ivar Hanson

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made butter and curds for cottage cheese from the rich Jersey milk. Ivar took me to meet his parents, and his mother asked me if I would like to help her churn the butter. I agreed willingly, thinking this ought to be easy—after all I thought my arms were pretty strong from tennis and swimming. I was in for a surprise: operating the heavy churn was really heavy work. For the first time I noticed how muscular Mrs. Hanson’s arms were, and realized how easy churning had been for her. She was watching me attentively, and I hated to let her see that I couldn’t really manage it. I did give up, and she silently took over the job and finished it. Of course I felt I had failed a test. Then she took me into the house to show me some intricate stitchery she was working on— she spread it out on the carpet and squatted down on her heels to show it to me—seeming to expect that I would do the same. But I couldn’t get down on my heels—I had to pull up a chair and lean over to look at it. Mr. Johnson was a large man—at least six feet, like his son, but broader. He was hearty and good-natured, and seemed to welcome me, but it was clear that his wife ran the household. Ivar never told me what their verdict about me was—if indeed he ever knew. Taking Ivar over to my house and introducing him to my family was a different story. They were pleased with him, and after some initial shyness he fit right in. It was too early in the year for Dad to subject him to the acid test he reserved for our boyfriends. He had a twenty-foot ladder, which he would stand up against the top branches of our pear tree, so that it was very nearly vertical, and invite the visiting young man to help him pick the pears at the top. Dad would stand back and wait for the boy to start climbing. It looked (and was!) precarious. But of course at Christmas time Ivar didn’t have to run this particular gauntlet. When we got back to Reed I began to accompany Ivar on his nightly rounds. Since he had to earn the full cost of his years at Reed, he took some odd jobs. One of them was to close up Elliott Hall at night—check to see that offices were locked, windows closed, heat turned down, etc. When he would turn out the lights in a classroom he would take my hand or put an arm around my shoulder, ostensibly to guide me in the dark, but of course one thing

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would lead to another till I called a halt. Why did I go with him in the evenings if I knew this was going to happen? Because I was attracted to him and too prim to acknowledge what was really going on. We spent a lot of evening time together. In the spring semester I was taking a physics course at 8:00 in the morning, and the teacher would often darken the room and show slides—at which point I would fall asleep. I performed dismally on quizzes—my only academic slip-up at Reed. Along the edge of the golf course there was a row of weeping willow trees whose branches fell to the ground, making cozy hideaways. These were well-known trysting places. In spring you would see courting couples walking toward the golf course with a blanket draped over an arm, and of course we all knew what was going on. Finally one spring evening, Ivar and I went exploring and found a secluded clearing under a willow tree. I knew as we walked toward it that I wouldn’t be able to duck any more, and truth be told, I no longer wanted to. Ivar was about to graduate. He lined up a good job in Portland with IBM. He wanted us to get married. To him it seemed like a natural progression—in those days one finished college, got a job, and got married. But I had only begun college; I loved Ivar and Eleanor

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student life, and was by no means ready for marriage. It was time for summer vacation, and I went back to Tacoma while Ivar stayed in Portland and started his new job. I had a talk with Dad about the coming year. My scholarship had been for one year only, and wasn’t renewed, although I had done very well as a freshman. Dad told me reluctantly that he simply couldn’t afford the Reed tuition, but I greatly wanted to return there. So I decided to take the next year off from school, get some job training, and work to earn next year’s tuition. Probably at the back

of my mind there was the thought that this plan would help to cool off the relationship with Ivar. Toward the end of the summer I enrolled in a secretarial school, and learned to be a fast and accurate typist, along with other office skills, including Gregg shorthand, filing. Of course Ivar came up to Tacoma for several weekends that summer and fall—he would stay one night with his parents and one night sleeping on our living-room couch. We talked endlessly, but I had gradually been developing the determination to break it off. I knew it would be painful for us both, and it was, but I finally did convince him and he understood that this was really a final decision. He went back to Portland and married shortly thereafter. I was much less politically active that year at home than I had been in high school—I still held my leftist political convictions, but most of my old friends had scattered and I somehow didn’t feel quite up to seeking out another politically active group. I did spend a little time at Orcas during the summer that followed my secretarial year, but I no longer felt part of the camp activities and became increasingly skeptical about Theosophical teachings. My sights were set mainly on going back to Reed. So that’s what I did, in the fall of 1936. I felt ready to immerse myself in my studies once more, and ready for social life among Reed students. It was a happy homecoming.

Ivar

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sophomore Year at Reed Coming back to Reed after a year away, I felt like a different person in many ways. No longer bewildered by newness, nor anxious about whether I could meet the intellectual demands of college, I felt simply glad to be back and ready to get to work. Frannie Miller had found a new roommate in my absence, and they were well settled in to their joint life, so I needed a new roommate. The dean of women asked me whether I would be willing to room with a Japanese foreign student who would need help getting oriented, and of course I agreed. Sachiko Kasahara was a strange girl. She spoke little English and quietly followed her own routines without seeming to need or want much information about the Reed environment. She put up a poster on the wall—very large Japanese characters—and when I asked her what the letters meant, she told me that it said, “Loyalty to the emperor and obedience to one’s parents are the two greatest virtues.” It didn’t seem as though we were going to have much in common. We had the same suite in Anna Mann that Frannie and I had had in my freshman year. But this time we rearranged things: we put one bed and one desk in each of the two rooms, and tossed a coin to determine who would have which room. After the first few evenings when I took her in to dinner, we pretty much went our own ways. When I went in to dinner I found myself sitting with a new set of people—the seniors that Ivar and I had eaten with had of course all graduated and gone. The students I was encountering in my sophomore-level courses were new to me. A number of them were interesting, though they seemed somehow immature (from my great vantage point of being a year older) and a few, quite eccentric. I remember one in particular—an art student with

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haunted-looking dark eyes who seemed especially vulnerable and lost. One evening currant jelly was on the table—he noticed its brilliant color and picked up a generous quantity with his knife, spreading it over the palm of his hand, to hold up and admire. I heard later that he had become quite a well-known painter and a professor of art at a small college. Conversation with him, however, and others of my classmates, always seemed somewhat desultory and scattered. Eentzie Nicholas was no longer around to play tennis with, and I never did find a regular tennis partner that year. But I renewed my political interests. If I remember correctly, that was the year when Japan invaded China, and some of us decided to boycott silk stockings—most of which were imported from Japan—and wear lisle ones instead. They didn’t look nearly so nice but they served to announce our political correctness to one and all. I was elected to the student council—also called the Student Union—and became its secretary. The activists on the council took up cudgels against Reed’s new president, Dexter Keezer. He had set out to see to it that the “intervisitation” policy was strictly enforced. That is, male and female dorm students were not allowed to visit one another’s rooms. We thought such visits should be allowed, at least as long as the door was kept open, because couples of course often wanted to study together. Basically, we were simply trying to make dents in the parietal rules. That year, I took a second year-long history course, plus French, biology, and psychology. The psychology course turned out to be profoundly important for the subsequent course of my life. It was taught by Monty (for Montana) Griffith, a dyed-in-the-wool behaviorist. Monty was a gargantuan man—he weighed 300 pounds, was about 6’3” tall, and still a respected athlete. He had once played college football, meanwhile earning his college tuition as a professional prize fighter. At the time I knew him, he was known to be able to beat any student at handball, and he loved competing with students on any test of physical dexterity. He was witty, profane, and a heavy drinker. He had a small coterie of devoted male students who went to lunch with him every day at the golf-club lunch room and joined him for occasional evenings at

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his house. He was known well beyond Reed for his powers as a raconteur, and a number of celebrated people (mainly writers—one of them I believe was Eugene O’Neill) would make it a point to look him up when they traveled to the Portland area. In the mid-1930s, the field of psychology had only recently spun off from philosophy, and in some universities it was still not taught as a separate discipline. In the United States, it was striving to define itself as a young science—the science of behavior—-and to distinguish itself from psychotherapy. The mission of the new discipline was to

understand why humans behave the way they do. Most behaviorists adopted the assumption that a newborn infant was a tabula rasa who gradually learned an expanding set of behavioral habits appropriate for an increasing variety of situations. Many of the people studying how stimuli get connected to responses (so-called S-R psychologists) were adopting the idea that children’s learning of new S-R connections rested fundamentally on reward and punishment. But Monty had studied psychology at the University of Washington, where Edwin Guthrie, a leading theorist during the 1920s, taught a different theory of how learning occurred. Guthrie’s theory was based on Pavlov’s experiments with dogs. It claimed that any element of a situation that was always present whenever a given response occurred would become

Monty Griffith and Lloyd Reynolds Lloyd taught calligraphy to Steve Jobs

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associated with that response, and through repeated association would acquire the power to elicit the response. He did not think that reward was necessary for connections to be formed. Both theories were thoroughly behaviorist, in that they believed the business of psychology was to observe and record what people do, not what they think, feel, or say. Much of the behaviorist research being done in those days was done with animals, where of course nobody was tempted to inquire into their subjects’ thought processes. Monty was a remarkable teacher: his lectures were fluent and endlessly fascinating—at least to me—especially when he undertook to debunk popular beliefs. He was especially biting in his critique of Freudian ideas, and gave hilariously funny lectures on what he painted as the absurdities of astrology, thought transference, and mediums’ claims that they could bring back the dead during a séance—visible in the form of ectoplasm. He was full of lore about the ways in which seers and mystics and mind readers actually performed their trickery. He used a lighter touch when he talked about the miracles described in religious texts, but there was no doubt that he saw them as evidence of human gullibility. I’m almost embarrassed to describe an incident in which a small group of us super-serious students went to his office to complain that his lectures were too amusing and we thought there ought to be more serious meat in them. Monty was seated at his desk, his feet next to his big Doberman dog (called Rex) that accompanied him everywhere and stayed under his desk during office hours. We announced that we had come as members of the Student Union. He bellowed, “UNION! YOU PUNKS! I’M THE ONLY UNION MAN IN THIS PLACE!” and he pulled out his copper miner’s union card to show us. Rex stirred and growled, aroused by the tone of Monty’s voice. We felt considerably deflated, but delivered our message nonetheless. He laughed at us and waved us away. Some years later, when I was started on a career in psychology, I wrote to him to say that it was only after I left Reed that I realized how very good his lectures had been. He never answered, but I felt better having written it.

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I began to talk with some of the students in Monty’s inner circle, and there was one in particular with whom conversations became especially lively. We began to drift over to the commons for coffee, and then to date in the evening. His name was Ben Barzman, a literature major and budding playwright. Of all things, he was also a Day Dodger—one of those people who didn’t live on campus with whom we campus residents seldom associated. He stood out from the rest of the Reed students in a number of ways. For one thing, he was older—definitely a man, not a boy. I later learned that he was about seven years older than me. He was a small man,

barely taller than me, with a very self-contained manner, and attractive for his quick incisive wit. Most conspicuous was the fact that he always wore a three-piece suit to school. As we became better acquainted I learned that after graduating from high school, he had been working as a cutter in a local cloak and suit factory. His family was poor, and he had acquired the suit at his place of work—in retrospect I realize that he probably couldn’t afford to buy the kind of clothes that the other college fellows wore, even if he had wanted to. He had never expected to go to college, but had been talked into signing up for courses at Reed by his good friend Nathan Maccoby, a recent

Reed graduate, famous among the in-group as the only student who had come close to beating Monty at handball. One evening Ben took me over to Monty’s house for one of the famous sessions of Monty’s storytelling, with his little group of faithful psychology students in attendance. Everybody except me was drinking and smoking. I think I was the only girl there. As Ben’s girlfriend I became a peripheral member of the group, although I never went to lunch with them. Under the spell of

Ben Barzman and Eleanor

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Monty’s teaching and the companionship of his thoroughly behaviorist students, I gradually relinquished all the remnants of my Theosophical beliefs. One evening, Ben took me to a nearby eatery where I had my first hamburger—it tasted delicious, and I was liberated from the nightly cottage cheese, thereafter eating whatever was served in the commons. I began to develop an attitude of scorn toward my parents for their unenlightened beliefs. I cringe when I think of the way I acted toward them when I went home for Christmas vacation that year. I argued with my mother about vegetarian diet—didn’t she know that humans had evolved to be omnivorous? Or that there was no clear demarcation between the animal and vegetable kingdoms—didn’t she know about the euglena, a tiny animal that locomoted on its own but also contained chlorophyll and could convert sunlight into carbon the way vegetables could? Would she eat a euglena? And anyway, why was she wearing leather shoes—didn’t that mean taking animal life? And look at me! I’d been eating meat for several months, and did I look like I had been invaded by base emotions? She didn’t argue back—raised her eyebrows in her patient way and changed the subject. Looking back, I wonder how my parents put up with me. And as a matter of fact I had been carried away by what my parents would have considered to be base emotions. Drifting into an affair with Ben had certainly been as much a matter of my own passions as his.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Leaving Reed College

Something strange happened in the spring of my sophomore year. For the first and only time in my long life, I fell into a deep depression. Although it may seem from what I have written earlier that I had moved into adult sexuality quite smoothly, that was not actually the case. I felt guilty about my relationship with Ben. Although my rational mind told me that there was nothing wrong with it, my deep feelings were different. Here I was, just arriving at the age of twenty, and in the midst of a second affair. Was I becoming promiscuous? Somehow my family’s traditional morality—or perhaps the public morality of the whole culture at that time—had seeped into me. I felt I ought to be married, but Ben and I almost never talked about our feelings for each other, and certainly we had made no plans for a future together. But issues about our relationship were by no means the major reason for my depression. Through the winter, the implications of my new-found behaviorism had begun to sink in. I had never believed in an all-knowing, all-powerful deity who would judge my behavior and administer rewards and/or punishments to me accordingly. But I had believed in a kind of justice, a world plan whereby we had to work out our karma in this life, and would be rewarded or punished in the next life according to how morally we lived in this one. Ultimately, one could reach a benign state of being beyond human passions and beyond doubt. This was a core set of beliefs and values that hard work and support of good social causes are worthwhile. I had become a striver, an achiever, and all of a sudden I had to wonder: why was all this worth doing?

98 Chapter Fourteen From a sophomore’s perspective, the take-away message from Monty’s teachings was that we have no free will. Although people may feel as though they are deliberately choosing a goal and applying the energy it takes to achieve it, in fact what people decide to do is a function of what they have been conditioned to do in their lives since birth. It all depends on the kind of society and family people have been born into, and what actions they are rewarded or punished for. We come into the world as blank slates, and our environment writes upon us. Our behavior is certainly determined; but there’s no great planner who has an agenda for individual humans as to what this conditioning will be. And indeed pure chance—what situations and opportunities we happen to encounter—plays an important role. What happens to us, and therefore what we become and how we behave, is pretty much a random matter. Thinking in this way undermined my core beliefs and set me adrift. For the record, let me say that later in my career as a psychologist I came to see behaviorism as an intellectual straightjacket. Indeed, I, along with the whole field of psychology, have morphed toward a much deeper analysis of human behavior as a function of environmental inputs and genetic characteristics, as these feed into emotional, cognitive and self-regulating processes—all connected to brain development and functioning. In any case, at that time I felt deeply anguished. I read quite a bit of poetry during that winter and spring, growing intensely fond of the writings of T. S. Eliot. I resonated to the existential angst he expressed so well. Together with another girl who lived in Anna Mann, I memorized long passages from the Elliot poems “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Waste Land” and we would quote passages back and forth whenever we were together. I also wrote some rather doom-laden poetry myself. I was feeling empty, purposeless. Could life really be nothing more than automatically following a path determined by events over which we had no control? Events that themselves had no purpose? A path to what end? I told myself: ultimately, there was only death. I thought about death a lot. What an exquisite relief it would be to just let all these anguishing thoughts and feelings go, and drift away into nothingness. I began to skip classes. I stopped working on my term

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papers. I skipped meals, and ate apples and crackers and peanut butter in my room. I hid away from my friends. Soon, my teachers took notice and notified responsible college officials. Small colleges like Reed—Reed had only 400 students at that time—had many fewer counselors and trained therapists available than they do now. At Reed the one and only person who was thought to be qualified for helping an emotionally distressed student was, of course, the only psychologist on the faculty—Monty Griffith. Monty came to my room (I think with the assistant to the dean of women) and tried briefly to find out what was wrong and offer counseling. Could there possibly have been a less suitable person than Monty to understand and help a young woman so troubled she was harboring thoughts of suicide? Perhaps I would have been a tough case even for modern counselors. In any case, Monty was ill at ease, in part because he knew me as a peripheral member of his inner circle. I was certainly unwilling to tell him anything about how I felt. I simply felt humiliated by his visit. I told them firmly that I wanted to drop out of school. The college authorities were at a loss. They got in touch with my parents, and Dad immediately arrived. I told him about my determination to drop out of Reed. After long discussion, he reluctantly accepted the inevitable, and worked with the dean’s office to see how much could be salvaged for my academic record. It was very close to the end of the academic year, and my teachers didn’t want me to lose the credits for my sophomore year’s work since I had been doing good work up to that point. They said if I were to finish my term papers and turn them in by the end of the summer I would be credited for the year. So I dropped out, and moved out of my dorm room. To go where? I urgently resisted any thought of going home to Tacoma. I wanted to stay in Portland, certainly partly because of Ben. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Dad then performed something of a miracle. Somehow he got a franchise for a small business that could set up a branch office in Portland where I could have a job. He rented a small office in a rather shabby building in downtown Portland. I moved briefly into a boarding house, where I met a

100 Chapter Fourteen young woman who wanted to get an apartment but needed a roommate to help with the rent. We soon found a small furnished studio apartment. We moved in with our meager belongings (including my typewriter, of course). I began going to work every weekday. My job was to sell unit heaters and expansion joints. This work involved visiting architects’ offices to find out whether they were working on any new buildings or renovations of old ones where either of these products would be needed. If so, I would tell them we wanted to bid on them, and pick up a set of plans. I’d take these to my office and compute the number and size of unit heaters needed to heat the cubic footage of the rooms, and the number of expansion joints. Then I’d draw up a bid and take it in. I had learned how to read blueprints during some of my work in Dad’s office, and could make accurate estimates. I wasn’t much of a salesman, however, and we didn’t do much business. Dad came down from Tacoma to help me close our first contract, and after that I did better on my own. I have no idea whether we broke even that summer—for all I know Dad may have been paying part of my salary all the way, although his business was certainly not doing well enough at that time to make that easy for him. The truth is that I simply didn’t think about Dad’s role in all this or the expenses he might be incurring—I was too self-absorbed. It was a strange summer. Ben was a loyal and supportive presence, and we spent a good deal of evening time together. Sometimes we went over to his brother’s house to babysit for their four-year-old little boy. I learned something about Ben: he was a remarkably skillful inventor of games and stories, and together we had a good time keeping ourselves and the little boy entertained. I remember one game Ben invented: we would pretend that his little nephew was a lump of dough, and we would set him to rise for a few minutes, and then knead him vigorously and then carry him over to the corner of the couch, which was our “oven.” We’d close the oven door and leave him to bake. When we thought he’d been quiet as long as he could stand it, we would go and test him to see whether he was “done” (sometimes poking him with a pretend toothpick). When we pronounced him fully baked we’d slice him

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up and take delicious bites of him here and there. The little boy was generally a very active child, and when we thought he was getting too hyper it was a good game to calm him down with. Portland had several hot spells that summer—the streets were mostly paved with asphalt, and the heat made some of the streets so soft that my heels would sink in when I walked across the street. The oppressive weather did not help my distressed mood, but nevertheless I gradually recovered my good spirits as the summer went on, and I realized that what I really wanted for the coming year was to go back to college. But not to Reed. I got to work on my remaining term papers, and turned them in within the time limit. The obvious choice for the coming year was the University of Washington. It would offer in-state tuition that would be within Dad’s budget, and I could enroll in a first-rate psych department with more than one professor and where I could study with the famed Professor Edwin Guthrie. So I applied to the University of Washington and was admitted. (How quickly those things could be done in those days! ) At the end of the summer I packed up and went home to Tacoma for a week so Mother and I could sort through my clothes and mend some things and replace a few others. Mother never asked me about why I had left Reed—I suspect Dad had never told her about what had happened. So she cheerfully saw me off to Seattle. Ben had said that he would come up to see me very soon, and I knew he would. My departure for my new college was much more sober than my first trip to Reed had been, but all the same I felt optimistic, and more than ready to immerse myself in college life once again.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

University of Washington

Dad drove me over to Seattle to register for my junior year, and to look for housing. I knew, of course, that the University of Washington was much larger than Reed, but still felt overwhelmed by the sheer size of the campus, and the busy bustle of thousands of students. The housing office told us that the university didn’t have any dorm rooms for transfer students. They told us about another girl from Tacoma who was also looking for a place—Myrtle Foss, a Stadium High student whom I vaguely remembered. I called her, and we went looking for an apartment or room near the campus that we could share. We found a furnished one-room studio on the second floor of an oldish house about nine blocks north of the campus. Our two single beds were tucked against the two side walls, under a slanting roof. There was a good-sized dormer window at the front of the room, overlooking the street. Our kitchen was in a small former bathroom, which had kept its washbasin for use as our sink. There was a two-burner hot plate, a small fridge, and a few shelves. There were two desks with lamps, and two small bookcases. I don’t remember a closet—there must have been an armoire or something of the sort for our clothes. The rug and furniture looked well used, but the whole setup was certainly adequate for our needs. And most important, it was cheap—$22 a month. After the first month’s experimentation, we found we could live on $16 a month for our food. So that meant $19 a month for each of us for our board and room. Dad had agreed to send me $25 a month, so I had $6 a month left over for books and other school supplies. We made our own lunches to take to the campus each day, had cereal and milk for breakfast, and cooked some sort of dinner

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on our hotplates. All in all, we seemed to be managing okay. Myrtle and I weren’t especially compatible when it came to interests or political views, so we didn’t have much discussion but managed the practicalities of our everyday lives to our mutual satisfaction. True to his promise, Ben came up a few days after Myrtle and I had settled into our little apartment. He took me over to the psychology department to meet his old friend from Portland, Nathan Maccoby. Mac was a teaching fellow, and we sought his advice about what courses to take and other campus lore. I liked him, but of course my attention was pretty much focused on Ben and the delight of seeing him again. Mac was with us when Ben had to leave to go back to Portland. He said to Mac, looking very directly at him, “Take good care of her—and I trust you explicitly!” Mac did indeed help a lot in getting me oriented to the U. of W. environment. He showed me around the Psychology department, including the office he shared with the other T.A.s. We toured several other campus buildings, including the library and the student-union building where you could get a meal at any time (if you could afford it, which, of course, I couldn’t). We went over to the big campus bookstore on University Avenue, and later in the fall quarter went to a football game. Especially pleasing to me was the fact that he played an excellent game of tennis and offered to teach me to sharpen up my game. So we began to play regularly, at least once a week. Of course, on the way back and forth to the tennis courts we talked about a lot of things—our experiences at Reed, what interesting things Nathan Maccoby

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we had learned there, and life in general. I became more and more impressed by the quality of Mac’s mind. He T.A.ed in philosophy as well as psychology, and once—I don’t remember what brought this up—he reeled off from memory Mill’s canons on causal inference. Here in the one that smote me most:

If two or more instances in which a phenomenon occurs

have only one circumstance in common, while two or more instances in which it does not occur have nothing in common save the absence of that

circumstance, the circumstance alone in which the two sets of instances differ is either the cause, or the effect, or an indispensable part of the cause of the phenomenon. I got him to repeat if for me till I could say it glibly myself.

I’m pretty sure that Mac wasn’t consciously wooing me at the time, but if he had intended to, that certainly would have done no harm.

Classes began a few days after Myrtle and I found our little apartment. I expected that the classes would be large, and some were, but as luck would have it the psychology class I had signed up for had only 30 or 40 students. To my delight, I had been able to get into the only undergraduate class that the famed Professor Guthrie was teaching that quarter, so I happily filed into his class that first day, and was mesmerized from then on by what he had to say. It amplified greatly on what I had learned from Monty at Reed. I absorbed it thirstily, and worked very hard on my term paper. Prof. Guthrie liked it well enough that he arranged for me to be admitted to some of the graduate psychology courses in the second semester. That led to a number of important changes. I began to meet the other graduate students. Two of them—Virginia Fairfax and Annette Macdonald—were sharing an apartment quite close to campus, and they said they had been looking for a third roommate and invited me to move in with them. This I gladly did—Myrtle was able to make other arrangements too. The new apartment became a place where grad students could gather conveniently. And as I began to be known in the depart-ment, people learned that I knew how to type and take shorthand, and I was offered a part-

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time job as secretary to one of the faculty members. I earned a marvelous 40 cents an hour through the New Deal NYA (National Youth Authority) program, and was able to afford my share of the expenses on our joint living quarters. During the Christmas vacation that year, a group of us made a skiing trip up to Mount Rainier (which I still called Mt. Tacoma). I was on borrowed skis (heavy wooden ones, too long for me, with curved-up front tips). I had very little skill—I practiced on the beginner’s slope and took a number of spills, but enjoyed it just the same. As it turned out, Mac simply couldn’t ski at all. So we decided we wanted to go back to Seattle sooner than some of the other members of our group. We hitched a ride with Mac’s roommate, Launor Carter, and his girlfriend. Mac and I were crowded together in the back of Launor’s coupe. That ride

Professor Edwin Guthrie

Eleanor, University of Washington age 20

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provided our first opportunity for some quiet deep talk, and the feelings of mutual attraction for one another that we had been trying not to show emerged into the open between us.

Soon after that trip, I secretly went down to Portland to see

Ben and tell him what was happening. He was unhappy about it, but I think not terribly surprised. I later found out that a few days after my visit, Mac also made a secret trip to Portland for the same purpose: to end the “explicit” pact that Ben was relying on for Mac to keep his distance from me. So for the rest of that school year, Mac and I became a committed couple, and married in September, at the beginning of my senior year, when I was 21 and Mac was 26. We honeymooned at Orcas Island.

The wedding was at my home in Tacoma. Whom could we

get to perform the ceremony? Theosophy had no ministers or priests. But it did have connections with a strange small sect called the Liberal Catholic Church, and one of our Seattle Theosophical friends was a bishop in that church. He agreed to perform the ceremony. My mother asked Mac for a list of the members of his family who should be invited to the wedding. She was startled when he said “nobody.” He explained that if his Portland family learned that he was planning to marry outside the Jewish faith, they would do everything in their power to break it up. Though Mac's father had died more than a dozen years earlier, he was still remembered as the major Hebrew teacher in town and his family as the most orthodox people in the Portland Jewish community. In fact, Mac’s father had told all of his five children that if any of them ever married outside the faith, he would sit shiva and mourn them for dead. So Mac convinced my parents that we could not tell his family about the wedding, but we planned that some few months later we would go down to Portland to see his mother and other family members, and let them decide whether or not to accept our marriage.

We settled into a tiny apartment on the second floor of an

old house near the campus. We had a living room, a tiny bedroom just big enough so that there was about a foot of space on each side of the bed, and a bath and small kitchen, all decently furnished. The

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rent was $30 a month, which we could just afford. Mac was getting $70 a month as a teaching fellow, and I had a double readership (grading exam papers for professors) that paid $30 a month. Our income was adequate for our modest expenses. But then, in an economy move, the university cut all double readerships to single ones—we lost $15 a month. That made our situation precarious, but

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our landlords offered us the rental of a renovated double garage at

Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Maccoby September 1938

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the back of their property for $22 a month. We moved in. It had one large main room with a curtained alcove for the bed. Two long narrow rooms along one side of the garage were the kitchen and bathroom. At the front of the kitchen was a small table next to a window, and two chairs—this was where we had our meals. The living room had a badly worn wall-to-wall carpet. The place was heated by an old wood stove with a black stovepipe going up through the ceiling, and outside we had a woodpile that the landlord replenished when needed. Of course the wood was delivered in fairly large chunks, and it had to be split for use in the stove. This was a chore that Mac was very good at, and really liked to do, so although I did it occasionally (I liked it too) it was mostly Mac’s job, and I liked hearing the sound of chopping while I cooked or did other household chores.

As it happened, rumors of our marriage somehow filtered

down to Portland, and the family sent Mac’s maternal uncle up to Seattle to check out the situation. He called Mac at the university (we didn’t have a phone at our place), and Mac invited him to dinner. I was flustered, but did the best I could to prepare a simple meal. However, I made a terrible mistake. I think the main course was leftover pot roast with potatoes and carrots, and I put bread and butter on the table at the time it was served. Uncle Jake was reluctant to eat the meal. I didn’t understand what was wrong and thought he simply didn’t like my cooking. Mac explained later about the orthodox dietary laws that forbid eating a milk dish

On the ferry Leaving for Orcas Island

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(including butter) and a meat dish at the same time. Butter might be used if, for instance, you served a roll with a salad or appetizer as a first course, but it had to be whisked off the table before a meat course appeared. He apologized for not having told me more about kosher dietary laws, and I began to realize I had a lot to learn if I expected to be accepted by his relatives.

December 1939 brought the first Christmas of our marriage.

We went home to Tacoma to join my family for the usual full program of Christmas festivities, and Mac went out with us early Christmas morning to sing carols. He had a nice resonant voice but of course didn’t know any of the words but began to pick them up. I wondered what his family would think if they could see him singing “O Holy Night” with enthusiasm.

