WfrU^
University of California • Berkeley
'
Regional Oral History Office University of California
The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California
Mary Cover Jones
HAROLD E. JONES AND MARY C. JONES, PARTNERS IN LONGITUDINAL STUDIES
With Introductions by Ernest R. Hilgard R. Nevitt Sanford
An Interview Conducted by Suzanne B. Riess in 1981-1982
Copyright (cj 1983 by The Regents of the University of California
MARY COVER JONES 1975
Photograph Courtesy G. Paul Bishop
S.F. Chronicle Saturday, September 12, 1987
Mary Cover Jones
•'-' • 'A memorial service for Mary" Cover Jones, professor emeritus at the University of California who de voted 55 years to UC's celebrated Oakland Growth Study, will be held at 4 p.m. Wednesday in the Faculty Club on the Berkeley campus-
Mrs. Jones, who died July 22 in Santa Barbara at the age of 90, fol lowed the lives of a group of Oak land and Berkeley residents from their teenage years into old age. She came to know not only the original participants but their parents, chil dren, grandchildren and, in a few cases, great-grandchildren
>-
" Although Mrs. Jones retired from the UC Berkeley faculty in 1960, she continued her research until last year. t
She also studied . the conse quences of early versus late^matur- ing in adolescence and conducted important research on problem drinking. t
She received many honors, in cluding the Stanley Hall Award for Distinguished Research Contribu tions by the American Psychologi cal Association.
She was a native of Johnston, Pa., and a graduate of Vassar Col lege. She received her doctorate from Columbia . University. She moved from Berkeley to Santa Bar bara in 1966.
Mrs. Jones is survived by two daughters. Barbara Coates of Clare- niont and Lesley Alexander of San ta Barbara: a sister, Louise Hill of Mariposa: six grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the Regents of the University of California and Mary Cover Jones dated December 17, 1982. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of Califor nia, Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley .
Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows :
Mary Cover Jones, "Harold E. Jones and Mary C. Jones, Partners in Longitudinal Studies," an oral history conducted 1981-1982 by Suzanne B. Riess, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1983.
Copy No.
TABLE OF CONTENTS — Mary Cover Jones
INTRODUCTION by Ernest R. Hilgard ±
INTRODUCTORY NOTES by Nevitt Sanford ±i
INTERVIEW HISTORY iv
1. MARY COVER JONES
Family
Carrie Louise Higson
Charles Blair Cover
The Flood
Chautauqua
Education for the Cover Children
Education
Entering Vassar
Psychology and Economics Studies
College Summers
Vassar Traditions
Socialism, Pacifism, and the War
Deciding to go on in Psychology
Siblings 23
John Higson Cover Anna Louise Cover Hill
2. HAROLD JONES
Family and Education
O Q
Genealogy
Interest in Nature
Friendships , Amherst
Mary's Influence, and the Beginnings of the Child
Welfare Institutes Columbia, Meeting Mary, and Marriage 36
Berkeley
The Lighter Side of Harold
Meiklejohn, the Oath and Psychologist Friends 42
Psychoanalysis, and Other Theories 43
Child-raising and Watson's Theories 45
Harold's Writing, Mary's TV Class 47
3. THE WAY WEST 49
A Career for Mary Cover Jones 49
Careers for Women, 1919 49
John B. Watson 50
The Hecksher Foundation 52
R. S. Woodworth's Seminar 54
In Defense of Child Psychology 55
Mary Jones: "Peter" and Ph.D. Thesis 56
Observing Mothers and Children 58
Moving On 60
Married by Norman Thomas 60
Motivations, Inner and Outer Drives 62
Teachers and Parents 63
Comments on Larry Frank 64
A Home in Berkeley 66
4. THE LONGITUDINAL STUDIES 69
Getting Started 69
The Nursery School
Cooperating with Other Departments
Academic Appointments and Tenure 74
Twins, Fears, Colds, Birth order
Interviewing
The "Lunch Study" 79
Helping the Study Members 81
A Talk at Holy Names 85
Initiating the Project 86
The Clubhouse
The Excursions 89
ICW Staff 91
1937 91
Erik Erikson
The Dinner Group 95
[The Material Submitted Separately by Mary Cover Jones]
More on the Individual Staff Members 98
Herbert Stolz
Nancy Bay ley
Dorothy Eichorn 100
Jean Macfarlane
Marjorie Honzik
Erik Erikson
Judith Chaffey
Nathan Shock 103
Elsa Frenkel-Brunswick 103
Nevitt Sanford 103
Paul Mussen 104
Margaret Erwin Schevill 104
Catherine Landreth 106
The Study and the 60-Year Old Group 106
AFTERWORD by Mary Cover Jones 108
APPENDICES 109
A. The Institute of Human Development 40th Anniversary Award 110
B. G. Stanley Hall Award, Dsvision 7, American Psychological Association 111
C. Curriculum Vitae, M.C. Jones 112
D. Publications, M.C. Jones 121
E. "Mary Cover Jones: Feminine as Asset," by Deana D. Logan 134
F. "History of the Institute of Human Development: A Model"
by Vicki Green 141
G. "Harold Ellis Jones Memorial" by R. Nevitt Sanford, Dorothy Eichorn, and Marjorie P. Honzik 147
INDEX 152
INTRODUCTION
Mary Cover Jones and Harold Ellis Jones were married in 1920, three years before he completed his Ph.D. at Columbia, and six years before she completed hers — with two children in the meantime. The saga of their lives is intertwined with the rise of John B. Watson's behaviorism in the early years, and with the evolution of developmental psychology throughout their lives.
The oral account by Mary Cover Jones becomes an important intimate document to reflect how a professional couple working together in the same field can become individually distinguished and show little evidence of conflict because of their mutuality of interests. They were able to remain caring parents despite the hours of absence of both of them from their home. Although this is an account by Mary, sixty years after their marriage, it reflects Harold's life and career as well as hers.
Mary's reduction of the fears of the boy Peter became a classic. She used the conditioned response method of John B. Watson, whom they knew and who appears as a f lesh-and-blood person in the account. Little did they know then how prominent behavior therapy was to become in later
/
years.
After they moved together to the University of California at Berkeley, their careers were tied to the important longitudinal studies initiated there under Harold's leadership, and involving both of them thereafter. The teams of those who worked on these studies find their way into the account, because many were involved, and what started out as child devel opment became life-span development as the years rolled by. We have here an account of an important era, probably not to be repeated again, reflec ted through the careers of two of those who were central in it.
September 30, 1982 Prepared by Ernest R. Hilgard
ii
INTRODUCTORY NOTES
Several years ago I wrote "I believe that the culture and social structure of an academic institution can be changed, albeit by somewhat heroic measures, while changes in people who leave their academic positions are readily to be observed. Two more or less retired professors, a woman and a man, joined the staff of the Institute for the Study of Human Problems at Stanford soon after its beginning and immediately began to take a new lease on life. Their gaiety, eagerness to learn, and capacity to find excite ment in a new venture contrasted sharply with the grim, know— it-all coolness of the striving academics who surrounded us."*
One of these retired professors was Mary Cover Jones, the other E. M. Jellinick, the expert on alcoholism. I had moved from Berkeley to Stanford in 1961 to establish the Institute mentioned above. The main funding of the Institute, which in time addressed a variety of problems, was a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to the Cooperative Commission for the Study of Alcohol Problems. This was a national commission whose base of operations was at Stanford.
I think it was at the very beginning of the Institute's life that I asked Mary, who had just retired from her professorship at Berkeley, to join us in the work on alcohol problems. She seemed glad enough to do so. Her work centered mainly on personality in relation to alcoholism or problem drinking. Previous studies had shown that various personality characteristics are commonly found in association with problem drinking, but it had not been made clear which was cause and which was effect. What Mary did was interview 108 women and men who, when they were adolescents, had been subjects of the Oakland Growth Study. She found, as had other workers, that there were indeed personality dimensions on which problem drinkers were differentiated from other types of drinkers ("heavy," "moderate," "light," "abstainer") but, for the first time as far as I know, she showed that some of these differences were present when her subjects were adolescents. She was able to do this because these people in adolescence had been closely observed, interviewed in depth, and given a wide range of personality tests. Thus she was able to provide support for the hypothesis that there are durable personality characteristics, generated in the setting of family life, that predispose the individual to problem drinking .
Mary continued in this line of investigation during her five years with the Cooperative Commission and for some years after that. She published various papers on the correlates and antecedents of drinking patterns, the latest, I believe, in 1981. She may well have others in preparation.
This work shows clearly that Mary represents a kind of psychologist that has become too rare; that is, one brought up in the stern tradition of experi mental psychology and thoroughly schooled in rigorous quantitative methods for the study of personality but who remains open to radically different approaches
*Learning After College, Orinda, Ca., Montaigne, 1980, pp. 61-62.
iii
Mary was originally trained in the theory and methodology of behaviorism, and during most of her career worked in accord with the tenents of this school of thought. One of the enemies of behaviorism was, and is, psychoanalysis, and it is my opinion that Mary, and her husband Harold, made little use of this body of theory and concepts. Yet they were always willing to listen to what I had to say on this subject. They gave the impression that they were eager to learn about it. I think they were eager to learn, period.
This approach to science requires strength of character. Mary has this in abundance, and when I was Director of the Institute at Stanford I was in a position fully to appreciate it. Anyone who takes on the responsibility of running a research institute, or any other organization I suppose, has to have some people around who can be relied upon absolutely. Mary is such a person. What my colleagues at Stanford and I appreciated especially was her loyalty, honesty, and forthrightness which, when combined with her good sense and tact, made her an ideal colleague.
Mary's integrity and moral courage are of long standing. (I do not know whether the following story appears in the oral history, but it ought to be on the record.) Mary was a student at Vassar College in 1917 when Presi dent Wilson declared war on Germany. Amid the burst of patriotism that followed this act there was a meeting at which the student body at the college voted overwelmingly to support the president. Someone shouted, "Let's make it unanimous." They would have done so had it not been for Mary, who stood alone to say, "No." She was soon joined by a few other students.
I have written about Mary mainly on the basis of our close association during our years at Stanford. I have, in fact, known her since 1940, when my family and I moved to Berkeley. Harold was at that time Director of the Institute of Child Welfare and Mary was deeply involved in the Oakland Growth Study. I saw little of Mary in work situations in Berkeley, for we were in different departments, and during my half-time at the Institite of Child Welfare I was taken up with the Guidance Study. I knew about her research only in a vague and general way, but I felt that I knew her well as a person. When my family and I arrived in Berkeley she and Harold went beyond the call of duty in making us feel welcome. They entertained often in their home, where the groups of guests were large or small but almost always variegated. The talk was typically animated, and general, directed to the issues of the day rather than to scientific or administrative matters. Mary, ever the watchful and gracious hostess, devoted herself to drawing others out rather than taking the center of the stage herself. Alone now, Mary carries on this same tradition of generous hospitality. It is my impression, however, that now, more than in the past, she is likely to tell something about her work.
One more thing. As an assistant professor at Berkeley, and for quite a few years after that, come to think of it, I always felt that I had the moral support of Mary and Harold. It seems to me now that whenever I read a paper at a meeting of the American Psychological Association Mary was in the audience and spoke to me afterward. I valued this support highly and am grateful for it,
December 1982 R- Nevitt Sanford
Berkeley, California
iv
INTERVIEW HISTORY
Mary Cover Jones, Professor Emeritus, Education, UC Berkeley; Research Psychologist, Institute of Human Development — the titles suggest the reasons for wanting to interview the subject. Mary Jones' impressive curriculum vita, together with Deana Logan's article titled "Mary Cover Jones: Feminine as Asset," bracket the multitude of roles Mary Jones has played in her career and life. Both are appended and should be read.
At the outset of this introduction, I must describe the memoir that follows as an Early Life History. Mary Jones' name is synonymous with Longitudinal Studies, and we are aware that these interviews concentrate on the beginnings , with not as much follow through and follow up as we would have presented had it been financially feasible to record the complete story of all the years .
The interviews with Mary Cover Jones were conducted January 23, January 30, February 2, 1981, and on February 22, 1982. Mary Jones and the interviewer met in the living room of the Shasta Road home that the Joneses lived in for fifty years in Berkeley. I had prepared a list of outlined questions bringing in both global and particular aspects of the lives of Mary Cover and Harold Ellis Jones, because this was to be, insofar as possible, a dual biography. Mary Jones had studied her copy of these questions — not always the practice in doing oral history, but a result of the sense that for a developmental psychologist, this was the way to proceed — and she was well primed with thoughts and documents, and so we began.
Several months later, seeing the transcribed results of the first edited interviews, Mary Jones was skeptical of the value to The Bancroft Library of recollections that were to her thinking so relentlessly personal in nature. She proposed to make of the work two oral histories, editing out what was "for family." I argued against such a process. We also talked about the commonly-perceived problem for oral history interviews of making sure no one was "left out" in the story. Mary Jones took to a suggestion that she begin to write up her material on the Institute of Child Welfare (later the Institute for Human Development) prior to the next meeting, to be sure to cover the history to her own satisfaction.
The last interview took place a year after the first three sessions. In that time severe budget cutting within the University had eliminated the fund from which the oral history was to proceed. Without a clear sense of what future the oral history had, we chose to review the written material sent to the interviewer, in November 1981, and to record Mary Jones' thoughts on how she worked to keep the Longitudinal Study participants committed to returning. In the volume that follows, the written material comprises the final section, and the interview in which it was discussed precedes it.
On April 28, 1982, Professor Jack Block of the Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley, after having lunch with Mary Jones and learning about her oral history and its location in limbo, offered the Regional Oral History Office the services of his typist and word-processor. It was an opportunity that had to be seized instantly. We knew that Mary Jones would be able to make her final changes and corrections on the word-processed copy and we would be en route to a product. The energy of Jack Block, powered by his great fondness for Mary Jones, and the cooperation of the typist Joanie Singer, enabled us to complete our oral history. We are in Jack Block's debt.
We extend our thanks to Mary Jones for her understanding and good humor. We thank Ernest Hilgard for the careful historical note on his colleagues, Mary and Harold Jones . And we thank particularly Nevitt Sanf ord for taking time to write his fine, informative and familiar introductory words on his friend Mary .
Students of child development history, and readers of this autobiographical material, will wish to seek out Vicki Green's oral history of a half -century of the Institute of Human Development (IHD) at Berkeley, which will be deposited, when completed, in the Institute archives. Professor Green, on a sabbatical leave from Oaklahoma State's department of psychology, 1981-82, became inter ested in creating a history at many levels of IHD's work and its staff, by questionnaire and oral history interviews of about twenty key participants. A brief presentation on that study is appended.
Milton Senn and Elizabeth Lomax have done work on the history of the child development movement ["The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial: Some of its Contributions to Early Research in Child Development," Elizabeth Lomax, in Science and Patterns of Child Care, Freeman, 1978; Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Vol. 40, Nos . 3-4, Milton Senn] that gives an even broader context to Mary Jones' work. The Sanf ord, Eichorn, Honzik memorial for Harold E. Jones (1894-1960), husband and colleague of Mary Jones, and the Logan article [1980 Psychology of Women Quarterly] supplement the oral history in focusing on the personalities of these memorably human beings . [Appended]
The Regional Oral History Office was established to tape record autobio graphical interviews with persons prominent in recent California history. The Office is under the direction of Willa K. Baum, and under the administration of James D. Hart, the Director of The Bancroft Library.
Suzanne B. Riess Interviewer
January 10, 1983
Regional Oral History Office
486 The Bancroft Library
University of California at Berkeley
1 . MARY COVER JONES [interview 1: January 23, 1981 ]
Family
Carrie Louise Higson
Riess: What do you know about your ancestors? How far back do you remember?
Jones: Well, it isn't how far I remember — but I do have some literature. I remember my grandmother on my father's side and both my grandparents on my mother's side.
Riess: Do you know their countries of origin?
Jones: Yes. I start with my mother. I have no illustrious ancestors, but I had a preciously good mother and father. Here is a picture of my mother. '
Riess: A very strong and put-together-locking woman, I must say.
Jones: You know this little thing that was written up about me for the Psychology of Women Quarterly? [Volume 5 0), Fall 1980, pp. 103-115] Nevitt Sanford, who was interviewed for that, said he thought I was nurturant. Well, if I'm nurturant, I get it from my mother. After she died — some years — I was down in Carmel. I stood on a streetccrner, where I saw an older woman who reminded me of my mother. The thought came to me: nobody ever loved me in the same way as my mother did, unselfishly and completely. I'm sorry I never told her this. She was a grand person.
Her name was Carrie Louise Higson. She was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1866. One of the outstanding things about her was that she had a good voice. She had very little voice training, but she sang when she was a young woman. For example, she was in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado . She was "poor little Buttercup." So she used
to sing around the house quite a bit. My father has said to us girls, "Neither of you have voices as good as your mother." [laughs]
Riess: How many children were there?
Jones: There were three. I had an older brother, five years older, and a sister four years younger.
If you want the educational level, my parents went through high school. None of my parents went further formally than high school. I'll go on more about that when I come to my father, because he was more interested in education.
My mother was a housewife, and a loving mother, and did the things that most housewives do. She was a social and community per son: she belonged to several organizations with other women. She was more sociable than my father.
Riess: Did you have grandparents living on her side?
Jones: Her parents, when I knew them, lived at School Place across from the high school. My grandmother was English and French in origin. She was born in Philadelphia on May 1 , 1846. She was also a nurturant person. She baked on Friday. I went over after high school on Friday and got a slice of hot bread from the loaf just out of the oven. She was a great handiwork woman. She sent her little embroidered pieces to the state fair; she got prizes. She quilted; she had a quilting frame set up in her house, in the dining room. She was in charge of quilting for the Episcopal church group, and for the — is it the D.A.R. , the Daughters of American Revolution?
Riess: Yes.
Jones: That was the kind of thing she did. If you want to see her quilts, I've got them on my beds! [laughs] We can lock at them. And on the dining room table, I've got one of her embroidery pieces that won a prize at the fair.
Riess: Back in that generation was there talk about an "old country" at all, or a sense of pioneering?