When it came time to open presents, our present from my

family came in the form of an envelope with a clue. This was to be a treasure hunt. There was a succession of clues, leading finally to the clock on the mantel in the living room. Under the clock was tucked a set of car keys. Yes! They had given us a car. It was a small coupe—perhaps a Chevy? I’m not sure. It certainly was not a new car—it had been driven by Dad’s salesman, who used it for sales trips all over the Northwest, and it had many miles on it—I forget how many. But it had been well maintained and was wonderful for our needs.

So now we couldn’t delay any longer—it was time for our

long-delayed trip to Portland to meet Mac’s family. His mother was still living in the family home in what was probably the poorest area of Portland, home mainly to immigrant Italians and Jews. His father, a Hebrew teacher, had died when Mac was thirteen. At that time his older sister was a teacher in eastern Washington. His eldest brother, Max, was in rabbinical school. His next older brother, Elijah (later known as George), must have been in high school at the time of his father’s death. The youngest brother, Wendell (five years younger than Mac) had of course still been living at home, with his mother and Mac. His widowed mother needed a source of support to raise the younger children, and to put them all through college—something she was determined to do.

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With the help of her father she bought a little grocery store

close to her house, and managed it with the help of her sons. They had an old Model-T truck, and Mac’s responsibilities included driving down to the farmers’ market early every morning to buy the fruits and vegetables that were needed for the day. He would just have time to unload them and get them in place in the store before he left for school. After school he would help to wait on customers. Most of the customers spoke Yiddish, which Mac had never learned because his father had forbidden the use of anything other than Hebrew or English in their home. His mother, however, spoke Yiddish fluently, and Mac learned to understand it well enough, and to speak it haltingly. He developed a strong muscular body from lifting and carrying heavy boxes of produce, and his right shoulder was a bit lower than his left. He said it was from carrying 60-lb. bags of sugar or flour over his shoulder. Another of his chores was to carry and stack the big chunks of wood that were delivered to the house, and to chop them for use in the wood-fired kitchen stove.

With the help of Wendell, his mother was still managing the

store at the time Mac and I met. At this time, the older sister had died (I believe of a strep throat); Max was in New York as a young rabbi; Eli, the black sheep of the family, had finished only two years of college and then dropped out; and Wendell was in his fourth year at Reed college, commuting to school from home.

We let Mac’s mother know that we were planning a visit

and arranged a time. I felt very nervous about the upcoming encounter with his mother. We walked up the front walkway of his Portland house; the door opened and his mother came out onto the front porch. She called out to me: “So, you’re Eleanor. I know you must be very nice, but I just want you to know that I’m terribly disappointed.” We walked up the front steps, Mac hugged her, and she led us into the front room. I was able to get a good look at her. She was fairly short, with a vigorous, sturdy body. She had a ruddy complexion, and dark curly—actually quite wiry—hair much like Mac’s. She seemed tense, and was unsmiling. She talked to Mac, in heavily accented English, but not to me. She got out some old photo

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albums to show us. She found a picture of Mac and his cousin Frances sitting on the front steps of the house, and Mac and his mother began to chat about the time when he used to see Frances quite a lot. His mother said: “I discouraged that friendship at the time because I didn’t think she was good enough for you. But if I had only known what was going to happen!” I was feeling more and more miserable.

She took us into the kitchen for cake and tea. It was a

homemade sponge cake, quite heavy, and of course I didn’t feel like eating anything, but knew I should out of courtesy. I literally choked on the first bite, and Mac’s mother said triumphantly, “You see! She can’t even eat our food!” We left the house soon after the abortive meal, knowing sadly that it would be a long time before his mother would get used to the idea of a daughter-in-law like me. We understood that the Maccoby family took pride in being respected as devout, leading members of the Orthodox Jewish community. And it was humiliating for her to have her son—who had once been destined for the Rabbinate—marry outside the faith.

Indeed it took a good ten years before his mother and I

finally became friends. For one thing, I learned more about her and greatly admired her toughness in the face of adversity, her total honesty and integrity, and her courage. Here’s an incident that illustrates what I mean. Toward evening one day, her little store was still open, and she was there alone. A shabbily dressed man came in and pulled out a gun, demanding money from the cash register. She refused to give it to him. She told him that the money was hers, and she had worked hard for it. If he wanted to kill her, he should go right ahead. She missed her late husband, her children were all grown, and she had nothing much to live for, and wouldn’t mind dying. But she was not going to give him money at the point of a gun. If he was hungry, though, she would give him a meal. He confessed that he certainly was hungry. So she took him into the kitchen at the back of the store and fed him, after which he left quietly. Yes, she was a strong, gutsy woman, and had lived strictly according to her own clear standards.

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We didn’t meet any other family members on that first visit, but on a subsequent visit we were invited to dinner by his cousin Frances, now married to a successful business man. After that we often stayed with Frances and her husband when we visited Portland. As it turned out, however, we were soon to move to the East Coast, and the member of his family with whom we became closest was his brother Max, the rabbi of the Free Synagogue of Westchester, in Mt. Vernon, New York. Max ran a reform synagogue and seemed to have no reservations whatever about welcoming me into the family. He and his wife, Dora, visited us often, and we stayed with them in Westchester when the opportunity arose. We became very fond of their two children, Michael and Mimi.

After that first visit to Portland, we went back to Seattle, and

devoted ourselves to our studies and lived very happily in our shabby converted garage. We managed frugally on our limited income. Food was cheap—I think the lowest grade of hamburger was 12 cents a pound, and other foods were equally affordable if one shopped carefully. My younger sister Helen entered the U. of W. that year and sometimes came over to have dinner with us. I can’t remember whether she was still a vegetarian—probably not. My cooking repertoire was terribly limited but she didn’t complain. The teaching fellows received their paychecks every two weeks, on alternate Fridays, and those were the only nights we went out. We would walk over with the other psych graduate students to a pub a mile from campus, and splurge on beer and some light food, and sometimes sang on our walk home.

I joined the League Against War and Fascism, which was a

united-front group of several left-wing groups who jointly supported several causes. We raised money to support the loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. A few of our members went over there to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and take up arms against Franco. We got stirring letters from them about being strafed in their trenches by German and Italian planes. We also learned of the death of one of our friends—very sobering to those of us naïve young people who had thought of our activism as a matter of ideology, not as a matter of life and death.

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Mac was a staunch liberal, but not as politically

impassioned (nor quite as leftish) as I was, so he stayed home while I went to meetings. He did join me, though, in going house to house to lobby for adoption of an income tax in the state of Washington (the state still doesn’t have one!); we thought relying on sales taxes was regressive. We were courteously received at most houses, but found very little support for our cause.

Mac earned his master’s degree in June, and I graduated

with a B.S.; we both felt satisfaction with passing these milestones. I was offered a teaching fellowship for the following year, so we looked forward with optimism to our future.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Oregon State College Mac’s salary of $70 per month from the University of Washington Psychology Department ran for the nine months of the school year only. He had had three tentative job possibilities lined up for the summer, but there were delays in all three of them, and suddenly, in mid-June, we were out of money. Feeling completely humiliated, Mac borrowed $50 from my dad. In those days, when you were married you were expected to make your own way and certainly not to depend on your parents. We got by for a couple of weeks on our $50, and then all three of the hoped-for jobs came through at once. Mac chose the most interesting one, and it paid well enough that we could pay Dad back with the first paycheck. This experience sobered us, though, and we began to think more carefully about the coming year. We both knew that the University of Washington Psychology department had granted only one Ph.D. degree in its entire history. All graduate student T.A.s were planning to get their master’s degrees there and go somewhere else if they wanted to go for the advanced degree. Mac applied for a graduate fellowship at the University of Chicago. It had been advertised by the famous Professor Thurstone, who had done exciting work on measuring the different components of intelligence. It happened that a friend of ours was present in Dr. Thurstone's office when he was opening his mail, and pulled out Mac's application. He turned to our friend: "You were just out at the University of Washington. Do you know this fellow?" Our friend said yes, he did. Thurstone said: "Is he Jewish?" Our friend said he thought so, but wasn't sure. Thurstone dropped Mac's application in the waste basket and went on with his mail. As

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far as we know this is the only case in which antisemitism raised its ugly head to impact Mac's career. In mid-summer, we got wind of a teaching job in psychology at Oregon State College. It would pay a handsome $1,800 for the nine-month academic year. Mac wrote to them and the job was offered to him sight unseen. (I think a letter from Monty Griffith had something to do with this.) Should we take it? The Oregon State system of higher education was bifurcated—if you wanted to do graduate work in the natural sciences or mathematics, you had to go to Oregon State—there was no advanced training in these fields offered at the University of Oregon, in Eugene. Eugene did have graduate programs in the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences. Sadly for us, psychology was classified as a social science, so at Oregon State, in Corvallis, 40 miles from Eugene, only undergraduate courses in psychology were taught. If we went to Corvallis, Mac would be teaching only undergraduate courses, but he didn’t mind that. The problem for my hoped-for career, however, was more serious. I would not only have to give up my teaching fellowship at the University of Washington for the coming year, but would not be able to get any graduate training at Corvallis in my chosen field. We got in touch with the Psychology department at Eugene, however, and found that I would be able to enroll in graduate courses there, commuting on two or three days a week in our little Chevy. We decided to take it, and moved to Corvallis in September 1939. At that time Corvallis was a small town surrounded by lush farm lands and bordered by the Willamette River. The streets were all named for presidents, and we found a little furnished apartment on the second floor of a pleasant house on Van Buren Street. We settled in with our meager belongings and went out to do some grocery shopping. Now that we had the munificent income of $150 a month we could afford to have beer more often with our dinner. Beer was by far Mac’s favorite beverage; I didn’t like it very much but would drink a little just to be sociable. To Mac’s consternation we learned at the grocery store that Corvallis was in a dry county! We had to go across the river to a town in the next county to get our beer, which we did fairly regularly throughout that year.

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Oregon State was originally mainly an agricultural college, and we soon learned that they were doing a good deal of experimentation and innovation with frozen foods. You could go over to the Dairy Products Department and get an ice cream sundae for 5 cents. The topping was made from fruit (strawberries or raspberries or sometimes peaches) that had been frozen and sweetened and then blended into a delicious sauce. They also made butter as part of their dairy program, and faculty members were eligible to buy a year’s supply whenever they thought the fluctuating price was at its lowest ebb. We all gambled on the price of butter, seeing who would succeed in buying their year’s supply at the lowest price. The chairman of Mac’s little Psychology department—Othniel Robert Chambers—and his wife took us under their wing and explained to us some of the intricacies of local customs. New faculty members would be called upon by various people (e.g., the dean’s wife) and we should have a little silver tray on a table near our front door where visitors could put their calling cards. If they left one of the wife’s cards, that meant that I, a faculty wife, was expected to return the call in the afternoon. If they left two of the wife’s cards and one of the husband’s, the new faculty couple were expected to return the call together in the evening when both the husband and wife of the host couple would be at home. We, of course, had never thought of having calling cards of our own, but we had to order them and carry out our part of these social rituals. I learned later that these customs were similar to the ones in vogue at many military posts. These rituals were intended to help us get acquainted with people in the community and find people who would become friends. We found, however, that we had very little in common with the people we met this way. They were mostly churchgoing folks, politically conservative, with very little interest in the kinds of issues that seemed important to us. Luckily for us, one day on the campus Mac met a fellow who had been a tennis buddy of his at the University of Washington. He was a budding poet by the name of Clark Emery, and he was teaching in the Literature

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Department at Corvallis. They immediately made a date for a tennis game, and then we invited him and his young wife over for dinner. We found we were wonderfully compatible, and became close friends. Clark had an engaging, quirky sense of humor. We remained friends with the Emerys over all the following years—Clark visited us in Arlington, Virginia, we visited them in Illinois, where Clark had an academic appointment, and ultimately in Palo Alto, where Clark moved for retirement. It was an important event for us when Monty Griffith came down from Portland to visit us. We went out to dinner with him and the Chamberses. “Bob” Chambers was also a huge man—at least 300 pounds. His weight ran to fat, while Monty’s 300 pounds was still mostly solid muscle. Monty looked across the table at Bob, and said, “I think I must be affording you a rare pleasure. It’s not often you can look across the table and say to yourself, ‘My God, man, you shouldn’t eat so much!’” Monty slept on our couch, and the next morning at Sunday breakfast, Mac made a double recipe of waffle batter. I cooked bacon, and we sat down to an ample meal. Monty ate six waffles, and Mac ran out of batter. Monty said, “You got any hen fruit?” so Mac began cooking eggs, and Monty ate five, at which point he put down his knife and fork with a sigh of pleasure, saying, “That’ll do it!” I had been worrying throughout the meal about whether our rather flimsy kitchen chairs would hold his weight, but despite a couple of creaking sounds, his chair held up. And conversation with Monty was always endlessly interesting. As it turned out, one of Monty’s reasons for coming down to see us was to try to recruit us to work with him in the coming summer. He had taken on the job of helping the state of Oregon organize and manage its newborn merit system. The New Deal Social Security program required that if states wanted to participate—as they all did, of course—they had to have a staff chosen through a merit system, rather than through the usual channels of political patronage. Monty was asked to organize a program of state-run exams for people applying for positions in the new Oregon State Office of Social Security. He wanted us to help

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write and validate the new tests, which we were more than glad to do. We hadn’t known what we would do during the summer months when Mac would no longer be receiving his Oregon State College salary. Monty’s offer was a godsend. For the remainder of that academic year, I commuted to the University of Oregon in Eugene, taking a few graduate psychology courses. It was okay, but it became obvious that it would be very difficult for me to become a full-time grad student heading for a graduate degree in psychology at University of Oregon. And Mac didn’t find it very rewarding to teach only several sections of introductory psychology. We started a modest research program, and recruited one talented undergraduate student to work with us, but the research facilities were limited, to say the least. We realized that what we wanted was to be in a department that would have a graduate program in which we both could work for our Ph.D.s. When we left Corvallis at the end of the school year in the spring of 1940, we moved up to Portland to work with Monty, feeling fairly sure that we wouldn’t be coming back to Corvallis. In the nation, things were changing fast at that time. The war had started in Europe, and it seemed likely that our country would be in it before long. We knew that widespread hiring was going on in Washington, D.C., and we wanted to be part of the action. Mac applied for a job at the U.S. Civil Service Commission, and toward the end of the summer we got the magic envelope in the mail: he was offered a job as examiner at $2,600 a year. We knew we could live on that comfortably even if I did not get a job, though I probably would. So after a farewell trip to Tacoma, we started off across the country in our little old Chevy, with our belongings packed in the meager trunk, beginning this new phase of our lives in high spirits.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Wartime Washington

Our drive across the country in the late summer of 1940 was an eye-opener. Neither one of us had ever been east of our Washington and Oregon home states, and we were floored to see how HUGE the United States actually is. The day-long drives across deserts, and then prairies! For northwesterners who had never experienced really hot weather, the heat in our little car (which of course wasn’t air conditioned) seemed unbearable, and nights in hot motel rooms left us feeling wet, enervated and unrefreshed in the morning. Still, we did enjoy some of the spectacular scenery. I remember one particular spot near Kemmerer in Wyoming where the sheer mountain-side in front of

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us had alternate horizontal stripes of red and white rock, with a vivid blue field of alfalfa at its foot. Overhead was a bright blue sky except for a very black cloud looming up ahead of us. We drove into a downpour with noisy swirling winds and violent lightning—all very dramatic. The last half of our drive was tame by comparison, and the distances between towns seemed to get shorter and shorter. We followed our maps into Washington, D.C., filled with excitement over seeing the national capital. Our first task was to find a place to live. In the classified ads of the Washington Post we saw an ad for someone to take care of a house and dog in Silver Spring, Maryland, while the owners would be traveling for a couple of months—just right for our needs. It would give us time to try to find an apartment, which we knew might be tricky. It seemed that hordes of people were coming in to Washington at that time. We did find an unfurnished apartment out in Brookmont—a suburb just above the Potomac River, and near the end of a streetcar line that went out to Glen Echo amusement park. Our apartment was the lower floor of a fairly new house, with one bedroom, living room, bath and modern kitchen—pretty much what we needed. Our landlord, living above us, was an Italian fellow with a volatile temperament and a picture of Mussolini on his living-room wall. From our windows we could look down on the Potomac Canal, a narrow waterway that had once been used for modest commercial traffic but was no longer kept in good repair. I believe the locks above us were no longer functioning, so the canal could be used only for short canoe trips. There was a long trail alongside the canal, however, and plenty of week-end hikers made use of it. The walk along the canal was especially hot and humid. No breezes made their way down there, so we didn’t make much use of it till cool weather arrived. Our first enterprise was to get some furniture. We frequented garage sales and sales in low-end furniture shops, and were pretty well set up by the end of the first week. We rather expected that we’d be getting some overnight visitors, so we bought a living-room couch that would fold out into a double bed. Mac had to start his new job at the Civil Service Commission almost immediately, so I had to shop by myself for some of the lesser

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items—kitchen equipment and household linens that we hadn’t brought with us. This was a very good opportunity to learn my way around Washington and its suburbs. I also went job-hunting. A bachelor’s degree in psychology didn’t qualify one for much in the way of a professional job, but I hoped to avoid being buried in a typing pool somewhere. I don’t remember how I learned that they were hiring at the Social Security Administration, but I knew from our summer work with Monty that there was a Washington S.S.A. office that supervised the development of state merit systems, so I located the office and was immediately hired as a Level-1 Examiner. They needed people to write multiple-choice tests for use by state merit systems. And that’s what I did for 18 months. If you think you could write several dozen good test items a day, think again. I became acquainted with some of the arcane arts of test construction. These were supposed to be tests of general knowledge about public affairs and government and, to some extent, current events. The multiple choices were supposed to be equally plausible, but of course only one correct, and the correct choice was not supposed to signal itself by the way it was written. For example, if you are not careful, you’ll find that a correct answer is more likely to have modifiers such as “probably” or “usually.” You have to sprinkle such words into the false choices as well. Correct answers tend to be longer—you’d be surprised at how hard it is to make them short. We’d write out an item with four possible choices as answers, and then block out the question and pass the answer choices around among our colleagues, to see whether they could guess the correct answer just from such clues. If they could, the item would be discarded. I remember I struggled for more than a day over a set of eight items on price control and rationing. Here’s an example: Price control without rationing leads to: Inflation Hoarding

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Queueing Deflation There ensued intense arguments with my fellow test-makers over whether this had two correct answers. I hope you can see that this kind of test-making could be fun and challenging, but after a year or more one just began to run out of ideas. Soon after we arrived in Washington, our old Chevy coupe gave out and we bought a new (used, of course) car, which gave us the opportunity to explore beyond the immediate Washington area into Maryland and Virginia, sometimes into the Blue Ridge Mountains and sometimes into the coastal bays and rivers and beaches. It turned out that we had been right to expect visitors—sometimes relatives, but more often fellow grad students from Seattle. Launor Carter, Mac’s erstwhile roommate and best man at our wedding, arrived with his girlfriend, and they stayed with us while they were looking for jobs and a place to live. Our landlord was irate. For one thing, they weren’t married. We hadn’t thought to suggest that Marianne should wear a ring, and they stayed for several weeks. Our landlord said he had rented to two people, not four, and that we were using too much hot water for showers, etc. On one occasion he turned off all our water just when Launor was in the shower; he had to towel off all the soapy water. So we thought we’d better start looking for a house. Fairly early in 1941, we found one, in a new development over in Arlington, Virginia. It was a tiny place—if memory serves, it was 750 sq. ft., with a half-finished basement. It had a small living room with fireplace, two tiny bedrooms, one small bathroom, a dinette just barely big enough for a table and four chairs, with a built-in buffet, and a small ill-equipped kitchen with linoleum flooring. Quite adequate for our needs. It was on a corner lot, with a sloping front “lawn” and a street going somewhat downhill. I believe the price was $5,000, and since we had both been working we had saved enough for a 20% down payment. We took out a loan at 4%, and bought it.

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There was no garage, so we had to park in front of the house. There were sidewalks, but no curbs or paved gutters. We had to walk across the sidewalk, down a narrow sloping strip of lawn, and then jump over a drainage ditch to get to our car, which was parked a foot or two below the sidewalk level. We blithely jumped down to the car without really noticing what would be a truly impossible jump for me now. We wanted to take a breather after all the bustle of moving and settling in, so on December 7 (1941) we decided take a drive down to Charlottesville, Virginia. We had our car radio tuned to the New York Philharmonic when the broadcast was interrupted: The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor! I asked Mac, “Where in the world is Pearl Harbor?” He said, “It’s a naval and air base we have in Hawaii.” Of course, Hawaii wasn’t yet a state, so we talked about whether this was really an attack on our country, but soon realized that as a territory belonging to us, it was indeed an attack on the United States. We turned around immediately and drove back home, trying to adjust to what this would mean not only for our country but for our own lives. When we got home we looked at our tires—how long would they last? Soon, we thought, they’d have to be rationed. And they were. Soon after our return, we got a phone call from an old Tacoma friend named Blayne Hopkins. She had been my sister Sue’s best friend, and her father had been our family doctor. Blayne was a very good-looking woman, but was a childhood victim of polio, and had a very thick sole on one shoe and a deep limp. She said she and her young husband, George Link, had just arrived in Washington and needed to find a place to live. Could they stay with us while they were looking? We said, “Of course,” and when they arrived we saw that Blayne was eight months pregnant. At that time, when we were actually in the war, more people than ever were flooding into Washington and looking for housing. There wasn’t a single ad for an apartment or house for rent in the Washington papers, motels were crowded to overflowing, and people were searching the obituaries for clues to a place that might

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soon become vacant. Blayne and George went cruising every day looking for “for rent” signs in house windows, and visiting apartment complexes—no luck. When their car was parked in front of our house, it was agonizing to see Blayne trying to get across our sidewalk, down the embankment, and over the ditch to their car, lame and heavily pregnant as she was. She had made a vow to herself that she would NOT call on Uncle Harry Hopkins, her father’s brother, for help, but at last they realized they must. They called, and got an apartment in a nearby apartment complex the next day. George immediately went to work as a new-minted tax lawyer in the Department of Internal Revenue. They were only the first in a series of visitors. We began to call ourselves the Maccoby Stop and Flop. But everybody’s spirits were high. It was an exciting time to be at the action center of a nation mobilizing for all-out war. One visitor, to our great surprise, was my dad. He didn’t have business in Washington, and we tried to guess what had caused him to take the long cross-country trip under the crowded wartime conditions. It soon became clear. He had come to tell us that he and Mother were divorcing. It was a shock. We had been away from Tacoma for several years, and none of my sisters had told me that trouble was brewing between Mother and Dad. He didn’t tell us during the visit that he was already planning re-marriage. But after he left we phoned my sisters, and learned that this break-up was on Dad’s initiative and that there was indeed another woman in his life. Mac and I took the position that all of this was our parents’ business and we prepared ourselves to behave decently to our new stepmother, though we were certainly concerned about what Mother’s life would be like as a divorced woman—something seen as disgraceful by many Tacomans of that generation. My sisters Sue and Joan took the same position as ours, but Helen indignantly refused ever to meet Pearl Emmons. When we did finally meet her, we found her intensely boring.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Our Jobs in Washington, D.C., 1940–43 Mac was doing well at the Civil Service Commission. At first he started out as a test-writer, with a job much like mine. But at that time the commission was being flooded with requests from agencies to help them fill a variety of jobs for which no formal exams would be required. There were higher-level jobs available in some of the old agencies such as Treasury, State, and War departments, but there were also new federal agencies springing up, such as the Office of Price Administration, that were starting from scratch and needed just about every level of personnel you could think of. The Civil Service managers wanted to shift Mac over to a unit called Executive Placement, where he would be doing positive recruitment of people for a variety of executive jobs in a number of different federal agencies. This would be a promotion, and of course we were greatly pleased. But there was a hitch. His promotion in the Civil Service Commission was turned down because of what were said to be “security” concerns. He of course appealed, and there was a hearing. The first point the interrogators made was that he had married a radical wife. I think Mac said something about not being responsible for my views. The interrogators then produced a long list of names, asking about each one, “Did you know this person?” Mac quickly realized that these were all members of the University of Washington teachers’ union, which he, along with all the other psychology graduate student T.A.s, had joined. Evidently the Civil Service people believed this to be a Communist Front organization. Mac had no reason to believe that this was true, but simply told them that many of the people on the list were people he had seen occasionally at one of the few teachers’ union meetings he had

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attended. Several, however, were friends of his, one a tennis partner, and one a faculty member in the Philosophy department with whom he enjoyed discussing philosophical books and ideas. Others were fellow T.A.s in the Psychology department. They asked: “So, your field of concentration was psychology?” “Yes.” “Then why did you have the following two books on political science on your bookshelves when you lived at 2210½ 12th St. N.E. in Seattle?” Mac was floored. How could they possibly know or care what books we had at that time? He cudgeled his memory about those two books. Oh, yes, they belonged to a friend of ours, Norville Granneberg, who was a seaman, a member of the left- wing Maritime Union. He was leaving for a long voyage, and asked whether he could leave the books with us. It seems he had bought them at a local left-wing bookstore, and they had been published by an avowedly Communist press. When Mac came home for dinner that night, we tried to figure out who among the people who visited our house in Seattle could possibly have looked over our books, spotted these two, understood where they probably had come from, and reported us to security people? Was someone we knew secretly an agent of the FBI? Did someone have a really strong grudge against us? Only one that we could think of. We had had a visit from a Portland man—named Bill—who was a long-term “friend” of Mac’s. He was a brooding, neurotic fellow who would hook up with one close friend (usually younger) whom he could totally dominate. For a brief period in his teens, Mac had played that role. He and Bill had had a “date” every Saturday morning to go for a long walk, during which Bill, who was very bright, would expound on philosophical matters and expect Mac to listen and learn. Woe be to Mac if anything should interfere with this arrangement. But of course something did—his tennis games. The two of them did continue to take walks occasionally, but Bill was burning with indignation when Mac more and more frequently skipped the walks for tennis. In retrospect, we realized that Bill was intensely jealous over any outside interests or attachments Mac might form. After Mac moved to Seattle for graduate work, they would occasionally meet and talk

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when Mac went down to Portland to see his mother, but the relationship felt more and more burdensome and unwelcome to Mac. Of course it was the last straw when Mac and I were married—Bill truly hated me. We never saw him again after that visit, but just before he died, Bill wrote to us and told us that indeed he had been the one who had reported us. After his security interview at the Civil Service Commission, Mac was exonerated and quickly promoted into his new job, and his career took off. The Office of Price Administration was formed to administer the new programs for price control and rationing. They grabbed Mac for their personnel office and he was very busy indeed. Meanwhile, I had made a career move too. We had heard from friends about a very interesting agency that was looking for a starting-level job for somebody with only a bachelor’s degree. This agency was the Division of Program Surveys in the Department of Agriculture, of all places. The DPS was an organization established by Henry Wallace as soon as he became Secretary of Agriculture. At that time, a number of New Deal programs impacted heavily on the lives of farmers. For example they could receive a subsidy in return for limiting the amount of acreage they would plant of a given crop such as corn. Or they could plow under every fourth row of corn already planted. This program was designed to reverse the catastrophic fall in the prices of certain agricultural commodities that was proving so disastrous for farmers. Wallace wanted to find out how farmers were accepting and adapting to programs of this kind, and whether there were any unintended consequences of the policies. So the DPS was formed, and it hired a number of older farmers who would go out to rural areas and interview farmers who were involved in these programs. When the war began, there were a number of other agencies that had the same need to find out how their programs were affecting people in their homes and workplaces. At that time the DPS had a new director—an enterprising young psychologist named Rensis Likert—who persuaded administrators in other agencies that instead of establishing their own field survey offices, they should contract with DPS, which was already up and running,

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to do it for them. He got a number of contracts, and of course needed to greatly increase his staff. I went over for an interview and was hired immediately. I had truly found my first professional home. The senior people at DPS were mostly Ph.D.s in psychology from good universities, and I could learn a lot from them during my crowded work days. At Program Surveys, the policy was to use a form of interviewing that used few “yes,” “no,” or multiple-choice questions. Instead, most of the questions were so-called open-ended ones, inviting respondents to use their own words in reply and allowing them to elaborate on their opinions. Interviewers wrote the answers down word for word as fast as they were able, and our job in the home office was to devise ways of coding their responses into meaningful categories. So that was my first job: to help to develop these codes, and to train groups of coders to use them in scoring hundreds of interviews. I graduated to the post of assistant study director, and one of my new duties was to go on pretest field trips to try out a proposed new interview schedule, to see whether its wording was being understood by farmers or city-dwellers or other people whom the study intended to cover. We’d interview during the day, and then spend the evening going over the answers we had gotten, to see whether our questions were being understood, and were yielding the kind of information we needed. We’d revise the interview schedule, and try it out the next day. I was almost always the only person in a pretest team who could take shorthand and type fast and accurately, so it usually fell to me to keep on working after everyone else had quit for the night, typing out each new version of the interview schedule. I’d either type with six carbons (if our team numbered seven), or I’d take a typed copy down to the hotel office for copying on whatever equipment they had—usually a ditto machine—which provided copies in a messy purple ink that got all over your hands and sometimes your clothes. In retrospect, it’s amazing that in those days there was almost always someone at home at the addresses our sampling unit had selected for us. Telephone interviewing was seldom used at

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that time. It was recognized as a deeply flawed survey method since the Literary Digest poll had used telephone interviewing to predict (erroneously) that Landon would defeat FDR in 1936. The problem was, it turned out, that their sample was seriously biased because at that time only better-off people had telephones and the poll missed a large swath of blue-collar and impoverished pro-FDR folks who had no phones. With our decision to use only face-to-face interviews, the fundamental issue was: how to get an unbiased sample of the population we wanted to study? For some of our studies, there was an easily defined population. For example, we had a contract with the Office of Price Administration to survey the people who received heating- oil rations, to find out whether they understood how their ration was determined and what appeal procedures were open to them if they thought they were being seriously short-changed. The population for that study, then, was all the people receiving fuel- oil rations, and the OPA had lists of these people all over the country. We agreed with OPA to study only selected areas, and the sampling proceeded smoothly through random selection of households from their lists. Getting an unbiased sample of the nation as a whole, however, was a different matter. The Treasury Department wanted a national sample for the studies we were doing for them of the market for war bonds. National probability sampling was made possible through the cooperation of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, our neighbors in the huge Agriculture Building, who worked with the Census Bureau to develop a national sample with the use of aerial photos of all the rural areas of the United States, and street maps of all the urban areas. Our work on a survey followed a very tight ten-week time schedule. There would be a week for getting a clear statement of objectives from the sponsoring agency and preparing a pretest interview schedule, a week for the pretest, a week for training interviewers—a task handled by our field office, but with help from the study directors who had attended the pretest. Meanwhile our sampling division was busy drawing a probability sample of rural

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and urban households. Then the study went into the field for two weeks. During this time we in the home office would spend a week devising a reliable coding scheme for the free-answer material that would be coming in from the field (we used the pretest interviews for this purpose) and the second week training a group of coders. We allowed two weeks for coding the interviews, which would number anywhere from 500 to several thousand. Then there were two weeks for analyzing the data and writing a report. We used state-of-the-art IBM machines—actually, that meant only the counter-sorters. Our data would be entered on punch cards, which could then be run through the machines to yield both simple counts of answers and cross-tabulations of one variable by another, from which we could compute standard deviations and correlations on the smallish hand-cranked calculators we had on our desks. The final week involved discussing the findings with the sponsoring agency. I gradually developed facility in these various operations and was moved up to the level of study director by the time I had been with the organization about a year and a half. Let’s see—I would have been aged twenty-six at that time. Of course, our lives were not totally devoted to work. Through our work, we met many interesting new people, some of whom became close friends. We played bridge with one couple. And there were many parties—often at our tiny house. One of Mac’s colleagues at OPA—Bill Nunley—turned out to have a talent for writing satirical political songs (an early Tom Lehrer). But he really couldn’t sing. I got out my guitar and learned his songs, and then would lead a party group in singing them together. Here’s one of them (to the tune of “The Birth of the Blues”): “If you want to stay in the pay of the good old U.S.A. Don’t let them call you a security risk Watch your diction, just read fiction, never harbor a conviction Or they’ll call you a security risk. “If you work at State, don’t deviate, sex is your Munich Girls are not for you, boys are taboo, just be a eunuch

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Avoid pastors, Lady Astors, degrees higher than a master’s Or they’ll call you a security risk.” I carried my repertoire of five or six Nunley songs with me to all our later locations, and they were much appreciated over many years.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Transitions in 1943 In 1943, Mac and I were very busy and satisfied with our jobs. But we realized that since we were childless and Mac was relatively young (aged 31) he was eligible to be drafted. He decided to apply for a naval commission. He talked to an admissions officer, and during that interview was told that his application couldn’t be approved because of “security” issues. “Look how thick your file is!” the examining officer said. In the file were all the same bits of our history that Mac knew about from his Civil Service file, but also something new. Added was the fact that we had joined the Washington Cooperative Bookstore. Mac said yes, we had joined fairly soon after coming to Washington because they offered a discount on books, and we were frequent book buyers. He asked what could be wrong with it, considering that we knew that Eleanor Roosevelt and other prominent people were members. Nonetheless, they said, didn’t we realize that the bookstore was known to be a Communist Front organization? This bit of new information about us contributed to a suspicious whole. Regardless of whether any individual item in the file was a valid problem, the whole was simply too thick a package to permit Mac’s being considered for a commission. We talked it over when he got home that night. We thought back over our experiences with the bookstore. Yes, we had certainly noticed one thing. Before June 14, 1942 (the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union), the bookstore carried in its music department a 78-rpm of satirical songs criticizing our involvement in the war. One of them was entitled “Plow Under,” and its tag line was “Plow under every fourth American boy” (referring to the Department of

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Agriculture’s requirement for farmers to plow under every fourth row of corn). Another had this verse:

“Franklin Roosevelt told the people how he felt We damn near believed what he said He said “I hate waw, and so does Eleanaw, But we won’t be safe till everybody’s dead!”

We had noticed this record earlier and, after June 14, decided to buy it, thinking it would be a good collector’s item to document some of the isolationist sentiment that prevailed in some left-wing circles before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. But when we went down to buy it a few days after June 14, all copies had mysteriously disappeared from the bookstore’s shelves. The person behind the counter raised his eyebrows incredulously when we asked for it, wondering why we could possibly want it NOW. We should have connected the dots then, but somehow we hadn’t. Well, Mac never got the commission, and was soon drafted. Just at that time, another pair of Seattle friends turned up to stay with us while looking for housing. It was Fred and Ginnie Sheffield: Ginnie and I had been roommates before either of us was married, and the two of them had been our closest friends during our last year in Seattle before we moved on to Corvallis. We had a serious talk with them about whether they would like to remain with us—Mac’s departure to his army duties was imminent, and I didn’t want to hang on to the house alone, not knowing at what point—if at all—I might be joining him. The Sheffields were more than pleased with the new arrangement, and Mac went off to basic training in Fort Riley, Kansas.

He wrote me that on his first night in the barracks he was wakened by other soldiers throwing their shoes at his bed. I knew, of course, that Mac would often issue loud groans or moans in his sleep, but I had gotten so used to it that I never heard it anymore and we had both essentially forgotten about it. But his barrack mates certainly reacted. And somehow he learned to sleep more quietly.

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He wrote that the non-com (a corporal) in charge of their platoon had singled him out for ridicule because he was a college grad. He made remarks like, “So, you think you’re so smart; how would you like to clean the latrines?” But one result of this public teasing was that he became known among the recruits—many of whom were illiterate—to be able and willing to help them write letters home. His status also improved when they went on a long hot hike with heavy backpacks and their young lieutenant (Mac thought he couldn’t be more than 19) became exhausted and Mac ended up carrying the lieutenant’s backpack as well as his own. His good physical condition from all that tennis and handball really paid off, and he managed all the grueling physical conditioning fairly easily, although he was considerably older than most of the recruits. Other letters described the infiltration course, where they crawled on their bellies over hot dry and prickly Kansas dirt, under the occasional barbed-wire fence, with live machine-gun fire about a foot or so overhead. When any group of men got together for a beer before lights out, he wrote, there was always at least one person who swore he—or someone he knew—had encountered a rattlesnake face to face while crawling along the ground. Mac had seen snakes while on overland hikes, but never on the infiltration ground. He was skeptical, but it made for a good yarn. Mac had never handled a gun in his life, nor had he known anyone who owned one. But much to his surprise, he quickly picked up skill as a marksman, so they put him to work helping train soldiers who were having trouble hitting the target. Shooting was usually done from a semi-prone position, and Mac had to stretch out with his head close enough to his tutee’s head so that he could get an accurate line of sight to the target. Nobody thought to give the men any ear protection, so Mac was constantly exposed to the explosive sound of a gun going off in his ear. He suffered a moderate lifelong hearing loss in that ear. I went out to visit him when he had been there about a month. I was the first wife in his unit to visit. I stayed in a seedy

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little hotel in Junction City, a dreary little town on the edge of the camp called “Junk Town” by the soldiers, of course. His sergeant had promised him an overnight pass during my visit. But late that first afternoon the weather turned ominous. A heavy black cloud on the horizon was beginning to assume the dreaded funnel shape that meant “tornado.” Mac told me later that the sergeant assembled his squad and shouted, “Maccoby, fall out!” and whispered to him, “Get the hell out of here. I’m going to cancel all leaves.” Mac of course took off in a flash while all the other recruits went to work on damage control as the tornado struck the camp. Among other things, it struck the army post office and there was both incoming and outgoing mail flying around the camp in the wind. Many jokes of course about a new way to deliver air mail. Later that evening, and the next morning, several of Mac’s newfound buddies came to see us at the hotel. Evidently they had been longing for some contact with a female person from “back home.” They would take off their boots to show me the bleeding blisters on their feet. They would longingly touch the clean white sheets on the bed—I never found out whether they slept without sheets, or had the olive-drab Army-issue ones that bore the marks and smells of sweaty male bodies. But they did admire the clean crisp whiteness of our hotel sheets. Of course what they really envied was Mac having his loved one right there beside him. After his ten weeks of basic training, Mac got the usual interview where it was decided what kind of duty he would now be assigned to. They actually paid some attention to the kind of work he had done in civilian life, and transferred him to Camp Blanding in Florida, where he would be in a personnel unit. His duty would be to assign new recruits to appropriate duties. Actually, at that time there was very little choice. It hardly mattered what kind of assignment a man wanted or what he was specifically qualified for—with rare exceptions everyone was automatically assigned to the infantry, to be readied for overseas deployment. Foot soldiers were what the Army needed most. Mac wrote me from Florida that it looked as though he would be stationed there for quite some time. I took a furlough

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from my job, and went down to join him. We found a sparsely furnished little apartment over a garage on the outskirts of Gainesville, about 30 miles from Camp Blanding. That first night I was sitting in front of the little winged mirror on the vanity, brushing my hair, when a large brown cockroach (about two inches long) flew past my ear and landed on the mirror. I started to cry, and then the two of us went into the darkened kitchen where we had cooked our dinner, and as soon as we turned on the light, cockroaches fled in every direction and disappeared down assorted cracks. We had made friends with several other young military couples, and asked them what we should do. They explained that in that part of the world, even a good housekeeper never got rid of cockroaches—she just kept trying to. I explored Gainesville and quickly learned that Gainesville was a college town. There was a large branch of the University of Florida there, and I went over to the Psychology Department to see what might be available for me. I quickly got a job as a secretary/research assistant to the department chair. So, I could contribute to our modest living costs. But neither one of us liked Florida, nor our jobs there, and after a few months the miracle happened: Mac was being transferred to the Pentagon! He would work where he wanted to be in the Defense Department’s Research Branch, headed by an eminent young cognitive/social psychologist from Yale, Carl Hovland, whose work both of us knew and admired. This was the place where both Fred Sheffield and Art

Sergeant Nathan Maccoby

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Lumsdaine—another former fellow graduate student from the Seattle department—were now working. We never learned by what kind of magic Carl Hovland was able to reach over the entire Army bureaucracy and snatch Mac away from Camp Blanding. But we were eternally grateful. We could go back and live in our own house—it was close to the Pentagon—and I could get my precious job back. Hallelujah! When we got to Arlington, Virginia, the Sheffields gave us a homecoming party, and then told us that Fred was being sent overseas to the European Theater. So, there would be only three of us in the house for a time. Later, just as Fred was coming home, Mac was sent overseas. Throughout the war, things continued much like that, with occasional periods when just Ginnie and I were holding the fort in the little house. I remember when the two of us went out to the back yard with axes and saws, and struggled with the large rounds of wood that were piled there to try to reduce some of them to fireplace-sized pieces. I wrote to Mac that I had discovered that it really made a difference who was on the other end of a crosscut saw! All in all, one or both of the Sheffields shared the house with us for over three years. In retrospect, it’s amazing how well we all got along, and what good times we had. In August came V-J day—two unimaginable bombs, and Victory in Japan! That evening we went down to Lafayette Park, opposite the White House , to join throngs of people in joyous revelry. Some people had brought fireworks; people were laughing, drinking, shouting, hugging strangers. Someone had brought two 6-ft. ladders that were joined at the top, so that two people could climb it at once, on opposite sides. A line of men formed at one side, and a line of women on the other, and people took their turn to climb up and kiss whoever had climbed up on the other side. The next day, of course, everyone’s thought turned to post-war plans.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Leaving Washington In 1945, before the war in Europe had ended but when we all knew it would be over soon, Mac wrangled a discharge from the Army and went back to his job in the personnel department of Office of Price Administration. At that time executives had begun leaving their government jobs and finding good opportunities in the private sector. With the departure of his boss, Mac became the de facto head of the personnel division, and became responsible for what was called “out-placement.” OPA was slated to be one of the first wartime agencies to be closed down as soon as the war was over. Strong political factions wanted to get rid of price controls and rationing and get back to a free-market system as rapidly as possible. As it happened, OPA had hired more minority personnel than almost any other government agency. So a major task of the out-placement effort was to help minority people (mostly blacks) to get jobs in other agencies or in the private sector. This was no mean project, considering that American society—including the armed forces—was still largely segregated at that time. But Mac and his team managed a lot of good out-placements, by dint of hundreds of phone calls and effective arm-twisting. Then the war ended, and OPA was largely shut down by the end of 1946. The head of the agency was Chester Bowles, a former advertising executive who had guided the agency during much of its rocky history. He gave a big farewell party at his Georgetown home for his department heads, and we all gathered around the piano to sing a farewell song written by Bill Nunley,

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who was leaving to join the State Dept. To the tune of “Little Glowworm,” we sang: OPA is old and battered, all the bureaucrats have scattered OPA has bit the dust now, there is only God to trust now Heaven help the poor consumer, leave him still his sense of humor Poverty is here to stay – Goodbye, OPA. Along with many other verses. Mac was the one who locked the doors of OPA in early 1947 as the final employee departed. The Research Branch in the Pentagon was dismantled too. There were rows of file cabinets packed with data from the studies of troop morale the Branch had done during the war. Sam Stouffer and Carl Hovland wanted to finish the analyses of these studies and publish the findings in a series of volumes. But they knew that the post-war War Department (which later became the Defense Department) was no place to try to do this work. So Sam Stouffer arranged for a large truck to back up to one of the Pentagon’s delivery ports, and the Research Branch staff quietly carried out all their files, loaded them into the truck, and drove it away. This was done without initially asking anyone’s permission. No decisions had yet been made by the Pentagon bureaucracy about what would be classified and what would not, but the university-bound leaders knew full well that many things would be overzealously stamped “classified” and kept moldering in some storage building in Washington without access for scholars. They took a big chance, but quickly arranged to have the data officially released to the Social Science Research Council, who in turn released sets of files to Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Columbia Universities, where the scholars who had worked in Research Branch now had academic appointments. Two remarkable volumes on the lives of American soldiers during their wartime service, and how they fared during combat and its aftermath, appeared during the first few years after the war, and were foundational documents for sociology and for the new field of Social Psychology that grew so rapidly after the war.

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As for the Division of Program Surveys, (in the Department of Agriculture), Rensis Likert had begun negotiations in late 1946 to transfer its functions to a major university. He got the best deal from the University of Michigan, where he could establish a research organization. He started by establishing the Survey Research Center there, made up of people selected from Program Surveys. A year or so later, a group called the Center for Group Dynamics transferred from MIT to Michigan, and as a variety of social science research contracts began to come in, the organization grew into the Institute for Social Research. At that time, a great advantage of Michigan was that it agreed to let the Institute keep the overhead money from its contracts. The organization started in rather seedy quarters in the basement of a former school, but was soon able to construct its own building. In the fall of 1946, I went in to Angus Campbell’s office to discuss something about an ongoing study. A visitor was there—Donald Marquis, Chair of the Psychology department at the University of Michigan. (Unbeknownst to me, he was there to discuss the transfer of Likert’s organization to Michigan.) Marquis quizzed me about my plans, and said, “You don’t have a PhD, do you? Well, you’re going to need it.” Then he said—I was so startled that I remember his exact words—“Why don’t you come to Michigan and get a gift degree?” Well, of course I had been thinking about going on to graduate school in psychology, and so had Mac, since he had only an M.S. at that time. As things turned out, the New Survey Research Center wanted Mac for a program of studies in Industrial Psychology, and they wanted him to go as soon as he could in early 1947. For me, however, there was a different plan. Likert was establishing an office in the Federal Reserve building in Washington, where George Katona would continue to lead the series of studies on consumer spending and saving that we had been doing for the Fed for some time. Likert and Campbell wanted me to move over to that office with Katona to finish up the work on current Fed studies. I could move to Ann Arbor in September, in time to register for fall courses. So all of a sudden Mac and I had our post-war plans nicely in place.

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I settled into my office in the imposing, marble Federal Reserve Building on Constitution Avenue. After a few months, something odd happened. I got a phone call from a man I didn’t know—he said he was planning to do a survey, and had read an article of mine on sampling. Actually, it was the only article I had published up to that time, and so of course I was pleased. Could he consult with me about his sample? I said certainly. Would he like to come over to the Fed building for lunch? He agreed, and we made a date for the following day. He asked how he would know me, so I described how I look and told him I’d be standing near the bank of elevators on the first floor at noon. When he appeared the next day he turned out to be an attractive, courteous, pleasant young man. And he was black. We went up to the cafeteria on the top floor and started through the cafeteria line. I noticed that there were some hurried whispers among the servers on the other side of the food trays. When we got to the cash register I pulled out my wallet, but my new friend said that, no, he had asked for a consultation, and the least he could do was to pay for my lunch. I agreed, he paid, and we found seats. That afternoon our secretary said she would no longer type papers for me. The elevator operator said she would no longer admit me to her elevator. It was only then that I realized that the top floor cafeteria was supposed to be segregated: no blacks allowed. And worse, the fact that I had allowed my friend to pay for my lunch suggested to observers that we were dating. Buzz, buzz around that dignified building. I happened to know Ralph Young, then a member of the Federal Reserve Board, so I went up to his august office and told him what was happening. He was shocked. He had no idea that the cafeteria was segregated. He and the other Board members of course had their own elegant dining

Eccles Federal Reserve Building Washinton, D.C.

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room and never visited the daily lunch settings for ordinary employees in the building. The next morning, he issued a directive that hence forward no eating facility in the building could be segregated. So I guess I can take credit for playing a role in the gradual desegregation of the benighted Washington, D.C. culture of those times. It is worth noting that the very next day after Ralph Young issued his decree, our secretary went back to typing my papers and the elevator operator calmly greeted me in the morning and took me up to our floor. Is there a lesson here about how authoritative rules can change behavior if not attitudes? In September of 1947 I moved to Ann Arbor, where Mac had already found an apartment. It was the second floor of a fairly old house on Tappan Street—a nice neighborhood within easy walking distance of the University of Michigan campus. Mac was already enrolled in graduate school, and I enrolled for the fall quarter, ready to begin my academic professional training at the age of 30. Let me note, incidentally, that the idea of a “gift degree” never surfaced again. I found that I was part of a horde of returning G.I. Bill veterans, all geared up to work hard and prepare themselves for their life careers as quickly as possible. The competition was brisk and the atmosphere charged and exciting.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Graduate Work at University of Michigan Our first year at the University of Michigan was very busy indeed. Mac already had a master’s degree from the University of Washington, so he was able to take a somewhat lower course load than I did, and was able to work half time at the Survey Research Center, joining his major professor (Dan Katz) in a study of morale among railroad workers. He was partly supported by the G.I. Bill. I became a full time student (doing occasional consulting at the Center), with a concentration in experimental psychology and a minor in social psych. Our classes were very large—larger than any we had experienced as undergraduates. The returning G.I.s were serious about their studies, and classrooms were energized by motivated students many of whom did not hesitate to press their teachers with searching questions. There was a young professor—Urie Bronfenbrenner—who was a brand new PhD doing his first teaching, in this case a class in Personality. Most of his students were at least as old as he (Mac was quite a few years older). Mac and I, as well as a few others in the class, had had undergraduate training at universities where there was a predominantly behaviorist theoretical viewpoint, and we felt dismissive toward Bronfenbrenner’s psychoanalytic point of view. We were not shy about asking pointed questions. Years later, when Urie and I would meet at professional meetings, he told me that that first year of teaching was the worst in his whole career—he dreaded coming in to stand in front of that class, knowing he would be under pressure to justify everything he wanted to say. Looking

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back on those days from my later perspective of being a university teacher myself, I cringe at the memory of how arrogant we were. During our years in Washington as members of the U.S. Civil Service, we had not been free to be active politically, but now that we were breathing the free air of academe we quickly began to explore the political situation in our new environment. We learned that there was a very active group of Democrats seeking to unseat the dominant group of old-style Democrats. Many of them were Irish Catholics and sympathetic toward Senator Joseph McCarthy. They were led in Michigan by a man named Franco. The state-wide leader of us newer Democrats was Neil Staebler—I believe he was an executive in the Michigan branch of a large oil company. He lived in Ann Arbor, was a strong liberal, and when we met him we learned that he was forging a partnership with the United Automobile Workers in Detroit. The leaders of the UAW at that time were Walter and Victor Reuther—two left wing leaders who had emerged as strong union organizers and leaders at the time of the bitter 1936 strike against General Motors. The Reuther brothers had gone to Russia when they finished their college training, and worked in an automobile factory there. They were expelled from the Soviet Union because of their efforts to organize a strike of auto workers there. They were trying to get improvement in the workers’ safety on the job. We never met Walter Reuther, but we did meet Victor. I think it was late in 1948, the year in which there was an assassination attempts on Victor’s life. He survived, but lost an eye, and when we met him he was wearing an eyepatch, but working just as tirelessly as ever for the auto workers’ rights. We and other U. of Michigan grad students, under Neil Staebler’s leadership, fanned out to Democratic district caucus meetings around the state, helping to bring about a shift in local party leadership from Franco loyalists to newer style Democrats. Staebler’s major efforts were devoted to bringing about the election of G. Mennon Williams (called “Soapy” Williams) to the Governorship of Michigan. To our great excitement, Williams was indeed elected. We then succeeded in electing one of our own group—Sam Eldersveld, a grad student in Political Science—as the new Mayor of Ann Arbor. A tough job for Sam. I wondered how in

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the world he would be able to continue working for his PhD, but he did. Despite these successes, Mac and I became less and less involved in politics as we went on to our second and third years—we were simply too much immersed in our professional work. I was asked by Angus Campbell (then director of ISR) to join him in teaching a graduate seminar in social science field methods. I did so, and learned quite a bit in the process. Toward the spring of that first year in Ann Arbor, Mac and I decided to build a small house. We had been comfortable in our centrally located rental apartment, but had become convinced of the financial advantages of home ownership. We could get a very favorable loan through the G.I. Bill, and could make the monthly mortgage payments with the rental income we were getting from our house in Arlington, Virginia. We heard about a small company offering prefab houses, and signed a contract with them to build a Steelocks house in the small development they were building on a lane, out at the end of Huron Aveue. One had to drive through the small central region of Ann Arbor to get there from the university, so it wasn’t quite as convenient a location as our close-in apartment, but Ann Arbor was so small at that time that it was entirely manageable, and we had had experience in Washington managing with only one car. Incidentally, when the war was over and rationing lifted, we had bought a newer used car. So one or the other of us would take time out to go over to the site where our new house was being built. It was small—probably about 1,200 sq. feet, with a kitchen, living room with dining ell, two small bedrooms, bath and laundry/storage room,

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and two closets. Plenty of room for us and the occasional visitor. The furniture we had had in Arlington was pretty shabby, so we moved very little of it, and shopped at some of the cut-rate places

in Ann Arbor and on the northern edge of Detroit. Of course we had to compete with the many graduate students who lived in Ypsilanti, just outside of Ann Arbor. During the war, the Kaiser company had built some makeshift housing in Ypsilanti for the flood of workers (mainly from

the South) who had come up to work in Kaiser’s huge aircraft factory on the northern outskirts of Detroit. At the end of the war, the University of Michigan acquired these long, one-story buildings (cut up into separate apartments) for use mainly by the G.I. Bill veterans coming for post-war university training. Despite the brisk demand for household furnishings, we did find most of what we needed by the time we were ready to move in. I think that was at the end of that first summer—1948. A group of friends came out to help us clear the lot. There was a fair amount of poison ivy growing in one corner. They grubbed out most of it and made a trash pile to burn in dry weather. We learned a lesson: when we burned it, Mac and several others stayed close enough to inhale the smoke, and they got a very unpleasant dose. Having an itchy rash down your throat, we learned, was something to be avoided at all costs. We learned to deal with the poison ivy with great care from then on. We had a rousing housewarming party quite early in the fall quarter. I got out my trusty guitar and we belted out the good old standby songs. People contributed unfamiliar funny songs, which everybody began to learn so they could sing along— a lot of beer disappeared and a good time was had by all.

Mac with Builder

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That first year in Ann Arbor had gone by in a flash. Both of us felt well located in our program of studies. We were doing well and were very busy, making friends we’d be close to for many years into the future. We also came to know some of the faculty. We played bridge with a young faculty couple. And of course we knew all the faculty people who had come from Washington to form the core of the Institute for Social Research. As it happened, three of our new graduate student friends had rented the top floor of Prof. Ted Newcomb’s house. They had enough space to give parties, and so it worked out that we more or less took turns between our place and theirs, giving the parties for our overlapping group of friends.There must have been between 18 and 25 people who were regular members of this group, and most of them liked to sing. It was at one of these parties that I first met Ted Newcomb. He and his wife occasionally dropped in to the parties given by their three top floor tenants. I had heard about Ted Newcomb for years—the first edition of the Newcomb and Hartley book of Readings in Social Psychology was very well known indeed and was required reading in many psychology courses. The second edition , whose lead editor was a young sociologist, had not done so well. To my very great surprise, Ted Newcomb asked me if I would be the lead editor (and first author) on the third edition. I asked him whether Hartley, whom I had never met, concurred in his choice. He let me know that that didn’t really matter. Hartley had told him he didn’t expect to do any work on the third edition. All he wanted was assurance that his name would still be on the book. A year or so later, Ted and I began planning the new edition. Beginning our second year, Mac and I felt very thoroughly settled in. We had our new little house, and a group of very interesting friends, some of whom we had come to know through our political activities and others through our academic world. We had been able to organize our lives so as to get back and forth between our house and the campus in our single car, aided by the fact that each of us had a strong ethic about the importance of being on time and not making the other wait in the car or on a street corner. We did much of our shopping and other household errands

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together on Saturdays when classes were not in session, making some stops during the week on our way home from the university. Of course our lives were not entirely devoted to our work. Michigan had a super football team during the years we were there, and we enjoyed going to the games. My father would sometimes come from Tacoma to join us for a game. Ann Arbor was on the outskirts of Detroit, where there was some very good jazz to be heard. We heard Ella Fitzgerald sing there, as well as Slam Stewart on the bass. And I’ll never forget Paul Robeson in the role of Othello. His deeply resonant speaking voice filled the huge hall. He could be heard even in a whisper. When the drama reached the point where he kissed his white wife, there was a deep stirring in the audience—taboos against inter-racial sexuality were still very widespread at that time. There were farming areas close to Ann Arbor that also offered some recreation. One of our friends loved sweet corn, the

fresher the better. He scouted out some nearby places, finding a picnic area with tables and camp stoves near a farmer’s corn field. He made a deal with the farmer, and we made a fire in a camp stove, set on a deep pan of water, and when it was boiling

went out into the field to pick our corn. We shucked it within minutes and dropped it into the boiling water. I’ve never had such delicious corn before or since.

Eleanor with her father, heading to a football game

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Beginning in that second year at Michigan, Mac and I began to lead more and more separate lives intellectually. We no longer took any courses together. Mac was focusing on social and applied psychology. Building on some of the work on troop morale that he had done in the War Department, he began working on the morale of workers in their work places, and some of the conditions that affected it. He became involved in an industrial-psychology program being run by Dan Katz, and focused on the role that first-line supervisors played in the workplace, along with other factors that influenced worker satisfaction and expectations. Meanwhile, I was immersing myself more and more in the traditional heartland of experimental psychology—in the theories and concepts that underlay the work in perception and attention, learning and memory, and some physiological factors affecting behavioral outcomes. I loved some of the theoretical discussions we grad students would get into. One issue I remember our discussing was whether an individual’s change could always be thought of as a shift in degree along some psychological dimension, or whether there were changes in kind that could not be described as changes in degree—that sometimes a person’s attributes can undergo a kind of reorganization. Even more interesting to me was a central issue in dominant stimulus-response theorizing of the time: what exactly do we mean by a stimulus? Does a visual stimulus only count as a stimulus only if the perceiver is paying attention to it? I wrote a paper on attention for one of my courses. I found that very little was being written about attention at that time, and didn’t get a good grip on the subject, but stored it away in my mind with question marks. These seemed to be important issues to some of us grad students, and we would discuss them passionately. But Mac was not at all interested in issues of this kind. (Perhaps he had left them behind, having been in the field longer and five years older than the rest of us.) In any case, we were drifting apart intellectually. And there was another issue that brought tension to our marriage at that time. We had been married ten years and still no pregnancy. Gradually over time the prospect of being childless began to weigh on us—especially on me. It’s hard to describe what

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that longing for a child is like. Several of our friends were by that time having children, and if we visited them and I had the opportunity to hold an infant or toddler or play with a preschooler, I felt more and more the lack of a child of our own, though I began to understand too that Mac and I were freer than our child-bearing friends to pursue our careers. Still, whenever I saw a baby, my arms felt empty, and I began to think about alternatives. Of course, adopting was always a possibility, but I wanted the experience of gestating and giving birth to my own child. I was becoming more and more frustrated. This was probably the low point in our marriage. Finally, however, we did have a long deep talk about our problems and came up with a plan: When we had finished our graduate work and found our first jobs—something that should be easy in the post-war job market—we would adopt. As things turned out, in the spring of his last year Mac was offered a full professorship with a named chair at Boston University, with what seemed to us like a very good salary. Mac was a year ahead of me when it came to finishing work for the Ph.D. I had finished all the requirements and prelim exams for my degree, but needed another year to do my dissertation research. The Boston area seemed perfect to us, since it was a location where I might hope to find a lab where I could do my dissertation work in absentia. So in the fall of 1950, off we went to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Life in Cambridge We quickly found an apartment—the top floor of an old house where Garden Street converges into Concord, across the street from the old Commodore Hotel, quite close to Harvard Square. Don Marquis had suggested to me that in my search for a place to do my work, I should go to see B. F. Skinner. That was a startling idea—how could the famous Professor Skinner find room for an unknown grad student when he must have so many of his own? But, with trepi-dation, I went to see him. His office was in the Psychology Department, then housed in the lower level (basement,

really) of famed Memorial Hall, underneath Sanders theater. He was surprisingly cordial and didn’t seem surprised by my visit. I realized that Marquis must have written or phoned him: the Old Boys’ Network at work.