Jones: No, really not. Her husband, John Higson, was an Englishman. I got a little more feeling from him of our background. The story that my brother tells me is that he [Higscn] heard the American ambassador speaking in London about the slaves in this country. When we went to war, he came to this country to fight against the South. He landed in Philadelphia and was sent to a camp up in New York state, and that's where he met my grandmother. She lived in Elmira then. Her name was Anna Eliza Paxson. A Jaquette ancestor of hers came to the United States with Lafayette to fight in the American Revolution.
My grandfather Higscn was wounded at the battle of Antietam. He was sent to Washington, B.C. to a hospital. The bullet went in his shoulder and came out further down his side. He wasn't getting better, and he used to get out of bed at the hospital, or the camp — whatever it was — and go and lie in the stream and let the water run over his wound. This is his story — that it saved his life. From there he was promoted in rank. But he never could fulfill the func tion because he never recovered from the wound completely. I can remember my grandmother helping him on with his coat, even forever.
I also remember that when he returned from work he would give a favorite call as he approached the door. Grandma would rush to the door, and jump into his arms. He caught her and tossed her in the air. She was petite. He was a large man.
Riess: Was your mother an only child?
Jones: No! The oldest sister was Kate. There were baby twins, boys, who died. Then my mother. Then my Aunt Agnes. Then my Uncle Alec. There was a Mary who died as a young woman; she had had typhoid fever. But when I was growing up, I had my Aunt Kate, who was a public school teacher, and my Aunt Agnes, who was married and had children. She followed my grandmother's interest in handiwork more than the others.
My Uncle Alec went to college. He went to Perm State, where he also played football on the college team. He married and had a child, but he died rather young.
There's a question here [in interviewer's outline] about who else might have been a parent figure. I would say that maybe my Aunt Kate to some extent.
Riess: All of these births and deaths — was there a lot of trauma associated with that?
Jones: I wasn't present when many of these people died. But I was present when my grandfather Higson died. He was ill, but he was an old man. I don't think there was any feeling that it wasn't his time.
The only traumatic death that I remember from my childhood was my Aunt Agnes' s baby boy. I don't think he was more than a year. I used to love him and carry him around. He died of spinal meningitis. I can remember the sadness of the parents. But there wasn't a great deal of death in my childhood.
You asked about values, and I would like to say one more thing about my grandfather John Higson. He was wounded, and he was entitled to veterans compensation. He never would take it, because he said no, he went into the war on his own, and he wouldn't take any compensation for his injury. That's some kind of a value. My brother said that my
grandfather wouldn' t talk about the war even though he had volunteered to fight. He said, "¥ar is Hell," or something to that effect.
Riess: What did he go on to do as a business?
Jones: We had the Cambria steel mills in Johnstown. He was in charge of the blast furnaces. He had people working under him. Apparently they kept the furnaces going, and he was in charge.
Riess: This is Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
Jones: Yes. I think the mills later became the Bessemer Company.
I was called Mary Liz by that family, just by that family, nobody else. My name is Mary Elizabeth.
Charles Blair Cover
Jones: Now, you want me to say something about my father at this point? This is one picture of him.
Riess: Oh, he is dashing!
Jones: Yes, he was. He was considered to be a Beau Brummel. [chuckles] My mother said he always locked as though he'd just come cut of a band box, which was a way of saying he was neat and well-dressed. I want to show you this picture also, which is much more human. That's my father with my daughter, Barbara.
Riess: What was his full name?
Jones: His name was Charles Blair Cover. Maybe I should go back at this point to the Covers, [locking at family history material]
Riess: An article from the Johnstown, Pennsylvania paper — October 30, 1894. "A Remarkable Family."
Jones: Remarkable in the sense that they'd lived in Johnstown for a long time. This is about Adam Coover, the father of the family.
Riess: You're pronouncing it differently: Coover.
Jones: There were two c's in it originally. Apparently, they still used two o's when this was written in 1894. My father said the family settled in the east, Philadelphia, and they lost an "o" coming over the Al legheny mountains, [laughs]
Riess: I wonder what the origin of that name is?
Jones: It's German. I know somebody named Gofer, who thought he might be re lated to me, and he spelled his name originally with a K, and then they changed it to a C.
Riess: So they came across the mountains.
Jones: From Philadelphia.
Riess: Also because of the steel industry, or coal?
Jones: No. My grandfather Cover settled up on what is known as Cover Hill. This article says they are probably the seven oldest living brothers and sisters in the state.
There was transportation across the country, partly by water and partly by land. Grandfather Adam Cover had something to do with that system in Johnstown. I think they changed from the river to trains, or whatever they had. He was connected with that. He was the second son. The first son got the property up on the hill. The second son got a suit of clothes and was off on his own. He also was a car penter, a cabinet maker. I don't remember him. I'm not sure whether he was alive at all when I was.
Riess: Did any of them go further west, join any of the westward migrations?
Jones: No.
Riess: They did net have the lust for gold?
Jones: No, definitely not. [laughs] My grandmother had the name Blair in her family somewhere, and my father's middle name is Blair — Charles Blair. Her name was Saylor, Mary Elizabeth Saylor, before she was married. I remember her. She was practically blind when I knew her. We used to go to see her, of course. I was named for her, Mary Eliza beth. One Christmas, I wanted a doll, a big doll, and I wanted her with brown hair and brown eyes. Christmas came, and there was no doll under the tree. I was told Santa Glaus had visited my grandmother, too. We went across a bridge — it was a swinging bridge across the river to my grandmother's — and there was the doll in a box. The box was closed, and I just sat there and held it but didn't open it. They said, "Why don't you open it?"
I said, "I'm afraid she won't have dark hair." (She did!) [laughs] I saw that doll this Christmas time; I gave it to a dark- haired granddaughter. It's still in existence.
The other grandmother, Grandma Higson, used to make clothes for that doll. She still wears the same lace-trimmed underwear and a
white dotted swiss dress made by Grandma Higson. There was also a red coat, white wool- trimmed, and a silk bonnet.
Riess: You must have taken very good care of it. Were you the only grandchild?
Jones: No. That grandmother (Cover), as I say, was almost blind when I knew her. She sat in a chair in her living room, I can remember, a rocking chair, and she also sat out on the porch. They lived there off of Main Street, and across was a big auditorium where they had shows and things of that sort. She used to listen to the music. She said she felt the music in her feet, and enjoyed that sort of thing, although she was pretty inactive.
Riess: How important was religion for those grandparents?
Jones: My grandmother Higson was a good Episcopalian. But she didn't like the High Episcopalian services, which were more formal. She liked the low services, and apparently that's what they had at her church.
My father was Lutheran. When my mother married him, she became a Lutheran. She gave up whatever Episcopal connection she had and at tended the Lutheran church. We went to the Lutheran Sunday school. I joined the Lutheran church. I remember being quite serious about that when I was an adolescent. I went to Sunday school, and I went to church. They had children's day with speeches, songs and plays in which I participated.
You wanted to know about my father's business? Riess: Yes.
Jones: He was in a number of different businesses. At the time of the flood, which we're coming to later, he and his brother had a livery stable. There were horses and carriages which they rented, and they kept horses. My mother tells about seeing my father before she knew him, even, riding around town with a stallion — that's an unaltered horse — hitched to a carriage, looking like a well-dressed dandy! Well, they lost all that in the flood. And then, after the flood, he went into the grocery business. When we get to the flood, I'll tell you how he got started with that. Then later he went into the coal business; he had some coal mines. That was his last venture.
Riess: To have some coal mines means he had a claim and worked them, or what?
Jones: Well, yes. He had two mines that I know of and I can remember him go ing up the hill to the mines. I don't know what he did up there — supervised, apparently.
The Flood
Riess: When did he and your mother meet?
Jones: Well, maybe we should go to the flood. Both my mother and father were in the flood. [May 30, 1889] My father lost his house and his busi ness. But his house went off the main flood stream for some reason; my mother's house went down the main stream where all the houses were being swept away. Her father got the whole family up on the roof and several other people in the neighborhood. According to the story, he told them when to jump, when to stay where they were, and when to hang on. They finally were swept down to the stone bridge, which held. But when things crashed into the bridge, they tended to burn. He got them all out from the wreckage and up on to the hillside.
And in this little story, my grandmother said, "Here we are, homeless and penniless." My mother had two cents in her pocket. She had bought a quart of milk for eight cents and given the milkman ten cents; there were two cents change, and that was the extent of their money supply.
They had some relatives named Hamilton who lived on the hill. They found the Hamiltons,, or the Hamiltons found them. There was a flood committee appointed by survivors and my father was in charge of supplies.
Then the Red Cross came in, of course, and brought supplies. And my father was in charge of seeing that the right people got the right supplies.
My mother came to get supplies. She got a blanket, handwoven, sent by someone in Michigan. I had it for years. When they opened a museum in Johnstown, I sent it back there. The family was given a Bi ble. It was a Bible that had a lot of passages marked for comfort. We used that Bible as a family Bible and put in dates of births and deaths. Well, that got lost. You know there have been several floods in Johnstown. That got lost in one of the later floods.
Anyhow, that's how my father and mother met. He liked her locks, and gave her nice little confections and such. Then they got married.
Riess: Did any member of the family live down below the dam again, or did they all move to the hills?
Jones: No, we lived in the valley. There was a flood, I can remember, when I was there. The basements used to get filled with water practically every spring. The river banks were just too narrow, and the city just didn't do enough about it, I guess.
8
Riess: Disaster, did you feel, was always threatening?
Jones: Well, it's just like sitting here in the Bay Area with the earthquake possibility.
Riess: Not too much feeling of danger. Jones : No .
My grandfather Cover is mentioned in this book as being one of the older people who was saved. [McLaurin, J.J. The Story of Johns town. Harrisburg, Pa.: James M. Place, 1890. Also: O'Connor, R. Johnstown; The Day the Dam Broke. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1957.] And then, this is about my mother. This is about getting off the bridge, getting off of the debris: [reads] "The people seemed to be stunned. Many men went to work to save the victims. The first person recognized after probably a dozen women and children had been rescued was Miss Carrie Higson, who walked off as deliberately as though going down the gangplank of a steamboat." [laughter] That ex plains it all. And that explains why my father went into the grocery business. Apparently, after giving out supplies, he decided it was the kind of thing to do, so he went into the grocery business. I have a picture of him standing in front of his store.
Let's see. Maybe the educational level comes now. I told you we were not a highly educated family. I'm still talking just about my side of the family, not my husband's (Harold Jones). My father always regretted the fact that he hadn't had more education. I would say he, maybe more than my mother, saw to it that when anything came to town- -a musician, or a speaker or a play — we all got to go.
Chautauqua
Jones: Then, Chautauqua, New York, up on Lake Erie, had a summer institute for six weeks. There were educational courses, lectures, concerts. We didn't always stay for six weeks. But we went up every summer for many years.
There was the Chautauqua Scientific and Literary Circle, CLSC. In the summer there were lectures, and then, it was like a correspon dence course with reading assignments for the winter. That was some thing like a four-year course, apparently, and my parents took that. They attended graduation festivities.
My brother was quite musical; he took violin lessons, played vio lin in the orchestra, played baseball [at Chautauqua]. Walter Dam- re sen led the orchestra. We children belonged to clubs — there was the
girl's club and the boy's club, with nature study and swimming and other activities.
Riess: Jones:
Riess: Jones:
Riess: Jones:
Riess: Jones :
Riess: Jones : Riess:
Jones:
Riess:
Jones : Riess:
Recently, I was talking to my sister about this experience. She said it was a great influence in her life.
Were there many people from the town who did this?
No, I don't know anybody else, except my Aunt Kate sometimes went with us.
Then when you got there you were in boarding houses?
Yes, we were in boarding houses. We stayed at the St. Elmo. There was a hotel, The Atheneum, which was the best place to stay. But we weren' t that well off.
Do you remember names of Chautauqua speakers or performers?
I believe I heard Scott Hearing there. I remember President Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt came there. They put up arches for him to march under as he came in, and they had five children sitting in each arch — one at the top, two on each side. I was one of the children who sat on an arch and saw Teddy Roosevelt.
And Chautauqua was lectures, not just entertainment.
Oh, no, it was supposed to be serious, church, I remember.
And religious — we went to
A particular religion?
No, I don't remember that there was any special denomination.
It was just something on Sunday that took care of the religious as pect.
Yes. I remember also one afternoon when the girl's club was going swimming. I went in my bathing suit, which was a big dress with a skirt. And I didn't have any stockings on. I was twelve years old. They wouldn't let me be on the beach without stockings. I had to go home and get stockings, [laughter] So we were very proper at that place.
Getting away from your home town, did you meet young girls of your age that opened up your idea of the world?
Yes, at Chautauqua.
I was wondering whether these were people who opened your vision of
10
what life was all about in any way.
Jones: Yes, I would say so. I remember one woman from Columbus, Ohio, who lived in our little St. Elmo. She persuaded my father to send my brother to Ohio State, because he could stay with her until he got into a group of young people. He joined the Delta Upsilon fraternity. So he went to Ohio State, for one year, then he transferred to Colum bia. He went to college, and then my sister and I went. Of course, this was my father's idea; he wanted us to go to college, because he never had the opportunity.
Riess: Was there a good library at home?
Jones: Yes, I read. I think a lot of it was pretty poor stuff, but I read and read and read, [laughs]
Riess: Was your father interested in politics?
Jones: Yes, my parents were Republicans. And my father ran for at least one office — treasurer of the county or something of that sort — but he didn't get elected.
Riess: Your mother did the Gilbert and Sullivan — did you feel that she was in any way a frustrated performer?
Jones: I don't think so. But she could have been. Not perhaps as a perform er, but in general. I mean, she was a housewife. She had other abil ities that might have been developed. But in those days this did not become an issue. Woman's place was in the home.
Riess: Chautauqua was a big trip. Were there any other summer vacation des tinations?
Jones: No, not that I remember. We owned a place called Brookacre, which was several miles out from Johnstown. We used to go out there. I used to take my friends. But as a family, that was about it.
I had an aunt — my father's sister, Molly, and her husband — who went to Europe. They used to bring us home presents.
Education for the Cover Children
Riess: Your brother went to Ohio, and then to Columbia. Was the emphasis on his education?
Jones: I think my father wanted us all to go to college. My mother wanted us to go to college, all right, but she was sorry to have us leave home.
11
I remember when I was married to Harold, and we were doing graduate
work, one of my aunts said, "Why doesn't he come home and teach in the
high school?" She didn't have as much ambition for us as we had for ourselves.
I don't know whether this comes in now, but my brother was five years older. He was an influence because he was, of course, that much ahead of me in school. He was editor of the school paper, so I wanted to be editor of the school paper, and was. My father thought I could do as well as my brother.
Riess: As far as they were concerned, women had possibilities.
Jones: Yes.
Riess: You weren't being tied to the apron strings?
Jones: No. I think my mother never quite understood why I became profession al, [laughs]
Riess: Did you learn to do all the things that you should have learned to do, like cooking and sewing?
Jones: Oh, yes, oh yes. Oh, we did housework, you know, even through we usu ally had a live- in maid. I remember I could make noodles, very fine little noodles. That was one of my specialties.
Riess: It sounds like the German side of the family, to know how to make a good noodle.
Jones: Yes. My mother used to make an effort to cook German things. There was something called schnitz and knepf, or something like that.
Riess: Oh, yes, I know what that is.
Jones: Do you?
Riess: Yes, it's apple and ham.
Jones: Yes. And every Saturday night we had oyster stew. My father went to a special store where the oysters came in on Saturday. You see, we weren't on a seaport.
Riess: What were the schools like in Johnstown?
Jones: I went to the neighborhood school; I walked to school. I remember my teachers. We used to have spelling bees. We stood up, and if you spelled the word right, and got it better than the next person, you moved up the line. I got so excited and fidgety that my teacher had to call me over and fasten up buttons which had gotten undone.
12
[laughter] That's what I remember about early school. Riess: Did you usually win?
Jones: Well, I guess so. I think I stood up pretty long toward the top. I got good report cards. Yes, I did all right in school.
Riess: Did you learn Latin and Greek?
Jones: Latin, in high school. I didn't take Greek — Latin and German. And physics — these were college preparatory.
The question of where I would go to college came up. ¥e went and visited several. We visited Bryn Mawr and Barnard, and Vassar. And here's a very silly thing that doesn't belong in there, but —
[laughter]
Riess: Oh, let's risk it.
Jones: A man named Harrison Fisher, an artist, drew pictures of women. There was a picture at that time of a young girl sitting at a desk; there was a Vassar pennant on the wall, and she had one of these American beauty roses on the desk beside her. And I thought, "Gee, I'd like to go to Vassar." When we looked at Vassar, it was commencement time, and I was shown into a room, and introduced to a girl who had a dozen American beauty roses in a vase. So I knew it was true!
Well, I decided to go to Vassar.
Riess: Were the high school teachers and counselors strongly influential? Or was it just your parents who were motivating you?
Jones: It was my parents and nfy brother. I can remember my brother being motivated by teachers, and an English teacher in particular. They wanted to make sure my brother got to college. When it came to me, I think it was just more or less assumed that I would go.
Riess: Did you need a scholarship?
Jones: There was never any question of a scholarship. I don't think we knew there were such things. Let me say a few more things about high school. I told you, my brother was editor of the paper, the Specta tor. So I wanted to be editor of the Spectator. There was a boy in the class, Ralph Coleman, who wanted to be editor also. Apparently, we both wrote, and it took several months to decide, but finally they said I could be the editor. Ralph became the business manager. For the first several months, we didn't get on too well. But at Christmas time, he showed up at my house with a ten- pound box of chocolates, and said this was because I hadn* t run over the budget of the Spectator. From that time on, we were friends!
Riess: It sounds like this was a romance, or was it just a friendship?
Jones: It was considered a romance. When I went back to the high school reunion, fifty years later, someone said, "I thought you were going to marry Ralph." [laughter] I had a couple of boyfriends from time to time. I had one in the fifth grade. There was a Rutherford Sheridan who brought me a rose each morning for a while in the fifth grade. He came and sat on my porch in his high boots, with his dog, to save me in one of those threatening Johnstown floods.
Education
Entering Vassar
Riess: You said you went to Vassar, as if there were no question of your get ting in. Was there any difficulty in being admitted?
Jones: No. At that time, Johnstown High School was accredited and I was recommended by my high school. But this is where we come to my prob lems. My high school preparation was very poor. I began having dif ficulty immediately, with Latin especially. I was told that the two girls _who had gone to Vassar before me from Johnstown had both flunked out. (One was the niece of the high school Latin teacher.) If I flunked out, that would take away the accreditation for Johnstown. So I was under pressure not only to stay for myself, but for the reputa tion of the Johnstown High School!
Well, I flunked Latin. I had a tutor at Vassar, a Miss Swan. We had a song about her related to tutoring, with the refrain: "Take me back to Swanny's door." I had to tutor in the summer at home. I fi nally passed Latin. But here I was at a place where they'd say to you, "Where did you prep?" I didn't "prep" at a prep school. I just went from an ordinary high school. I had trouble.
Riess: And there was a significant difference in sophistication between the rest of those "preppie" girls and yourself?
Jones: Yes, I would say so. They had no problems at all about grades. They didn't have to study as hard as I did. I can remember waking up at six o'clock in the morning, to study geometry.
Riess: Were you in a room by yourself, or did you have a roommate?
Jones: No, I had a roommate, a friend — well, she's a friend now; I saw her this Christmas time. She was Lois Warner from New England. We had two joining rooms the first year. We had three rooms for our sopho-
14
more and junior years, two bedrooms and a living room, and then we had singles next to each other as seniors.
Riess: Did you write home regularly when you were in college? Did you have time to do that?
Jones: To write? Oh, yes, and my parents wrote to me. My father wrote to me at least every week, probably a couple of times a week. Yes.
Riess: Have those letters survived?
Jones: No, I don't think I have any of them.
I remember when I went home my freshman year, I wanted a new evening dress, and I wanted a black evening dress. My mother said, "You're too young for a black evening dress." My father said, "I'll go shopping with her." I got a black evening dress, [laughs]
However, then we had the war. I was in college during the First World War. So there weren' t many occasions to wear a black evening dress.
Riess:
Once you had gotten through your freshman year, you had really made it over the hump.
Jones: Yes. But I can remember that first year. If you got a slip saying you failed, it was in a little envelope, and it was put in your mail box. Well, I lived off-campus all freshman year, at McGlynn's, be cause I hadn't registered early enough to get on campus. And — they called them wardens in those days — the warden used to bring our mail to McGlynn's from the main campus. I can remember our awful tension, thinking maybe we're going to get one of these little slips. If you got three of them, you were out. I got one in Latin. After I made up the deficiency, I wanted to go on with Latin, but my advisor said, "Oh, you'd better not." [laughter]
Riess: Was there an advisor who was assigned to you?
Jones: Well, there was one person assigned to you when you first were an entering freshman. You were given the name of someone who would be your advisor. What I did was to go look this person up. She was a German professor, and she was simply astounded. She said, "You're supposed to wait for me to make the contact." I never was very close to her.
One of my English teachers, Winifred Smith, was a great person. She taught Shakespeare, that was her specialty. She came to our dor mitory room one night with the Shakespeare class and read Othello. I had refreshments to offer the class afterwards. But Dr. Smith was so moved by this reading, she had tears in her eyes and she just rushed
15
off. She was really moved by Shakespeare. By the way, would you like a cup of coffee or tea or something? [brief tape interruption]
She was one of the influences as a faculty member. I saw her in New York after I graduated, and I kind of apologized for not having been back to Vassar. She said, "I don't think you should come back to Vassar. You've left Vassar, and people who come back seem to me to be kind of looking into the past instead of into the future." I went to my forty-fifth, my fiftieth, and my fifty-fifth reunions. I don't think I'll go to any more.
Psychology and Economics Studies
Riess: Was there a prescribed course that was taken in the freshman year?
Jones: Yes. We had to take math, and depending upon what we had had before, I think I had to take geometry and trigonometry. If you had had Ger man, you took French. I took French. I had to go on with Latin for one year, and I had to take chemistry. Then sophomore year I started psychology and economics. I majored in economics. This is as an un dergraduate.
Riess: And psychology was just one of the sciences that one took?
Jones: No, I elected it. I had Margaret Floy Washburn, who was the second woman to be president of the American Psychological Association.
But I didn't do well in the laboratory course. I didn't like it, and I didn't work at it, and I got a C.
Riess: What were you doing in the psychology laboratory?
Jones: What they called threshold limits — when you could hear a sound, and when you could taste something, this kind of thing. I didn't like it. It was Titchener. He was at Cornell, and we used his textbook. And then weights, when you could feel a weight, this one different from that one.
Riess: What branch of psychology is that considered? Jones: Let's see, what did you call it? Structural.
Well, Washburn wouldn't let me into her seminar, because I'd only gotten a G in the laboratory, and that was her favorite course. But she was a very go.od teacher. Senior year I did take a course that she gave with Tredwell — I guess he was a biologist — so there was a combi nation of sciences and of points of view. Washburn, for example,
16
didn't like the idea of child psychology. She didn't teach it; she let someone else teach it. When the Blodgetts donated the building for a nursery school, she objected very much.
Riess: She was the women who [l have read] said, "Over my dead body?"
Jones: Yes. She's the one.
Riess: I'd like to hear more about Margaret Washburn's attitude about this.
Jones: I believe that she thought that child psychology was inferior to the kind of psychology she wanted to develop, which was a kind of Titchen- erian psychology, structural. It was experimental, and she thought that child psychology was introducing something like home economics, which she would also think was an inferior field for bright Vassar women.
Riess: And in fact, no home economics was taught at Vassar, and no domestic sciences, or anything like that.
Jones: There was never any home economics; there isn't now. (Later there was a Department of Child Study, but it was originally called "Buthenics." Perhaps that sounded more scientific!). And of course, there isn't on this campus, either.
Riess: Well, if somebody at that point were majoring in psychology, which you weren't, what more would they have gotten at Vassar?
Jones: They would have done an experiment, and she would have published it with them. She published with some of her best students.
Riess: Was she the only psychology professor?
Jones: No, there was Professor Gould who taught child, and Josephine Gleason. But she [Washburn] was the head psychologist. I met Professor Wash- burn at a meeting of the American Psychological Association in Prince ton when I was studying at Columbia. She was very cordial, knew about my marriage to Harold and my work at Columbia.
Riess: What did you think you would do with the economics?
Jones: My brother was in economics, you see. He had an influence en me. I wasn't sure what I'd do. But at any rate, I had taken all of [Herbert Elmer] Mill's courses, and liked them. And when I applied for a sem inar, he let me in. I did what I think is one of the best studies I ever did, a history of the Socialist Party in the United States. I went down to New York, went to the magazine The Masses (I think that was the name of the Socialist paper at that time) and interviewed So cialists, and wrote a good report — and then I threw it away after gra duation.
17
Riess; Jones:
Riess: Jones;
Riess:
Jones : Riess: Jones : Riess: Jones :
College Summers
Did you go home to your family summers in your Vassar years?
The summers? The first summer I went home and had a ^job in the YWCA. The second summer — Oh, yea, one of those summers I went as a counselor to a camp for underprivileged East Side New York City children.
At that time my brother was engaged, and his future wife and I went together. That was when he was in the service, during the First World War. He was in Europe and she and I went to thia summer camp. She arranged it.
A third summer, I went to a settlement house, in worked in a lower-class neighborhood with the children, ranged through Vassar.
Boston, and That was ar-
One summer — maybe more than one summer — they had students stay and farm at Vassar. I applied for that, but for some reason they didn' t think I looked subatantial enough to do a physical job. I waan' t choaen.
You mean work in a vegetable garden?
Yea. Actually I had quite good health. In fact, when I entered Vas sar, they did a physical exam and asked questions about my ancestry.
They seemed to be impressed that all of my grandparents had be into their seventiea, at least.
lived to
It's interesting that they would encourage some of you to farm during the summer, since they were down on home economics, and all other re lated activities.
Well, the war made it a different thing.
The Victory Garden idea.
Yes.
I see. It wasn't a Vassar tradition to till the land every summer.
No, no. Just during the war.
Vassar Traditions
Riess: Tell me about your social life during college. You said that most of
18
the boys were off fighting the war.
Jones: Yes. We didn't have proms the way you ordinarily do until the war was over. At that senior prom, I went with a man who was a friend of my roommate's brother — somebody I hadn't known before, and that's the only time I ever saw him. My first year at Vassar, I went over to West Point. There was a young man from Johnstown whom I knew who was at West Point, and invited me to a dance, or a hop, or whatever they called it. I took a couple of friends. That was all that ever amounted to .
We had daily chapel in the evening, required. Riess: Was there inspirational talk also with chapel?
Jones: Not especially. But, yes, there was always a talk and singing, and a choir. And we always ended, as I remember, with a song with words from the Bible, "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you. Not as the world giveth give I unto you. Let not your heart be trou bled, neither let it be afraid." I never objected to having to go to chapel. Maybe some people did, but it didn't bother me.
I think chapel was at seven. I can remember in winter time wear ing galoshes. Actually, some girls wouldn't fasten them up, and you'd hear these buckles clinking as they walked down the chapel aisle.
Riess: Did you study in your rooms?
Jones: I studied in my room a good deal, I studied in the library too. My roommate and I had a living room and we each had a bedroom. We drew numbers for rooms. They were all the same price; it was part of the tuition and board and room. At the end of the freshman year, you drew a card, and according to how lucky you were in the draw, you got your choice, or maybe your second or third choice of accommodations. As I say, I was off-campus freshman year. We drew cards at the end of the freshman year, for the next two years. Then senior year everybody went to Main Hall, and then we drew again for that.
They used to have stepsinging practically every night. We went to Davidson dormitory and sat on the steps and sang. One I like to remember goes:
Oh we never used to bathe
Till we heard the doctor rave
In the lectures that she gave
How to behave.
Now we take our daily bath
Even though we miss our math
How in the world did you know that?
She to Id us so !
19
It ends with:
We will keep our heart a prize For the right man who applies How in the world,? etc.
Ve were advised to be heterosexual. This was Dr. Thelberg. She also warned against finger-bowls. They might carry germs — venereal?
Riess: And the daisy chain, were you in the daisy chain?
Jones: Oh, yes, the daisy chain. That's a good question! I couldn't remember just how the daisy chain was chosen. I called Jane Brooks last night — do you know her? She went to Vassar. I said, "How was the daisy chain chosen?" She said, "For looks." I said, "Well, that's what I thought." But as I remembered, the girls that were on — I didn't think they were very beautiful. The reason I wanted to know was: when my father came to my commencement — my father and mother came to my commencement — there was a daisy chain, and my father said, "Why aren't • you on the daisy chain?" He thought I was an important person! He thought that I should have been on the daisy chain! [laughs] And I was trying to remember why I wasn't on the daisy chain.
Riess: Did you look like your mother when you were young?
Jones: I think I looked more like my mother. You see, my father had "this kind of patrician nose. And my brother and sister both have that, and I don't. But I have curly hair, at least wavy, which my father had. I've got a combination of things.
Socialism, Pacifism, and the War
Riess: You said that you did your paper on socialism. Was that something that really interested you personally? The Socialist view?
Jones: Yes. I was president of the Socialist Club at Vassar. Riess: How did you get into that?
Jones: I don't know. Well, you see, I was not a prep girl, and I think maybe I just thought I'd better be different. I wasn't a Socialist; I wasn't a member of the party. But we had a Socialist Club, and I was one of the officers. Some of my friends, of course, were in it.
Riess: Did it include a group that you would think of now as rebels?
20
Jones: There were several Jewish girls in it. I had quite a few Jewish friends. Maybe that was also part of my feeling that I didn't belong to the prep group. One Jewish friend told me that there was a quota. I mentioned this at a recent meeting of the East Bay Vassar Alumnae Club. I was told by a member of the class of 1924, Elizabeth Paragoh, that she had asked Josephine Gleason, admissions officer at Vassar, about this. Jo Gleason told her that there had never been a quota for selection for any group at Vassar.
Riess: Was it the not very religious German Jewish intellectual type?
Jones: Yes. Some of these girls belonged to the Ethical Culture, if you know what that is, in New York City.
In my day, when you entered as a freshman a list was posted with your name and religious affiliation. An upper classman might consult the list and invite you to go to church with her in Poughkeepsie. One of my Jewish friends put up "Ethical Culture," and somebody had crossed it off and put "Jewish."
A senior called and asked me to go to church in Poughkeepsie (the Lutheran). Maybe I went once or twice. But I lost my religious in terest, in fact, as a result of my first course in philosophy.
Riess: Did you identify, then, with these Jewish girls in some ways?
Jones: Well, I was friendly with several of them. I went to visit two of them in New York City for occasional weekends. But, of course, I also had other friends, my roommate for four years, and a friend of ours who always had a room near us, Mary Herring.
Riess: Were there — I'm certain I know the answer to this — were there any Black girls?
Jones: No. There were two Chinese; no Blacks.
Riess: Chinese from China?
Jones: Yes.
Riess: Did any of these Chinese girls go on to become well-known?
Jones: They went back to China, and I don't know what happened to them then.
Riess: They didn't marry Chiang Kai Chek, or anything like that?
Jones: No, that was a Wellesley graduate. Madame Chiang Kai Chek was Welles- ley.
Riess: Was suffrage an issue that was part of your —
21
Jones: Yes! I worked on that. One of my friends, Miriam Beard, daughter of the historian Beard, went to jail for picketing, I believe in Washing ton, B.C. Suffrage was granted in 1920, which was the year after I was out of college. I worked on it at college. I remember we went to see either Pratt or Platt in Poughkeepsie, who was a member of the Congress, and we finally persuaded him to vote for it. Inez Mulholand Bausevain, the suffragist, was a contemporary Vassar student.
Also, I was a pacifist. I don't know whether that's in any of the papers I've shown you.
Riess: No.
Jones: Yes, my brother was a pacifist. As a senior at Columbia he organized Students Against War. He graduated in 1915, was in the foreign ser vice in Vienna as a special attache under William Jennings Bryan. Be cause of the war he was recalled in 1917.
When we went into the war I was at Vassar. They had a mass meet ing in the chapel the night war was declared. It was celebrating and approving our entrance into the war. A student got up and moved that we say that the Vassar students were all in favor of this. That passed. Then somebody got up and said, "Let's make it unanimous," and I got up and said, "No." Then some of my friends, and others, got up and said, "No," also. You know, I'm kind of interested. I thought maybe when I went back after forty-five or fifty years, somebody would still remember that, but they didn't. They hadn't held it against me.
Riess: Had it been something that you had been thinking about before that night, or did it just gel that night?
Jones: Oh, yes, I'd been thinking about it._ I'm sure it was my brother's in fluence. There was a pacifist meeting in New York, and I was invited to go to represent Vassar. I asked for permission to go and was told no, my grades weren't good enough. I think that was just an excuse. But the Hew York Times came out with my name as representing Vassar. So I was called up before the Vassar student council. They were all ready to expel me, but I said I hadn't gone. So — [laughs]
Riess: You might very well have been expelled?
Jones: Yes, or suspended or something. I haven't been that fired up about anything since. Oh, maybe being married by Norman Thomas was also a little far out. [chuckles]
Riess: When your brother declared that he was a pacifist, did that bother your family?
Jones: He went to Johnstown to register. My father went with him when he re gistered. By this time he was married and his wife was pregnant so he
22
was excused. In 1945, after the Second World War he was sent to Biar ritz to organize the Army University Center for soldiers who were waiting to come home. At that time he was a professor of economics at the University of Pittsburg.
Riess: So his conscientious objection or pacifist status was not on a reli gious basis, I take it.
Jones: No, I think he was just anti-war. Maybe my grandfather's experience had just —
Riess: In the same way, you were anti-war.
Jones : Yes .
Riess: Did it re-direct your life?
Jones: You mean my interest in the Socialist Club?
Riess: Or in the pacifism.
Jones: No, but I am still anti-war.
Riess: Did you campaign for Debs when he ran for president in 1920?
Jones: No, I was a Democrat. I believe I heard Debs lecture at Chautauqua.
Deciding to go on in Psychology
Riess: Could we continue to follow your interest in psychology?
Jones: Margaret Washburn was a very good teacher, and I was really interested in psychology. But I wasn' t sure when I left Vassar and went to Columbia whether I would go into economics or psychology.
Riess: How did you know, though, that Columbia was the graduate school to go to? Just because your brother was there?
Jones: Yes. Actually, I thought of going to Johns Hopkins, to work with John Watson.
Riess: How did you meet John Watson, then?
Jones: Through Rosalie Raynor, who was a classmate of mine. She came back from Easter vacation senior year to say that she had gone down to the psychology department at Johns Hopkins — she lived in Baltimore — and had been accepted as Watson's assistant. I was thinking then that
23
maybe I'd like to go to Johns Hopkins, because I'd heard of Watson. I didn1 t hear much about him at Vassar, but I knew there was such a per son.
Riess: Was she accepted as his assistant because she was a particularly bril liant student, or because he already found her a very attractive wom an?
Jones: I don't know, [laughter] No question she was a bright Vassar student and an attractive woman.
I saw her in New York that first year after Vassar, and she was saying she was in love with John Watson. I was so innocent, I just couldn't believe it, you know.
When I went to Columbia, I decided on the psychology department. I had no trouble. I don't remember even how I got in, but there was no problem with achievement as there had been at Vassar.
Riess: Watson was developing a whole psychology of his own?
Jones: Yes. And his new textbook, Psychology from the Standpoint of £ Behaviorist [Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1919J, had just come out. I can well remember the day where Harold came home with that prize. To us even the chapter headings were new and exciting. "Implicit Language Habits," "The Organism at Work," "Personality." Watson's ideas even permeated our love letters. In a brief separation, Harold wrote me: "I am speeding away from all that world which is yours and mine. Some of it I take with me in memory or, as Watson would have it, 'retained in the neuromuscular system in the form of residual molecular change.'" Isn't that impressive? After the Titchenerian structural psychology, the behaviorist approach had appeal.
Oh, and I remember Edward Tolman said that he was terribly bored with this Titchenerian approach, and that Watson's behaviorism ap pealed to him. Of course, he became his own kind of behaviorist — Tolman.
When I got to Columbia I went and saw Woodworth. He was just a lovely person. Then I signed up for courses. Do you want this now, about Columbia?
Siblings
John Higson Cover
Riess: Since we don't have very much tape left, what we could do is go back
24
and pick up your brother and sister, as you suggested earlier, [look ing at notes] You were a middle child. Did you ever think about your middle child status?