I had heard

that Skinner was very good at engineering mechanized research equipment to facilitate his work. He showed me around his lab, and sure enough, there was the piano I had seen in one of his films, with a light over each key, so that a pigeon that had been trained to peck at any lighted key could be guided to play the Star Spangled Banner. When making a video to publicize his work, Skinner had,

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of course, positioned the camera from above and behind the piano so that the viewer would see only the pigeon pecking, not the lights. For me, the research equipment of greatest interest was a large circular drum, about six feet in diameter, divided into nine pie-shaped compartments. At the narrow end of one compartment was a small feeding trough, and above it a disk that pigeons could be trained to peck whenever it lighted up. If the pigeon pecked the requisite number of times, pellets of food would drop into the food trough. Every peck and every “reinforcement” (e.g., food appearing) was recorded on a moving tape. When a given bird had been in “working” position for a half hour, the drum automatically rotated the next bird into position to begin its half-hour session of pecking and—occasionally—eating. After eight birds had finished their sessions the drum rotated to the ninth compartment, which was empty, and the drum stopped. With this setup, it was possible to put eight birds into the drum in the evening and go home. Next morning a strip of tape would be draped out of the drum onto the floor. The tape gave you the data for each of the eight birds, the rate and any changes in the rate at which each bird had pecked. Then Skinner told me that there had been a fire in the lab. Some of the relays in the drum apparatus had been damaged. They had come in on some mornings to find only seven records on the tape. One bird had been skipped, but they didn’t know which one, so the data for all eight birds could not be used. My thesis experiment did involve a comparison of different reinforcement schedules, so his set-up was ideal for me. Skinner said he would be happy to have me use the equipment if I would remain there with the birds whenever I was working them, so that I could catch it whenever the drum malfunctioned and help them to discover where exactly the damage was. So ensued a period of four or five months during which I went over to Skinner’s lab each evening and spent about three hours working with my hungry pigeons. All the birds in the lab were kept starved down to 80% of normal body weight, so that they would be motivated to work for food. I became fairly well acquainted with Skinner, though I can’t say as friends. He was a man of considerable ego, always conscious

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of status. On one occasion we were invited over for a social occasion at the Skinners’ house. We spent the evening listening to Skinner play the piano. (He was quite good.) On the next occasion there was

a play reading in which Skinner played the role of Jesus Christ. We never went again. There were few students working with him. I learned that there were only

seven undergraduates

majoring in the Psychology Department at that time. Some years earlier, the Psychology Department had split, and social, clinical and developmental psychology had become part of the new department of Social Relations, which included Anthropology and Sociology, and which had several hundred undergraduate majors as well as numerous graduate students. Low student interest in traditional experimental psychology was a bitter disappointment to Skinner. And he was scornful of the kind of psychology being taught elsewhere. Once when I was in his office the mail came, including a book. When he unwrapped it, we saw that it was Clark Hull’s latest book expounding his very different learning theory. Skinner threw the book down on his desk and said, “Well, that will set psychology back another ten years!” One day as I walked through Harvard Square I encountered Jerry Bruner, whom I had known when we were both working for the Division of Program Surveys during the war. He asked me if I would be interested in co-teaching a course in Public Opinion with him. I was indeed interested, and the deal was on. Jerry was now a member of the Social Relations Department faculty, and I was given a modest lecturer’s appointment in that department. I thus became the only person to have keys to both the Psychology and Social Relations departments, and to be on speaking terms with members

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of the two hostile groups. The chair of Social Relations learned that, with Angus Campbell, I had been co-teaching a seminar on social-science field research methods at Michigan. He asked me to work up a similar one at Harvard. The seminar was mainly for graduate students, but I accumulated a few undergraduate majors who wanted to do a senior thesis with me and were also admitted to the course. Of course this new teaching assignment added to my time commitment but also to the interest of the work. During that first year, the Department of Social Relations recruited Robert Sears to their faculty. He was a youngish developmental psychologist, who was at that time president of the American Psychological Association. The understanding was that he would build a developmental-psychology program within the department. Sears’s plan included establishing an Institute of Human Development. He brought with him an anthropologist, John Whiting—they had met during their graduate studies at Yale. They combined a strong knowledge of experimental psychology (i.e., Hullian learning theory) with a strong interest in psychoanalytic theory. Their plan was to focus the work of the new institute on socialization, i.e., on variations in child-rearing practices and the cultural settings in which children were being reared, and to examine how these things related to children’s development. John and Bea Whiting would approach these same questions cross-culturally. Bob and Pat Sears would conduct a fairly large-scale study with American parents and their children. They would examine how a group of parents dealt with such issues as a young child becoming too aggressive or too clingy. Then they would study their children, to see how various parental training approaches had worked out. The new institute was to be housed in Palfrey House, one of the satellite old houses that served as the fiefdoms for senior professors. The data on child-rearing were to be obtained through parent interviews. Bob Sears wanted to hire someone who would run the parent-interview part of the study, while he and Pat would work on the assessment of the children. I, of course, had solid experience in working out an interview schedule, hiring and training interviewers, building a code for analyzing interview

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responses, and training coders. So that job and I were pretty much made for each other. When the Searses interviewed me for the job, they thought my training in experimental psychology was a plus as well. (I wonder now, did they also check in with Don Marquis, whom they knew from their earlier days at Yale?) They never asked what I thought of psychoanalytic theory and I never told them. So I was hired in the early fall of 1951. During that first year in Cambridge, I had finished my dissertation and gone back to Ann Arbor for my orals. I never did publish a paper based on my dissertation research. There were solid findings about the differences in resistance to extinction that emerged under different schedules of partial reinforcement, but by the time I finished the work, the results seemed to me to be boringly obvious, and I had gotten involved in more-interesting activities in Social Relations. In any case, by the summer of 1951, I was a certified Ph.D. Mac and I took a celebratory trip to Europe that summer, coming back ready for work in the fall. Now as to our personal lives. Very soon after we got to Boston, we went downtown to an adoption agency called the New England Home for Little Wanderers. I was 33 years old and Mac

was 38—at that time, we were thought to be close to the upper age limit they would accept for adoptive families, but they did accept us. The greater barrier, however, was the religious laws of Massachusetts. The religions of natural parents and adoptive parents had to match exactly. That meant that we could only have a child with a Protestant natural mother and a Jewish natural father. We took the application papers home to think about it. I told Mac that I couldn’t see how to stretch the truth to make me a Protestant,

and he was anything but a practicing Jew. But we convinced

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ourselves that what they really wanted to know was our ethnic origins. And we realized that if we were to find a child to adopt, it would have to be on Massachusetts’ terms. So we signed our application, knowing that it would be a long shot in any case for a child with the right pedigree to turn up. We settled in to our new work schedules. Toward the end of that year, we bought a house in Arlington, Massachusetts, a suburb just north of Cambridge, on the way out to Lexington and Concord via state highway 2. The house was quite new—the owner was living in it but hadn’t finished the second floor, where he had intended to put in two bedrooms and a bath. But he ran out of money, and put the house on the market in its unfinished state. In the back of the house was a large grassy area surrounded by a stone wall. The ground was uneven. Exploring with a spade told us quickly that there were quite a few large rocks lurking beneath the grass and pushing it up in mounds. But the soil made up for the rocks. The area had been a pasture, and the soil was a dark loose loam that was the best soil for raising flowers that it has ever been my pleasure to work in. We gradually dug out many of the rocks and added them to existing stone walls. An elderly neighbor, Mr. Lane, whose wife had died a year or so earlier, no longer wanted to keep up her gardens, so he gave us a large batch of bulbs from her bed of peonies. We dug up a 6-foot-deep strip along the stone wall on one side of our yard, and planted the peonies there. They turned out to be magnificent—I can still smell their fragrance. There was a very large pine tree near the house. It provided shade in the summer for the patio we designed and paved with flag stones. All this and planning for finishing the second floor kept us more than busy enough on weekends. Before we moved out from Cambridge, Mac had been walking through Harvard Square when he heard his name called by a familiar voice. It was a man named Henry Aiken, who had been a student in one of the philosophy classes at Reed where Mac had been the teaching assistant. They went out for a beer and

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brought each other up to date—Henry had married a fellow Reed student and they had had two children, but then divorced. He now had a beautiful red-haired girlfriend named Lilla, who was one of his graduate students in philosophy. We invited them over for dinner and the four of us went on to spend a fair amount of social time together. I later learned that Henry’s course on the history of religion was always overcrowded even though it met at 12:00 noon, an unpopular scheduling. Students called the course “Darkness at Noon.” It was known for its total skepticism about religious beliefs. Henry was a man of large ego, full of didactic certainties, and I never actually liked him very well, but he could be entertaining, especially when drinking, which he did too much of. Soon after we had moved out to Arlington, Henry told us that he and Lilla had decided to get married, and he wondered whether they could have the wedding at our house. We agreed, and if I remember correctly we did all the arranging, including for the food following the ceremony. Neither Henry nor Lilla was any good at that sort of thing. The guests were mainly from the Philosophy Department, but there were some relatives too. Lilla’s mother (Mae Woodward) came, bringing a little ten-year-old girl, Lilla’s niece. Mac and I both found ourselves drawn to this child. She was very shy—you felt you had to be careful not to startle her if you approached. She didn’t talk to the other guests, nor to us, but she moved around the living room looking at the various vases and art objects that we had accumulated during our travels, touching them gently, with a kind of subdued delight. A week or two later, we got together with the newlyweds, and asked Lilla about the little girl. Lilla told us her name was Janice Moore, and she was the daughter of Lilla’s sister Retha. Retha was an exceptionally beautiful woman, and (as we later learned) something of a sociopath. She had abandoned her fisherman husband for another man, who wanted to move the family to the West Coast. He was willing to take the two youngest children, but not Janice, who was six years old. They departed for California, abandoning Janice, who was hospitalized at the time, severely ill with meningitis. Her grandmother, Mae, who was a psychiatric nurse, became her legal custodian, and when Janice was

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discharged from the hospital, Mae took her home to her Boston apartment. This was a welcome arrangement for both Janice and her grandmother. Mae had kept a close eye on Retha’s young family and brought food and clothes when needed. A loving presence, she was the only adult Janice had been able to count on through her early years. After her illness, Janice lived happily with Mae for a

year or two, but inexplicably, Mae didn’t send her to school. A neighbor reported this to the state child-welfare agency, and they took control and put Janice in a state boarding home (in foster care?), where she would go to school, while spending every other weekend with her grandmother. That’s where Janice was living when we met her. We asked the grandmother whether we could invite Janice over to our house on some

alternate weekends. She agreed, and these weekend visits began. We would pick her up at her boarding house on Friday late after-noon, and take her back in the evening on Sunday. We would do various things on the weekends that she had never had the opportunity to do—going on picnics, or to the beach in the summer time, or to a local small carnival. There was a shopping center where they had pony rides, usually patronized by three- and four-year-olds, but Janice wanted to ride, even though, when she rode a pony, her long legs almost touched the ground. She began to talk with us more freely, and liked to help us with gardening or household chores like setting the table or clearing up after a meal. After many weekends with us, it became evident that she hated to go back to the boarding home on Sunday

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evening. She was fine throughout Friday night and Saturday, but on Sunday morning she began to throw up. It wasn’t until later that we learned there was a big boy there who harassed her and kept trying to look up her skirt. And several of the other children were seriously retarded. We finally called her grandmother and asked whether she could come to live with us. Her grandmother was reluctant, but finally agreed. Janice moved in with us shortly before her eleventh birthday. She was overwhelmed with delight at having a room of her own!. And so we developed a well-ordered, very pleasant family life. At first, she would want to sit on our laps whenever the opportunity arose, and of course we wanted to cuddle with her too. Strong bonds and firm mutual trust developed. Janice loved animals of all sorts—we soon got a dog for her, and a bird in its cage. I was still working, but Jannie seemed quite comfortable about having a house key and coming home to her pets. I did begin to come home earlier and do some work at home. She found a close girlfriend, who often came to our house with her after school. Jannie made her own lunch to take to school each day. At the boarding home, she had been given a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch every day. She was ecstatic to discover that in our house she could make a tuna fish sandwich! Or cheese or a variety of other choices that we usually had available in the refrigerator. I made sure that there were things available for after-school snacks, too. She was growing fast, and one day ate a whole

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cake after school—a cake I had planned to use for at least two dinners. We soon worked out what was okay. for her to take and what wasn’t. We went on occasional weekend trips, or longer ones during school vacations. One trip was to Quebec, followed by a long drive along the Maine coast. I remember staying one night at a bed and breakfast. Janice loved to fish and we asked whether there was a boat available. The proprietor told us that the fish were not running well and that nobody had been catching flounder, the fish for which the area was famous. But he said the little girl could go out in one of his boats and try if she wanted to. She came back with six flounders and we shared them with the proprietor for dinner. During her second summer with us, we spent a week with our friends the Whitings at their place on Martha’s Vineyard. The cottage was situated on the edge of a pond. They had a daughter the same age as Janice, and the two girls were constantly in or on the water, swimming or fishing or joining us in harvesting clams or oysters from the bottom of the shallow pond. The Whitings were envious of us: their daughter was feisty and defiant and sometimes profane, and they were amazed at how well-behaved and easy to

live with Janice was. We realized that she was simply enormously grateful for the huge change from her earlier life, and we considered ourselves lucky. The only real problem: Janice wasn’t doing well at school. In the spring, as her twelfth birthday approached, the school counselor called us in and said that they were planning students’ programs for the coming year, and that the children were to be placed into either a college-oriented stream or a commercially oriented one. It was obvious, the counselor said, that Janice wasn’t college material, and they planned

to put her in the lower stream. We protested that nobody could

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know at that point what Janice’s potential was. When she came to us she could hardly speak a full clear sentence, had a very limited vocabulary, and could barely read. But the counselor was adamant. We appealed her decision up the Arlington school system’s ladder, and they reluctantly agreed to let her take a foreign language, which would keep the door open to the college track. She took French. Her grades got better each year. By her senior year in high school she made the dean’s list. When she graduated, she applied to the University of Michigan, and was admitted. When we moved out to California, she transferred to U.C. Santa Barbara. For her junior year, we sent her to the French speaking area of Switzerland for a year abroad, and she came home speaking fluently in accent-free French. Her senior year she spent at Berkeley, and married Douglas Carmichael, a Psychology grad student who was one of the Berkeley student activists of the sixties. After graduating, she got a job teaching French at Anna Head, an upscale private school in Berkeley. I have often thought I’d like to go back and tell that eighth- grade counselor about what kind of young woman that girl with “no college potential” had turned out to be. After Janice joined our household, our busy lives proceeded on an even keel for several years. Both Mac and I were deeply involved in our professional work, and of course we had some social obligations in connection with his chairmanship of the Boston Univeristy Psychology Department. Our new house made dinner parties quite doable, and we had occasional at-home seminars with students as well. Janice seemed to be thriving, and we three all enjoyed our recreational time together. Another real benefit of our situation was that our nephew, Michael Maccoby, the son of Mac’s older brother Max, the rabbi, was admitted to Harvard, and we saw him frequently through the ensuing years. Max and his wife, Dora, occasionally came up from Westchester for a weekend with us and to see their son. We became pretty much Michael’s off-campus home. We went through some of the vicissitudes of his college life with him, feeling great pride

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when he joined the staff of the Crimson and was elected the president of the Crimson in his senior year. During all of Michael’s childhood, his family, of course, had never celebrated Christmas, and Michael had harbored a secret envy of his Christian friends, with their decorated trees, bright colored lights and all the rest. So on the next Christmas he wanted to join us for our celebrations. He helped trim the tree, sang carols with us, and woke up Christmas morning to find a stocking for him hanging at the fireplace. His mother thought we were leading him astray, and blamed us when he subsequently married Sandylee Weile, from a fairly prominent non-Jewish family. Sandylee and Michael and their four delightful children have remained a close and beloved part of our family over all the many years since that time. As it happened, my older sister Sue’s younger daughter, Helen Bee, was admitted to Radcliffe during our Harvard years, so we also had the pleasure of visits with her. She took my course in Developmental Psychology, and later came to Stanford as a graduate student in Psychology. Needless to say, she too has been a continuing close family member and I see her and her wonderfully interesting mathematician husband, Carl deBoor, as often as possible. In the Department of Social Relations, I continued teaching the graduate field-methods course, which involved doing a field study each fall semester with a random sample of nearby households. I usually worked during the Christmas break with a few students who would help analyze and write up our findings—several of these studies turned out to be publishable. Probably the most interesting one concerned the social control of juvenile delinquency. From census data, we were able to identify two neighborhoods (census tracts) in the Cambridge area that both had working-class levels of income and education, but which differed strongly in their levels of juvenile delinquency. Our primary hypothesis was that there would be higher levels of social cohesion in the low-delinquency neighborhood: that people would have lived there longer, know their neighbors better, be more willing to

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correct a neighbor’s child seen stepping out of line. We took a probability sample of each census tract (something like every fourth block, every fifth household on each block). After we had coded our interview responses, we found that, contrary to our expectations, the neighborhoods did not differ in how long residents had lived there. But otherwise the predictions were strongly supported. Yes, in the low-delinquency neighborhoods, people were much better acquainted with their neighbors, much more willing to tell a child’s parent if the child had been seen swiping a candy bar in the grocery store, or bending over the aerial of a parked car (a common form of teenaged mischief in those long-ago days when cars had radio aerials). As it turned out, people in the low-delinquency area were 90% Catholic, and they usually knew their neighbors at church. Interviewers reported that in the high-delinquency neighborhoods, blinds were more often drawn, and doors chained and opened only a crack when the interviewer rang the bell. When asked whether they would report a child’s misdeed to a child’s parents, the response was likely to be something like, “You think I want to get my block knocked off?” Evidently, it wasn’t only the juveniles who were delinquent in that neighborhood. Neighbors were very wary of one another. At that time I also had several undergraduate tutees, whom I worked with on their senior thesis research studies. In several instances, I recruited them to assist me in some small-scale experiments. During our discussions over at Palfrey House, I had begun to realize how important the concept of “identification” was to my colleagues’ views of personality development. During the preschool years, children were thought to begin “identifying” with their parents, so that they began to take on some of the strict values and sometimes punishing attributes of their parents, thus developing a self-controlling “superego.” And briefer, partial identifications also were thought to occur, allowing children to incorporate attributes of others whom they admired, feared, or loved. My colleagues looked for evidence of these phenomena by tracking similarities in the way a parent and child behaved. I was uneasy about this approach. I wanted something that could be observed as immediate influence process. As it happened, I got into a discussion at about that time with a colleague in Emerson Hall

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(the Department of Social Relations) as to which main character in a romantic movie a man or woman would mostly watch. Would a male viewer spend more time looking at the beautiful woman star, while the female viewer mostly watched the handsome male actor? My colleague thought yes, I thought no, because I thought people would watch mainly the character they identified with. So we said: let’s find out! With an undergraduate tutee, I set up a viewing room where a popular romantic film could be projected onto a screen. We cut two small holes in the screen, so that by standing behind the screen and looking through the holes we could see the eyes of the viewer. We selected a half-hour segment of the film during most of which only the two main characters were on the screen. While we were watching our subjects’ eye movements, we held a timing button in each hand. We’d press the left one when the viewer was looking at the character on our left side of the screen, and the right button when the viewer was looking at the character on our right (the viewer’s left). I think I must have borrowed some technology from Skinner’s lab to produce from those two buttons the timed data that could be printed out on two moving tapes. Anyhow, the results were clear: People very clearly focused more on the protagonist of their own sex while watching the film. I hope you realize how hopelessly primitive our methodology was. Twenty years later, there would be sophisticated methods whereby concurrent pictures of viewers’ eye movements and their field of vision could be taken, so that they could subsequently be projected side by side (or superimposed) so that you could see directly what a subject was looking at. And assessments of the reliability of measurements became more possible with the newer measurements. But we did find something out. Well, it was nice to win the bet. But more important: I realized that with this method we might be able to find out something about the factors that determine how fully viewers would “identify” with, and learn by observation of, the characters they chose to watch on films. We found a film of the Dead End Kids’

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gang activities that was popular with preteens at that time. The Dead End Kids were dressed rather shabbily, and wore well-worn sneakers. The leader of the Dead End gang was a charismatic boy with enormous energy—he could run away from cops at breakneck speed, with the other boys fairly close behind, jumping over fences and ditches without losing a step. There was another leading character, though, who was very different. His name was Harry, and he was nicely dressed (wearing leather shoes) and quick-witted. One of Harry’s distinctions was that he had an uncle in the FBI who had taught him some ways to investigate things, and who had given him a watch. None of the Dead End boys had a watch, and they were envious. Somehow Harry became a central member of the gang, and best friends with the leader. We found two groups of ten- and eleven-year-old boys, one group attending a school in a run-down working-class neighborhood near Cambridge, and the other attending school in a fairly affluent suburb. One at a time we showed them the film and recorded their eye movements, to find out how much time each of the boys spent watching each of the two main characters. A substantial difference emerged—the boys from the working-class school preferentially watched the gang leader. The boys from the well-to-do suburb preferentially watched Harry. But there was an interesting exception. We had asked the boys, in a questionnaire, whether they planned to go to college. Predictably, almost all of the well-off boys said yes. And a majority of the working-class boys said no, but there was a subgroup of working-class boys who broke out of the stereotype and said they did indeed plan to go to college. This group of boys preferentially watched Harry! We asked each boy a series of questions to find out how much they had noticed and remembered about the scenes and events in the film. For example, one question was: “Why did Harry suddenly look at his watch?” The right answer was: “He heard the church bells ring the noon hour.” Boys who had preferentially watched Harry more than the gang leader were considerably more likely to know the answer. This suggests that viewers were

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vicariously experiencing the action in the film from the perspective of their chosen protagonist—seeing what he saw, hearing what he heard. This little finding foreshadows some of the later work on empathy. At Palfrey House, the locus of the Institute of Human Development, work hummed along. The Whitings were conducting their very ambitious cross-cultural study of child-rearing in several preliterate societies. They had trained and sent out teams of young anthropologists who were to collect data in uniform, pre-established ways, so that the data would be comparable across societies. Members of these teams would sometimes appear at our daily bag lunches, and tell us about their experiences, and we would talk with them about our current child-rearing study as well. By 1952 we had finished collecting the interview data on parenting in some 400 families, as well as the observational data on their five-year-old children. I was responsible for hiring, training and supervising interviewers, and also for developing a code for scoring the interviews. I hired and trained a group of coders and we went to work on achieving reliability for our scoring. As we finished the coding of each of the parental interviews, the scores were entered on IBM punch cards. Bob and Pat Sears were also finishing up their assessments of the five-year-old children in the study. Each child had been brought into a playroom where there was a dollhouse and several dolls representing a family: a father, mother, boy, girl, baby and dog. The children acted out little scenarios with these dolls, depicting ordinary home-life situations. The children’s actions with these dolls were coded and the coded scores entered on punch cards. We had acquired a counter-sorter, but more important, also had installed the latest state-of-the-art IBM machine, a tabulator, large enough to require a room of its own. Wonder of wonders, it would compute means and standard deviations from punch-card data, and we could then compute correlations using the little hand-operated calculators we had on our desks.

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We were finally able to match up the parents’ scores with the scores of their own children and to begin to look for some of the predicted relationships between the parenting attributes revealed in the parent interviews and children’s behavior with the dolls. We looked to see whether children whose parents had dealt harshly with their aggression were more likely to “displace” aggression through having a child doll kick or hit or shove the baby doll or the dog. No, they didn’t. Did children who had been subjected to harsh weaning or toilet training show any signs of “anal” or “oral” personality traits, as Freud would predict? No, they didn’t. We kept looking for ANY connections between parenting attributes and the children’s actions with the same-sex child doll, but none emerged. None whatever! Bob thought that the problem probably lay in their having used a projective method to assess the children’s characteristics. He began to believe that behavior observations would need to be used. I thought that at least some of the problem lay in the theory. Why had we wasted so much interview time asking parents to look back to their children’s infancy and report on the severity of weaning and toilet training, in the hope that Freud’s strange theory of psychosexual development would be vindicated? Well, whatever the root of the problem, we had to decide whether to abandon the study or try to salvage something. We decided to work with the parent interviews, which provided a wealth of information about current child-rearing practices—information unavailable in the literature of that time. Granted we could only report about families in two Boston suburbs, but it would be a beginning. We began working out which segments would be the Searses’ responsibility and which mine. But just at that time, a serious disruption occurred. Bob was offered the chairmanship of the Stanford Psychology Department, on the condition that he would start work there in September of the current year—1953. Pat was offered an opening on the faculty of the Stanford School of Education. Bob and Pat were both Stanford graduates, and both had had a parent on the Stanford faculty. These were their dream jobs, and they could not possibly turn the offer down. But how to organize our joint work? We agreed that they

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and I would each have a set of the punched cards containing both the parental and child data. I would retain the original parent interviews at Palfrey House and they would take all the original child data to Stanford. We had already begun planning our joint book. Pat Sears decided to drop out, what with the demands of her new job and establishing a new household for her husband and two children. Bob and I would each do first drafts of the chapters we were primarily responsible for, and then exchange the drafts by mail for each other’s critique. Remember that at that time there were no faxes, no e-mail, no FedEx. Everything had to be sent by what we now call snail mail. The Searses left for Stanford, and I remained at Palfrey House with the Whitings and our teams of research assistants. The Department of Social Relations asked me to take over temporarily the teaching of Bob Sears’s courses until they could find a new senior child development scholar to join their faculty. As it turned out, they never got a replacement for Bob Sears, and so I continued to teach the undergraduate classes in developmental psychology every year. I had never had a course in this sub-field during my own graduate training, and had to cover a large new literature. It took a lot of class-preparation work, but I began to be truly interested in the field, and enjoyed teaching it. A couple of years after the Searses had left for Stanford, Mac and I got a very surprising and exciting phone call from the Home for Little Wanderers. In spite of all their warnings that they might never find an infant who met Massachusetts requirements about ethnicity, they told us about a little 7-month-old girl who was indeed eligible and had become available for adoption. They told us that she had been held off the adoption market for several months because she had been severely anoxic at birth, and they wanted to make sure that her development was on track. We went immediately to the foster home to see her, along with the social worker who was to help us decide whether this was the child for us. Of course we were thrilled, and when we got the go-ahead from the agency, quickly set about getting a crib and a changing table

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and all the paraphernalia that we now discovered would be required for taking care of a baby. We very soon brought little Sarah home to our new house. To my great regret, we didn’t own a camera at that time, and I don’t have pictures either of Janice when she first arrived or of Sarah as a baby. We had some difficulty with settling in—both Mac and I were inexperienced with infants, and for several weeks Sarah cried inconsolably in the evening at bed time. We got through this difficult beginning—helped, I must say, by Janice, who was 14 at the time and good with the baby. I arranged to reduce my hours at work, of course, so as to be home as much as possible. I hired a woman who was very experienced with babies who could come every day to the house to baby-sit through the morning hours. I would go home at noon. Getting home was much more meaningful now. There was a baby to come home to. Sarah was a lively child. She liked being outdoors—we’d put her on a blanket and she’d watch as Mac and Janice and I were busy in the garden. Soon she was crawling, so we set up a playpen near the garden and she was content—for a while—to watch what we were doing. After she was walking she would toddle around the yard—her joy was to get over to one of the stone walls that separated us from our neighbors, and climb up. We’d try to divert her, and repeatedly retrieved her, but on two occasions she did get over and we had to go find her in a neighbor’s yard. We would take her out for a ride in the car. In those days there were no requirements for a young child to be strapped into a child seat, so I held her in my lap. When Mac turned on the windshield wipers for the first time, she burst into shouts of laughter. On a long drive, she’d get sleepy and cuddle against me —I liked her warmth, and the soft smell of the back of her neck. My arms were no longer empty.