Jones: I think in my case it was good. My brother is five years older and my sister is four year younger. I don't know how they managed that. My sister was very devoted to my brother. She called him "mine John." Her John. Anytime I had any associations with him, she would remind me that he was hers. But I don't think he felt that way about it. He used to take me to dances to teach me. He let me play tennis with him and a girl at Chautauqua. I think we've always been quite close. When I went to Columbia, he was there.
Let me tell you first of my brother, since he was older. This is he. [shows photo] I talked about Chautauqua. He took music lessons, played in the orchestra and played on the baseball team at Chautauqua. He wrote music. He wrote the high school song, which I have — "Dear Old Johnstown High School." They still use it. And they invited him back, I guess it was about 1970, to give him a key to the city and an award. He's living in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He taught at the University of Maryland; they lived in Washington, D. C. then. He was with the government for some time with assignments as economic advisor to a number of foreign countries: India, Barbados, Syria. When they re tired, they moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio. His wife is an artist. She did that, [looking at painting] She has had a number of exhibits of her sculpture and paintings in Washington, D.C. Recently she had an exhibit in Yellow Springs and was written up in the local papers. She had friends in Yellow Springs, and she persuaded John to move there.
Anyhow, my brother wrote the high school song. The Merchant of Venice has something in it about "Tell me where is fancy bred, or in the heart, or in the head," which was supposed to be a song, and he wrote music for that. Somebody from a Shakespeare company came to see the performance in Johnstown (it was when my brother was in high school), and used the music for a long time afterward, his music.
Then he wrote something called "Serenade to a Jeep" when he was in Biarritz teaching soldiers who were waiting to be sent home. The Jeep was fairly new. That's the sort of thing he did.
Now he is still writing little things for the local paper in Yel low Springs. I should tell you that he wrote a poem — I wonder if I've got that here somewhere — about my sister — here it is — when she was born. I don't know whether you want me to read it to you.
Riess: This is a poem written by a nine-year-old.
Jones: Yes. I like this line: "She is a very good one, although the bed she pees." [laughter] Spelled it p-e-e-s. I guess that's all right.
25
I have a little sister Her name, I think' s Louise she is a very good one Although the bed she pees She likes for us to hold her And not to put her down But, oh my! When she spits It flies all over the town.
There are several more verses indicating that she tries to talk, but "I wish that she could walk."
He's always been a great conservationist. He also got some kind of an award from the National Parks Association because he was an off icer for that for years.
Riess: Was he a radical thinker in economics?
Jones: Well, I don't think so. Actually, at the University of Maryland, he was head of some kind of business bureau, business economics, which is kind of surprising, because he's not the establishment.
i
Riess: But he was not a Socialist.
Jones: No. This time he voted for Commoner.
Anna Louise Cover Hill
Jones: I'll go on to my sister, who was four years younger. Her name was Anna Louise. She was named for her grandmother and her aunt — the sisters — and she preferred Louise, which was the aunt's name, the name she's taken.
Riess: Did your parents plan these age gaps?
Jones: I don't know. We never talked about things like that.
She got an A.B., I think in botany, at the University of Wiscon sin. I can't remember why she went there. Probably some Chautauqua influence, somebody she met who suggested that. She went on to get an M.A. at Columbia. As a child, she was a little unconventional. I remember one time when we were stood up to have our pictures taken, she put a teddy bear in front of her face so she wouldn't show.
I remember that teddy bear. One Christmas, she asked for a bear, a book, a bed, and a ball — four things. And I wanted a teddy bear also. I must have been about twelve. My parents decided I was too
•
26
old for a bear, and they got me a very nice little Morris chair in stead, but they got Louise the bear. Sometimes Louise and I slept in the same bed, and I was jealous of that bear. One night I grabbed it from her, and she grabbed it back, and I pulled its head off. [laughter] It was put back together again, but that was how I showed my resentment.
She was very good at nature and mechanical things. I remember she knew how to take care of our car, the mechanics of the car. And she learned to drive before I did. She was interested in that kind of thing. For a while she worked at Columbia in the greenhouse propagat ing plants, and then somehow she got off to Seattle doing the same sort of thing, I guess at the university. Then she got T.B. out there, and she was ill for several years. At that time, my brother was in Denver, so they took her to Denver and she was at the T.B. san itarium.
So she married rather late, and has no children. She married a man who lived down in the San Joaquin Valley and had a dairy farm. She wrote a column three times a week for the Merced Sun-Star called "The Diary of a Dairy Wife." She did that for seventeen years. They were good columns; I think they should be put together into a book.
Her columns talk about how they name their thoroughbred cattle, about The Spring Beckoning of Birds: "Mr. Titmouse has a hankering for our sunflower seeds we grow just for him... The bluebirds come back to look over their summer nesting home. They use it each summer — squatter's rights. ..A couple of hummers, teased the quince for a bit of nector."
Here is part of a column on lambing:
Maybe we had better get this straight as to why we have our lambs come in the foggy, cold, should be rainy, winter.
It is not because we are old meanies. We are farmers trying to pay our taxes with the able assistance of the livestock we enjoy.
Sure, I know Canada and New England and Pennsyl vania have their lambs come in the nice, cheerful, sunny spring. Although in Ohio I have seen the litle guys pogo sticking through the snow following their mothers who
27
paw the white stuff for nip of the grass beneath.
It is all a matter of plan ned parenthood. Like the ear ly bird the early lamb hopes to catch the higher early market. It is as simple as that — economics.
She is a devoted naturalist, bird watcher, knows her wild flowers. She also had a radio program. One program was on bells. Several people sent her interesting bells.
She mentioned that Chautauqua was a great influence in her life. Here's something she [Louise] wrote to me recently. "Harold always expected so much of you, and you always came through. I think that is why it is hard for you to accept little daily things as normal. Your challenge has to be big." [laughter]
Oh, by the way, she does these little greeting cards, decorated with real weeds and flowers, and she said to "give some to your inter viewer." Aren't those nice?
Riess: When you wrote to her to ask about the interview, what questions did you ask her?
Jones: I call her every Sunday morning at 8:30 on the phone. I just told her on the phone that I was going to be interviewed, and that if she remembered anything from our childhood or early life that she thought should be mentioned, to let me know. One of the things I said was I heard this business about Father meeting Mother when he was giving out supplies after the flood, and she said, "I heard that story too." So we heard that same story.
She seems to have a feeling that now that Harold's gone, people can look at me. The idea that I wasn't as important as Harold; but now that he isn't here anymore, I can be a little more visible.
Riess: Is she a widow also?
Jones: No, her husband's still living. They live up near Yosemite. She still writes a note occasionally for the Merced Sun-Star and the Mari- posa Gazette. She and her husband, Bob Hill, were both influential in getting the library and history center started at Mariposa. Her hus band was president of the history society at that time. Here are her columns. Oh, we might as well see a picture of her with some of her handiwork. She did that kind of glass work. She made these Pennsyl vania Dutch symbols, to hang on their barn. Somebody took a picture of that for the Merced Sun-Star. So that's the kind of person she is.
28
Riess: How did your parents die?
Jones: My father died in a hospital — some kind of a prostate condition. My brother was there; I wasn't. He lived to be in his seventies. My mother lived in Santa Barbara, but she was visiting my sister who lived in Solvang. She apparently had a stroke, she fell and my sister found her. This was around New Years time. Anyhow, they called me up, and I had flu, but I went down. I took the train down from Berke ley. Her doctor had said, "There is no need for you to come. She won't know you." I went into the room where she was. She opened her eyes and said, "Oh, Mary, how long can you stay?" Isn't that wonder ful? I said, "As long as you need me." And that was the last she ever spoke.
29
2. HAROLD JONES
[interview 2: January 30, 1981 ]
Family and Education Genealogy
Riess: Last week, you said you didn't know that much about Harold's child hood. But you've done some work since then.
Jones: Yes. It's been a little difficult, you know, because in some ways it
was a pleasure to go back over some of this material, and in other
ways it was sad because it's over. But I thought you might want to know about his background.
He was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He was always sorry that he wasn't born in New England, because he is a New Englander. His father, Elisha Adams Jones, was in charge of the Rutgers College Agricultural Station, and so Harold was born in New Jersey. His fa ther graduated from Massachusetts Agricultural College.
Then they went to Amherst, to Massachusetts Agricultural College where Adams Jones was in charge of the college experimental farm. So most of Harold's life he lived in Amherst.
Harold has always been interested in his ancestry. I was talking to my daughter the other day. She has all of his collected data, his genealogical charts. I told her I was going to be talking about Harold. She's coming up toward the end of February, and she wanted to know if I wanted her to bring the data. She said, "I think the impor tant thing was not who his ancestors were, but the fact that he was interested in them." And I think that's true too.
So I have some little things to show you to represent what he collected and kept. Here's something. Somebody by the name of Azubah Ellis. Apparently this is from his casket. Ellis was Harold's middle name. So it's some relative of his.
30
Riess: "Died March 2J> , 1858, aged 81 years." Had the family been in this country long?
Jones: Yes. They came in 1630. At least that's one of them. This is a rub bing, you know, from his grandfather's tombstone, and his grandmother's tombstone. It's not important, but it shows that he was interested in that sort of thing. I've often wondered whether — his mother's name was Brown, and his father's name was Jones. It seems to me in order to have any individuality, you'd have to know something about people with names other than Brown and Jones, [laughter]
He saved things like this. This is an old letter from somebody. I can't even read it. Then he framed letters that he picked up when he was looking up his ancestors — see, these hanging on the wall. I like this one. It says, "As the men of Massachusetts troops are chiefly gone off without liberty, Captain So-and-so and so-and-so have leave to go to New England." [laughter]
Riess: And that's 1763. "Given under my hand at Crown Point, New York, the seventeenth." So these aren't necessarily family things, or are they?
Jones: Yes, they were in the family. Then he went to the trouble of collect ing and photographing names from old letters and documents. Here's one, 1670, 1657, these are ancestors. He got them maybe from li braries where they have genealogies. He really spent some time on it.
Riess: He did this throughout his life?
Jones: Yes. And I'm sure, if he'd lived, he would have put it all together.
Riess: Did he involve your daughters in it? Did he tell the story of his family?
Jones: Yes. And especially the older girl has been interested. There are four very thick notebooks, eight by twelve sheets full of information, not just names. For example, here is part of an excerpt about Thomas Tracy, 1610-1685-
"He came to America in the interest of his friends Lord Say and Lord Brooks and was granted land in Salem, 1638. He was variously described as a ship's carpenter and as 'interested in ship building.' In 1645 he went (with others) to the re lief of Uncas Sachem of the Mohegans, when the Mohegans were besieged ^by Naragansetts. Uncas gave him 200 acres of land in 1645. ^ (Uncas mark)."
My granddaughter Jane was reading through some of this material and told me another story about Indians.
An ancestor was going home from the village in Massachusetts at
'
31
night and sensed the presence of hidden Indians. Should he return to the village for help or go home to protect his family? He decided to go home. At home he climbed up on a hill and started calling as if to collect a band of soldiers. There weren't any militia but the trick scared the Indians away.
Here's an old book that he got somewhere. In fact, it's a copy of old newspapers. Seventeen seventy-six. This is 1775, some are from '76.
Riess: They really are treasures. Jones : They should be in a museum.
I have dozens of leather books like that, some put away.
This is grandfather Perez Rio Brown [looking at photographs], the third one over there. I have a letter from Harold's sister Florence saying that after the grandfather's wife died, he used to take her [Florence] to the DAR reunions.
This is his father, who was one of the editors of the college magazine at Massachusetts Aggie. That's his father's picture in the Massachusetts Agricultural Journal.
I'm just amazed: I've got loads of letters that his family saved. Then his father came out to live with us after his mother died, and he brought all this material with him. So the way some peo ple keep diaries, I've got letters and letters, going back to before Harold went to college, then all through college.
Riess: When he met you, was he interested in what your background was?
Jones: A little. He had one friend at Amherst, the wife of a professor, and he wrote her about my background when he was telling her that we were going to get married, what he knew about it. He said something about my father being a coal merchant, which was true. I guess he thought that sounded impressive, [chuckles]
Riess: Do you know what his mother's education was?
Jones: I have some old letters and report cards. She went to a private school in Philadelphia, apparently, for some time. Then she moved to Amherst, too, I think, and went to school up there. She didn't go to college. His father went to college, but his mother didn't.
His father also went to what was called a prep school, Choate, or one of those in the East. Probably not because of status, but because it was near and they believed in education.
Riess: His sister was older?
Jones: Eight years older. Each of them was like an only child in a way, be cause they were so far apart.
Riess: You and Harold are both second children. Do you subscribe to any theories about sibling order?
Jones: I hadn't even thought about it. [laughs] I think it makes a difference whether the first child is a boy or a girl. I think there is a lot in birth order which may affect a child. But I also think it makes a difference whether a boy or a girl was wanted.
Riess: It sounds like Harold's family would have been ambitious for him. Jones : Yes .
Riess: There was enough money so he could be educated in any way that he wanted?
Jones: Yes. They weren't rich, but they certainly were willing to spend their money in that way.
Interest in Nature
Riess:
Jones :
What was he interested in when he was at Massachusetts and when he was at Amherst? His major was biology.
Agricultural
Prom the time he was a child, he was interested in nature. These notebooks he kept when he was still in high school, notes about the birds and the bees and the flowers. He wrote a column for the local New Canaan, Connecticut paper, describing what birds had arrived in February, March, and so forth. Here are these books, just full: "jon quils and other seed-eaters." Just in his own handwriting, you know! I saved out this one letter, to his parents after we moved out here. This is written in February of '28. [reads] "¥ildflowers are coming out now, about a dozen species in evidence. In many of the fields wild mustard has reached a height of two feet, and provides a brilli ant blanket of yellow." Then he goes on about them. This one is kind of interesting: [reads] "In the back yard of the Institute, some of the more characteristic spring flowers are in evidence" — and then some more of that. "Song sparrows and robins sing a great deal. And we are often visited after the children have gone home" — this was in the nursery school — "by flocks of quail. The California quail are less handsome and tuneful than the Connecticut variety; but on the other hand they seem much more sociable."
33
Riess: That interest in nature and observation seems like a very New England tradition, like the transcendentalists.
Jones: His family was not religious. The parents weren't associated with any religious groups.
Riess: What do you think nature meant for him?
Jcnes: I think it took the place of what religion does for many people. But of course it was less sociable; he did it all by himself.
Another thing, he was a delicate child — I think he had diptheria when he was fairly young — and he didn't go to school. I think he was tutored at home until high school.
Riess: By his mother, or did they have a tutor?
Jcnes: I think a teacher who came in. I think they were somewhat isolated from the school, and he had to go on the train when he did go, down to Stamford from New Canaan, Connecticut.
Riess: New Canaan, Stamford, why were they in Connecticut?
Jones: After his father's job with the agricultural experiment farm, he left and went to manage the Lapham Estate in New Canaan, Connecticut.
When somebody asked Harold when he was going to go to school, he said, "Well, I'm going to wait until I go to college." Actually, he went to high school, and he was editor of his school paper.
Friendships, Amherst
Jones: You asked me about the influences [on me] of Vassar, the faculty and so forth, and I didn't have much to say, if you remember. He has all sorts of letters from faculty and to faculty and to student friends to whom he wrote. Robert Frost was one of his professors at Amherst. He used to go walking with Robert Frost. He wrote to his parents: "I was out for a walk this afternoon with Robert Frost." Then there was David Praul, a professor, and another one named Stark Young. I think Stark Young was fairly well known; he was an English professor. He was much more influenced by his friends and his faculty than I; at least there's more evidence about it than I ever could produce for my self.
He was a serious student, and a good student. Amherst was much smaller than Vassar; there just weren't as many students. So perhaps for that reason, he had much more association with his professors.
There was another association. I mentioned the wife of one of the professors, Churchill. Churchill was a professor, and then he was elected to Congress. I think Harold had a course with him, but he didn't know Mr. Churchill very well. He apparently knew Mrs. Chur chill quite well. She invited Harold to her home and showed him her garden. He knew so much about the garden and the names of the plants and the ferns and so forth that it became quite an interesting rela tionship. She used to take him on local nature trips in her car.
She had a little girl named Rosalind. He cultivated little Rosalind. I have letters that he wrote to Rosalind and copies of stories that he told her, and that sort of thing.
He stayed at Amherst one year after he graduated as an assistant to a biology professor. So that would be another reason for knowing the faculty better than most students.
Riess: Was Frost well-known at that time?
Jones: Oh, he was a well-known poet when he went to Amherst. I'd say his reputation had been made by that time.
There was one poem he [Frost] wrote for his daughter. His daughter's name was Lesley. And our daughter's name is Lesley, spelled the same way. Harold's mother was called Lessie (Estelle). Maybe partly because of that, we thought of some name for Lesley that would sound like Lessie. So we named her Lesley, and I'm sure it had to do with Robert Frost's daughter. Harold knew his daughter Lesley. I may have met her. And there's this little poem by Frost, "The Blue bird."
"The bluebird tells the crow,
'I just came to tell you to tell Lesley, will you,
that her little bluebird wanted me to bring word
that the north wind last night that
made the stars bright and
made ice on the trough, almost
made him cough his tail feathers off. '
Riess: What about his sister? What did she do?
Jones: She got married fairly young. She lived in Amherst. Her husband was in the Massachusetts Agricultural College experiment station, and also taught at Aggie. They lived there most of their lives. After he re tired, they moved to Tucson.
Riess: Do you think that the family's hopes were centered in Harold? Jones: Yes. I think the sister felt somewhat that he was favored.
Riess: Did he act out his life in a way that satisfied his parents? Was there consciousness on his part of this?
Jones: Yes, I think so. And I think from the kinds of letters he wrote, tel ling about his successes and promotions and so forth. He knew they would be interested in that.
Mary's Influence, and the Beginnings of the Child Welfare Institutes
Jones: Actually, as I read over the letters — I've just been reading them for the first time to get ready for this interview — I felt touched by the number of references to me, and what I was doing. He wrote that there were certain things I could do better than he did, or he was going to have me do this or do that, because I could do it better than he could. It's something that's very nice to be able to look back on and realize.