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Her language development turned out to be remarkable. In a few months time, she began to babble, and from the next room her babbling had all the rhythms and intonations of real speech. She had a few real words by her first birthday. From then on she was insatiable in wanting to know the names of things, always asking, “What’s ‘at?” When she was about two, I remember being at the sink with her—we had a double sink, and I would put soapy water in one side and rinse water in the other. Sarah would climb up on a stool, and I would wash something and hand it to her. She’d dip into the rinse water, saying: “Washing! I washing! Washing cup. Washing spoon.”—naming each thing as I handed it to her. Full sentences soon followed. An interesting, mischievous, precious little girl she was. I felt under enormous pressure. I would wake up in the middle of the night thinking and worrying about everything I had to do. During my mornings at the university, I was either teaching or working on the analysis and write-up of the child-rearing study. But I also had to prepare for the next day’s teaching; I was responsible for meeting with a number of individual tutees and giving them detailed help with their research; and I was deeply involved in working with Ted Newcomb back at Michigan on the new edition of the Readings in Social Psychology. As the senior editor, I was the one responsible for making the initial choices of articles to be reprinted, and in several instances commissioning new articles that involved a lot of editorial back-and-forth with the authors. Ted Newcomb reviewed and usually ratified my choices. I had planned to do much of this work during my afternoons at home, but found that babycare was much more demanding than I had expected. I would toss and turn at night, trying to figure out how I could get everything done, until finally Mac suggested that I might just as well get up and do some of it, and then come back to bed and finish my night’s sleep. That’s what I began do to, and developed a pattern that lasted over the next thirty years, of going to bed early, getting up at 2:00 a.m., working for a couple of hours, going back to sleep, and getting up at 7:00 or 7:30 to get organized for the day. Mac always cooked breakfast, which was a big help, and somehow we managed our new life and more and more enjoyed our family.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Moving to California Early in 1958, Mac and I got a very interesting letter written jointly by Bob Sears and Wilbur Schramm at Stanford. Schramm’s field was communication, and he and Sears were conducting a joint research project on how parents get their information on parenting and how they could most effectively be reached with new information. They wanted the two of us to come out for a year to work on the project. As it happened, Mac was due for a sabbatical. For me, both books Patterns of Child Rearing and Readings in Social Psychology had just been published, so I too was ready to take a year away from my Harvard duties. We were very tempted. I explained to Bob that I wouldn’t be able to work full time because Sarah was still so young. He said he was sure a workable time-table could be arranged. Before deciding whether to go, however, we went down to talk to the people at the Home for Little Wanderers. We told them we didn’t want to jeopardize our chances of getting another baby by being away for a year. They told us that they only had about 25 babies each year ready for adoption, and reminded us that the chances of one of these having a Jewish natural father and Protestant natural mother remained slim indeed, so it didn’t make sense to give up our chance of an interesting year at Stanford. They said, though, that if such a baby did indeed turn up, they would phone us in California and give us a chance for another adoption. So we decided to go. We arranged a one-year rental for our house, and agreed to rent a faculty house in Palo Alto that would be available for a year. Janice, then seventeen, had just graduated from high school and had been accepted at the University of Michigan for her freshman year, so it was a time of transition for her as well. We packed up

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clothes, some professional papers and books that Mac and I would need for our work, a few personal belongings that Janice would want for her college dorm room, toys and picture books for Sarah, and camping equipment, including a tent. Our station wagon, with its top carrier, was fully loaded as we started out on our long cross-country drive in the summer of 1958. Sarah, at two and a half years old, was a very active child, full of curiosity, and exceptionally verbal. We had to plan how to arrange our trip to provide frequent stops for her to get out of the car and run around. We usually had picnic lunches at local parks. We stayed a day or two in Champagne-Urbana with our friends the Emerys (from Corvallis); Clark was teaching at the University of Illinois at that time. Then came the next long drive, as we headed northwest through Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, and finally into Canada on our way to visit Mac’s cousin, Ted Riback, in Calgary. Ted put us up at a motel he owned, and arranged for a babysitter to come so that we and Janice could go with the Ribacks to the Calgary Stampede. For me, the most fascinating event was the Chuck Wagon Race—men driving horse-drawn covered wagons had to stop on signal, jump out and unload a kitchen stove, build a fire in the stove, cook some pancakes, re-load the hot stove onto the wagon and race to the finish line. Amazing. And of course there were rodeo-style events as well. Ted had a daughter, Donna, close to Janice’s age, and the next day they went over to a nearby ski area to ride the ski lifts up to some glorious view spots. We drove south from Calgary through a strip of the Rockies to Waterton Lakes State Park, just a few miles north of the Canadian-U.S. border. We pitched our tent and bravely donned our swimsuits for a dip in the lake—a lake fed by waters running off a nearby glacier. Yes, it was the coldest water I have ever tried to swim in and we didn’t last long. We warmed up by our campfire, cooked a good meal and slept cozily in our tent that night. The next morning, Mac was chopping wood for the fire, and I was brushing my teeth by the water tap, with Sarah close by my side, when Sarah jumped with excitement, shouting, “Look, Mom!” and ran with her arms outstretched toward a bear that had just ambled into our campsite. I chased her and snatched her up and ran to the car—

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luckily it wasn’t locked!—where we watched in safety while Mac waved a stick of wood hoping to look menacing. At that moment a park ranger appeared and also grabbed a stick of wood, which he brandished in a threatening way as he advanced toward the bear. The bear ambled quickly out of sight. Sarah was disappointed that she hadn’t had a chance to hug the great big teddy bear. I was thanking our lucky stars that our visitor had been a black bear, not a grizzly. From there we drove southwest to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to stay for several days with my sister Helen and her husband, Ged Barclay. Ged was a family doctor who could get calls at any hour of the day or night and was sometimes called away from the dinner table to tend to an illness or deliver a baby. Coeur d’Alene was a much smaller town then than it is now, and much of the surrounding area was undeveloped, providing wonderful woodsy places for picnics. We could go swimming in Lake Coeur d’Alene at nearby beaches with very little crowding, and when Ged was free we went boating in their motor launch called the Helengone. Sarah loved being on the boat, and was fascinated by the way the water parted and rushed by the sides of the boat and was churned up by the motor. Once she quite unexpectedly jumped off the boat into the lake. She was wearing her lifejacket and floated happily like a little cork while Ged got the boat turned around and we pulled her out of the water. She couldn’t understand why we were upset over what she had done. I was upset with myself, too, for not having been attentive enough to Sarah’s movements. If you’re getting the impression that Sarah was a fearless child, you’d be right—she continued to be a risk-taker. Then came the long drive to California. We arrived in Palo Alto about the end of August, and found the little house we had rented. It was an Eichler near the Midtown Shopping Center and perfectly adequate for our needs. Janice helped us move in, and then we took her to the airport for her trip to Michigan. We had a happy reunion with the Searses, who took us to see the new house they had built on Golden Oak Drive in Portola Valley. We set about finding a babysitter for Sarah, and then went over to the Stanford campus to meet Bob Sears and Wilbur Schramm, who showed us

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our offices and gave us our first briefing on the project we would be working on. As it happened, Lois Stolz, who had been teaching the introductory course in child development in the Stanford Psychology Department, had retired that summer, and Bob asked me if I would teach it right away—fall quarter. I agreed with some trepidation. I hadn’t brought with me all the books and articles and course notes I had been using for my teaching at Harvard, but the Stanford libraries had rich resources and I was able to get some of my Harvard materials sent on immediately. I began teaching near the end of September. So we settled in to a very busy schedule of work and family life. Sarah adapted well to her new surroundings. We found that a number of people we had known at Michigan or Harvard had also come to Stanford, and we began getting acquainted with our new colleagues who were working on the project as well as those in the Psychology Department. We also began to meet some of the people who lived on our little cul-de-sac. There were playmates for Sarah and all-in-all a satisfying social life for Mac and me. Mac was more deeply involved than I was in running the field studies for the Sears-Schramm research project, since some of my part-time work schedule was absorbed by teaching, but the balance worked out well. Mac and I did much of our grocery shopping together, and we followed our familiar pattern of his cooking breakfast and my cooking dinner. Then in October came the amazing phone call. It was from the Home for Little Wanderers. The miracle had happened: They had a little seven-month-old boy who fit the matching

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requirements for us. Were we interested? WERE WE? Oh, yes, indeed. I called Bob Sears and asked him if it was okay if I had another baby in a few days’ time. I said I would have to drop to less work time—no more than half time. He said he would take me off any committee assignments, and reduce my teaching duties so long as I would continue to teach the introductory child development course. Mac couldn’t get away, so I was the one who would go to Boston to see the baby. (I asked Mac: “Can you trust me to make this decision?” He said, “I can if you say yes!”) At that time my class met on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. I had scheduled an exam for the Wednesday of that week. My graduate assistants could administer the exam. I met my class on Monday morning, hopped on a plane and flew to Boston that afternoon. Our nephew Michael Maccoby was still at Harvard at that time, and he met my plane. The next morning he drove me out to the home of the foster mother caring for the baby. She let us in reluctantly—she had become quite attached to him herself. But there he was! It was love at first sight. What a marvelously attractive little fellow he was—responsive and cheerful, sweet and cuddly. Michael drove us around for a while so that I could hold him and we could begin to get acquainted—learning each other’s voices and facial expressions. On the second day, Wednesday, we picked him up in the morning again and spent more time with him. He began some energetic happy bouncing on my or Michael’s thighs when we held him upright on our laps. He seemed very much at ease with us. By Thursday the social worker gave the okay, and I carried him on board the flight home. On the plane, there was a woman who asked to hold him. He went to her rather warily, and soon stretched out his arms for me. She said, “Oh, they always want their moms, don’t they?” and of course I was glowing all over. Mac was waiting at the foot of the exit stairs and the baby gave him a big smile. Mac practically melted with delight. It’s hard to describe how happy we felt. On the drive home, I began to think out loud about all the things we’d have to get—a crib, a highchair, bottles and diapers.

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Mac said, “Oh, we don’t have to worry about any of that—it’s all there.” He said that a stream of neighborhood women had been arriving at our front door bringing baby clothes and diapers and powder for diaper rash and baby furniture. The only thing we needed to buy was a set of bottles. The neighbor across the street, Marm Cutler, had organized it all. To this day, I find it amazing that a neighborhood where we had lived for only a little more than two months would organize itself so briskly to welcome a new child for a new family. A very precious happening.

That evening after everyone was fed and bathed and tucked in, Mac yawned and said, “Well, it feels like time to turn in. Let’s just go and check once more on our children,” which we did, and then slept soundly—if I remember correctly, little Mark slept through the night. I got up the next morning and while Mac was cooking breakfast got him changed and dressed while Sarah was closely involved, watching every move and not at all certain how she felt about this whole new turn of events. Then the babysitter arrived—she had been forewarned—and I left for Stanford to meet my Friday morning class. So, our family was complete.

Eleanor and Mark

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Sarah, 1959

Mark, 1959

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Life at Stanford

For the first several months at Stanford, we’d expected that we’d be returning to Massachusetts toward the end of the summer of 1959. We had no idea that they had invited us out so that they could look us over for possible appointments. One day in February I met Quinn McNemar—an eminent quantitative psychologist in the Psychology Department—in the hallway. He fell into step, walking along with me, and asked about our plans and whether I’d be interested in an appointment in the Psychology Department. I was startled and very excited, and Mac and I discussed it that evening. It turned out that Wilbur Schramm had asked Mac the same question that very day. We realized that it would be a wonderful change for both of us if the proper arrangements could be made for our appointments. The problem was that Stanford had a rule: both members of a married couple could not be members of the same department. Though we were both psychologists, I was the one being offered the appointment in the Psychology Department. There was a slot open, and I had already begun teaching the courses meant for that slot. Where could Mac have an academic home? He was called in by the provost, Frederick Terman, who said they planned to create a Department of Communication, and they wanted Mac to work with Wilbur Schramm to build the new department. Meanwhile, he would be housed temporarily in the Speech Department—that was

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the department with courses on persuasion—and they thought Mac’s work on attitude change would fit in well enough until the new department came into being. It was a strange arrangement for Mac, and we had some doubts. But we realized that the chances of being offered two tenured appointments at another first-rate university were slim indeed, even in those days when higher education had become a booming industry and academic jobs were not hard to get. The longer-term prospects at Stanford looked very enticing, and we knew we were very lucky. So we decided that yes,

indeed, we would stay, and as time went on it was more and more evident that this had been a wonderful move for us. The adoption of little Mark was not yet final, and I took him on a quick trip to Boston in the spring. Our kind case-worker from the Home for Little Wanderers took us to a judicial hearing. The situation was strange for Mark, of course, and he looked more sober than usual, but didn’t cry. I signed the relevant papers, and he became unequivocally our son. Back at Stanford, we set about arranging things for our new life. We learned that the dean of Engineering would be taking a one-year sabbatical and we arranged to rent his campus house. That would give us most of a year to build our own campus house. Stanford had been growing rapidly, and had opened up a new segment of its land for the building of faculty housing. They divided up the land into approximately l/3-acre parcels, and those of us who wanted to build drew lots for our parcels. The parcel we drew was on Mayfield Avenue, across the street from a fenced hillside that was still occupied by free-range cattle. That area of the

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campus was called Naked Acres at the time, because there were very few trees or shrubs. Our lot had one pine tree in the back. How much could we spend to build our house? We had a long-established rule for ourselves: we would never spend more than 20% of our income for housing. So as soon as we knew what our new salaries would be, we were able to set the level of what cost we could incur. We estimated what our Massachusetts house would sell for—that would be a substantial down payment. Stanford arranged low-interest mortgages for campus home-builders, so we could finance the remainder and stay within our 20%. We would have to economize to pay for landscaping, etc. Back in Massachusetts, we had had to get a second car when Sarah arrived, because when I dropped to part-time work Mac and I could no longer coordinate our trips to and from work. We thought that at Stanford, living so close to our offices, we could economize by having only one car. How wrong we turned out to be! But we had a financial plan in place. We hired an architect who questioned us closely about our life-style. During leisure hours, did we prefer sun or shade? Which rooms did we spend most time in? He designed the layout of the house, and its orientation on the lot, with these things in mind. He also advised us strongly to hire a landscape architect with whom he could work from the beginning. We were accustomed to thinking about landscaping as something you did after a house was finished—put in a lawn in front, put shrubs around the foundation, nothing elaborate. But we soon realized that things were different in California, no doubt because, with such a wonderful climate, people spent more of their daily living time on their outside decks and patios. We knew that we’d want a deck with out-door furniture and a barbecue. Casey Kawamoto, our landscape architect, designed its placement and shape so that we could have either sun or shade at almost any time, and so that we could have interesting gardens and small trees surrounding the deck. There would be narrow walkways next to the foundation. We were very happy with the result.

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The house was finished in March 1960, right on time and pretty much on budget. We moved in on Mark’s second birthday, when Sarah was four and a half. Sarah was enrolled in a morning preschool in Menlo Park, and we quickly formed a car-pooling arrangement with another campus family. We found an excellent half-day baby-sitter for Mark, and Mac and I settled into a satisfying work-and-family routine, with my working half time and Mac full time. When Mark reached preschool age, he attended a small preschool on the campus until the wonderful new Bing Nursery school on the campus opened. When Mark entered kindergarten, I switched from a half-time to a three-quarter-time appointment at the university. I wanted to be home by 3:00 to meet the school bus. Over the past couple of years I had been gradually increasing my teaching and research time in the Psychology Department, and realized it was time to make my actual time schedule official (and get paid for it!). My enormously supportive

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department chair was ready to accept any time arrangement that suited our family situation. We soon switched to having a series of live-in au pairs, who ate with us and would become pretty much a family member. There was Mrs. O’Reilly, with her wonderful Irish brogue. And Pat Anderson, a strapping young woman from the Australian outback. And Yvonne Yun, a quiet, efficient Chinese young woman. And when we spent two quarters at the Stanford overseas campus in England, we brought home with us an English village girl, who had been working at the Stanford manor house. This was Angela Hamilton. She had been especially kind to ten-year-old Sarah while we were in England, and Sarah was very fond of her. Angie was ecstatic about the prospect of coming to California, and turned out to be a very successful member of our household. She made a trip to Mexico with us, and we stayed in touch over many years. We hosted her two boys when they visited the United States, and she came over for our fiftieth wedding anniversary. It was customary for the houses in the newly developed faculty housing area to have 7-foot fences along our lot lines. We negotiated with each of the four neighbors who shared our lot lines to share the cost of building the fences. With three of the neighbors, we easily agreed on a contractor we all trusted. But the fourth neighbor was suspicious of the choice, insisting that the price was too high. (The others of us felt he was quite paranoid about being cheated.) There were long delays while he tried to find a reliable contractor who would give us a lower bid. Meanwhile the fencing began to go up between us and two of the other neighbors. The recalcitrant neighbor spent quite a bit of time simply standing and watching the work on this nearby fencing. We never found out what it was exactly about what he saw that changed his mind, but one day he told us this was the best fence-building he had ever seen done, and he wouldn’t worry any more about the price. So, the old maxim “good fences make good neighbors” turned out to be true. We ended up with four good fences and four good neighbors. The neighbors on our eastern side had started to build their house later than we did, and were not finished by the time we

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moved in. They didn’t want our joint fence to go up till they were finished. We, too, had a problem with this fence: we had decided to put in a swimming pool in the back corner of our lot, and the only way we could bring in the necessary heavy equipment was across the back of our neighbor’s lot. To get our work done before they finished their landscaping and the fence between us was built, we had to put in the pool sooner than we wanted to. The children were still pretty young to be around a pool. Sarah, at age four and a half, was already a good swimmer, while Mark was not. But by dint of careful locking of the several doors that offered access to that corner of the yard, and very vigilant training of the children, we managed safely till Mark swam confidently. That pool gave great pleasure to all of us. After we put in some solar heating for it, we were able to swim for at least half the year. After the children were grown and living in their own homes, it was still one of the attractions that made our house the center of festive gatherings of children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews and long-term friends on Memorial Day or the Fourth of July. Throughout the year there would be parties and gatherings of various sorts. Mac and I had festive celebrations for our fortieth

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and fiftieth anniversaries. Sarah set the date for her marriage to Russel Hatch to coincide with our fortieth wedding anniversary. My madrigal group, led by lawyer Charlie Schulz, met successively at various houses, and we took our turn hosting this group for singing. And the little “jazz” group, organized by Josie Hilgard, came to provide the music for parties where there might be dancing. That was Mary Festinger on the piano, Josie Hilgard on the mandolin, a university librarian on the trumpet, her husband (a soccer coach) on the drums, a young friend of the Hilgards on the bass fiddle, and Rose Kleiner and me as singers. Rose and I loved to do the counterpoint in “Lida Rose” (from The Music Man). This little group met once a month, and we called ourselves “The San Andreas Fault.”

Jessica Maccoby, Eleanor Maccoby, Brianna Hatch, and Grace Corley.

Fortieth wedding anniversary

Eleanor, Mark, Sarah, Mac, and Janice

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There were a number of weddings at the house. Henry and Prue Breitrose were married there, as well as several other colleagues and grad students. Most memorable was the re-marriage of my parents. They had been married for thirty years, divorced for twenty, and were re-married in their seventies. Of course that was an occasion for a grand family reunion. My three sisters with their children were all there, and Janice came home from college to help with the party and entertaining Sarah and Mark. Mac and I belonged to a four-couple bridge group, including Al and Barbara Hastorf, Herb and Marilyn Abrams, and Ken and Selma Arrow. We took turns hosting those meetings, and

Gene and Viva Emmons

Mark, Janice, and Sarah Viva seated;

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the host would serve cocktails and dinner before the card tables were set out. In those days we all had silverware and china service for eight, along with linen tablecloths and napkins. We could show off our cooking specialties, and took care with the flower arrangements.. As time went on, activities like this became more and more rare on the campus, as more wives were working and time was short. Of course we celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas. For a few years we adopted the old Emmons tradi-tion of making our own Christmas cards with family photos. We always had a Christmas tree, and the children enjoyed getting out the ornaments, which were collected over the years, always including some that the children had made at school. When they were older, we added a celebration of Chanukah. Mac would sing a prayer in Hebrew as we lighted the right number of candles and set them into the menorah. But we never sent the children to Sunday school or Hebrew school, and they were not baptized, confirmed, or prepared for a bar mitzvah (or bat mitzvah). I have often wondered whether we deprived our children of important growing-up experiences by avoiding any kind of religious training, but the fact was that Mac and I were non-believers ourselves and would have felt hypocritical if we had built religion into the children’s lives. Mac’s mother would have felt vindicated if she had lived into those years. Quite often, we went up to San Francisco to see a play or attend a concert. And occasionally, on a Saturday evening, we'd go with friends to the Hungry I, a small nightclub where we heard Tom Lehrer or Nichols and May perform their hilarious satirical routines. When we went up to "the City," we dressed more

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conservatively—and more smartly, we hoped—than our usual attire when going out to events on the Peninsula. We took a number of vacation trips with the children during the long school vacations in the summertime. We bought a lighter-weight tent and some sleeping bags, and on one occasion went camping in Redwood State Park in northwestern California. The park is in the middle of a magnificent stand of first-growth redwoods, and our campsite was bordered on two sides by fallen redwoods that made a wall 7 or 8 feet high. As soon as we were unpacked, the children went to explore nearby places, and they ran to us in great excitement—they had discovered a tall tree nearby that had a wide space between its roots where they could enter at the base of the tree. The space formed a small room—and there was a deerskin attached to the inner wall! We speculated that this must

be a place where Indians had once found shelter. Several times, we went up to Orcas Island to share vacation time with my sisters and their families. One summer, Ged Barclay (Helen’s husband) towed his boat from Idaho over to Anacortes, and launched it there, boating on over to the north shore of Orcas, where he anchored it. One day he took Sarah out for a fishing trip, and she reeled in a sizable salmon. She was about thirteen at the time, and ecstatic over her success. Ged had also caught one. Of course, we couldn’t bring the fish over to the vegetarian Theological Society camp for cooking. If memory serves, we heated rocks to an intense heat, put

them into a sand pit, wrapped the two salmon with seaweed and tinfoil, covered them with sand, and let them cook, meanwhile getting out the other picnic fare we had brought, and arguing about

Sarah with her “catch”

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how long the fish should be left to cook. We dug them out when we were just too hungry to wait any longer, and they tasted wonderful (and so did the forbidden beer we had with them!).

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Our Professional Careers Mac and Wilbur Schramm did indeed establish the Department of Communication. It had a section for journalism—where aspiring journalists could be trained—incorporating the preexisting Journalism Department led for many years by Chilton (Chick) Bush. Now there would also be a film section, focusing mainly on training students in documentary film making. And finally a research section, which would focus on the role of the media in the lives of consumers. Mac became head of the research division. In those days, of course, there were none of the social media that have become so influential today, so research concentrated mainly on the influence of television and films. For a number of years, research focused on persuasion. Mac collaborated with graduate students Henry Breitrose and Don Roberts doing experimental studies to identify the factors that affect how effective a TV or film message will be. Will it be received and believed, received but ineffective in creating or changing a belief, simply be ignored, or actively rejected? This work was absorbing, and through it Mac deepened his involvement with colleagues around the country, and some in other countries, with similar interests. Then one day a man walked into Mac’s office and introduced himself. He was Dr. John (Jack) Farquhar, a cardiologist from our Stanford Department of Internal Medicine. He told Mac that in working on the causes and possible remedies for high rates of heart disease and heart attacks, he had come to understand that most of the causes were behavioral. For example they knew that

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obesity was associated with heart disease, but the remedies were somehow to get people to eat a healthy diet and get more exercise. And smoking was clearly associated with heart disease, but you couldn’t cure smoking with a pill. Could behavioral science help? Mac and Jack spent over a year thinking through the behavioral

elements known at that time to be related to heart disease, and considering how these behaviors could be changed. They decided to attempt some community studies, in which one or two towns would be flooded with persuasive messages through all possible channels—television, radio, newspapers, billboards, and messages for parents carried home by school children. These messages would focus on needed dietary changes, on ways of getting more exercise, and on the urgent need to stop smoking. And there would need to be at least one “control” or “contrast” community that would not be subject to this communication blitz. The plan was to draw a random sample of adults in each

of the communities, and periodically assess their blood pressure and body weight, as well as asking them about their smoking and habitual diet and exercise habits. The data would allow them to trace changes in these things over the time period of the study and sometime thereafter. Obviously, this would be a very large and expensive enterprise, and so the next step was to raise money. They were able to raise a considerable fund—I believe mainly from the National Institutes of Health—and set to work.

John Farquhar

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They chose Gilroy and Watsonville as their experimental towns, and Tracy as the comparison town. They prepared reams of persuasive material, much of it in both English and Spanish. They trained teams of assistants (some of them bilingual) in how to take blood pressure measurements, and how to conduct interviews about diet, smoking, and exercise. Then, at last, they launched the study, and for several very busy months everything went smoothly. But then a totally unexpected stumbling block emerged. Three Hispanic graduate students who were working on the project published a protest letter in the Stanford Daily. What right did these gringo researchers have to interfere with traditional Hispanic foods? If Hispanic citizens wanted to make refried beans with lard, nobody had the right to tell them not to. Long- faced a dilemma: they could reply in the Daily explaining their reasons, but to publicly criticize members of the research team might be bad for morale, to say nothing of endangering the three students’ careers. They got an unexpected assist. A close colleague of Cesar Chavez, the famed organizer of Hispanic agricultural workers, phoned Jack, saying, “What’s the matter with these crazy kids up there at Stanford? Don’t they know that Hispanics have too many heart attacks? And that they pay taxes, and have every right to benefit from a government program that could make them healthier? Do you want me to come up there and straighten them out?” Jack thanked him, but answered, “Not right now.” Jack and Mac decided not to put an answering article in the Daily, but told the students about the phone call. They were deflated, and quietly went back to work on the project. Two or three years later, they each graduated from the program with a Ph.D. and good job prospects. The results of the project were published in a series of papers in professional journals, and the news was good. In the experimental communities, the rate of heart attacks fell significantly over the life of the study and afterward. Blood pressures went down. Smoking decreased, and diet improved. And these trends were not seen in the comparison town. A series of interviews with citizens documented that the study’s messages had been received, and there were many stories about people’s efforts

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to stop smoking, lose weight, or get more exercise. At the time of his retirement, Mac was able to feel considerable satisfaction over a career that had turned out to be so helpful to so many people. During our first three or four years at Stanford, with a demanding teaching schedule and spending only half-time at work, I did very little in the way of research, and did not publish anything new. In the mid-sixties, I had begun attending the national regional meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), giving papers and joining panels there, and was gaining some name recognition from the publication of the Patterns of Child Rearing book and the Readings in Social Psychology. I was elected to the governing council of SRCD, and to a national committee of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and increased my involvement in these (and other) national organizations as time went on. The SSRC asked me to organize a group to study how the two sexes differed—and did not—in their development. After arriving at Stanford, I drew on Stanford colleagues and on scholars spending sabbatical years at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science (CASBS), a national think tank adjoining the Stanford campus. We met monthly. Theoretical discussions and data collection over a period of three years led to a joint book (which I edited and wrote a chapter for): the Development of Sex Differences, published in 1966. However, during those first Stanford years, I did not feel a commitment to gender studies as my primary focus. Since my graduate-student days I had had an interest in perception and its development, especially in how attentional processes are involved in perception. It’s obvious that we don’t look at everything that’s available to be seen. It’s not quite so obvious, but equally true, that we don’t listen to everything that’s available to be heard. I had always thought that studies of perception had focused so strongly on vision that the attentional processes in audition had been neglected. With two gifted graduate students (John Hagen, Karl Konrad), we began an exploration of selective auditory perception and how it develops. That is, we wanted to know how well children of successive ages could focus on one auditory message and hear it clearly while shutting out an unwanted auditory message. We

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published a monograph in 1967, and some papers, showing the age-related changes in auditory attention-focusing skills. In 1970–71, I had a year as a fellow at the CASBS. That was a time of tremendous turmoil on campuses all around the country. Like many of my students I was strongly opposed to the Vietnam War, and joined a group of faculty members, university administrators, and student leaders to charter a plane and fly to Washington to lobby against the war on Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon. When we returned, Mac met our plane and said, “Don’t worry, your study has not been burned!” I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about, but it turned out that some arsonists (student activists?) had set fires at the CASBS. The study of an Indian scholar was totally destroyed. He had been working with reams of handwritten field notes, of which there were no copies. All gone. The study across from mine had been burned, but flames did not jump the corridor. Down on the campus, students had invaded Encina Hall, where a number of classified records were stolen—including records of faculty salaries. At that time, salaries were a deep dark secret, known only to the individual faculty member, the department chairman, and the dean. I did not know the salaries of any of my colleagues, and none of them had ever asked me about mine. That spring, commencement was held in Frost Amphitheater. The faculty gathered together at the bottom of the outside entrance ramp, wearing their academic robes with their colorful cowls and the occasional touch of ermine. We lined up and started to walk up the ramp. Then we saw that there was a cluster of students above us on the embankment. They had what looked like a long computer printout in their hands, and they began to call out salaries: “Here comes professor so-and-so from the Economics Department—he gets $$$$$$$ dollars a year. Do you think he’s worth it?” Then they got to me. They called out: “Here comes the lowest-paid full professor in the university. Do you think that’s because she is a woman?” I was amazed. My salary seemed reasonable to me, and I had no idea that everybody else was getting more. The news spread quickly, and my department chair was embarrassed. I got a nice raise two weeks later. In retrospect, I

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realized that my years of part-time pay had reduced the base for salary raises. My teaching of the introductory course in Child Development involved close attention to a topic that was gaining more prominence in the field. It was what we had earlier called “dependency” in our Patterns book—a child’s clinging to parents, and resisting being separated from them. At that time, behavioral-oriented psychologists saw “dependency” as a habit built in infancy through the child’s being held and carried and fed by parents. This habit was inevitable in infancy but needed to be “unlearned” as a young child became capable of more independence. In the late 1960s, this point of view was largely replaced by the concept of “attachment,” which saw infants’ wariness toward strangers and the need for closeness in both parent and child not as a “bad habit,” but as biologically evolved benign processes building a foundation for lasting emotional ties. I was asked to write reviews of publications on attachment, and became convinced that the newer approach was absolutely right and needed to be explored further. With Shirley Feldman (first a student, then a colleague) we observed a group of children at age two, and then again at age three, to see how the children would change during this time in the way they dealt with separation from their mothers and the presence of a stranger. Our modest contribution to the growing attachment literature was published as a monograph in 1972. The focus on gender studies—the work for which I became best known—returned almost by accident in 1970. A young woman walked into my office to inquire about getting a post-doc appointment with me. Her name was Carol Jacklin. I knew her major professor at Brown University, and knew I could call him. But in that first meeting we chatted over a range of issues and discovered a mutual interest: We were both indignant over the glib generalizations about sex differences that we kept encountering—“men are from Mars, women from Venus,“ “men are naturally more active, women more passive,” “women just can’t do math,” etc. We both thought it would be useful to do a careful review of evidence for and against such generalizations, but before I could

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feel ready to accept Carol as a colleague in such an enterprise, there was something I needed to know. I told her about a colleague in my department who urged strongly that if anyone’s research yielded a finding that might be detrimental to women, it should not be published. I asked Carol how she felt about this. She strongly disagreed, and said, “The truth will make us free.” So I hired her. Carol organized a team of student assistants who searched the literature for relevant studies and wrote short abstracts of the relevant ones. We agreed to rely on observational studies as much as possible, and to trace age-related changes. We faced the “file drawer” problem: people were likely to publish results that showed a significant sex difference, but when sex differences were tested for but not found, the findings often went unpublished—simply filed away. We wrote letters and made phone calls to quite a few people whose published reports showed that they had tested or observed subjects of both sexes with respect to some of the traits we were studying, but didn’t report sex differences. Often, we learned, they had analyzed for sex difference and not found them; we were able to add these negative findings (as well as a few unpublished positive ones) to our summaries. Carol fed me the set of abstracts pertinent to the topic we were working on, and I organized the findings into tables showing the age of the children who were studied, the sample size and the sex difference—if any—that had been found. Using these tables, I did the writing. Our book The Psychology of Sex Differences was published in 1974. Its major impact was as a “myth breaker.” Although it was found to be true that men and boys are the more aggressive sex, in most respects in which the two sexes had been thought to differ, they didn’t. At least, there was no evidence that they did. The early 1970s were a time when the feminist movement was growing fast. Women were demanding equal treatment in the workplace, and were breaking through one glass ceiling after

Carol Jacklin

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another. What they wanted was equality, usually implying that the two sexes were alike in their needs and capacities, and deserved the same treatment in all settings. So our book was grist for the feminist ideology of the times, and was widely cited. Over the next decade, Carol and I embarked on longitudinal studies of several groups of children, following development from birth to age six, with a focus on the gender aspects of this development. Our

studies involved observing the interaction of mother-child pairs at several successive ages, with some less systematic observation of father-child pairs as well. By the time the first cohort of children was about three years old, play with other children had become an important part of their lives. We wanted to study how children of the two sexes interacted with playmates. We thought of arranging a situation in one of our observable playrooms where a child in our study would encounter an unfamiliar child. But the question was: would it make any difference whether the new potential playmate was of the same or the other gender? Carol said: “Let’s find out!” We recruited 46 pairs of previously unacquainted children, all of whom were close to 33 months of age. They were brought into our observation room two at a time—either a boy-boy pair, a girl-girl pair, or a boy-girl pair. Each child was dressed in pants and a simple, unadorned t-shirt. Mothers, who brought the children into the playroom, were asked not to use their children’s names, so as to minimize clues to a child’s gender. We observed how the children reacted to one another, coding both positive and negative interactions—smiles and frowns,

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hugs and pushes, friendly or unfriendly speech. The findings were very clear. Boys engaged in twice as much interaction when with another boy as they did with a girl. They became more active when with another boy—more running and chasing. The strong same-sex orientation was found also in girls—even more so. Though the presence of another girl didn’t make a girl more physically active, she simply played and talked more than twice as much with another girl as with a boy. This study led me to think about interaction in a different way. Perhaps we needed to focus more on the characteristics of dyads (pairs), not just on individual children. And clearly, we were missing a good deal studying children only one at a time. I mulled over this study for a long time, finding more and more information relevant to it, and it became the focus of my last book, The Two Sexes, published in 1998. In retrospect, I think that book should have been called “The Separate Sexes,” focusing as it did on children’s attraction to same-sex peers (and probably avoidance of the other sex). In the discussion of the findings, I noted that in the parenting activities of the families we had studied, we had never seen parents fostering a same-sex playmate preference in their young children. Instead, parents tended to arrange play time with other children who lived nearby, or with the children of their own friends regardless of the playmate’s gender. Among other possible explanations, I dared to include a chapter on possible biological factors in same-sex playmate choices, giving some credence to these. This, of course, was not nearly as consistent with feminist ideology as the earlier book had been. Mainly, the new book was just ignored by many writers on gender issues. Certainly my stardom among feminists was considerably diminished. During the decade following the publication of The Psychology of Sex Differences, a number of graduate students (mostly women) worked with Carol and me on our longitudinal studies of two cohorts of children from birth to age six. Some students branched out to do dissertation studies of their own. I won’t attempt to name all these excellent and stimulating young colleagues, for fear of leaving someone out. But each year there was a coherent group, welcoming several new students each

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September. And in May or June of each year, there was a party to celebrate accomplishments during the year and to honor students who were completing their dissertations and leaving Stanford for new jobs. We had a song that we usually sang at these year-end parties, to the tune of “Oklahoma!”—we sang: “R-E-E-E-E-PLICATION That’s the word that brightens every eye” to remind ourselves of the importance of checking findings on more than one group of children. Those were busy, productive years. We published a substantial series of papers, co-authored with students. By the time of Carol’s departure for a job at University of Southern California in the mid-1980s, our perspectives had been diverging considerably. Carol remained a strong, committed feminist and was mainly interested in gender studies and feminist professional issues. I continued to be active in several feminist enterprises on the campus—activities dedicated to safeguarding the rights and opportunities for women. But at the same time my research focus turned more to family structure and socialization processes. I became especially interested in parent-child interaction, and how parents and children reciprocally influence one another. In collaboration with a talented graduate student, John Martin, I experimented with getting detailed, fine-grained measurements of the back-and-forth of mutual influence. We published this work in a series of papers and a long chapter in Handbook of Child Psychology. Throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, I was teaching some small seminars for upper classmen and graduate students, but also some larger lecture courses. At the back of my large introductory class in developmental psychology there might be one or two students who were bored and simply read their copy of the Stanford Daily. But one year I began to notice a man sitting back there who always paid close attention and seemed very involved in issues, though he never spoke up. One day he came up after class to introduce himself. He was Michael Wald, a professor in the Law School, and was interested in family law: the treatment of juvenile

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offenders, adoption, foster care—the whole range of issues concerning how the law deals with children and juveniles. He said he wanted to start a Law School seminar on these topics and asked me whether I would be interested in co-teaching it with him. I certainly was! We organized the seminar, called Children and the Law, and announced that it was open to graduate students in other departments. We taught this seminar for—how long?—I think it was 13 years. Our teaching styles were different—mine more data-focused, his more Socratic—and the combination seemed to work well. The students came from the Law School, from Anthropology, from Sociology, from Psychology, once from the Medical School; and one year Judge Ladoris Cordell, from the local juvenile court, sat in, to our very great enlightenment. The Stanford Psychology Department had a rotating chairmanship. In 1973, it was time for me to take my turn. I set about learning about the department’s budget, about pending appointments, about promotions and salaries, and other departmental functions. One of my new duties was to supervise the care of any laboratory animals being used for department members’ research. It came as a startling surprise to me to learn that I was responsible for the care of a gorilla. Penny Patterson was a graduate student in the department, and she was studying the acquisition of sign language (ASL) in a nonhuman primate. She had acquired Koko, a four-and-a-half-year-old gorilla, who was housed in a trailer parked on an open area of the campus (yes!—there were open areas then!). I was supposed to inspect and report on Koko’s living situation at regular intervals. I made a date with Penny to make my visit during the lunch hour. I didn’t have time to eat lunch—I just grabbed a piece of celery and ate it on the way over in the car. Koko’s cage occupied most of the interior of the trailer. It was a long narrow space, and there was a corridor running along the outside of the cage; from there it was easy to watch Koko’s activities and communicate with her. When Penny and I came in, I was able to get a good look at Koko for the first time. When she stood upright, she came up nearly

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to the level of my hip and her arms were so long that the palms of her hands were flat on the floor. When we came in, Koko’s face became animated, and she grabbed her stool, pulling it over to our side of the cage. She climbed up on it, bringing her closer to face-level with us. Penny said: “Breathe at her—she wants to smell you.” So, a little nervously, I came up close to her and breathed into her face. She jumped down from her stool, and moved toward her cage door, making some sort of sign to Penny. Penny said, “Oh, she likes you! She wants to take you for a walk!” (I learned later that celery was Koko’s favorite vegetable, so it seems my breath was pleasing to her.) Penny attached a long chain to her collar, and opened the door so that Koko could come out into our corridor. She immediately took my right hand in her left, and led me out of the trailer and over to her play yard where she had a jungle gym. Penny was talking to her as she walked along behind us, but Koko’s attention was mainly on me. Suddenly, while she was still gripping my right hand in her left, she reached her long right arm up behind her own head and around my neck, pulling my head down to her face level so she could kiss me. Her mouth was rubbery and her fur was scratching my neck. I tensed up, trying to pull away, but then I realized how enormously strong she was—there was no way in the world I could release myself from her clutch. I called to Penny to rescue me, which she did quickly and skillfully. On future inspection visits, Koko and I stayed on our own sides of the cage’s wire-netting wall. So, I believe I can claim a distinction. Surely I must be the only person you know who has been kissed by a gorilla!

Speaking at the American Psychiatric Association

Meeting

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In the mid-1970s, an interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Families, Children, and Youth was established at Stanford, and I became an active member. Many of the discussions there centered around the conditions that endangered children, including the disruption of children’s lives occurring when their parents divorce. A member of the group was Robert Mnookin, a faculty member in our Law School, whose major research interest was on conflict resolution. We discovered a mutual interest in the topic of divorce. Bob wanted to study the processes whereby divorcing couples resolved conflict over the custody arrangements for their children. I was interested in the impact of these decisions on the children themselves. Divorce law and legal practice were undergoing change in California at that time: Groups were advocating increasing awards of joint custody, but there was little evidence concerning what the effects of such a change might be. We knew this issue must be part of any new research program we would undertake. We began planning a study. From the court records in two nearby counties, we identified couples who had filed for divorce between September 1984 and April 1985. We enrolled 1,100 divorcing couples who had at least one child under sixteen, and with interviews followed these families over three years. We relied on the indispensable help of post-doc Charlene Depner, who supervised the data collection. The findings were too many and too complex to summarize here, but let me just mention a few. Over time, children living with their mothers visited their fathers less. Children living with their fathers visited their mothers more. Maternal custody was the most usual, and the most stable, custodial arrangement. Joint custody proved to be an unstable arrangement—difficult to maintain if either parent remarried, or, of course, if either parent moved. But some couples who had not initially chosen joint custody did adopt it a year or two later. These parents, wanting to respect their children’s wish to maintain a close relationship with both parents, were willing to accept the limitations on their own freedom that it entailed. In 1992, we published the findings in Dividing the Child (by Maccoby and Mnookin).

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Bob Mnookin moved to the Harvard Law School as we were finishing our work on the book. A follow-up study with these families was done with a focus on the adolescent children of our divorced families. We recruited a talented post-doc, Christy Buchanan, who directed the study and took the lead in analyzing and writing up the results. The study found that the children’s well-being depended very little on the custodial arrangements—the adolescents living in joint custody were doing as well as those living with their mothers or their fathers. But some adolescents were caught up in their parents’ conflicts. Some parents competed for the child’s loyalty, openly disparaged each other, or used the child as an intermediary (e.g., “You tell your father that if his check is late one more time he won’t be seeing you for a while”). Adolescents involved in such conflicts showed increased levels of depression and/or deviance. These findings and many others were published in the 1996 book Adolescents after Divorce, by Buchanan, Maccoby, and Dornbusch. Through my years of teaching and doing research, I seem to have developed a talent for analyzing and summarizing large bodies of research literature and tracing changes in various aspects

of children’s development over time. I was constantly called upon to give lectures and do topical reviews at professional meetings, and was asked to write 40-to-100-page analytic and summarizing chapters for several of the big manuals and handbooks that were being published in those days. Remember, there was no Internet, no Google, no Wikipedia, and doing these reviews was laborious to say the least, but more needed by the profession then than it would be now. I relied mainly on

the books, monographs, and the complete sets of developmental psychology journals that crowded the bookshelves in my office, drawing also on the university libraries. All this digging and organizing of evidence was useful, of course, for my teaching.

Honorary degree, Northwestern

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When Dr. David Hamburg had been chair of the department of Psychiatry in the Stanford Medical School, he expanded the department’s focus to include behavioral science, and we became acquainted at that time. After he left Stanford to become head of the National Institute of Medicine in Washington, he nominated me for membership in it, and we continued to be in touch. He later moved to New York to head the Carnegie Corporation, and he asked me to be co-chair of a Carnegie Committee on Children and Families. We put out a report stressing the importance of the first three years of life in children’s subsequent well-being. The following year, a reputable psychologist published a book entitled The Myth of the First Three Years, challenging our conclusions. Subsequent research, however, has strongly supported our claims, and I am happy to see the current programs focused on making early-childhood education available to more and more children. Through my various publications and talks at meetings I acquired a level of name recognition that led to my being elected to leadership roles in various professional organizations. The American Psychological Association (APA) has divisions representing the various sub-fields of psychology, and I served a term as president of Division 7, the division for developmental psychologists. But psychology has always had a basic split between clinical psychology—the part of the field devoted to therapeutic practice—and psychological research, the “science” part of the field. Over time, many people felt that the APA was more and more becoming the representative of the clinical side, and finally the scientific group split off and formed a new organization, the Association for Psychological Science (APS). I canceled my membership in APA and became a founding member of APS, whose journals I subscribed to and whose publication agenda I supported by serving as a reviewer of submitted papers. However, my main professional home has been in the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD). I was elected to a term as president in the early ‘80s. I was also active in the Social Science Research Council, serving a term as chair, and in the Consortium of Social Science Associations, also with a term as

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chair. I was elected to several honorary organizations: the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The NAS was formed to assist all the agencies of government by providing scientific information needed for their missions. I joined a number of working groups dealing with issues concerning children and families, helping to organize reports on whatever scientific evidence was available to be brought to bear on whatever question a government agency had brought to us. I felt very glad that my knowledge of the existing data enabled me to make a real contribution to the work of government agencies charged with providing support to children and families. Beyond the NAS, each of the other organizations I was involved in at a leadership level had a schedule of meetings. Of course, all this entailed multiple trips east to attend meetings and work sessions. In the late 1980s (after I officially retired), there was a six-week period during which I flew to Washington or New York eleven times. Mac did some professional travel, too, so there were many days when only one of us was home. This created few problems in our household management, however, since much of our professional travel occurred after the children were grown and gone. Being inducted into the NAS was an exciting and sobering experience. For me, it occurred in 1992, only a few months after Mac had died. How I wished that he could have been there to enjoy the experience with me! I was escorted to the induction ceremony by my nephew, Michael Maccoby. The ceremony was held in a large lecture hall in the NAS’s august marble building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C. The room was filled by family members of our inductee group as well as NAS members. After welcoming speeches from the NAS president and other dignitaries, each new inductee walked down an aisle and up onto the platform to sign THE BOOK. It has the signatures of all NAS members since the organization was formed, and the first signature is Abraham Lincoln’s. I turned the pages back to look at his scrawl.

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During the long years at Stanford, enormous changes took place in the technology available for research and teaching. Back in Cambridge in the 1960s, when I had been working on the manuscript for Patterns of Child Rearing. I made two carbon copies as I typed, and any mistakes had to be corrected by erasing words from the original and both copies. We did have a ditto machine available, and if multiple copies of something were needed, we typed on a ditto master and rolled off one copy at a time, getting purple ditto ink on our hands and sometimes on our clothes and faces. Mimeograph machines were a considerable improvement, but still required that someone—usually a secretary—had to type each page of a manuscript on a mimeograph stencil, and run off multiple copies page by page. I don’t remember just when the great personal computer revolution began, but it changed all aspects of academic work. For me, the first step was to install a personal computer at my desk (at first without a printer). I quickly learned to use it for e-mail and for writing research papers. What a delight to be able to correct errors with the touch of a key, to move paragraphs from one place to another, or to forward a first draft to a colleague. I vividly remember the first time I received a student term paper that had been typed on a computer and printed out in neat, highly readable form. Within a year or so, all the students submitted their papers in this form. The punched cards and counter-sorters were soon gone, and raw data could be sent over to the giant computers in the university computer building, with neat printouts coming back the next day showing distributions, means, standard deviations, correlations, p values—whatever we asked for. When the divorce study began, Bob Mnookin introduced us to

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the methods for doing all the data analyses on our own desk computers, without the costly reliance on the university’s mainframe. My feelings about the transition into the high-tech world are perhaps best described by the “poem” I wrote for our long-term secretary on the occasion of her retirement in about the mid-1980s. It began with some comment about the time she first arrived at Stanford, and then continued:

In many ways, times were much simpler then. Thinking back, do you remember when Files were in drawers, telephones dialed Copies were carbons, and you broadly smiled At a gleaming Selectric, so dear to your heart And absolutely State-of-the-Art. But suddenly CHANGE switched from a walk to a run From the Wang to the Vax and now to the Sun Terminals everywhere beep and glow We crouch in our offices, lights turned low, A giant Xerox gained a room of its own. And, Ye Gods, what has happened to the plain old phone? The bleating, infamous message machine Has totally changed what talking can mean. Word processor, graphics, electronic mail How could one cope with it? Bold hearts did quail Old skills grew obsolete, new ones essential The crisis for each of us became existential Well, each undaunted, all sails unfurled We made the great leap to the high-tech world.

Little did we know in the mid-1980s how much greater the upcoming changes would be—Google, the smart phone, Facebook and Twitter. I was reasonably computer literate through the 1990s, though if I needed Power Point for a talk, that was done for me by a research assistant. But with the new century, I began to fall behind, and now I’m feeling obsolete. I do have a mini iPad, which

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I now use for reading my daily New York Times and for reading books—my vision has been failing over the last couple of years, and the enlarged print on the iPad is a blessing. But I don’t have a smart phone. I don’t have Facebook, and I don’t Tweet or Text. If I want to communicate with family members or friends or colleagues, I rely on e-mail or the good old telephone. There seems to be a limit on the amount of technological change I can handle—or want to handle. I did like the simpler times, but regret getting gradually out of touch with the next generations.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Professional Travel I did a great deal of professional travel, often to international psychology meetings, where I would give a talk or participate in a panel. But there were more, unique journeys, too. In 1973, I was amazed to get a phone call inviting me to go with a group of developmentalists to China. Ever since the Communist revolution in 1948, China had been almost completely closed to Western eyes. But after their 1972 trip opening up relations between our two countries, Nixon and Kissinger set up a committee with the imposing title: The Committee for Scholarly Exchange with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Its mission was to bring groups of Chinese scholars to study American culture, science and technology, and to send groups of American scholars to China for comparable study. Chinese scholars at that time were intensely interested in learning about the nascent development of Internet technology, about agriculture, and many other fields. They quickly applied to the committee for an invitation, and there were few barriers. But for every group that came here, there was supposed to be an American group going to China, and here difficulties emerged. Groups wanting to study such things as the Chinese legal system, or their manufacturing, or life in Chinese villages were not initially welcomed. But one thing the Chinese were proud to show to the West was their system for the education and care of their children and youth. So in the fall of 1973 a group was formed to go to China to study their preschool and grade-school education, child-rearing practices, and to a limited extent, family health care. I certainly wanted to go, but I was committed to teaching the large introductory course in developmental psychology and felt I couldn’t just leave for three weeks. But my colleagues stepped up and offered to cover my classes, so off I went. We were a group of—

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let’s see, I believe we were nine—plus two staff members, one of whom spoke fluent Mandarin Chinese. The chair of our group was Bill Kessen, of Yale. At that time Mao was still alive and the Cultural Revolution was waning but still widely powerful. We visited many preschools. In each one, the children would put on a program of songs and dances for us, sometimes in costumes they had helped to make. One preschool was close to a steel mill, and the workers there came over to build swings for the children. In return, the children would go over to the mill to sing and dance for the workers during their lunch period. At each preschool, we were shown the children doing their required “productive labor.” In a preschool that was close to a factory that made tiny light bulbs (I think for flashlights), the children folded stiff paper into boxes that would be used for shipping the bulbs and batteries. We visited one “residential” preschool, where the children stayed overnight through the week, going home to be with their parents on the weekend. We understood that these were children of “elite” party pe, and the children were told that their parents were doing very important work to serve the people, so the children’s job was to be proud and brave and not to fuss over the weekly separation. They were allowed to talk with their parents by telephone occasionally. In early December, we traveled inland to Sian (now Xi’an), a place now famous for the excavations that revealed a whole army of life-sized individualized clay soldiers. Unfortunately, we got there the year before these remarkable clay sculptures were unearthed. We went out in the morning to walk through the town—a delightful hush prevailed. The only motor traffic was two army vehicles, no private cars. It had snowed the night before, and bicycles made a soft “whish” as they sped by on the snowy street. Until we caused a bicycle accident, that is. It happened that two of the men in our party were several inches over 6 feet. in height, and each had bought a Russian fur hat that made him even taller. A bicyclist glanced our way, saw these two giants, and jammed on his brakes. Other bikes piled into him. And then all the riders left their

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bikes and came over to us—none had ever seen Westerners before. They stared and pointed up and laughed at our two tall men, wanted to touch our clothes, examined our shoes, and tried out a few words of English they had learned in school. It was a very upbeat encounter. We put on our warmest clothes, and went to visit a nursery-school/preschool just outside of Sian. The classroom was heated by a single small stove burning corncobs, and the windows were kept open at the top. The room was very cold. The children were bundled up, but were busy and didn’t seem to notice the cold. I noticed one little boy who looked as round as a ball. When his mother came to pick him up at noon, she allowed me to pick him up, and helped me count his layers of clothing—six layers! We visited a number of grade-school classrooms. One usual feature was that the two or three children who had been nominated as monitors for that day would go up and down the rows, checking each child’s hands to make sure they were clean. Also, the grade-school students did a stint of “productive labor” each day. And yes, we did climb up the steep steps of the Great Wall. I had been assigned a Chinese “guide” to take care of me on the climb. They had learned that I was 57 years old. At that time, Chinese women were required to retire from work at age 52, and after that were considered old. So, I was thought to be in need of elder care, and accepted it as gracefully as I could even though my “guide” got in the way much of the time. We also visited the Forbidden City, where wonderful collections of jade and other ancient Chinese treasures were displayed. The things we saw and the experiences we had during that trip to China are simply too rich and extensive for me to tell you about here. Of course, we were aware that our tour had been carefully managed to show us only the best picture of Chinese life, and we tried, with the help of our two bilingual members, to creep out from under the surveillance of our “guides” and find out more about how ordinary Chinese families lived, but we were not very successful.

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Being there was a culture shock—but so was coming home. For example: In the three weeks we were there, we didn’t see a single beggar. When we got off the train just outside the PRC, in the Free Territories outside of Hong Kong, we were surrounded and harassed by crowds of beggars including maimed children. When we returned home, the Christmas season was in full swing. I had just come from a Chinese shop where a sales clerk had shown me with great pride that they now had FOUR patterns of blouses, which a woman could choose from to wear under a Mao jacket. When I went in to a department store just after returning home, the opulence of choices, the sound system blaring “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” the eager grabbing of bargains—suddenly it was just too much and I left without doing any shopping. I was a member of another group that went to China in 1980. Very great changes had occurred after the death of Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution. In 1973, the national goal was to provide at least four years of education for every child, but many schools could not yet provide a fourth grade for everyone. Teachers had told us that when the time came to choose the children who would

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be promoted to the fourth grade, they were required to give preference to the children of workers, soldiers, or peasants. And at that time, teachers were not allowed to tailor their teaching to a child’s ability level. When we asked how they dealt with “retarded” children, they told us that there is no word in Chinese for “retarded.” They said: “You mean children who have not had as much opportunity to learn? Well, we get the more fortunate children to help teach them.” And they also had trouble with the idea of providing any sort of enrichment in their teaching of “gifted” children. How different things were in 1980! Now, children were promoted on the basis of test scores. And teachers asked our advice about “gifted” children. Was it was good enough to provide separate advanced classes for them, or did we think they should be in separate schools? American scholars visiting China at that time had become frustrated over trying to make use of Chinese libraries. The catalogues were incomplete. No one was allowed to go into the stacks. If a scholar knew the name of the particular book he wanted, he could ask the librarian, who might recognize the title and go in to look for it—more often than not coming back to say it must have been checked out. Our group’s leaders kept pressing for permission to visit the stacks, and finally, toward the end of our visit, a group of us were allowed in to the stacks of the great national library in, I thinks Nanking. What a shock! There were people living in the stacks, with lines for drying their laundry strung between the shelves. There were long tables filled with piles of loose pages. These were from books that had been torn from shelves and stamped upon by young soldiers of the Cultural Revolution, breaking the bindings and scattering the pages everywhere. We were told that there were not resources now to put teams of people to work trying to reassemble and rebind some of the irreplaceable books—that was in the future. As we came out, we regretted that we had insisted on this visit. We had made our hosts lose face, certainly not our intention. When I hear about present-day China, it takes my breath away. Almost universal education! Private ownership of homes and cars! Millions of people moving from the countryside into the

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cities! High-speed rail! I treasure my memories of the China that is no more, and eagerly follow the news of the ever-changing new China. Shortly before the Vietnam War began, I was invited to be a member of an international group being sent to Thailand by UNESCO. There was a child-study research center in Bangkok that was funded by UNESCO. The center had applied for renewal of their funding, and our group—child-study “experts” from nine countries—were to examine the quality of the work being done and recommend whether or not to continue its funding. We visited a school some distance north of Bangkok where much of the center’s research was done. This gave us the opportunity to see some of the beautiful Thai rural countryside. We stopped to snack at a roadside stand serving deep-fried sweet potatoes—we knew that anything cooked in boiling oil would be safe to eat. At restaurants, our guides whispered advice to us about what was safe to eat and what wasn’t,

and we were all spared any attacks of the “tourista” that afflicted many visitors to Thailand. In Bangkok, we were entertained at a formal state dinner by the Minister of Education. He was a prince—

UNESCO delegates at conference in Thailand

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a high status that meant we had to be careful how we stood in his presence. At that time, the understood rule was that one’s head should never be higher than that of a person in the room with higher status than oneself. At the head of the dinner table, the

prince’s chair was on a raised dais, so his taller guests were relieved of the necessity of stooping while they ate. We were amazed at how status-conscious the Thais were. My guide would enter a room in a slightly shrunken stance until she could look around the room and determine the status of others who were present. She expected me to do the same, but I decided I could be excused as a foreigner who could not be expected to make these fine status distinctions. Amazingly, at the formal dinner given in our honor, there were alleys in the floor behind our chairs, so that servers could wait on us without having to crouch! We did review the Center’s activities and budgets, and granted new funding. I really liked professional international travel. When I would go to a conference to give a talk, people in the host country would usually take me to events and places that tourists might normally not see. I made such professional trips to Stockholm,

Eleanor and Bangkok hat salesman

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Bergen, Berlin, Paris, Crete, Herzlia (near Tel Aviv in Israel), and Mar del Plata (in Argentina). Mac was doing some collaborative research on heart-disease prevention with Pekka Puska, a Finnish professor and expert on public-health policy. We made three trips to Finland, and much enjoyed driving trips with the Puskas, going North from Helsinki. Pekka was well known in Finland—he had a half-hour TV program every Saturday morning that was widely viewed. At that time, I believe, Finland had the highest rate of heart attacks in the world. In his talks, Pekka urged people to sign up for the heart-disease-prevention program he had organized nation-wide. On one occasion we stopped at an inn for an overnight stay, and before dinner Pekka went into the kitchen and was recognized by the chef. Pekka inspected the soup, and noted that there was at least a half-inch layer of melted fat floating on top. He had a serious discussion with the chef about how undesirable that was. On the trip home, we stopped at the same inn. Pekka once again went to inspect the kitchen, and lo and behold, there was practically no fat on the top of the soup. A minor triumph! He congratulated the chef and rejoined us in a very good mood. It may have been at that same inn that we took a sauna (very hot!) before and Pekka and I dove into the cold lake outside the inn for a brisk swim (our spouses were not swimmers) and then the four of us had a quiet candle lit dinner looking out over the lake in the fading northern light.—So peaceful. So beautiful. When in Finland, I found occasion to go up to Jyväskylä University, where a woman psychologist I had met at international meetings (Lea Pulkkinen) was teaching. I gave a talk, but mostly we discussed her professional problems. She was being denied tenure because she was a woman. There had never been a tenured woman at that university, and her male colleagues didn’t want to be the first to make a change, even though she was becoming

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internationally known for her research (unlike her colleagues!). Lea and I conspired to go over the heads of the department and go directly to the national committee governing Finland’s universities. They immediately voted to grant her tenure. By the time of our next visit to Finland she had become chair of her department. Stanford had a number of overseas study centers for Stanford students, many of whom would take two quarters abroad during their four years at Stanford. The teaching faculty at each of the overseas centers would usually include one or two local teachers, and two visiting Stanford faculty members. In 1966, Mac was invited to teach at the overseas campus in England, then located at a large manor house called Harlaxton Manor. It was a mile or so outside of Grantham, a town 100 miles north of London—Margaret Thatcher’s home town. I took leave for the fall quarter and brought the children—Sarah was ten, Mark was eight—to join Mac. He and I had a large room and bath, which had once been the master bedroom, and the children had two small rooms in a turret above us that you reached by climbing a circular stair case. Rather spooky! We enrolled the children in the local village school, and on the first day of school the local children crowded around them—it was a novel event to have American children as classmates. During the break between our two quarters there, we picked up our new Audi and went by boat to Denmark (right-lane driving), by boat again—there was no bridge as yet—to Sweden (left-lane driving at that time), then to Norway (right-lane) and back to England (left-lane). Mac did most of the driving, and he adapted to these changes seamlessly, much more easily than I did. We found things to do and see that were interesting to the children, and returned “home” to Harlaxton ready for the next quarter. On one occasion the students gave a party. They set up a game of “musical chairs,” although instead of chairs they had cardboard squares set out on the floor. When the music began, they had to jump on one foot from square to square until the music stopped, but one square had been withdrawn, and the student who hadn’t managed to get onto a square was “out.” Mark was invited

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to play, and he loved the good-natured shoving over who could manage to stay on the last square. A student had baked a cake for the winner. Well, Mark won, and there was some consternation among the students. I later learned that some marijuana had been baked into the cake, and the students had to move fast to get something to substitute as a prize. I was glad that they had conscientiously succeeded. For an evening party, the students invited a local group of musicians who arrived bringing the largest amplifiers I had ever seen. They set them up in a basement room large enough for dancing. Mac and I attended as the required “chaperones.” But when the music began, it was so loud that we found it absolutely unbearable. We ducked in and out for a while and finally just went up to bed. The floor of our room was vibrating. Six years later (1972) we went to the English overseas campus again. But the location had changed. Now the campus was located at Cliveden House, on the Astor estate, located on the Thames about an hour by train west of London. The landscaping was beautifully maintained—carefully clipped and shaped hedges, smooth green lawns and neat pathways under beautiful old trees. Later in the spring, patches of bluebells and daffodils burst into lavish bloom under the trees and along the river. Sarah had stayed behind in Palo Alto, but Mark, now aged fourteen, was with us. We enrolled him in the middle school in the nearby town of Taplow. This time, both Mac and I were faculty members. I knew that, compared with other overseas campuses, the English site would usually have a larger representation of football players and other athletes. This was because they usually didn’t have time, in their busy athletic schedules, to take language courses, and therefore were not eligible for the other overseas campuses. I confess, I had a prejudice against football players— would I have to “teach down” to them? I decided to offer a seminar in the education of kids from disadvantaged backgrounds and to give the students some hands-on experience. I went to several schools in Slough, a suburb of London with a largely Pakistani population. A number of fourth- and fifth-grade teachers agreed to accept my

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students as classroom assistants. They were to come two half-days each week, get acquainted with the students, and help in any way they could. For our seminar sessions, the students would have read some relevant studies and the discussion was lively, peppered with observations from their school visits. If I remember rightly, there were about five football players in the class. An unexpected thing happened. In the classroom visited by the big athletes, the little boys were fascinated by them, watched them, followed them around, sat close if they could. Our footballers got acquainted with these children, worked with them (very successfully, the teachers said), and toward the end of the class, invited some of the boys from their classrooms to come out to Cliveden House on a Saturday morning. Mac and I watched from our window as the flock of little dark-skinned boys ran around on the beautifully manicured lawn. Our students asked the boys to show them how to play rugby, and the boys were in turn taught about American football. You may be thinking: weren’t there any girls in the seminar? Yes, of course there were, and some of them were focused on the football players too. (Thinking back, I was probably focused on them myself.) Usually the women students also developed good rapport with the children in the classrooms they visited. And they certainly contributed expertly to our seminar discussions. But somehow they weren't quite so magnetic to the children, and they hadn’t thought to invite them to Cliveden House. I believe the seminar was a success, and I certainly didn’t have to dumb it down for anybody! I was getting rid of some of my stereotypes about student athletes. The students gave a May Day party toward the end of spring quarter. We were told we COULD NOT dig a hole in the lawn to plant the maypole in, so the biggest and strongest man among the students simply held it erect while the students danced around it weaving their long ribbons in and out. There was a variety of other games and contests, notably a wrestling match between Stanford’s wrestling champion and—Mark! It was hilarious to see the wrestler groaning and faking great strain while he allowed Mark to win.