You see, I had the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fellowship in Child Development for two years. It was a matter of branching out from psychology to take in nutrition, neurology, early childhood education. In other words, child development was interdisciplinary. I think Harold was influenced by what I was doing. Larry Prank, who was the Rockefeller representative, was the person who got California in terested in Harold and Harold interested in U.C. He recommended Harold for director of the Institute. I remember that Edna Bailey, who was in the Education Department here and whom we had first met as a Rockefeller Fellow in New York (Columbia) objected to the statement in the Memorial that I had influenced Harold's choice of a field. "He did it on his own," she said. [Sanford, R.N., Eichorn, D.H. and Hon- zik, M.P. Harold E. Jones, 1894-1960. Child Development, 1960, 31 , 593-608.]
Of course, Woodworth was also very interested in the developmen tal field. He was in charge of the child development section of the National Research Council, and was perhaps more influential with Harold than Frank, because he was more of an academic figure and a fa ther figure for Harold. I have a very nice letter that Harold wrote to Woodworth telling him what he'd meant to him. He also has a chapter (with Eichorn) in the book Current Psychological Issues; Es says jLn Honor of Robert S. Woodworth [Seward, G.S. and Seward, J.P. (Eds.) , New York: Henry Holt and Co., Inc., 1958].
Riess: Child development was just being born.
Jones: These institutes were just being set up. Ours [Berkeley] was the last. There was one in Iowa started before the Rockefeller grants, but they contributed after it got started. There was a center at
Columbia, where I was, one in Minnesota, one in Toronto. There is a history of this movement by Lomax. [Lomax, E. The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, Some of its Contributions to Early Research in Child Development. Science and Patterns of Child Care. Freeman, 1978.]
Riess: The one in Iowa, what got that rolling? Do you know?
Jones: I don't know, except this story: some lowans said that the state was spending a lot of money studying about hogs, and they thought it was time they began studying about children. [laughter] I think Bird Baldwin was the first director of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Sta tion, at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, in 1917.
Riess: Do you recall anything of a piece of legislation, the Sheppard-Towner Act, enacted in 1921, for the promotion of welfare and health in ma ternity and infancy? It meant a $1 million appropriation to states.
Jones: I don't know specifically. I do know that originally parent education was a large part of the expenditure, and nursery schools were esta blished.
Columbia, Meeting Mary, and Marriage
Riess: Let's return to Harold's history. We were talking about his years at Amherst, before we got off into the beginnings of the child welfare institutes.
Jones: He was interested in psychology, but I don't know what they had in the way of psychology at Amherst. I know that he was offered an assis- tantship at Johns Hopkins, beginning in fall of 1919, by Knight Dun- lap, who was a psychologist at Johns Hopkins. Harold considered that.
Then he apparently was offered an assistantship at Columbia under Woodworth, and decided to go to Columbia.
We were both at Columbia in the fall of 1919 for the first time. We both happened to take a course at the New School for Social Research, downtown, with Harvey Robinson, who was an historian. I went with a former Vassar classmate, Ruth Mann who lived in New York City. At the first meeting of the course, Harold was sitting there talking to an Oriental. He seemed to be very compatible with this stranger of another race. I couldn't have gone in and sat down and felt as much at home as he seemed to. I said to Ruth, "There's the most interesting man I've seen since I've been in New York."
He came up afterwards and said, "Haven't I seen you at Columbia
37
on the campus?" I said, "Yes." He wanted to take me home, but I said, "I'm with my friend," and I went off with Ruth!
At the next meeting, Ruth said, "Your friend Jones" — she had found out his name; I didn't even know his name. But then that time he took me home, and that was that.
Riess: That's lovely! What was the New School's connection with Columbia?
Jones: It doesn't have any connection with Columbia. It was the New School, it had just been established, and it's still there. Watson taught there at one time when he was in New York. I think Robinson probably also had taught at Columbia.
Riess: Why the name, "New School?"
Jones: I think they just wanted to be less rigid in the sense of academic re quirements and to present broadly meaningful material. It attracted people who wanted something a little more flexible and selective, maybe, than academic university courses. I don't know whether you got degrees there or not. Cornelia Parker, Carleton Parker's widow was in the class. Carleton Parker had been an economics professor at U.C. He died young. Cornelia wrote a book about their relationship: The American Idol. There are two streets in Berkeley named for him, I presume Carleton and Parker.
Riess: Isn't it surprising that in the midst of your study in psychology that you were at the New School taking history?
Jones: Yes, but I was in New York City for the first time, and there were lots of distractions and attractions. Part of the reason we were in New York was to go to concerts, theaters, museums and we discovered the New School.
Riess: Were you living alone then?
Jones: No, I was living with Lois Warner, who had been my Vassar roommate. She was a musician. When Harold and I decided to get married, she de cided that she'd move down nearer her headquarters, the Mannes Music School, and so we took the apartment.
Lois married her music teacher, Guy Maier. They became a well known two piano team. Now she has turned closer to my field. She is a volunteer counselor at the Senior Health and Peer Counseling Center in Santa Monica.
Riess: Did you ever think to yourself, "This is going to be the end of my career? Marriage?"
Jones: No, and I think Harold assumed that I wanted to go on. For example,
38
we took our eight-hour written exam for the Ph.D. There were six of us taking it: Harold and I, and four other people. I was pregnant, and Woodworth said, "Isn't it going to be kind of hard for you to sit here for eight hours, concentrating? Wouldn't it be easier if you had two four-hour sessions?"
I said, "Yes, it would." So he made everybody come to four-hour sessions on two days instead of one eight-hour. So I guess people thought I was going to continue.
Of course, I didn't get my degree until '26. Harold got his in '23. I had two children in the meantime.
Riess: Did your motivation flag at all through any of this?
Jones': No. I always thought I'd be doing something. Actually, I taught school one year. This was before any children were born. I quit at the end of the school year because I was pregnant. I taught an ungraded class in a public school when they were just beginning to try ungraded classes. They took twelve youngsters who didn't adjust in regular classrooms and gave them all to me. I quit that because I was pregnant.
Then I did mental tests for the Psychological Corporation, a New York . organization, which still exists. We tested children who were going into the first grade. We did a short Terman, and that test went in the files. That was their I.Q. at that time, and in fact supposedly for the rest of their school years. (That's something that we've learned at our Institute, that I.Q.'s are not permanent.) I remember I quit that job because Lesley was born on June 8th, 1925- She came early. I was supposed to work until June 15. Dr. Mitchell, who was my employer at the Psychological Corporation, was a little annoyed at me for having the baby before the last week of school!
Riess: Would Harold have been very disappointed, do you think, if you had just given it all up and stayed home?
Jones: I don't think so. But I think he was very pleased that I was going ahead .
Berkeley
The Lighter Side of Harold
Jones: We haven't talked at all about Harold's lighter side. He wrote poe try, jingles, and he did original Christmas cards, he told stories and wrote letters to the children.
Jones: I don't have many of them. Here's one To Our Professor, and I don't know who that was, but I think it was somebody at Amherst. There are two of those. Then he wrote this one to Professor Stratton:
I sing not of arms and the man, but of disarmament, When battleships will not be so darned prominent, When fascistic factions, and sadistic actions, Will cease, And nations turn from war to peace.
In that day both Slav and Latin Will bespeak the name of Stratton As one who used his talents To knock the jingoes out of balance.
Amid his colleagues in Geneva He needs no apologist; So let us turn from Europe's fever To honor a psychologist.
Rich in faith that could not fail We find him a young man at Yale, Exploring concepts, percepts, recepts, Obeying Scriptural precepts.
Gay were those pre-doctoral days, Merry those days at New Haven, Little he knew, when an Eli blue, What the future for him was savin' .
Famed e'en then for insight, And also for upside down sight, Quite at the start of his career, He was celebrated as a seer.
•
40
He could escape from any prism, Reversals were a spur to him, And students of the organism, Were happy to defer to him.
And as we scan, in later days, The outcome of these cerebrations, We note with pride and high appraise His list of publications!
The psychology of Demos, And Romulus and Remus, Wolf-children of the Ganges, Who walk on their phalanges. The sayings of Theophrastus, Whose wisdom far outclassed us.
The curious ways of cattle,
When they smell the blood of battle.
The emotions of the Philippine
When his hand is in the guillotine.
And college girls' vivacity,
As related to pugnacity.
Remember too that study of illusory undulations; (it has, however, no relations To Oriental observations.)
To one whose motto e'er has been Lux et Veritas Tonight, we love and honor you, Professor Emeritus. And if you'll still remain our guide, Through many kinds of isms, We'll keep ourselves topside, As with your prisms.
Nevitt Sanford wrote a poem for Christmas
1951, and he said, "With apologies to Prank Sullivan" --he [ Sullivan] used to write for the New Yorker — "and to Harold Jones." Harold was famous for his humorous doggerel.
He used to do a lot with radio. One year, I remember, he had a radio up the chimney, which spoke like a Santa Glaus. Once we had a party here, to announce a friend's engagement. We had arranged so that the announcement was made over the radio, presumably by a news commentator. He used to love to do tricks.
Riess: It sounds as if he had a very great sense of celebrating occasions. Jones: Yes. In fact, after he died, Jane, my little granddaughter, who was
41
just maybe three, would sit and look at the radio, and say, "Where's Granddad?" She seemed to associate Granddad with the radio.
He was very helpful with several people. We had a gardener who was drafted in the Second World War. He broke, emotionally and men tally, and was sent to a mental hospital. He was Polish. Leo's sister was asked to take him from the hospital. She didn't feel she was ca pable to care for him. Harold took him. We took him to our place in the country. Harold spent a lot of time with him, pretty much helped get him back to normal. Harold thought it would be a good idea for him to go down to the San Joaquin Valley and maybe get a job on a farm. He arranged that. Later he met and married a widow who had a little boy. They're still in touch with me.
Riess: Were these therapeutic relationships?
Jones: No, I wouldn't say he ever thought he was doing therapy. But Harold was very sympathetic with people who had problems, and did what he could on more or less a common sense basis.
Riess: You're the one who's always referred to as nurturant, but would you say that he was also?
Jones: Yes, I would say so. He was an unusual father. He would say to Les ley, if it was time to wash her hands, "Wash hands?" He talked to them at their level, and seemed to appreciate them at their level. I have letters which he wrote, mostly to his parents, telling about little things that the children said and did at various ages, their use of language.
My daughter reminded me when I was talking to her the other day, that at one time he bought each of the grandchildren pencils with their name printed on them. They lived in El Cerrito at the time. On the way out to get the grandchildren, he hid pencils in little places along the way. Coming back to our house, Harold would make excuses to stop at these places and the children would find these pencils with their names on them in bushes, under the stones and so forth.
My daughter, Barbara, has written up some of these experiences. She said when she drove back across the country with him from the East — I guess when she must have been in high school or a freshman in college — they went through North Dakota or South Dakota, and she found a fossil bone. She said, "I've often wondered if Dad found it and put it there where I'd see it!" [laughs] "He never told me, but I always thought it was so unusual that on my first trip going through the Dakotas that we would be taking a walk and we'd find this bone!" [laughter] He loved to play jokes.
42
Meiklejohn, the Oath and Psychologist Friends
Riess: Was Alexander Meiklejohn an important influence on Harold?
Jones: Oh, yes. Meiklejohn was president of Amherst, when Harold was a stu dent there. Harold tutored his two boys. I have letters that Harold wrote to the boys. I have letters that he wrote to the first Mrs. Meiklejohn. I think he was always somewhat in awe of Meiklejohn, but also very closely associated with the family. Of course, Meiklejohn is a liberal, a strong civil liberties advocate. At the time of the oath, Harold signed the oath. Meiklejohn would never have signed that oath. Harold used to go walking with him, but he didn't follow his political lead. Meiklejohn set an example, and he had a following. I have some pictures of Meiklejohn and newspaper clippings that Harold collected. Meiklejohn was let go from Amherst, and went to Michigan. But then he was invited back, finally, for an LL.D. at Amherst, just as Tolman here had his problems with the regents, and then received an honorary degree and has a building named for him.
Riess: Why was he fired from Amherst?
Jones: Some people said he was a poor administrator, but perhaps his politi cal activities were unpopular with the regents.
Riess: You had said that Harold didn't follow Meiklejohn on the oath contro versy.
Jones: No. During that oath controversy, Harold thought that the people who refused to sign the oath were admirable, but he didn't feel that in his position he wanted to make an issue of it.
Riess: You mean the people who refused to sign the oath?
Jones: Yes, who refused to sign it. And, of course, we knew Tolman; we had arguments up here with Tolman and Meiklejohn. Harold felt that the regents had made a great mistake. But he just felt they were probably as sorry as anybody else that they'd required it. He didn't feel that it was going to lead to all sorts of restrictions on people's liber ties. In other words, he just didn't feel he wanted to object to the extent of resigning.
Riess: Did you agree with him?
Jones: I would have been more willing not to sign. In fact, I talked to Tol man about it, and Tolman advised me to go ahead and sign. I think partly because he knew Harold wasn't going to resist. I don't think I would have added anything, as far as my status was concerned, to Tolman' s group, [chuckles]
Riess: In such a discussion with Tolman up here, who else might have been
here?
» Jones: The Tolmans, the Erik Eriksons, the Meiklejohns, Stewart Chase who was
visiting here then, and Harold and I.
Riess: The fact that some of these people were psychologists, was there a special thoughtfulness about the actual psychological consequences, damage aspects, whatever? In a group like this did you talk like psychologists?
Jones : On the oath?
Riess: Yes.
Jones : No .
Riess: The Tolmans, Eriksons and Joneses were just like other people?
Jones: [laughter] Yes. Erikson didn't say much, as a matter of fact, as I remember. I think eventually he did not sign. But at that point, I wouldn't have known what he was thinking about.
Psychoanalysis, and Other Theories
Jones: On one of these outlines, you asked about Freud, and We haven't said much about that. We had a group up here — the Tolmans, Jean Macfar- lane, Jean Macfarlane's husband then, Don, and Harold and I — who got together and read Freud.
Riess: Did you say Erikson was in that group or not?
Jones: No. Erikson wasn't here then. That was earlier, before Erikson came here.
Riess: Did you pooh-pooh it?
Jones: Oh, no! ¥e were seriously interested in what Freud had to say. Harold and I had a friend, Gordon van Tassil Hamilton, who was an analyst in Santa Barbara. We knew him first in New York City; he was doing a study of marriage. Harold and I were subjects for that study. So we knew him back there. He published a book with an introduction by John B. Watson. An associate, Kenneth Macgowan, used the same ma terial in a book. [Hamilton, G.V. _A Research in Marriage. Boni, N.Y., 1929; Macgowan, K. What's Wrong With Marriage. 1929.1 Then he moved to Santa Barbara, and was in private practice.
44
Harold and I, two different summers, had some analysis daily for maybe six weeks. So I mean we were not anti-Freudian by any means. They called it didactic analysis, learning, really, something about analysis. We lay on a couch, and told our dreams, and talked. I can remember Hamilton's putting on the board the id, the ego, the supere go, and that sort of thing.
Riess: Did you and Harold share that experience with each other, then?
Jones: Yes. And we talked a good deal about how we should handle our chil dren, that sort of thing.
Riess: I would like you to tell me how much of an influence all of that was on the theoretical basis of the Child Study Center?
Jones: I think the influence was not so much on the theoretical basis, but on bringing in people from different theoretical backgrounds — for exam ple, Erik Erikson, Elsa Frenkel-Brunswick, Nevitt Sanford, dynamic psychologists. i think that our Institute probably had more varied personnel than other institutes. We had physiologists, physicians, psychologists, sociologists, social workers. I think that was pretty largely due to Harold's influence. Harold was first director of research, and then he became director of the Institute. It was under his directorship that many people from other disciplines came in.
Riess: How did you influence each other — in staff meetings? What was the way of sharing thinking?
Jones: We had seminars, staff meetings, research reports, person to person communication. For example, Erik discussed his play techniques, you know, having children do things with toys, families, and that sort of thing .
Riess: Had he already developed his theory of the eight stages of growth?
Jones: Yes, I'm pretty sure he had.
Riess: It wasn't through observations at the Child Study Center.
Jones: No, I'm sure he had these ideas before.
Riess: From observation, or was that theoretical?
Jones: I'd say it was pretty largely theoretical, although he did observe In dians, and he's had some reports on the behavior of Indians. But I would say his contribution was mostly theoretical. He had a practice; he may have used that too.
Riess: The thing that everyone knows that Freud did was to orient most of life toward the sex drive. What were your various responses to that?
45
[pause] For instance, was Harold, with his New England background, a bit of a Puritan?
Jones: He was, and I was too, as I told you last week. I don't think that Freud — he thought what happened to you as a result of your sex atti tudes and sex behavior was important, but I think he was pretty much of a Puritan himself! [laughter]
In fact, one professor at Amherst told Harold that he thought too much sex interfered with your creativity. I think we tended to be a little Puritannical.
Child-raising and Watson's Theories
Riess: From what I've read, I would think Freudian psychology would not have been well-received by people who were in the developmental field.
Jones: Well, certainly Watson, who is associated with child study, and Freud, are thought of as antitheses. Actually, they both believed that childhood is the very formative period, that parental influence was extremely important. But of course, from there on, they're quite dif ferent. Watson thought the answer was for parents to keep their hands off and not have children become too attached or dependent upon their parents. In other words, he didn't like the idea of parental fixa tions. Freud didn't like that idea either. But I would say that Freud thought children should be associated with their parents much more. And Watson thought they shouldn't be subjected to too much parental influence.
In this country the first nursery schools tended to be scheduled for all day, or nine to three with lunch and naps. You see, they were patterned after the English nursery schools. England had nursery schools before we did, during the First World War. We had English nursery school teachers over here. And Americans, Abigail Eliot for example, went to England to study.
At Columbia an Englishwoman, {Catherine Edwards, was the head of the nursery school where I got my training. She was very strict. Children had to finish their juice; as she said, "I'm as inexorable as the laws of nature: if a child takes tomato juice, he has to finish it."
And I would say that the first nursery schools were fairly severe in this way. Children had to finish their juice, they had to take their nap, and this kind of thing.
I think maybe it was partly Freud's influence that parents got
46
the notion that they needed to spend more time with their children and were responsible for their parent-child relationships. At our Insti tute we started nursery schools with the naps and lunch, but before long we had just the morning session for younger and the afternoon session for older children. Our mostly middle-class children did not need the all day care provided for working mothers. Also, two ses sions gave us more children of a wider age range for observation and study.
Riess: At the time that Katherine Edwards was insisting that you finish your tomato juice, was that also a time when the parenting was in the same spirit?
Jones: I would say so. And I would say that that would have been Watson's influence, also. In his book, Psychological Care of Infant and Child [New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1928], he writes: "Never hug and kiss them [children]. Never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning."
He quoted one parent, "a dear old lady," who said, "Thank God my children are grown and that I had a chance to enjoy them before I met you." Of course, Watson's whole theory of being objective was probably part of that. You know, he's written quite a bit in popular magazines about, "give me a child when he is two, and I can make of him a mer chant, thief, beggar, anything. I can make anything of him." It perhaps had to do with his own divorce and remarriage and all this kind of thing. I'm not sure.
[added later] When John B. Watson's life is featured, I tend to be called on, as his "last student," to comment. This year at the American Psychological Association meetings his son, James B. Watson, was a speaker on the same program. Our meeting was cordial and pro ductive. His remarks were insightful and beneficial, especially for those who are familiar with John B. Watson's Psychological Care of In fant and Child and have doubts about his recommendations.
To quote Jim Watson in regard to his own upbringing: "I, frankly, think a better end product would have resulted, if the process of growing up under the direction of two behaviorists had been annealed with some measure of affection. I am sure my upbringing is not unique — behaviorism was then and is now a very convenient way of rais ing kids. But it is my great hope that the teachings of his disciples and others who have followed him have tempered the emotionally Spartan upbringing that he espoused. I believe his behavioristic theories on child development unquestionably have value in terms of life's preparation through the setting of standards and developing an under standing of the parameters of acceptable and responsible behavior, but they could have been much improved if one were permitted to mix in a big helping of parental affection." Rosalie Rayner Watson might be
47
said to have endorsed John's theories in her article: "I am the moth er of a behaviorist1 s son." [Dec. 1930, Parent's Magazine, 5_, 16-18]
Jim's wife, Jakie, daughter, Becky and her fiance, his son Scott and his wife all came to the meeting. He took us to dinner after wards. And recently Jim was in Berkeley on business and we got to gether, first at my house, then for dinner at the Claremont. His mother, Rosalie, died when he was ten. Since she had been a classmate of mine at Vassar, I was able to talk to him about her. I got out my Vassar yearbook with his mother's picture which he had never seen. I had enlargements made and sent to him. Whether or not we approve of his behavioristic upbringing, he is an attractive, thoughtful and understanding person.
Harold's writing, Mary's TV Class
Riess: I realize that the beginning of this conversation was my asking about Meiklejohn at Amherst. I'm glad we mentioned him. [reads] "Undoubt edly the Amherst education contributed much to our conception of Harold Jones as a gentleman and scholar of the old school." [Harold E. Jones Memorial, appended]
Jones: I haven't read that recently; that sounds like Sanford.
Riess: Yes. He also talks in this of Harold's remarkably lucid and graceful literary style.
Jones: Yes. Actually, I think everybody at the Institute, and certainly I, felt that he was just an excellent editor. As it says in there, if you had something that needed to be fixed, he helped you fix it, in writing. He certainly did that for me. When I first started writing things after he was gone, I just didn't know whether they were any good or not because I didn't have him to tell me.
I gave the first TV course for credit for the University. I remember once or twice I came home, and he would comment on something I'd said on TV. We didn't have a TV at first. Sears used to have a store on University Avenue, and he'd go down to Sears and watch my program. One Monday he was in there, and they wouldn't turn to that program. He went to Hinks, and when I got home he said, "You look better on Hinks TV than on Sears," and he bought one of them.
Of course, he was on the program quite often. Actually, we gave the program together.
Riess: Did you have a script that you read from?
Mary Jones hosting the first television course for credit from UC Berkeley; a visiting orthodontist and Marjorie Honzik discuss thumb-sucking, 1952.
Mary Jones interviewing Larry Frank, Director of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation, 1952.
48
Jones: Too much. [Compared with] the way people get up and talk on TV now, we were much too scripted. We always had other people on, you know. We had Larry Frank once, when he was out here. Nursery school teach ers, and some of the people in the study with their children. It was much too scripted.
Riess: It was a class for credit?
Jones: Yes, for credit, if you wanted it. There was a syllabus that went with it. They took exams. It was a course through the extension division.
Riess: Did you and Harold engage in mutual critiquing of each other?
Jones: Well, not too much. In fact, as I say, from the letters I've been reading, he was very admiring of what I was doing mostly, and telling people so. I remember one letter, I guess he wrote to me, saying we had been asked to do something, and he said, "You can handle a discus sion much better than I can"
49
3. THE WAY WEST
[interview 3: February 2, I98l]
A Career for Mary Cover Jones
Careers for Women, 1919
Riess: You said in your interview with Deana Logan [Psychology of Women Quar terly, op.cit. ] that there was peer support for combining achievement and motherhood evident at Vassar in 1919. I wondered how it was evi dent.
Jones: It was supportive. Yes, it was; except that I first thought of going into medicine, pediatrics. I've always enjoyed children, and thought of going into medicine to work with children. The college physician discouraged me. She said, "You have to realize that if you go into medicine, it probably means you can never marry." In those days, you either got married or you had a career. I dropped organic chemistry, which I was taking in order to get into a medical school, and decided not to go into medicine. It was, about that time when I heard Watson lecture, and decided that child psychology would be a substitute for medicine.
Riess: This statement was about the support for combining achievement and motherhood evident at Vassar.
Jones: Well, it could have been, because two of our classmates did go into medicine. They didn't marry, as a matter of fact, either. Why the physician thought she had to tell me about this I'm not sure. But ap parently I wanted to marry, although I don't remember a time that that would have stopped me.
50
John B. Watson
Riess: You said that Watson was charismatic. How about describing him, and telling me really what charismatic was.
Jones: Well, he was handsome, but this didn't influence me as much as it did some other people. I was reading Lois Meek Stolz's interview with Senn. Thorndyke suggested that she go and talk to Watson, and that perhaps she could work in child psychology. This was when she was at Teacher's College Columbia getting her degree. She went down to see Watson. He was then in advertising. She describes how handsome he was, and how polite he was. He rose to meet her. Usually professors didn't treat students this way, she thought. She was terribly im pressed with him.
One reason I wasn1 t so impressed was that I met him through my friend, so it was more personal than professional. The other thing is, as I told Senn in my interview, which I looked at yesterday, it was when I was first married and I was just attached to Harold, and other men didn't exist for me, even to look at, apparently! [Senn, Milton J.E. Insights on the Child Development Movement in the United States. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1975, 40, (3-4), 1-99.] Although I will say that I enjoyed Watson very much, and did appreciate his style. He was a Southern gentleman.
He really didn't talk much about his theories and so forth with me. He would talk more about how much it cost him to go out last Sa turday night, and whether for a talk he should wear a blue suit or a brown suit. Once I told him "a business suit" when he was going to be on the platform, to speak at Teachers College, Columbia, and everyone else had blue suits. He scolded me for not having properly prepared him.
Riess: Was he underestimating your mind in not having conversations about theories with you?
Jones: I don't think so. I think he just was glad to get away from that on Saturdays when he came up to our house.
I'd like to say this. I have never explicitly wanted to follow Watson's advice to parents. We were thrilled by his theoretical point of view in psychology, contrasted to what we'd had from Titchener and other laboratory psychologists. He had a chapter in his book on per sonality, and there were few psychology textbooks at that time, if any, that had a chapter on personality — this sort of thing. But when it came to his advice to parents, we weren't with him.
That's another thing Senn asked me: if I followed Watson's ad vice. I didn't. I thought it was too bad that he wrote some of his
51
popular books and articles on parenting. He himself said in his auto biography that two books which he had written were a mistake. [Wat- son, J.B. John Broadus Watson, A History of Psychology in Autobiogra phy, Vol. 3. Edited by C. Murchison. Worcester, Mass.: Clark University Press, 1936.] He said that he didn't know enough to write them. These were Behaviorism [New York: W.W. Norton Inc., 1924], and Psychological Care of Infant and Child, 1 928.
Senn asked me if I'd followed Watson's advice. I said, "No, I hope I raised my children more naturally." [chuckles]
Riess: I asked you last week, after we had turned off the tape, why it had taken your insight to consider positive modification of behavior using his theories, and you had said Watson himself would have gone on and done —
Jones: He says so, that he unfortunately lost contact with the child whom he had conditioned (Albert). I think if he had stayed in the field, he would have gone on with positive approaches.
Riess: You feel that Watson had not done enough work with children?
Jones: You mean that his recommendations were not based on experience with children? I would say so, although he'd had four children of his own.
Riess: How did they turn out?
Jones: One son committed suicide. I don't know what to say about how they came out. I admire James, whom I know.
He complained to me at one time that Rosalie's parents allowed the children to be too affectionate, and spoiled them and so forth.
Riess: That was certainly a period in child-raising. Can you imagine child- raising theory ever returning to that?
Jones: No. But several people have said that Freud and Watson were alike in emphasizing the importance of early childhood. This was a good con tribution. He [ Watson] made some excellent contributions, but he also went off the deep end on some things.
Riess: You said he came to your apartment. At the Hecksher?
Jones: The Hecksher.
Riess: Were there other proteges?
Jones: No. Lois Stolz had told me several times that she wanted to work with Watson. He told her to come to the Hecksher Foundation and see what I was doing. She came, and I met her. I'd forgotten this, but she says
52
that some child had diptheria, and she wasn't allowed to come in for weeks. She wanted to get her thesis done, so she did something else. Apparently [Edward L.] Thorndike had sent her down to see Watson.
Riess: In general, would he have worked well, Watson, with students and pro teges?
Jones: Well, yes, I would say so. You see, Rosalie was his protege. That was kind of the undoing of him academically. My husband helped me with writing my articles on children's fears, and suggested putting in charts and things. I would like to have had Harold or Watson co author those articles. I said to Watson, "Don't you want to co-author these?" He said, "No, I've made my reputation, and you have yours to make; if I put my name on there, it won't do you any good." So he was a generous person. He didn't want Harold's name as co-author, with mine either.
The Hecksher Foundation
Jones: While we're on the subject, this was at the Hecksher Foundation, which you said you wanted to discuss. There again, I talked to Lois Stolz yesterday and told her I was doing this history. She said, "Be sure to tell them about your life at Hecksher, because this was very unusu al for a psychologist to actually live in the place where she was working with and observing children."
In addition to those two articles which I published, I did a lot of other things. Some of these Watson refers to in his books that came after. One was that the children were kept in bed because there weren' t enough attendants to watch them. I made recommendations to the institution about improving the situation for the babies. Another was I kept a record of crying, and found there were certain periods when more babies were crying. I recommended a change in schedule so that they ate at a different time, this sort of thing.
Riess: What was the model of care for them?
Jones: It was institutional care. Hecksher had hoped to have, as he called it, "The Children's Home for Happiness." He thought it would be an or phanage. There were not enough children available who needed per manent care, as in an orphanage. There were children there whose parents temporarily couldn't take care of them, or perhaps they'd been deserted. But they were there weeks or months, maybe a year or two.
Riess: Were some of them retrieved by the families, or were they put up for adoption?
-
53
Jones: They were either retrieved or they were put up for adoption or went into foster homes, this sort of thing.
Riess: So they weren't following any theoretical model; this was just keeping a maximum number of people quiet.
Jones: Yes. We gave some of the children crayons and they scribbled on the wall. Hecksher didn't like this, [laughs]
Riess: Didn't he build a new place?
Jones: This was the new place. Do you want to see some pictures of it?
Riess: Yes. [brief tape interruption]
Jones: This picture is taken from a program for the children's theater. When my article about Watson came out in the American Psychologist, people sent me pictures and clippings. Somebody found that picture and sent it to me. [Jones, M.C. Albert, Peter and John B. Watson, American Psychologist, 1974, 29_, 581-583.]
Riess: Was Hecksher involved enough to have a say in how the place was run?
Jones: Oh, yes. There was an apartment on the third or fourth floor, which was supposed to be used to teach young people how to keep house. There wasn't any candidate for such training, so we got that apart ment.
Riess: And you and Harold -lived there?
Jones: Yes. And Barbara, our older daughter, Barbara.
Riess: This is interesting. Of course you'll hang onto this because the pro gram for the children's theatre is also a whole description of the Hecksher Foundation for Children. This building, I take it, still ex ists on 5th Avenue between 104th and 105th?
Jones: Yes.
Riess: Is it still functioning?
Jones : No .
Riess: You were able to make these changes. What kind of a staff was there besides you?
Jones: We weren't on the staff at all. We were just allowed to observe, and we made suggestions. They had the kind of staff you'd have in a home for children, mostly attendants, one nurse, and I don't remember too many others.
54
Riess; Jones;
Watson wrote in a footnote in one of his books that he had only seen one child who was not afraid of a loud sound. Well, that was our Barbara. She was home with her mother and father sitting in a playpen that she was accustomed to, and Watson's making a loud sound behind her back didn1 t bother her.
That doesn' t seem like a very valid observation then, does it?
No. He had the theory that there were three basic emotions: one was fear; one was anger; one was love. We don't believe that any more.
R. S. Woodworth's Seminar
Riess:
Jones;
Riess: Jones:
Riess; Jones;
Riess;
The seminars and classes that you and Harold took with Woodworth, large were they?
how
I'd say about a dozen people. Gardner Murphy was a member. The Gateses in education were there — Arthur Gates, and Georgina. They were in that seminar the year before they were married, I believe. Harold and I were in the seminar before we were married and every year that we were at Columbia. Harold and I were not demonstrative in front of people, and the Gateses were, [laughter] Harold and I were amused that they should let people see how they were feeling about each other!
After we got married I kept my maiden name for a while. We were married the first of September, 1920. Woodworth knew all about it. When we met for the seminar the first time, he looked at us and said, "I'm not sure how to introduce these two people." [laughs] The class responded with appropriate humor.
Why did you keep your name?
I was just that much of a feminist. I kept my name, I guess, until maybe Barbara was born. Then I decided I might as well take Harold's name.
Were there great debates in those seminars?
I wouldn't say there were great debates; but I will say that Woodworth was an excellent person for that seminar, because he was eclectic. We talked about Freud, and we talked about Watson, and we talked about the more conventional academic psychologists.
In the memorial article on Harold, I went on camping trips together.
read that Woodworth and Harold
55
Jones: Yea. They were more than just professional associates. It wasn't just a student-faculty relationship.
Riess: But Woodworth didn't have that relationship with the other eleven peo ple in the seminar?
Jones: No.
Riess: Something about Harold, once again.
Jones: As I told you, at Amherst he went walking with Robert Frost. Ap parently he had a way of relating easily and meaningfully with other people.
Riess: I remember in the television program on B. F. Skinner and his psychol ogy, it showed him walking through the woods, and he said how impor tant nature was to him. I wonder what the connection is between the interest in nature and the interest in the development of the child.
Jones: I haven't thought about that, but it seems to me to make sense. When Harold wrote letters to his parents, he wrote about flowers and how they differed, and how some birds were different and had different ha bits from the ones in Connecticut. He wrote a lot about the children and things they said and did and how they were growing.
In Defense of Child Psychology
Jones: Maybe this would be a place to read you a little bit that I found that Harold had written defending child psychology. [Jones leaves room; returns] I guess you'd say this was how he was describing the differ ence between the experimental psychologist and the child psychologist.
[reads] "Developmental psychologists tend to be oriented toward problems of human behavior, social behavior, and individual differ ences, and personality theory. They have many contacts outside of psychology in the social sciences, education, psychiatry, and also in the biological sciences. Their interest in physical and physiological correlates of human behavior extends widely beyond the central nervous system to other organ systems." Which I thought was interesting. "The developmental psychologist deals with problems that are often of great immediate human concern, which at some points require exploratory ap proaches because of a more limited background of theory and method. As compared with the laboratory scientist, who has abundant and ever- present resources of white rats and college students, the developmen tal psychologist must sometimes range far afield in assembling sub jects and in collecting data. Because the problems with which the developmental psychologist deal are more likely at one point or anoth-
56
er to have an urgent practical significance, they may become branded as applied or service-oriented. It would be fairer to say that developmental psychology is equally concerned with basic research. Should they be penalized because there is a wide interest in what they are doing?"
Riess : Interesting. It's very defensive, isn't it. Jones: Yes. It was written for that purpose.
[reads] "Developmental psychology favors an undergraduate educa tion closely allied to the traditions of a liberal education, and a graduate training which will give greater options to the student in pursuing relevant interests in other social and biological sciences and great opportunity for research experience with human beings."
Riess: When was that written?
Jones: Nineteen-sixty . Just before he retired. And he died, you know, in Paris. This was in the Spring of that year.
Riess: So there still was a need at that time to defend and explain it. Jones: Yes. There still is, if you read Lomax and Senn.
Riess: At the time, incidentally, did you all call yourselves behavioralists? Or did you have those labels pinned to you? Or developmentalists, or anything like that?
Jones: I don't think so. Developmental, yes. Not behavioralists particular ly. Life-Span Research is a current term.
Mary Jones: "Peter" and Ph.D. Thesis
Riess: I have not read any of your studies on "Peter" [experimental subject].
Jones: A lot of people come up and ask me what happened to Peter, and of course I don't know any more than Watson knows what happened to his Albert. I did go to see his mother after he left the Hecksher and be fore we came out here. I may have said somewhere that his mother had an approach which tended to frighten him. He wanted to go out when I was there visiting with her, and she said, "Don't go out, Peter, some body might get you." (Not Peter; that wasn't his name. But that's what I called him).
Riess: How was Peter singled out?
57
Jones: Harold and I had a snake and some white rats and ' when the children were playing we took them in to see what the children would do with them. Peter was afraid of them. He was the most afraid, and so we took him for an experiment. Someone who met me recently said they couldn't imagine me handling these white rats and snakes. We kept the snake in a suitcase under our bed! [laughter] A great big snake. In fact, we used that snake in experiments with other children in other articles that we'd written. Harold and I wrote an article together about children's fears.
Riess: Did that work that you did generate a lot of interest after you pub lished it?
Jones: No. And as I've said in one of my papers, it wasn't acceptable for a Ph.D. thesis because there weren't enough cases. So what I did for my Ph.D. thesis was also something that Watson suggested: look at babies and see at what ages various functions developed. This was about the same time that Gesell was working on his cases. I went to well baby clinics in New York City, where mothers brought their well babies for check-ups, and tested to see at what age they could follow an object with eye movements of various kinds, at what age they could sit up, what age they could hold their heads up, and so forth. It was a prel iminary to the present intelligence tests for babies, motor and intel ligence tests. I had enough cases, a couple hundred.