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Between quarters we went to Europe, driving through parts of Germany, Austria, and France, visiting our long-term friends the Barzmans at their villa just inland from Nice. Ben, who was a screenwriter, had been blacklisted at the time of the McCarthy hearings in Hollywood and moved his family to France, where he teamed up with another expatriate American film writer and managed to do quite well. They had a large house—necessary for their seven children—with a tennis court and swimming pool. We stayed in the gatekeeper’s cottage, and Mark still remembers that a fresh-baked loaf of bread, resting on grape leaves, appeared on our windowsill every morning.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Summer in Bogotá Mac had been helping with a research project the Peace Corps was conducting in Colombia. The Peace Corps was concerned with trying to help the Colombian Education Department upgrade the quality of the rural schools scattered around the country in semi-isolated areas. Peace Corps workers had been developing a program of educational television broadcasts to these schools, and they wanted Mac and his research team to evaluate the effectiveness of the program. Mac made several trips to Colombia in late 1962 and early 1963, but they needed his more sustained presence, and we decided to take our family down to Bogotá to spend the summer of 1963. At the time, Sarah was eight years old, and Mark was six. We got in touch with an American family who were living in Bogotá, and who wanted to spend the summer in the United States. We arranged to trade houses and cars with them. They made it a condition that we would keep their cook but arrange our own housecleaning. This was awkward for us—I like to cook, and so did Mac (at least for breakfast), but neither of us liked housecleaning. Still, we agreed to the terms and hoped we’d be able to work things out. We also checked out the possibilities for summer activities for the children, and learned that there was an English-speaking school that offered a recreational program, so we signed up for that. In June, we boarded our flight to Bogotá. I don’t remember whether we changed planes during that flight—if we did, it would have been in Miami. It’s hard for us Americans to remember that although Colombia is one of the western-most countries in South America, it’s directly south of

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New York, and east of Miami. Colombia has enormous variations in weather—steaming hot along the coasts, pleasantly tropical at its 3,000–4,000 foot levels, and mild to chilly at its higher elevations. Bogotá, its capital, is at 9,000 feet. The Equator runs through southern Colombia, so there is not much climate change from summer to winter—everything depends on elevation. Our plane flew over the main port on the Caribbean coast—Cartagena—and then, as we gained some altitude, over extensive coffee plantations. Finally, we touched down at the lofty Bogotá airport. We were met by one of Mac’s research team—I’ve forgotten his name but I’ll call him Tom—who had scoped out where our house was, and he drove us there. We had brought too much luggage to fit into his little car, so we just kept a couple of suitcases with us and arranged to pick up the rest later. We went north on Septima—Bogotá’s long, main north-south avenue—gaining altitude as we went, till we turned off to climb a very steep hill to our house, which (we later learned) was at an altitude of 10,000 feet. It was a substantial but not pretentious two-story house surrounded by a 10- foot wall, with a gate wide enough to admit a small car. Tom unlocked this gate, and we drove into the courtyard, where our little car was waiting. Tom turned over a set of keys to us, including keys to the car, to the front gate, and to the house itself. Adjoining the house, to the right, there was a one-story wing, which we learned was the servants’ quarters. That was where our cook, Mercedes, lived. We noticed that there were multiple locks on the gate, and also on the door of the house. After Tom left, we set ourselves to exploring the house and unpacking our things—the children ran through the house and up the stairs to find their rooms. But the first thing Mac and I needed to do was to see whether Mercedes was at home and to make her acquaintance. We saw her coming into the kitchen through a door from her room. She was a tiny woman, shorter than Sarah—we soon learned that most working-class Colombians were short but strong and sturdy. She had no English, and we had no Spanish, so immediately we had to begin our efforts at communication. What time was dinner? Much pointing at our mouths and at our watches. She opened the fridge and showed us that she had enough food to

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prepare our dinner that night. Tomorrow (I did know the word for mañana) we’d go out together to buy what I would want her to cook. Mac went off in the new car to pick up the rest of our luggage, while the children and I explored the house to find out where sheets and towels and dishes and cleaning materials were kept—and what our hosts’ children had left in their bedrooms in the way of toys and books. Mac returned with the rest of the luggage and we continued getting everything put away until we heard, for the first time that summer, Mercedes’ announcement: “Lista la comida, Señora!” We trooped into the dining room and ate a satisfactory dinner. I thought: maybe this isn’t so bad after all, having dinner appear like this! Of course I soon learned that it didn’t simply appear. I would have to negotiate with Mercedes about what was to be served when, and try to find out what she was used to preparing, what she liked to cook that our children would like. The next day she and I made our first trip to the market together—she told me the Spanish names of vegetables and fruits and a number of other things. I pointed out to her the things I recognized that we would want. It took some time, though, for me to venture into unfamiliar foods, some of which she would suggest. I wanted to have a party for the Peace Corps men and women Mac was working with, but decided that I wouldn’t try to make it a dinner party the first time—I needed to have a fuller understanding with Mercedes before we could do that. But we did eventually manage it. I phoned the American school, and learned that their school bus would pick up the children at the end of our block. So the next morning we walked them over to the corner, showing them where to wait. There was a woman waiting there with two children and a dog, but they were Spanish speakers and were waiting for another bus. When Sarah and Mark came home that afternoon they said school was okay, without much detail. The next morning the children said they knew exactly where to go to wait for the bus, so

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we watched as they started out for the corner, and then we went back into the house. Immediately the phone rang. It was our next-door neighbor—she was an American whom we had met the day before. “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MINDS?” she shouted over the phone. “You let your children walk ALONE to the corner!” She went on to say that children were being kidnapped almost every day in Bogotá. Hadn’t we noticed that the two children across the street (at the Chilean Embassy) were walked to the corner by the maid and a large guard dog? She had a friend whose four-year-old had been snatched and never heard from again. The police were helpless. I thought that she was being hysterical, but did walk the children to the corner after that. We gradually learned more about lawlessness in Bogotá and in the nearby countryside. In the 1940s, there was a war between political factions—there was widespread violence, and many thousands of people were killed. In the late 1940s, a liberal president was assassinated, followed by a military coup. Some of the ousted factions fled to the hills and formed insurgent groups there. The country’s political groups formed a united front (including liberals and conservatives), and some of the dissident factions returned to their homes, but some—who came to be called Las Violencias—continued resistance in areas they were able to control. They made predatory raids across their borders. They occasionally stopped buses and made all the passengers get off, then robbed them and drove away with the bus. They were rumored to have killed people during such episodes. In our upscale neighborhood, where there were several embassies nearby, we felt safe enough. But we heard endless tales of thievery throughout the city. One man we met had been driving downtown on a nice day—his driver’s window was rolled down and his left arm rested on the sill. When he stopped at a stop light, a man ran up and grabbed off his wristwatch. The driver was furious. He jammed on his hand brake, jumped out and chased the thief. The thief turned and ran back to his pursuer and grabbed off his glasses, darting away again. Anything left on the sill of an open window was fair game, even on the upper floors of an apartment building. If we were planning an overnight trip out of town, we

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were warned not to mention it in a restaurant. Waiters were known to pass the information along to a gang who had a moving van. They would drive up to a house whose owners were away, break the locks, and load up all the furniture and drive away. On one occasion, we parked our car briefly on a downtown street and returned to it only to find that the hub caps had been stolen. We worried about how we could replace them before we would have to return the car at the end of the summer. Neighbors said, “Oh, don’t worry. Just go down to the hub-cap store and buy them back.” They gave us the address, and we went there, describing the year and make of the car and sketching the design of the hubcaps. The proprietors said they thought they might have something that would do. Sure enough, they brought out our own hubcaps with recognizable original dents. We paid for them—I don’t remember how much they cost—and put them back on. A routine sort of transaction in Bogotá at that time. You may wonder how we got so friendly with our neighbors. Partly, that happened on Census Day. Once a year, everyone had to stay home all day so that they could be counted by the census takers. There were severe penalties for leaving your home base. It became a kind of national party day. People climbed over fences (with someone left at home to alert them when the census taker came) and shared drinks and gossip with their neighbors. By the end of the summer, Mac and his team had made enormous progress. They had tested the educational progress of the children in a group of randomly selected rural schools that had received the experimental TV broadcasts, and in a comparison group of schools that had not. At the time we left, the Bogotá Peace Corps team were hard at work analyzing the test results, and Mac felt confident that he would have some solid data very soon. (I should tell you that, yes, the TV broadcasts turned out to produce substantial improvement in children’s learning.) There was one unexpected side effect of the research program. Teacher pay was low, and some teachers would be absent

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on days when they could earn more doing something else. It was not uncommon for a child to walk two or three miles to school and find no teacher there. However, when teachers knew that their class was to be tested, they came to teach their classes more regularly. This was one reason but not the only reason for the children’s improved performance. We returned home to find that our campus house had been well cared for in our absence. The summer in Bogota had been fascinating, but we were very glad to get home.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Building Our Vacation House A year or two after we moved onto the campus, I joined a small informal group of madrigal singers. We sang together once a week, meeting at various members’ houses, and I, of course, took my turn as host. Although we sang a capella it was helpful that I had brought my medium grand piano from Massachusetts—we could use it to pick out chords so that people could get their parts clear. For several years, the director of our group was Bob Noyce, who I believe was one of the founders of Intel. He had a wonderful deep bass voice, and when we met at his house he would occasionally provide an accompaniment on the harpsichord that he had built for himself and continually kept in tune. Some lasting friendships grew out of this singing group. I met a woman named Estelle Gruenwald, whose husband, Dick, was a dour and acerbic man of German birth. He was a skilled craftsman who worked at Intel, helping to create a component in one of the early-stage computers being developed there. He always had trouble adapting to coworkers and supervisors. and sometime in the later sixties he had a blow-up at Intel and stormed away from his job. He and Estelle bought some land on the north coast, near the little town of Mendocino, and built a house there. They invited us to come up for a visit. At that time we had been living in the Stanford area for nearly ten years, but we had never seen the north coast. We had already decided that we wanted to find or build a vacation cottage somewhere within a four-hour driving radius of our Stanford house, and had briefly explored Monterey, places near Lake Tahoe, and the old Gold Country. Nothing seemed right. For one thing, a number of these places were too hot for us in the summer. Mac, despite his dark hair, had very fair skin and

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sunburned easily. Mendocino, as it turned out, was exactly a four-hour drive away, and had a wonderfully cool summer climate, to say nothing of its magnificent ocean views and charming village. We fell in love with it immediately. The Gruenwald house was a wonder. Dick had built a workshop on the back of their land, equipped with wood-working and metal-working tools, where he made all the cabinets and window frames for their house. He also made leaded stained-glass windows and shaped the tiles that were used for their bathrooms and kitchen. Dick recruited their son John to help with the work. Dick was a meticulous craftsman with very high standards for what a finished piece of work ought to look like. If young John produced something that wasn’t up to the standard, Dick, with his old-country German authoritarian style, would make him tear it up and do it over again. John came to hate his father and finally rebelled, but had meanwhile become an excellent craftsman in his own right and was much in demand by the communes that were trying to establish themselves in the Mendocino County forests in those hippie days. After we had returned home from that visit, the Gruenwalds phoned us to say that friends of theirs, who owned a four-acre tract with ocean frontage, had been planning to build there. But now the wife had become ill, and they had decided to divide the land into four one-acre lots and to put it on the market right away. We rushed back up to Mendocino to meet the owners, and they took us over to see the land. Two of the lots would have ocean frontage: they were flat, with a 40-foot drop—a cliff, actually—-down to an ocean beach in a cove. The other two lots were on a hillside behind the two frontage lots, and had nice groves of trees. We quickly realized that although the frontage lots would be more valuable (and probably more expensive) they would be swampy part of the year. The hillside lots had much better ocean views, and were well drained. As we stood there amid a grove of pine trees, we looked at each other and realized “This is it!” We made them an offer of $11,000, all we could afford, right then and there, and they accepted it. We thought afterward that we might have gotten it for less if we had bargained more, but we learned

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later from the Gruenwalds that the owners had planned to charge $12,000 or more. But they wanted to sell to someone who would love the land as they did, and as they saw our reaction when we touched the trees and looked out at the view, they decided we were the right buyers. We immediately set about plans to build. We would need a mortgage, so we went to see the local banker in Fort Bragg. He explained that we would need to depend on a reliable well for our water supply, but that there was no consistent water table under the coastal land. The sub-structure was too broken up, and you

could dig a dry well at one point and then find water if you dug 10 feet away. No one could get a mortgage for coastal building unless there was a proven water supply. “How could we prove that there’s a water supply?” we asked. He said, “I’ll send someone over.” So we waited on the small access road next to our lot, and soon we heard a motorcycle approaching. A man in a black leather jacket, with long hair streaming out behind, drove up. He greeted us and asked us to show him the boundaries of our land. Then he got out his water-witching wand. We watched as he walked around and around, and back and forth, holding his wand out in front of him. Then we saw it dip strongly downward. Our water-witcher called out “Here it

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is!” We all went up to the top of the hill where there was a public phone, and he phoned the banker. He said, “They got water.” He put us on the phone, and the banker said, “Okay, you’ve got your mortgage.” So, in the fall of 1969, we were ready to build. We needed a local builder. The Gruenwalds told us about a man who had built several coastal houses—he was something of an artist, and served as both architect and builder. We met him, and he showed us two of the houses he had built. We liked his use of big beams and thought his houses were well fitted into the pieces of land they were on. We made a deal with him, and one of the first things he did was to locate some large beams rescued from a dismantled railway trestle. We would need ten beams, so he bought five and set to work cutting them in half lengthwise. They were about a foot wide and 14 inches thick. We wanted to help, so he showed us how to split them lengthwise with his power saw. He did a couple of the beams himself, and then left us to finish. It was back-breaking work but very satisfying. Before we could go much further, we had to have plans drawn up to submit to the county building inspectors. But when that was done and building began, we realized that our builder was a rather temperamental fellow. He didn’t feel especially bound by the plan we had agreed on. He expected us to go home and let him use his own judgment about where the carpark would go, where the stairway up to the main floor would go, what kind of finishing the walls would have and so forth. By this time we had had a good deal of experience with house-building, and enjoyed being involved in it. He was proud of his building judgment, and was outraged by what he saw as our micromanaging. We, on the other hand, were not pleased about some major things he did that were not part of the plan we had agreed to. So we parted ways, and got a well-known but much more conventional builder, whom we had to convince not to cover up the beams and other nice wood surfaces with wallboard and plaster and paint. We kept in touch via frequent phone calls. On one occasion, when he wanted an answer to a question we couldn’t deal with by phone, we left our campus house about 6:00 in the morning, and

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met with the builder in Mendocino about 10:00. At noon we went down to Noyo Harbor to select a salmon that had just been brought in by one of the fishing boats, then drove home and served the salmon that evening at a dinner party we had already planned. Despite the various hitches during the building process, the Mendocino house was finished in the spring of 1970. Dick Gruenwald helped enormously with the finishing touches, putting up shelves and cabinets for the kitchen and bathrooms. And he invited me to come over to his workshop to use his tile cutter. Building codes required that we must use a fireproof material to cover the walls behind our Franklin stove and the old wood-burning cookstove that we had found in somebody’s barn. So we

bought a bargain collection of used tiles in Milpitas and carried the heavy boxes up to Mendocino in our station wagon. Sarah and I cut them to fit the spaces behind the stoves. We glued them into place, climbing up ladders to reach the high spots under our high ceilings.

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Mark became expert at rappelling on a rope down the cliff in front of our house, down to the small beach in our cove. He and Sarah fished off the rocks there, catching black snapper and sea trout, though they were more enthusiastic about catching the fish than about cleaning and eating them. On the headlands next to our cove was a marvelous hand-built house—we called it the Dolphin House, because the end of the house’s enormous central beam projected out beyond the house and had been carved into a dolphin. Two widows in their seventies lived there. One of them, Ivy, was a thin, muscular woman who had grown up on the coast, and several of her children lived nearby. She did the outdoor work. She rode around on a motorized mower and each spring mowed the meadow in front of our house. She had a substantial vegetable garden that was thoroughly fenced against the deer. When the tide was just right she would put on her wet suit and swim through a tunnel that ran under their house from our cove to an ocean exit. She occasionally harvested abalone, which she shared with us. Her housemate, Dorothea, was an artist who specialized in painting on silk, usually superimposing one painted silk layer over another of the same scene, producing a gauzy, three-dimensional look to the final product. There was a couple living in a small house above us on the hill—Eunice and Toss Cummings. Eunice was a potter with her own kiln. Sarah went over for a visit to get acquainted, and soon she was learning from Eunice how to use the potter’s wheel to shape clay bowls, and how to use glazes for things good enough to go into the kiln. There were two state parks near us, with old logging roads that went several miles

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into the redwood forest and skirted small streams that nourished deep moss and maidenhair ferns. The forest had been logged in the late 1800s and the earliest part of the 1900s, and there were some gigantic stumps, which often had clusters of new, already substantial trees growing up around them. At some places, a brave little tree would grow directly out of the top of a stump, with its roots running down over the sides of the stump to reach the earth. What lovely walks those were! We loved the sound of the rushing water, the wind in the treetops, and the fragrance of greenery.

We were very satisfied with the house, and it became a wonderful place to bring family and friends and week-end visitors from faraway places. Our long and narrow “great room” (15 ft. x 30 ft.) had a seating area in front next to the windows looking out to the sea, where during the migrating season we could see whales spouting. In the middle was the large round table that would seat eight. Suspended over it was the old lamp that my father had sent from the house on Orcas Island. And in the back, with windows looking out into

trees and toward our large water storage-tank, was the kitchen. I would cook dinner there while Mac was serving drinks and hors d’oeuvres in the seating area—in easy conversation distance. We had visits from members of Michael Maccoby’s family, as well as Mark and Beth Netter, and of course Janice brought her three children when she could manage the long trip from Washington, D.C. The last part of the drive up from Stanford was very curvy indeed, and Jannie’s children would get carsick shortly before we arrived at the house, but they recovered quickly and loved to go down to Noyo Harbor where they could fish from the dock.

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For twenty years, we spent at least one long weekend a month there, and a month or so in the summer. After Sarah and Mark were grown, Mac and I would sometimes go up for a cozy weekend for just the two of us. Mac was always first up in the morning. I would wake up to the sound of his chopping wood to build a fire in the Franklin stove, which was the main source of heat in the living room. I would get dressed in front of it while Mac cooked breakfast, sometimes on the old wood stove. I usually used the electric stove, though, to cook dinner. Precious times, those were. Back at the campus house, in the spring of 1992, I was just starting to make dinner for Mark and Mac. They had gone up to see the opening game of the San Francisco Giants’s new season. Taking his dad to the game was a delayed birthday present from Mark—we had celebrated Mac’s eightieth birthday in February. The phone

rang, and it was Mark, his voice sounding strange. He said, “Mom, it’s Dad. Something has happened. It’s bad. You’d better come." He told me they were at a hospital in South San Francisco, and gave directions. I jumped into my car and went there. Mark met me in the parking lot and put his arms around me said, “He’s gone,

Mealtimes in Mendocino

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Mom.” I almost fell, but Mark held me up. We walked into the hospital and I went alone into the little room where Mac’s body lay. I took his hand—that strong vigorous hand was limp. I kissed his forehead: his eyes were open, and I looked into his eyes—there was no one there. As I went out, someone asked me whether there was someone else they should call, and I gave them Sarah’s number. We drove home, Mark in his car, I following in mine, both of us dazed. I seemed to be running on automatic pilot. When we got home, Sarah soon arrived. I don’t remember whether we had dinner—it’s all a blur. When we went to bed, Sarah got in bed with me, and Mark went to his old room. A little later I went in to check on him and found him shivering, in shock. I piled on extra blankets. In the morning, Sarah had to go back to San Jose to tend to her own children, Laura and Nathan. And Mark needed to go to work. They didn’t want to leave me alone, but I insisted, saying “I’ll be fine.” And I thought I would be: Wasn’t I the one who was always cool under stress? But as I began to make some phone calls—to Mac’s office, to others who would need to know, my voice suddenly choked up and I couldn’t go on talking to anyone. And then the doorbell rang—it was my niece, Claire Paul, who lives in Santa Cruz. I don’t know how the news had gotten to her, but there she was, efficiently taking charge, making and answering phone calls and taking care of me. Janice flew in from Washington, D.C. the next day, and that evening there was a gathering at our house of his work colleagues and other friends. A little later there was a memorial service at the university. Pekka Puska flew in from Finland for that. We took Mac’s ashes up to Mendocino, where we hired a boat and scattered the ashes in the sea just outside our cottage. After Mac died, I did go up to Mendocino every once in a while with family members or friends, but it was never really the same. Mac and I had had our comfortable joint routines—I just couldn’t enjoy being there without him. Also, it was proving difficult to arrange, by myself, for long-distance maintenance. I talked with the children and it became clear that no one of them—

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or even the three together—felt able to take over, so I sold the Mendocino house a couple of years later. But I certainly treasure the memories of our experiences there.

Epilogue After Mac’s death, I continued to live in our campus house, usually renting out the corner bedroom, which had a separate entrance and its own bathroom. I was still very busy with professional work, and didn’t spend much time at home except for many lonely dinners. Our dear friends Henry and Prue Breitrose took me with them every year for a week-long trip to the Carmel Bach Festival—we made this trip for fourteen years. Other friends would invite me over for a meal or I’d join others for concerts or theater. When alone at home, I didn’t usually succumb to frozen TV dinners, and continued to shop for and cook real meals, with frequent reliance on leftovers. One evening I went over to one of the sessions the Stanford Bookstore held to introduce the author of a new book. A man came over to sit beside me and introduced himself. He was Bill Capron,

an economist I had heard of—he said we had met before, but I didn’t remember it. We talked before and after the book session, and I learned that he had worked in the Johnson administration, having responsibility for the financial side of Johnson’s war on poverty. I found him really attractive, and a few weeks later I invited him to dinner. After that we began to go out to a number of evening events. We turned out to be delightfully compatible. We developed a close emotional tie, and spent much of our free time together. I enjoyed getting to Bill Capron

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know his three children—his daughter, Margie Capron, a lawyer and political scientist, worked in Nancy Pelosi’s office and had wonderfully interesting tales to tell about life on Capitol Hill. We still see each other when she makes a trip West, but sadly, no longer with Bill. After only a brief two years together, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and died in a few months’ time. So I was once again alone. In my eighties, I realized that sooner or later I would have to move into a retirement community that offered long-term care, and I put in applications at several of the near-by places. Some of these had an age limit: one could not come in after the age of 83. When I reached that age, I got offers of apartments at both the Sequoias and Channing House, but didn’t feel ready to make the move then. It simply seemed too early. I was still too busy professionally, and needed to be close to my office. Also, I understood that Stanford was planning to build a retirement facility that would be very close by, perhaps on its own land, and I decided to wait for that. While Stanford’s earlier planning had been for a facility specifically for retired faculty, plans switched to building an upscale, for-profit retirement center on Stanford land with no age or Stanford-connection restrictions on eligibility for admission. I applied. The new retirement complex was finished in 2005, and I moved in on September 1 of that year. The university was eager to make houses available to new faculty, so as an incentive for us to sell, those of us who owned campus houses were given priority in the choice of apartments. I have been delighted with the one I chose. It’s on the first floor, has an ample patio with gate to a lovely courtyard and an inviting walkway out to a trail along the creek. I’m close to the dining rooms and front lobby. I have a full kitchen, where I prepare breakfast and lunch. I have only one bedroom, but there’s a computer workstation there, and a pull-down bed in the living room for an overnight guest. The decision to move here has turned out to be a very good one. There is a range of activities available here that have kept me busy. Early on I served a term on the Resident Advisory Council. I

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was the first chairman of our resident library committee, with Bob Buell as co-chair. We started with an empty room equipped only with shelves. With a hard-working library committee, we filled it with books—some donated, some purchased. After one year, Bob and Betty Lou Nordman took over the leadership of the library committee, and they set up a system to catalogue the books, and check them out, which has functioned well since then. Over the years, new books have been added, replacing old ones, and a large DVD collection has been added, along with some large-print and audio books. I have not served on the Library Committee for a number of years now, but feel satisfaction every time I go in to browse through newspapers or magazines, or to check something out. The fitness programs here are very helpful, with classes at various levels of difficulty. I go to the Strength and Balance classes twice a week, and supplement on other days with walks around our nicely landscaped grounds or an exercise routine at home. My passions about public-policy issues have found an outlet in our Current Events program. I’m part of the leadership group that puts on a Current Events program every Monday morning. We now usually draw a hundred or more residents to these sessions. Members of the leadership group take turns presenting a current topic and leading a discussion. I’ve been part of this activity for ten years now, and I’ve found that preparing a presentation for these sessions is an excellent way to keep up with the intricacies of public issues. And besides, it’s fun! Recently I’ve been less active as a presenter, but still feel very much involved. Oh, and I must mention the bridge games. I really love the game of bridge, and have been glad of the opportunities here to bring my game up to date with the new bidding conventions. Lessons are offered here by Gabi Bolling, an exceptionally good teacher, and she directs the Duplicate sessions. Nowadays, I’m finding that I can’t shuffle cards easily any more, and that my weakening vision makes it hard to distinguish clubs from spades—more than once, in defending against an opponent’s spade contract, I’ve trumped in with a carefully saved spade only to find that it was

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a useless club. And worst of all, I simply forget whether some crucial card has been played. Well, I must face up to the fact that I may not be playing much longer. The best thing about all the various activities that I have been involved in is the opportunity to work with new and interesting people. Solid friendships have emerged. My family has grown. Janice has three children, Aaron, Rebecca and Seth, and five grandchildren. I very seldom see Janice’s family members, since they live so far away and I no longer travel. Sarah has two children, Laura and Nathan, and three grandchildren. One of the grandchildren, Brianna, has lived with Sarah for a number of years and I have seen her grow up. We are close. After graduating from high school she immediately went into the Air Force, and was stationed in Florida. She finished her basic training last spring. Last month, to my delight, she came for a visit, bringing her new husband, Kaleb Taylor, a very tall man whom I immediately liked. Mark has two lovely daughters, Eleanor and Jessica, just entering adulthood—no grandchildren yet. When Sarah’s son Nathan was twelve years old, his parents were divorcing,. and there seemed to be no good place for Nathan to be. So he came up to Palo Alto and lived with me for a year. He quickly found that Palo Alto schools were harder than they had been in San Jose. Especially, he was shocked by the amount of homework that was assigned. He said, “In San Jose, we wouldn’t have let our teachers give us so much homework!” He couldn’t

Janice

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seem to organize his homework properly—came home with assignments all piled together in the back of his notebook

regardless of topic or class. We worked together on organizing things and I got in touch with his teachers, who helpfully offered to e-mail me on Mondays each week’s coming assignments. We made some progress. I had trouble making Nathan wear a helmet when he rode his bike to school. He told me kids never wore helmets in San Jose. One morning he left for school properly helmeted, but when I watched him from the front window, I saw him

hide his helmet in the shrubbery before he rode off. In spite of the difficulties, Nathan and I certainly bonded that year, and we are still in fairly frequent touch by telephone and his occasional visits here. We know we can count on each other. Sarah has become a reliable presence in my life these days. She usually comes up from San Jose late Monday afternoons. She busies herself immediately with any of the things that need doing.