Riess: What kind of contact did you have with Gesell, then?
Jones: We knew him; Senn asked that question. We went up there, and we thought we would have more contact with Gesell, but he came out of his office, shook hands with us, told us we could look around, and disap peared.
Riess: Where was he?
Jones: Yale. I knew Helen Thompson, who worked with him. She was a class mate of mine. So we made our contact through Helen Thompson.
Riess: Does it amaze you now, from our point of view in 1980, that this kind of observation hadn't ever been really systematically carried out?
Jones: Nancy Bayley's Mental Scale for the early years is well standardized and widely used. In the early days there were people who wrote baby biographies. There was one written by Millicent Shinn, here in California — I believe she was the first woman to get a Ph.D. at U.C. She lived in Nyles. Millicent Shinn's, The Biography of a Baby [Bos ton: Houghton Mifflin, 1900], was about her niece, Lucy. She kept notes on all the babies in the family. A friend of mine, Virginia Woodson, has these notes. Then there were several Europeans who wrote biographies — Pestalozzi. I'd read all of those. The Pentons wrote a book based on observations of one child. Darwin kept notes on his ba-
58
ties. And, cf course, Piaget observed his children, but that's more recent.
Observing Mothers and Children
Riess: In that first study you must have already seen a great range of development. Did you work with the doctors?
Jones: No, I didn't, really. Well, in the Hecksher Foundation, I might talk to the nurse or to a visiting doctor about seme child that I thought might use a little something or other in the way of observation, or more freedom than he was having.
I haven't mentioned another experience that Harold and I had just before we came cut here. There was a Mr. Harmon, a wealthy real estate man who had been ill, and his nurse Edith Burdick had one cf the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fellowships. I met her through that. Well, Harmon felt that she had saved his life — she'd nursed him when he was ill — and he wanted to do something for her. She was interested in studying children, so Harmon bought a house and we lived there, Harold and I and both the girls, and Edith Burdick. We were set up as a — what would they call it? — foster home, where babies who were wait ing to go back to their parents or were up for adoption were cared for.
Riess: Halfway or some kind of halfway house.
Jones: Yes. We were there for a year, and that's when we were offered the job out here.
Riess: From where were they referred?
Jones: From the city department — I've forgotten the name cf that department that would place children who needed to be placed. We had at one time as many as four children whom we observed and kept records on.
Then we came cut here after a year, and left that with Edith Bur dick, and it finally folded. But that was another experience.
Riess: After you have seen mobs cf babies do you still feel a kind of tug at your heartstrings?
Jones: Yes. And I'd say the same thing is true with the children, now adults, whom we've been observing here in the longitudinal studies, like Millie whom you know. I'm very close to some of them.
Riess: But you did have the satisfaction here cf being able to follow them.
.
59
You didn' t with the others. Jones: Yes.
Riess: I just wondered if you have to harden your hearts in some way when you do that kind of study.
Jones: Yes. And then just leave them, and "what are the practical results?" Of course, that's still the question. You know we're getting cut another book at the Institute, from the last follow-up. [Present and Past _in Middle Life, Academic Press, 1982.] The last chapter in this bock is called "An Overview." We still have the question, "Do we know enough to give advice about how to raise children?" and "Which advice is going to hold up?" We all feel this, but Jean Macfarlane expresses it particularly. People who were so premising when they were young sters who haven't delivered, and the people who had problems when they were young and are now doing fairly well. Of course, one of the theories is that if you have to learn early to cope with things, you learn to cope.
Riess: Isn't that what they found out in a lot of the creativity studies, tec?
Jones: Yes. And we den' t like the notion that everything that happens to the children is due to their parents. You know, there's a phrase: "the schizophrencgenic mother." I think this is unfortunate, to think that a mother makes her child abnormal, it isn't all the poor mother's fault. Certainly it's nothing that she does purposely. I think this was Erikscn's point of view in his case cf "Jean" in Childhccd and So ciety. "Jean" is new middle-aged. Her mother and I are friends.
Riess: You're probably having to conclude that a lot cf what you've done that's been most helpful is to be an extended family for people, and just a ventilating place.
Jones: Yes. Jean Macfarlane' s study, the Guidance Study, had a group that were interviewed and a group that were net interviewed. The group that were interviewed were given some chance to talk about their prob lems, maybe a little advice. There have been fewer divorces in that group than in the centre 1 group. So apparently it does do something. That's one cf the criticisms of these studies, that we change people, sc how can we — [laughs] — generalize?
Riess: The schizcphrencgenic psychologist also! [Jones laughs] What was Harold doing all of these years?
Jones: He was teaching; and he was writing his thesis on Experimental Methods cf College Teaching.
Riess: Did he interact with the children in the same way as you?
60
Jcnes: At the Hecksher Foundation, you mean? Riess: Yes.
Jones: Not as much, no. He liked to take pictures of the groups of young sters. I can remember when they'd be up on the roof playing, he'd go up and talk to them, take pictures and that sort of thing. He was often with me when I was observing. But he spent more time on the Columbia campus.
Moving On
Married by Norman Thomas
Riess: You were married by Norman Thomas. I want to back up a little bit. I asked you earlier whether you were religious, either of you.
Jcnes: I don't think Harold was ever religious, although he had ministers in his background. I was religious. I went to Sunday School and joined the Lutheran Church. Was it Billy Sunday who was one of those evangelists? Someone came to Johnstown. We were dismissed from high school to go to hear him. Almost all of us "hit the trail," which meant you went up and promised whatever you promised when you hit the trail. You got this emotional feeling that what you wanted to do was the right thing, and that you belonged to God. Almost everybody in the class went up. I remember one boy who didn' t. Must have been hard on him.
These things kind of wear off. However, I was religious. I went to YWCA summer camps. After my freshman year, I worked for the YWCA in Johnstown. In other words, I was still fairly religious. Then I took a course in philosophy my second year, and that was the end of my religious feelings and beliefs. I spoke to my philosophy teacher about this, and he asked me to come and talk to him, because I guess he didn't want to be responsible, [laughter]
Riess: Would you tell me about that marriage service? Jones: I told you about how we met Norman Thomas. Riess: You met through your brother.
Jones: Yes. The first of September was my birthday, and we decided to be married en my birthday. Norman Thomas invited us to come to his house to be married. It was their wedding anniversary, also, I believe. Then he called up maybe a day or two ahead of time and said, "We're moving on the first, so how about coming to my office?"
61
So we went to his office. I had an uncle from Johnstown who used to go to New York on business. He made it a point to go at that time to New York because he knew I was going to be married and wanted to come to the wedding. ¥e called at his hotel and left word that we were not going to be married at Norman Thomas's house, but at his of fice. He get the message that I was going to be married to Norman Thomas, [laughter] Anyhow, he missed the wedding. He was always sor ry about that. My brother and sister came as witnesses. I have the beck that Norman Thomas gave us. He gave us this bock and he said, "You can use as much of this service or as little as you want, or you can choose your own service, but there are certain phrases that are required for it to be legal." So we said, "Let's have those." And that was it.
He gave us this book, and he forgot to sign it. So years later I sent it back to him. He apologized for not having signed it. The marriage already, of course, was legal. But he hadn't signed this bock. Then when Harold died I wrote him, and he wrote me this nice little letter, which I appreciated, saying that he had gone through this same experience of having a good marriage and experiencing the less of his partner.
Riess: Why didn't you get married at home?
Jones: We were a little unconventional. We thought of being married at home. I went home and was planning it, but we wanted to be married on my birthday, and Harold had a job testing children and assigning them to various institutions and homes and so forth. It was just hard for him to get away at that time, so we just decided to skip it. I remember my mcther and father were disappointed; and someone said to my father, "She's saving you a let of money. You should accept this." [laughs]
Riess: So your mcther and father didn't come to the wedding. Jones: No, just my brother and sister. Riess: What did you wear?
Jones: I was looking in the mirror, and I said to my sister, "Should I wash
my face?" She said, "If I were going to be married, I'd wash my face."
I washed it. I remember a silk suit; it wasn't anything new or spe cial.
Then we went on a trip up the Hudson en a steamboat.
62
Motivations, Inner and Outer Drives
Riess: In your interview with Deana, you say it's the outer pressures of life that have motivated you, rather than an inner need to do something. What made Harold tick? Was it an inner need?
Jones: I would say that in both cases the motivation was inner but the direc tion it took depended upon outer circumstances. In Harold's case I think part of it was a masculine-cultural kind of thing. Men were supposed to achieve, and I think Harold had that orientation.
Riess: But would you call that an inner need? Jones: Inner? Riess : Yes .
Jones: No, I wouldn't. That's a cultural need. But, I'm sure he had an inner, a motivation, need to achieve.
Riess: Are you saying that in a vacuum you probably wouldn't have done any thing?
Jones: No, [laughing] I don't think I would say that. Obviously, I wouldn't have kept on as Icng as I did, if there hadn't been something inside. I think this was due to my father and brother — my father who was very pleased with anything I accomplished, and my brother who set an exam ple. Yes, there was motivation there, certainly. I think in Harold's case, there was much more directed motivation. He started at Mas sachusetts Agricultural College. I think it was his mother who en couraged him to transfer to Amherst where he got more of a liberal education and could move in the direction of a professional career.
Riess: Well, then maybe there is no such thing, really, as inner need, be cause it sounds like in both cases you're talking about other people's expectations.
Jones: Yes. Well, you want to meet other people's expectations. Sure, there's a good feeling about getting somewhere, and accomplishing something. Senn asked me if I would have gone into therapy if I had stayed in New York and worked with Watson. I told him yes. But now, as I think of it, I'm not sure I would have. I don't think I would have been suited to that.
Riess: Who was going into that at the time?
Jones: Very few people. Senn has a chapter on the relation of pediatricians to child development, and also psychiatrists. There were very few, either pediatricians or psychiatrists, who were working with the
"whole" child, or who felt it was essential to work with children from the child development point of view.
As laboratory psychologists tend to feel that developmental psychology isn't really as scientific, I think that maybe pediatri cians and psychiatrists felt that working with the "whole" child was not as scientific or professional as working in a specific discipline. And, of course, there are still arguments as to whether psychologists should have state certification for practice as psychiatrists do. In some states they do; in some states they don't.
Teachers and Parents
Riess: You published early in Parent-Teacher Magazine. Were teachers in terested in your work?
Jones: I hope so. Child development and progressive education were closely associated. I took courses at Teachers College with Dewey and Kilpa- trick, innovators in education. They encouraged teachers to think of children as individuals who could profit by educational opportunities planned to meet their needs. It was expected that parent education and preschool programs would develop within the public school system.
The program in child study and parent education in California was financed by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial in 1921 when Her bert Stolz was in the State Department of Education. But the insti tutes were set up to function independently of academic departments.
At the Institute I worked with parents who were going to be leaders of parent groups. Herbert Stclz was in charge of that en deavor. I also worked in the nursery school on research projects. Language development was one of cur areas. Sidney Adams, a student, wrote his Ph.D. thesis and published on children's language develop ment. I talked to various teachers' groups, lots of them. But I haven't worked specifically with teachers in the schools, except with cur longitudinal samples; we get the Oakland Growth Study group first in the fifth grade, and we knew and cooperated with those teachers.
Some teachers were interested in cur research. Sometimes they talked to us about special problems, and we'd talk to them about the children in cur sample. Our group went to Claremcnt Junior High, which was a somewhat experimental school associated with the Universi ty Education Department. The University used it's classes for prac tice teaching and observation. The vice-principal, Helen Hunt, was associated both with the University and with the junior high school. You could call it a "progressive" school. And the same was true of University High School. They were really experimental schools.
64
In the case of the Oakland group, originally called the Adoles cent Growth Study, we had a counselor, Judith Chaffey, who was the children's counselor from the fifth grade on through high school. She also visited the parents. I visited the homes, too. She was on our
staff.
As late as 1956, Harold wrote in a report to the Division of Edu cational Psychology of the American Psychological Association that closer association was needed between universities and school systems.
Comments on Larry Frank
Riess: Please describe Larry Frank and your meeting with him.
Jones: I was taking a course at Teacher's College in the summer. I heard that Larry Frank wanted to meet students. I went and met with him. There were several other women. He told us about these fellowships. I was quite excited. These fellowships (they paid something) would probably support me. And I would be enabled to take courses in medi cal school, in nutrition — at Teacher's College — and psychology. I talked to Woodworth about it. (Voodworth was my advisor in psycholo gy. ) He thought it was a good idea. So I applied for a fellowship.
Riess: Larry Frank — what was his background?
Jones: He got his degree in economics. He was a foundations administrator.
Riess: Was he just an administrator?
Jones: Yes, he was an administrator for the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fund.
Riess: Who was the real mind behind the fund and what it should accomplish?
Jones: Larry was it. The director of the memorial fund was Beardsley Ruml. But Larry was the real energetic person with a wealth of ideas whom we knew best.
Riess: I wondered who he might have talked to, though, to sort of conceptual ize what could be done in the field.
Jones: By the time I knew him, his ideas about child development were prolif ic.
Riess: Was there any attempt to put all of the people who were recipients of the money together, to talk, to confer?
65
Jones: No. I certainly met a number of them, because we were in classes to gether. One was Edna Bailey from here, who went back to New York City for a year on a fellowship. ;May Reynolds Sherwin, a Vassar graduate went back to teach at Vassar. We were close friends.
Riess: But you were all people who were working in child development.
Jones: Yes. I was in psychology; some of them were in nutrition and other fields too.
Riess: Was Larry Frank a particularly good administrator?
Jones: He was an extremely energetic person. He got everybody enthusiastic about things. He had a natural warmth. I remember once he came out here, and my girls had heard us talking about the fact that he was coming out, and would be deciding whether to give the Institute more money. I was putting the girls to bed — my bedrooms were downstairs — and Larry came down to say goodnight to them. Lesley must have said something to him about whether he was going to give us some money. He was quite amused, and he reassured her that it was going to be okay, [laughter]
Riess: Was he a contemporary?
Jones: He was about our age. He lived until maybe five years ago, I'd say. He lost two wives by death, and had a third wife when he died. I've met all of them.
Riess: Did you know the Stolzes in New York?
Jones: I knew Lois in New York, yes. She was then Lois Hayden Meek, a gradu ate student at Teachers College, Columbia.
Riess: Was that also instrumental in getting you out here?
Jones: No. It was due to Larry Frank entirely. Well, maybe Woodworth also, because I'm sure that when the job was offered he advised us to take it. He was interested. In fact, he was one of the people in the Na tional Science Foundation who established a child development section. He was always interested, although he didn't work in the field. He's one of the people who is always thought of as developing and promoting child development.
Riess: Did that make a difference in validating it?
Jones: Yes, I would say so. Harold, for example — as you see, there weren't very many men in this field. If Woodworth thought this was the thing to do, I'm sure it influenced Harold. Of course, the heads of all these institutions were men. However, I think it was Anderson at Min nesota who said to Harold something to the effect that there were an
66
awful lot of women in this field.
A Home in Berkeley
Riess: Was coming to California a hard thing, to leave the East and family?
Jones: No, I think we were glad to. We had a pediatrician, of course, for our children, and we talked to him about what he thought of our moving to California. And he said, "Unless you have (l guess it was) $10,000 a year, it's very hard to live in New York City." Well, we didn't have $10,000 a year, and it was cheaper out here. And, you know, Califor nia sounded good. We were a little sorry to leave our families, and that sort of thing. But, no, we were happy about coming out. I remember Harold's mother had heard that it was very foggy out here. She wanted to make sure we had good, warm underwear for the children, [laughter]
Riess: Over the years did you keep up relations with people in the East assi duously?
Jones: We did, yes. Some of Harold's Amherst friends, my Vassar friends, Columbia associates visited and corresponded. But we realized that being in the West had some isolating features. We didn't go to as many meetings.
Riess: Professionally isolating?
Jones: Yes. Harold went to some, but probably not as many as though we'd been in the East. Now, Nancy Bayley, for example, who was here for many years, her husband took a position at Johns Hopkins and she went back to Washington, D. C. as chief of the Division of Child Development of the National Institute of Mental Health. She said she never was anybody until she got to Washington and met the right people. This isn't a direct quote, but she had the feeling that the East was the place to be if you wanted to be recognized.
Riess: Particularly because she was a woman in the field? Jones: I think just in general.
Riess: You were leaving your extended family. Do you feel that an extended family is a benefit to bringing up children?
Jones: Really, you see, we were in New York; my family was in Pennsylvania; Harold's was in Connecticut. We hoped we could continue our visits back and forth. I'm sure they were terribly sorry to have us leave, more sorry than we were to be leaving.
67
Riess: When you came to Berkeley, what was your first community of really good friends.
Jones: I'd say some of our professional people, like Jean Macfarlane, Nancy Bayley, and Edgell and Herbert Stolz. Two families whom we knew be cause the women were parent education leaders, like myself: Margaret and Ralph Fisher, Josephine and Allen Blaisdell were friends. Allen was head of International House.
Riess: Were they also raising small children?
Jones: The Stolzes had a child, Rosemary, just about the age of our children. The Fishers had three, the Blaisdells two. Somewhere I was reading that the University during the depression carved back funds at the In stitute. The Laura Spelman Rockefeller people weren't sure they want ed to contribute if the University wasn't going to hold up its end. Sproul was one of the people who was interested in keeping the Insti tute going. His son John went to the nursery school. So, fortunate ly, he was interested in our Institute.
Riess: How did you care for your children when you were working?
Jones: I had full-time help, which took care of the home aspects, domestic aspects. I can remember I got home — I never worked full-time, you know — and I'd be home, either pick the children up or be at home when they got here from school. I can remember one day Herbert Stolz came in, and I was sitting here reading to the children about three o'clock in the afternoon. He said he thought I was a good mother; a lot of mothers he knew would be out shopping, and I was making some effort to be with my children when I could.
Riess: A lot of psychologists are blind to their problems at home and excel lent out in the field. I just wondered if there were ever any of those kinds of pitfalls in your life.
Jones: There probably were. I can remember my older girl said one time she hoped she didn't have to work when she grew up. She must have felt that my working wasn't exactly a pleasure to her.