She brings things up or down from shelves too high for me to reach (now that I’m under five feet tall!). On some visits she will shampoo and style one of my wigs; on others she will give me a pedicure. When needed, she cleans out the fridge or the microwave, starts a laundry, and empties the dishwasher. I will have ordered take-out dinners and we eat together in my apartment. About 9:30, we change into our bathing suits and go for a swim in our beautiful pool, which is always deserted that time of night, and enjoy the hot tub. When we get

Nathan

Sarah

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back to the apartment, Sarah often gives me a massage. She sleeps in the pull-down bed. (That bed is especially useful also for Janice’s treasured once-a-year visit—she flies in from Connecticut.) When I reached age 95, I decided to stop driving. Mark inherited my car, which is now being driven by his daughter Eleanor. Since that time, Mark, who lives in Newark across the bay, has been coming over every week to help me with shopping and a variety of errands. He sometimes brings Eleanor or Jessica with him, and I really enjoy the chance to get better acquainted with them. These days Mark arrives promptly at 10:30 on Saturday mornings, does some little fix-it or find-it chores in my apartment and goes out to check the plants on my patio, doing whatever watering or weeding is needed, and then off we go for our shopping. He lifts my walker in and out of his car while we go from one destination to another. We go to lunch at one of our favorite local eateries. When we get home, Mark unpacks things and shelves them where they go. He must have taken note of how clumsy and awkward I have become with can or bottle openers, for he now carefully opens all packages, cans or bottles that will be used soon, before putting them away. I keep pinching myself to make sure that it’s really real, this remarkably steady support I get from these two beloved grown-up children. At the advanced age of 99, I no longer travel, but treasure visits and phone calls and e-mails from family, long-term friends, and former students and colleagues. My sister Joan visited recently,

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and there was such a strong family feeling between us. I enjoyed a recent visit from Megan Gunnar, a former grad student with whom I’ve been in close touch over the years. She is now director of the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. She has educated me about important new research developments. I exchange e-mail with a number of other former students and colleagues around the country. I see my nephew, Scott Barclay, fairly often. He and his wife, Susan, live nearby, and and there has been a series of Thanksgiving dinners at their house. In addition, Scott is the executor of my estate, and we see each other in that context. I never expected to live this long. My body seems to be holding up remarkably well, though all my movements are slower and my hands are not as dextrous as they used to be (typing errors!). Loss of memory is certainly a problem. In conversation, I often can’t pull up the right word for what I want to say—when it arrives, the conversation has already moved on. Maybe it’s time for me to learn to talk less and listen more! In recent years, the loss of old friends and colleagues and family members has been very hard. But my life has been intensely interesting all the way. When I was a child, many people had no indoor plumbing, no electric lights, no telephone, no car. A century later our standard of living is vastly greater than we could have imagined then. Advances in medical care have given us longer lives. But now the wealthy are wealthy to an unimaginable degree, while those at the lower end of the income scale are living from paycheck to paycheck, and have no savings. This is an explosive situation. The academic world has provided a stable environment for my life and work. I know I have been fortunate to live securely through a century of roiling change. But this year's election has brought about a new kind of change, and I'm deeply concerned. To turn our country's leadership over to people with no governing experience, who are deeply ignorant about the issues they will have to deal with, and whose loyalties lie more with wealthy entrepreneurs than with working people—well, I'm scared. But in

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the long run I have confidence that the people of this country will have the good sense to rectify and stabilize the course our nation takes. Well, we shall see. Love and gratitude to you dear ones all, who have shared portions of this lifelong journey with me. Eleanor

Professional Milestones

BOOKS PUBLISHED

Patterns of Child Rearing (1957) With Robert Sears and Harry Levin

The Psychology of Sex Differences (1974)

With Carol Jacklin

Social Development (1980)

Dividing the Child (1992) With Robert Mnookin

Adolescents after Divorce (1996)

With Christy Buchanan and Sanford Dornbusch

The Two Sexes (1998)

ELECTED OFFICES

President, Division 7 (American Psychological Association), 1971

Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1974 Member, Institute of Medicine, 1974 President, Western Psychological Association, 1974–75 Vice Chair, Committee on Child Development and Public Policy, National Research Council, 1977–83 President, Society for Research in Child Development, 1981–83 . Member, National Academy of Sciences, 1993 Co-Chair, Carnegie Task Force on Meeting the Needs of Young Children, 1991–94 President, Consortium of Social Science Organizations, 1997–99

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AWARDS

Stanford University Barbara Kimball Browning Professorship, 1979

Stanford University Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, 1981 G. Stanley Hall Award, Division 7, APA 1982 American Educational Research Association Award for Distinguished Contributions in Educational Research, 1984 Society for Research in Child Development Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Child Development, 1987 American Psychological Society: Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, 1988 Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues Kurt Lewin Memorial Award, 1991 Distinguished Publication Award, Society for Women in Psychology, 1991 Society for Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics, Leadership Award, 1992 Eleanor E. Maccoby Award for Outstanding Book in Developmental Psychology, for The Two Sexes, in 1998 American Psychological Foundation, Gold Medal Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Science of Psychology, 2006

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Chapters and Papers

Maccoby, E. E., & Holt, R. R. (1946). How surveys are made. Journal of Social Issues, 2, 45–47. Goodman, R., & Maccoby, E. E. (1948). Sampling methods and sampling errors in surveys of consumer finances. International Journal of Opinion and Attitude Research, 2, 349–360. Maccoby, E. E. (1951). Television, its impact on school children. Public Opinion Quarterly, 15, 421–444. Maccoby, E. E., & Maccoby, N. (1954). The Interview: A tool of social science. In G. Lindzey (Ed.), Handbook of social psychology. Cambridge, MA: Addison- Wesley. Maccoby, E. E. (1954). Why do children watch television? Public Opinion Quarterly, 18, 239–244. Maccoby, E. E., & Gibbs, P. K. (1954). Methods of child-rearing in two social classes. In Martin & Stendler (Eds.), Readings in child development. New York: Harcourt Brace. Maccoby, E. E., Matthews, R. E., & Antone, S. M. (1954). Youth and political change. Public Opinion Quarterly, 18, 23–39. Maccoby, E. E. (1956). Pitfalls in the analysis of panel data: A research note on some technical aspects of voting. American Journal of Sociology, 61, 259–362. Maccoby, E. E., Levin, H., & Selya, B. M. (1956). The effects of emotional arousal on the retention of film content: A failure to replicate. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 53, 373–374. Maccoby, E. E., & Wilson, W. C. (1957). Identification and observational learning from films. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 55, 76–87. Maccoby, E. E. (1958). Effects upon children of their mothers’ outside employment. In National Manpower Council, Work in the lives of married women. NewYork: Columbia University Press. Maccoby, E. E. (1958). Children and working mothers. Children, May-June. Maccoby, E. E., Johnson, J. P., & Church, R. M. (1958). Community integration and the social control of juvenile delinquency. Journal of Personality, 14, 38–51. Maccoby, E. E., & Hyman, H. (1959). Measurement problems in panel studies.

258 Professional Milestones In E. Burdick & A. C. Broadbeck (Eds.), American voting behavior. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Maccoby, E. E. (1959). Role-taking in childhood and its consequences for social learning. Child Development, 30, 239–252. Maccoby, E. E. (1960). Review. Films and Kids: Foreign and domestic views. In UNESCO, The influence of the cinema on children and adolescents: An annotated international bibliography, 73, 105. Paris: UNESCO, Mass Communication Clearing House. Burton, R. V., Maccoby, E. E., & Allinsmith, W. (1961). Antecedents of resistance to temptation in four-year-old children. Child Development, 32, 689–710. Maccoby, E. E., Maccoby, N., Romney, A. K., & Adams, J. S. (1961). Social reinforcement in attitude change. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63, 109–115. Maccoby, N., & Maccoby, E. E. (1961). Homeostatic theory in attitude change. Public Opinion Quarterly, 25, 538–545. Maccoby, E. E. (1961). The taking of adult roles in middle childhood. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63, 493–503. Maccoby, E. E. (1962). Class differences in boys’ choices of authority roles. Sociometry, 25(1), 117–119. Maccoby, E. E. (1962). Review of Piaget Critique and interpretation. In W. Kessen & C. Kuhlman (Eds.), Thought in the young child: report with particular attention to the work of Jean Piaget. Society for Research in Child Development. Lafayette, IN: Child Development Publications. Maccoby, E. E. (1964). Effects of mass media. In M. L. Hoffman & L. W. Hoffman (Eds.), Review of child development research. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Maccoby, E. E. (1964). Developmental psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, 15, 243–253. Goldberg, M. H., & Maccoby, E. E. (1965). Children’s acquisition of skill in performing a group task under two conditions of group formation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2, 898–902. Maccoby, E. E., & Bee, H. (1965). Some speculations concerning the lag between perceiving and performing. Child Development, 36(2), 267–377.

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Maccoby, E. E., Dowley, E., Hagen, J. W., & Degerman, R. (1965). Activity level and intellectual functioning in normal preschool children. Child Development, 36, 761. Maccoby, E. E., & Hagen, J. (1965). Effects of distraction upon central versus incidental recall: Developmental trends. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2, 280–289. Maccoby, E. E., & Rothbart, M. (1966). Parents’ differential reactions to sons and daughters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4, 237–243. Maccoby, E. E., & Konrad, K. W. (1966). Age trends in selective listening, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 3, 113–122. Burton, R. V., Allinsmith, W., & Maccoby, E. E. (1966). Resistance to temptation in relation to sex of child, sex of experimenter, and withdrawal of attention. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 3(3), 253–258. Ferguson, L. R., & Maccoby, E. E. (1966). Intrapersonal correlates of differential abilities. Child Development, 37(3), 549–571. Nelson, E. A., & Maccoby, E. E. (1966). The relationship between social development and differential abilities on the scholastic aptitude test. Merrill Palmer Quarterly of Behavior and Development, 4, Vol. 12. Maccoby, E. E. (1967). Selective auditory attention in children. In L. Lipsitt & C. Spiker (Eds.), Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 3. New York: Academic Press. Maccoby, E. E. (1968). The development of moral values and behavior. In J. Clausen (Ed.), Introduction to the socialization process. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. Maccoby, E. E. (1968). Summary and commentary: Early learning and personality. In R. D. Hess & R. Baer (Eds.), Early education: Report of research and action. Social Science Research Council. Maccoby, E. E. (1968). What copying requires. Ontario Journal of Educational Research, 10, 163–170. Maccoby, E. E., Jones, T. M., & Konrad, K. W. (1968). Selective listening in later life. In S. A. Chown & K. F. Reigel (Eds.), Psychological functioning on the normal aging and senile aged: Interdisciplinary topics in gerontology, 1. Basel–New York: Karger. Maccoby, E. E. (1969). Infant love in another country. Review of Infancy in Uganda: Infant care and the growth of love, by M. Ainsworth. Contemporary Psychology, 14(1).

260 Professional Milestones Maccoby, E. E. (1969). The development of stimulus selection. In J. P. Hill (Ed.), Minnesota symposia on child psychology, Vol. III. University of Minnesota Press. Maccoby, E. E., & Masters, J. C. (1970). Attachment and dependency. In P. Mussen (Ed.), Carmichael’s manual of child psychology, Vol. III. NewYork: John Wiley. Maccoby, E. E. (1970). Intellect féminin et les exigences de la science. Impact: science et société, Vol. XX(I). Maccoby, E. E. (1972). The meaning of being female, Judith M. Bardwick. Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews, 17(7), 369–372. Maccoby, E. E., & Jacklin, C. N. (1972). Sex differences in intellectual functioning. On assessment in a pluralistic society, 37–51. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service. Jacklin, C. N., Maccoby, E. E., & Dick, A. E. (1973). Barrier behavior and toy preference: Sex differences (and their absence) in the year-old child. Child Development, 44(1), 196–200. Maccoby, E. E. (1973). Sex in the social order. Science, 182, 469–471. Maccoby, E. E., & Jacklin, C. N. (1973). Stress and proximity-seeking: Sex differences in the year-old child. Child Development, 44, 34–42. Maccoby, E. E., & Jacklin, C. N. (1974). Myth, reality and shades of gray: What we know and don’t know about sex differences. Psychology Today, 8(7), 109–112. Maccoby, E. E., & Jacklin, C. N. (1975). The psychology of women. Today’s Woman– Voice of America Forum Series. Washington, D.C. Jacklin, C. N., & Maccoby, E. E. (1978). Social behavior at 33 months in same-sex and mixed-sex dyads. Child Development, 49, 557–569. Maccoby, E. E. (1978). Current changes in the family: Their impact on the socialization of children. In J. M. Yinger & S. J. Cutler (Eds.), Major social issues: A multi- disciplinary view. New York: Free Press. Maccoby, E. E. (1978). Children's understanding of rules, justice, authority and friendship. Review of The social world of the child, by W. Damon. Contemporary Psychology, 23. Maccoby, E. E. (1978). La psychologie des sexes: Implications pour les rôles des adultes. In É. Sullerot (Ed.), Le fait féminin. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard. Maccoby, E. E. (1979). Woman's sociobiological heritage: Destiny or free choice? In J. E. Gullahorn (Ed.), Psychology and women: In transition. New York: V. H. Winston & Sons.

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Maccoby, E. E., Doering, C., Jacklin, C. N., & Kraemer, H. (1979). Concentrations of sex hormones in umbilical cord blood: Their relation to sex and birth order of infants. Child Development, 50, 632–642. Maccoby, E. E. (1979). Gender identity and sex role adoption. In H. Katchadourian (Ed.), Human sexual development: Alternative perspectives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Maccoby, E. E. (1980). Commentary on G. R. Patterson's monograph Mothers: The unacknowledged victims. SRCD Monographs, Vol. 45. University of Chicago Press. Jacklin, C. N., Maccoby, E. E., & Halverson, C. (1980). Minor physical anomalies and preschool behavior. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 5, 199–205. Maccoby, E. E., & Jacklin, C. N. (1980). Sex differences in aggression: A rejoinder and reprise. Child Development, 51, 964–980. Jacklin, C. N., Snow, M. E., Gahart, M., & Maccoby, E. E. (1980). Sleep pattern development from 6 through 33 months. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 5, 295–303. Maccoby, E. E., & Jacklin, C. N. (1980). Psychological sex differences. In M. Rutter (Ed.), Scientific foundations of development psychiatry. London: William Heineman Medical Books. Snow, M. E., Jacklin, C. N., & Maccoby, E. E. (1980). Crying episodes and sleep- wake transitions in the first 26 months of life. Infant Behavior and Development, 3, 387–394. Martin, J. A., Maccoby, E. E., & Jacklin, C. N. (1981). Mothers’ responsiveness to interactive bidding and non-bidding in boys and girls. Child Development, 52, 1064–1067. Snow, M. E., Jacklin, C. N., & Maccoby, E. E. (1981). Birth order differences in peer sociability at 33 months. Child Development, 52, 589–595. Martin, J. A., Maccoby, E. E, Baran, K., & Jacklin, C. N. (1981). Sequential analysis of mother-child interaction at 18 months: A comparison of microanalytic methods. Developmental Psychology, 17, 146–157. Jacklin, C. N., Snow, M. E., & Maccoby, E. E. (1981). Tactile sensitivity and muscle strength in newborn boys and girls. Infant Behavior and Development, 4, 285– 292.

262 Professional Milestones Maccoby, E. E. (1982). Organization and relationships in development. Commentary on papers in W. A. Collins (Ed.), The Concept of Development, Vol. 15, of the Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Jacklin, C. N., & Maccoby, E. E. (1982). Social factors in sex-related differences in spatial mathematical abilities. International Journal of Behavioral Development. Maccoby, E. E., Kahn, A. J., & Everett, B. A. (1983). The role of psychological research in the formation of policies affecting children. American Psychologist. Maccoby, E. E. (1983). Social-emotional development and response to stressors. In N. Garmezy & M. Rutter (Eds.), Stress, coping, and development in children. McGraw-Hill. Maccoby, E. E., & Jacklin, C. N. (1983). The “person” characteristics of children and the family as environment. In D. Magnussen & V. Allen (Eds.), Human development: An interactional perspective. New York: Academic Press. Maccoby, E. E., & Martin, J. A. (1983). Socialization in the context of the family: Parent-child interaction. In E. M. Hetherington (Ed.), Manual of child psychology, 4: Social development. P. H. Mussen (General Editor). NewYork: John Wiley & Sons. Jacklin, C. N., Maccoby, E. E., & Doering, C. H. (1983). Neonatal sex-steroid hormones and timidity in 6–18-month-old boys and girls. Developmental Psychobiology, 16, 163–168. Jacklin, C. N., & Maccoby. E. E. (1983). Length of labor and sex of offspring. Journal of Pediatric Psychology. Snow, M. E., Jacklin, C. N., & Maccoby, E. E. (1983). Sex-of-child differences in father- child interaction at 12 months of age. Child Development, 35, 227–232. Maccoby, E. E. (1983). Let’s not over-attribute to the attribution process. In E. T. Higgins, D. N. Ruble, & W. W. Hartup (Eds.), Social cognition and social behavior: Developmental perspectives. Cambridge, Engl.: Cambridge University Press. Martin, J. A., King, D. R., Maccoby, E. E., & Jacklin, C. N. (1984). Secular trends and individual differences in toilet training progress. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 9, 457–467 . Jacklin, C. N., Dipietro, J. A., & Maccoby, E. E. (1984). Sex-typing behavior and sex- typing pressure in child/parent interaction. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 13(5), 413–425. Maccoby, E. E. (1984). Socialization and developmental change. Child Development, 55, 317–328.

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Maccoby, E. E. (1984). Middle childhood in the context of the family. In W. A. Collins (Ed.), Development during middle childhood: The years from six to twelve. National Academy Press. Maccoby, E. E., Snow, M. E., & Jacklin, C. N. (1984). Children’s dispositions and mother-child interaction at 12 and 18 months: A short-term longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, 20, 459–472. Doering, C. H., Jacklin, C. N., King, D. R., & Maccoby, E. E. (1984). Neonatal sex- steroid hormones & muscular strength of boys & girls in the first three years. Developmental Psychobiology, 17(3): 301–310. Parpal, M., & Maccoby, E. E. (1985). Maternal responsiveness and subsequent child compliance. Child Development, 56, 1326–1334. Marcus, J., Maccoby, E. E., & Jacklin, C. N. (1985). Individual differences in mood in early childhood: Their relation to gender and neonatal sex steroids. Developmental Psychobiology, 18, 327–340. Greeno, C. G., & Maccoby, E. E. (1986). How different is the “different voice”? Signs: Journal of women in culture and society, 11. University of Chicago Press. Maccoby, E. E. (1986). Social groupings in childhood: Their relationship to prosocial and antisocial behavior in boys and girls. In D. Olweus, J. Beck, & M. Radke Yarrow (Eds.), Development of antisocial and prosocial behavior: Research, theories and issues. Orlando: Academic Press. Gelman, S. A., Collman, P., & Maccoby, E. E. (1986). Inferring properties from categories versus inferring categories from properties: The case of gender. Child Development, 57(2), 396–404. Maccoby, E. E. (1987). The varied meanings of “masculine” and “feminine.” In J. M. Reinisch, L. A. Rosenblum, & S. A. Sanders (Eds.), Masculinity/femininity: Basic perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press. Maccoby, E. E., & Jacklin, C. N. (1987). Gender segregation in childhood. In H. Reese (Ed.), Advances in child behavior and development, 20. New York: Academic Press. Maccoby, E. E. (1988). Gender as a social category. Developmental Psychology, 24, 755– 765. Maccoby, E. E., Depner, C., & Mnookin, R. (1988). Custody of children following divorce. In E. M. Hetherington & J. D. Arasteh (Eds.), Impact of divorce, single parenting and stepparenting on children. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

264 Professional Milestones Jacklin, C. N., Wilcox, K. T., & Maccoby, E. E. (1988). Neonatal sex-steroid hormones and cognitive abilities at six years. Developmental Psychobiology, 21, 567–574. Maccoby, E. E. (1989). Autobiography. In Gardner Lindzey (Ed.), A history of psychology in autobiography 8. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Maccoby, E. E., Depner, C., & Mnookin, R. (1990). Coparenting in the second year following divorce. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 52, 141–155. Maccoby, E. E. (1990). Gender and relationships: A developmental account. American Psychologist, 45, 513–520. Powlishta, K. K., & Maccoby, E. E. (1990). Resource utilization in mixed-sex dyads: The influence of adult presence and task type. Sex Roles, 23, 223–240. Mnookin, R. H., Maccoby, E. E., Albiston, C. R., & Depner, C. E. (1990). Private ordering revisited: what custodial arrangements are parents negotiating? In S. D. Sugarman & H. H. Kay (Eds.), Divorce reform at the crossroads. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Maccoby, E. E. (1990). The rote of gender identity and gender constancy in sex- differentiated development. In D. F. Schrader (Ed.), The legacy of Lawrence Kohlberg, 5–20. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Albiston, C. R., Maccoby, E. E., & Mnookin, R. H. (1990). Does joint legal custody matter? Stanford Law & Policy Review, 1(2), 167–179. Maccoby, E. E. (1990). The sexes and their interactions: Some explanatory models. In The invisible majority. Graduate School of Tulane University. Buchanan, C., Maccoby, E. E., & Dornbusch, S. M. (1991). Caught between parents: Adolescents’ experience in divorced homes. Child Development, 62, 1008– 1029. Maccoby, E. E. (1991). Gender and relationships: A reprise. American Psychologist, May 1991, 538–539. Maccoby, E. E. (1991). Different reproductive strategies in males and females. Child Development, 62, 676–681. Maccoby, E. E., & Buchanan, C. M. (1991, April). Conflict in divorcing families. Paper presented at the biennial meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, Seattle, WA. Maccoby, E. E. (1992). Family structure and children’s adjustment. Is quality of parenting the major mediator? Commentary on E. M. Hetherington and W. G. Clingempeel, “Coping with marital transitions: A family systems

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perspective,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 57(2– 3), Serial No. 227, 230–238. Maccoby, E. E. (1992). Trends in the study of socialization: ls there a Lewinian heritage? Journal of Social Issues, 48, 171–186. Buchanan, C. M., Maccoby, E. E., & Dornbusch, S. M. (1992). Adolescents and their families after divorce: Three residential arrangements compared. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 2, 261–291. Maccoby, E. E. (1992). The role of parents in the socialization of children: An historical overview. Developmental Psychology, 28, 1006–1017. Monahan, S. C., Buchanan, C. M., Maccoby, E. E., & Dornbusch, S. M. (1993). Sibling differences in divorced families. Child Development, 64, 152–168. Maccoby, E. E. (1993). Commentary: Gender segregation in childhood. In C. Leaper (Ed.), Childhood gender segregation: Causes and consequences, 87–97. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Maccoby, E. E., Buchanan, C. M., Mnookin, R. H., & Dornbusch, S. M. (1993). Post- divorce roles of mothers and fathers in the lives of their children. Journal of Family Psychology, 7(6), 24–38. Peters, H. E., Argys, L. M., Maccoby, E. E., & Mnookin, R. H. (1993). Enforcing divorce settlements: Evidence from child support compliance and award modifications. Demography, 30(4), 719–735. Maccoby, E. E. (1995). The two sexes and their social systems. In P. Moen, G. H. Elder, & K. Luscher (Eds.), Examining lives in context: Perspectives on the ecology of human development, 347–364. American Psychological Association. Maccoby, E. E. (1995). Divorce and custody: The rights, needs, and obligations of mothers, fathers, and children. In G. B. Melton (Ed.), The individual, the family, and social good: Personal fulfillment in times of change, 42, 135–172. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press. Maccoby, E. E. (1996). Peer conflict and intrafamily conflict: Are there conceptual bridges? Merrill Palmer Quarterly, 42, 165–176. Jacklin, C. N., Maccoby, E. E., & Snow, M. E. (1997). Children’s dispositions and mother-child interaction at 12 and 18 months: A short-term longitudinal study. In L. P. Lipsitt, C. Rovee-Collier, & H. Hayne (Eds.), Advances in infancy research, Vol. 12, xv–xxxv. Stamford, London: Ablex Publishing. Maccoby, E. E. (1999). The uniqueness of the parent-child relationship. In W. A. Collins & B. Laursen (Eds.), Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology, Vol. 29, Relationships as Developmental Contexts, 157–176. London: Lawrence Erlbaum.

266 Professional Milestones Maccoby, E. E. (1999). The custody of children in divorcing families: Weighing the alternatives. In R. A. Thompson & P. R. Amato (Eds.), The postdivorce family: Research and policy issues, 51–70. SAGE Publications. Maccoby, E. E. (2000). Parenting and its effect on children: On reading and misreading behavior genetics. Annual Review of Psychology, 2000(51), 1–27. Collins, W. A., Maccoby, E. E., Steinberg, L., Hetherington, E. M., & Bornstein, M. (2000). Contemporary research on parenting: The case for nature and nurture. American Psychologist, 55, 218–232. Maccoby, E. E. (2000). Perspectives on gender development. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 24, 298–406. Reprinted in W. W. Hartup & R. K. Silbereisen (Eds.), Growing points in developmental science, ISSBD publication (2002). Maccoby, E. E. (2000). The intersection of nature and socialization in childhood gender development. In C. v. Hofsten & P. Backman (Eds.), Psychology at the turn of the millennium, Vol. 2, Social, Developmental and Clinical Perspectives, 37–52. Psychology Press. Maccoby, E. E., & Weisner, T. S. (2000). Memoir: John W. Mayhew Whiting. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. Newsletter. Maccoby, E. E. (2002). Parenting effects: Issues & controversies. In J. G. a Borkowski, M. Landesman, & M. Bristol Power (Eds.), Parenting and the child’s world: Influences on academic intellectual and social-emotional development, 35–46. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Maccoby, E. E. (2002). Gender & social exchange: A longitudinal perspective. In W. G. Graziano & B. Laursen (Eds.), Social exchange in development, 95, New directions for child and adolescent development, 87–107. San Francisco: Jossey- Bass. Maccoby, E. E. (2002). Gender and group process: A developmental perspective. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11, 54–58. Maccoby, E. E., & Mnookin, R. H. (2002). Facing the dilemmas of child custody. The Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law, Vol 10(1). Maccoby, E. E. (2003). Dynamic viewpoints on parent-child relations: Their implications for socialization processes. In L. Kuczynski (Ed.), Handbook of dynamics in parent-child relations, 439–452. SAGE Publications. Maccoby, E. E., & Lewis, C. C. (2003). Less daycare or different daycare? Child Development, 74, 1069–1075.

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Maccoby, E. E. (2003). Gender of child and parent as factors in family dynamics. In A. Booth & A. Crouter (Eds.), Children’s influence on family dynamics: The neglected side of family relationships, 17, 191–206. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Maccoby, E. E. (2003). Reply to Kerr-Stattin critique. In A. Booth & A. Crouter (Eds.), Children’s influence on family dynamics: The neglected side of family dynamics, 17. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Maccoby, E. E. (2004). Aggression in the context of gender development. In M. Putallas & K. Bierman (Eds.), Aggression, anti-social behavior and violence among girls, 3–29. Maccoby, E. E. (2005). Editorial: A cogent case for a new child custody standard. Psychology Science in the Public Interest, Vol. 6. Maccoby, E. E. (2007). Historical overview of socialization research and theory. In J. E. Grusec & P. D. Hastings (Eds.), Handbook of socialization. New York: Guilford Press.