Riess: In raising the children, were they left to you, or both of you?
Jones: I would say Harold was much more of a raising father than most fathers at that period. He'd put them to bed, and feed them, and read to them, and had all sorts of little games with them. Took them out a lot on walks.
Riess: Did the two of you experiment on your children?
Jones: Once I used Barbara for a learning experience, which required feeding her raisins as a reward. I can't remember anything, except this one
68
little experiment with Barbara.
[tape interruption] I think I left the impression that I had been somewhat disadvantaged by going to Vassar, where there were a lot of people with more status. I thought I should have added that I did have a couple of student committee appointments, and in one case I was in charge of an occupational conference. We had people come to speak about opportunities and professions that were available to women. I did do some things on a leadership level. And Vassar, a woman's col lege then, added measurably to my background and my self-esteem.
Riess: You felt that you left the impression that you were "poor Mary." Jones: Yes, but I didn't do too badly.
68a
Human Development Research
Landmark Project Marks Half Century
BERKELEY — Three hun- families and public agencies dred California™ are celebrat- make informed decisions about ing an unusual anniversary this raising children, year— a half century of shar- But as the -participants ma- ing their lives with 'science. tured and grew, so did the
From childhood to middle studies. "With time, the scope
age, they have been observed, has grown to help adults of all
tested, measured, weighed, in- ages make good social, voca-
teryiewed and made the sub- tional (and personal adjust-
jects of both short and long- ments," says Eichom.
term studies. Some 500 research reports
The 300 are the original par- have been produced on topics
ticipants in a landmark re- ^ diverse as the development
search project at the Univer- of egO> the effects of the de-
sity of California at Berkeley's pression years on children,
Institute of Human Develop- marital happiness and patterns
ment. The UC research is the for job and health changes,
first to study systematically This year ^e Institute and
such a large number of people i{J participants are celebrating
for as long as 50 years. ^eiT unusual 50-year union
The work was begun in 1928 w-th an ^niveTS3ir^ lecture se as a study of the normal stages ^ and a ngw book Qn midd]e of human growth and develop-
3£ E£ ' Sh? IS: sm boov, ?«r -^ ™
hom, explains that the project fri Midlife, is scheduled for
was initiated in order to help publication in early 19/9.
69
4. THE LONGITUDINAL STUDIES [interview 4: February 2, 1982]
Getting Started
Riess: We're talking about the longitudinal studies. When did that word first cross anybody's lips?
Jones: I think it must have been Larry Frank who was the executive secretary of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fund. Certainly he agreed that we should be studying people over time.
Riess: Had it been done before?
Jones: Yes, [Lewis M. ] Terman had a study of gifted children. I don't think he called it longitudinal and I don't think he knew, when he started, it was going to be as longitudinal as it was. It's still going on. Robert Sears was one of the subjects and then he became a director. Harold consulted Terman and Terman sent him graduate students, Harold Carter and Mildred Earley (later Conrad), to work at the Institute.
Riess: Larry Frank got the idea in talking with people like Harold or Stolz?
Jones: No, I think he had the idea before he came out here to set up the In stitute.
Riess: I wondered whether the idea of longitudinal studies had evolved out of the work that was being done.
Jones: I would say it did. We needed research to tell us more about chil dren. Then after we got going we realized we needed to watch the same people over time.
Riess: So there was a kind of newness to it. Jones: Yes, I would say so.
70
Riess: When the nursery school was started, how did it fit into the whole proposal?
Jones: This was a national movement to begin studying and teaching children, before they got to public school age, before five. It was important to know what was happening to them in the earlier years. Then also, the Second World War brought the need for child care.
Riess: Looking at the Institute of Child Welfare bulletins, the first bul letin [Parents Bulletin No. 1 ] that came out was a description of the nursery school. The second bulletin, unlike the first one, which is all pictures of children and descriptions of when they have their juice and everything, the second one is a description of the studies that have begun and I wondered what happened between bulletin one and bulletin two. In other words, what was the process? You came out here and a nursery school somehow began, and then suddenly a whole lot of people were doing research.
Jones: Nancy Bayley was brought in to study children, their motor abilities, mental abilities, and their relationships, parent and child. The nur sery school was an essential part of the research program. It took longer to get the other research projects going. Harold brought in Jean Macfarlane to start a study of normal children. As she says, she had been working with problem children, but what were normal, how many problems did normal children have, and why shouldn't we look at normal children? They've concentrated a good deal on interviewing the parents about their parent-child and faaily relationships. Actually Jean was instrumental in getting the Institute at Berkeley. She knew Larry Frank in the East, roomed with his sister-in-law Elizabeth Bryant in Boston, stayed with the Franks when she was in New York. I believe Larry's first contacts with the University were through Jean.
After we got going — I think I've told you this — Larry Frank said it's going to take too long to get to adolescents — let's start with a pre-adolescent group. So we started the Adolescent Growth Study, (now the Oakland Growth Study). We started with ten-year-olds. Our group, the Oakland Growth Study people are about eight years older than the Guidance and Berkeley Growth Study people.
Riess: It's interesting for you to say, "and Larry Frank told us that we should do this." Who makes these decisions and how, that's what I'm really trying to get at. In the studies that you're responsible for, did you decide the areas you wanted to work in?
Jones: Yes, one of the things I worked on first was the rate of maturing and how this affected people. Harold said, "Look, Nancy Bayley 's doing x-rays of the wrists to get a skeletal age for these people, and you're observing them in school and in social situations and seeing what happens as they go through puberty. It would be interesting for you and Nancy to work together on this." So the first article that
71
came out on early and late maturing was Nancy's and mine.
Then I went on with that all the way through their growth until they were adults. Paul Mussen and I published several joint articles. My last article was based on my presidential address to Division 7 of the American Psychological Association. [The later careers of boys who were early- or late-maturing. Child Development, 1957, 28, 113- 128.]
When we were planning our latest book, Present and Past in Middle Life, I wanted to write again on personality as related to early or late maturing, but the editors said, "There'll be other books, you can do it later. [Both laugh] Better do the one on drinking."
Riess: How often did you refer back to Larry Frank? When Harold, and Herbert Stolz, had new ideas for research or anything, did they check them out with Larry Frank?
Jones: Not necessarily, but he often came out with ideas. I'm sure you've heard this story. When Frank first came and talked to President Camp bell, an astronomer, he wasn't sure he was interested in starting an institute. According to Jean Macfarlane, Frank said to Campbell, "All right, I'll go down to Stanford." That made the decision, because Cal wasn't going to let Stanford get the money, [laughter]
The Nursery School
Riess: You mentioned that there was that monthly meeting with parents and teachers.
Jones: I knew Herbert through that. It was through Herbert that I got the job. He wanted me to be a research associate and he's always been very supportive of me.
Riess: If it weren't for that fact, what would your role have been, do you think?
Jones: Well, you see, before we came Harold said, "I will consider it if there's going to be a job for Mary." [President William Wallace] Camp bell came to our house in New York and talked to us. He said there would be a job, but all there was at first was just this parent educa tion connection. That's all I did the first year. Then when the nur sery school got settled, they brought in a head nursery school teach er, but I was doing quite a bit of research in the nursery school. It was Herbert who got me an appointment as research associate. When Harold died, Herbert said, "I think they should put you in as director" — which of course never happened. But I just wanted to tell
72
you that Herbert was always supportive of me.
Riess: In the first bulletin it stated that the aims of the nursery school were first of all, the welfare of children; secondly, a lab for the study of child development by experts; third, to collect information on child training for use in parent education; and fourth, to offer the University students an opportunity for directed observation.
That's been consistently the direction?
Jones: Yes. The research is quite extensive right now. Here, Fall of 1981 [reading off of a calendar/brochure], this indicates the people who are doing research in the Institute Nursery School. The departments involved were psychology, sociology, education, men's and women's phy sical education and the medical school.
Riess: What kind of people brought their children when they heard that there was a full day nursery school?
Jones: There were a lot of faculty, and I have said somewhere that the Sproul's younger son John was one of the children in an early group. My daughter was there. The secretary of the psychology department, Mrs. Tooley, had her little boy Bill there. Bill has become a physi cian, and he has been one of the physicians who has examined the study members as they come back for physicals.
Riess: A very close tie all the way around. So University people would have heard about this first, probably, anyway.
Jones: Yes, and there may have been notices in the paper. I would say they
were people who were kind of in the upper strata, who were in parent
education or that sort of thing. In other words it wasn't like the
child care centers, where children were brought so that mothers could go to work.
Riess: Did that mean then that there was a high degree of parent involvement?
Jones: Yes, but this was not a cooperative nursery school. The parents
didn't help in the nursery school, but there were meetings at least
once a month. There were interviews with parents and that sort of thing.
Riess: I noticed, for instance, in the description of the LeConte home, where the nursery school was first housed, that parents could observe from cloisters. I was interested in whether the practice of observing your children was something that the parents did a lot of.
Jones: No, I don't remember that they did a great deal of observing, but they could if they wanted to.
Riess: Nursery schools are often the first place where parents really begin a kind of social life of their own, in some nursery school situations. I just wondered how this nursery school functioned in that way.
Jones: Well, probably not as much as in a cooperative nursery school for ex ample.
Riess: What is this little conditioning thing of "hang up your coat, go to the potty and have a glass of water?"
Jones: Is this in the report?
Riess: Yes, they said that that's the day's routine. It was rather nice the way they presented it, but I wondered what school of thinking that was?
Jones: Actually the first thing they did was to be sure the children didn't have colds.
Well, I think this was just the way we started nursery schools in the East and it was a pattern that went across the country.
Riess: A year later, when the numerous projects were under way, who was actu ally administering the whole thing at that point? Was it Harold or was it Herbert?
Jones: Both. Harold got Nancy Bayley here and Herbert Conrad, for example.
Riess: Who did people go to, to talk about their work, for instance? I mean if Nancy wanted to talk to somebody about her work, about what kind of data she was getting, and confer with somebody.
Jones: It would depend upon what you talked about. Dr. Stolz was the physi cian, and if she'd wanted to talk about medical things, she would have gone to Herbert Stolz. I think if she wanted to talk about the meas urement of abilities, she would have talked to Harold.
Riess: They were both there full time?
Jones: I don't know whether Herbert was there full time, I think he continued part-time with the State Department of Education. Harold was part- time teaching, in the psychology department.
Cooperating with Other Departments
Riess: I noticed also in the very early days there was a lot of interdepart mental stuff, cooperative studies with the Department of Hygiene, and
74
so on. Who would initiate that?
Jones: If it was in psychology, Harold would have been the person who made the association. If it was public health, it would have been Herbert. They worked together. I really am not quite sure how the administra tive job was divided. But I would say it was partly on the basis of the disciplines. Herbert's book, that he and Lois wrote, is on physi cal development. [Somatic Development of Boys. New York: Macmillan, 1951.]
Riess: What I'm wondering is, were you adding research staff each time you
worked with another department? Think of nutritional research, the
Department of Household Science. Did Agnes Faye Morgan come and use the Institute as a place for her research?
Jones: Yes, and brought in students. Of course Catherine Landreth, director of the nursery school, came in through the Department of Home Econom ics. The Education Department wanted me to teach a course in nursery school education and Agnes Faye Morgan felt that Landreth1 s course was covering that, and that there shouldn't be another one. She had an influential part in the program.
Riess: There was such a web; you could hardly jettison the Institute because it had so many connections.
Jones: This is still very important. The new director, Ed Swanson, is par ticularly interested in involving departments, and the University feels that this is important.
Academic Appointments and Tenure
Jones: As I have often said, I'm sure, you can't get tenure through just an appointment at the Institute. You have to get your tenure through academic departments. So one of the great problems of our Institute is to keep people who aren't on the ladder in departments.
Nathan Shock, when he was brought here, taught in the Physiology Department. But I think there was a question of tenure. The same with Herbert Conrad; he taught in the Education Department. Both men went on to important positions with the federal government.
Riess: Do you think that the reason they didn't get tenure was because so much of their time was Institute-related that they couldn't do what was required in their department?
Jones: In my case I was offered a position in the Education Department only if I would take it full time. The dean implied that he wanted to be
75
sure my commitment was to the Department of Education. Now Harold Carter, on the other hand, who was doing work with us, got tenure in the Education Department and stayed. Apparently they needed someone with his background at the time. I couldn't get a teaching position until way into the '50s. I went in after Edna Bailey retired. They offered me a job, and I didn't want full time. They wouldn't take me until I would sign up for full time.
Twins, Fears, Colds, Birth order
Riess: Harold was involved with twin studies. Tell me about his twin stu dies.
Jones: I remember especially that he worked with Paul Wilson, who was a gra duate student and who got his degree, I think, on a twin project. Harold Carter was also working on a twin project. Harold published with them on twin studies, but I think he directed or supervised rath er than actually doing the data collection.
Riess: How did he begin?
Jones: Well, if they were people who came into the Institute, if they were twins who came in, he saw them. But a lot of these twins, of course, were not in the Institute then. Of course the difference between identical and fraternal twins was important. In fact my son-in-law, Kenneth Coates, who is a fraternal twin, was surveyed but they're not as interesting as identical twins, [laughter] only as comparisons.
Riess: People are still doing things with twins that have been separated at birth and brought up in various parts of the country.
Jones: I'm sure they were all familiar with the literature too, and there's quite a bit of literature on twins.
Riess: I see you continued to do studies of fear. You and Harold had pub lished something on fear in CAL Monthly in 1930.
Jones: Yes, but that was based on research we did back East. Riess: You did a study of colds. Jones: Yes, with Herbert Conrad.
Riess: Do you remember anything about that data, because of course that's very interesting, I think.
Jones: The general conclusion was that especially because of the cyclical na-
76
ture of our data, colds were due to infection. We gave some recommendations — isolation, wash toys, etc.
Riess: That would have been observations in the nursery school?
Jones: Yes, that would be the nursery school and also in the Childrens' Com munity Nursery School, a cooperative in Berkeley.
Riess: I wonder if you can remember anything about this Chinese gentleman, Mr. Hsiao who studied birth order? He appeared to be trying to prove something about firstborn and I.Q.
Jones: Let me get you something, [gets scroll] This tells about him. He was a fellow of the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture, and his publication was "The Status of the Firstborn with Special Reference to Intelligence." Yes, he was a good friend of ours.
[ Jones is talking from another part of the room, where she had been reading from the scroll, and then takes out something else.] I have another little thing he gave us. Isn't that lovely? He went back to China and he sent us these things after he got back and Harold was in touch with him. Then the revolution came along and we never heard from him again. We thought he'd been liquidated, but just last year there was a Chinese, Professor Ching, over here from Peking University. I met him at Paul Mussen's house and asked him if he knew anything about Hsiao. He said that Hsiao continued to live — he's dead now — and that he introduced Gestalt psychology into China, [laughter] This is the latest I've heard about Hsiao.
Riess: Of course it's wonderful to think he had all of this data 'in the late '20s, and that China now is rewarding people for only having one child, and they can always cite his studies at the Institute. Did anyone else work in that field?
Jones: Nancy Bayley was interested in birth order, and Jean Macfarlane has some data on birth order. His interest was more especially on intel ligence, and there are also personality differences that have been re ported. There is other data.
Riess: The very idea of coming with that bias of looking for a greater degree of intelligence.
Jones: I'm not sure that he came with the idea. It may have been that Harold suggested it, I don't know.
77
Interviewing
Riess: Some research at the Institute must have been more "scientific" than other. Was that important?
Jones: I think of Harold and Nathan Shock first as persons who concentrated on psycho-physiological studies.
Riess: Maybe the farthest away from Nathan Shock and Harold would be the peo ple who did personal interviews.
Jones: Clinical interviews, yes, and observations. Of course some scientists think this is not scientific. There's always been this feeling about just observing people and asking them questions and so forth. Then the whole business of questionnaires — now we did a lot of that in the Oakland Growth Study, because they were all in the same school and we could get group tests in the classrooms. It was not done to anything like the same extent in the Guidance Study. They did get reputation measures. That is, they had pupils write down who was like this or that, rating each other in the classroom. For example: Here is some one who likes to talk a lot, always has something to say; or, someone whom everybody likes, others are glad to have him around. This was done for the Guidance Study and also for the Oakland Growth Study.
Now it also depends upon whether it's a psychologist or a sociol ogist, to some extent. John Clausen, sociologist, sends out question naires on smoking, occupation, etc. You'll see in this latest book John Clausen's chapter. He bases a good deal of the findings on ques tionnaires.
For this last program we send out questionnaires and get answers in addition to personal interviews. We try to limit the follow-up visit to a one-day program. Even that's a very heavy program, nine to five.
Riess: What's your own personal style when you're working, interviewing and note taking?
Jones: I can observe. I think I'm a pretty good observer, because I've had a
lot of experience, watching children in groups and then describing
behavior and rating them afterwards. I've used the results from ques tionnaires.
I was going to ask if you were interested in these findings from when they were young people, their attitudes toward various things — smoking, drinking, appearance, use of lipstick and so forth. I've written this up with examples of how they behave. I've written but not published one article called, "In the Eye of the Beholder", which has to do with their getting their first permanents and using lipstick
78
for the first time. This is tied in with a questionnaire that asked them about their attitudes toward these issues.
One important approach has been Jack Block's Q-sort. [Block, J. The Q-sort Method _in Personality Assessment and Psychiatric Research. Springfield, 111.: Charles C. Thomas, 1961.] Clinicians read the voluminous background data and then rate these people on these hundred items on the Q-sort. That's the way it's used now. Jack doesn't have a chapter in the book, but a lot of people who worked with the Q-sort have referred to it, for example [Flo] Livson and [Harvey] Peskin's and my chapters.
Riess: When you first went into a situation and were taking notes and inter viewing and so on, how did you figure a style? Was that something you learned in your seminars with Woodworth, or from your peers?
Jones: Now in the nursery school, Herbert Conrad was here, and he made out a rating scale to use in observing in the nursery school. We used the same sort of thing. Caroline Tryon was on our staff, she'd written a monograph on the adolescent peer group. She and Harold worked out a questionnaire and rating scale which we used during the school years.
Riess: What about room for your own very personal opinions about something, above and beyond?
Jones: After we rated, we wrote personal statements. Riess: How is that accessible?
Jones: That's all part of what the clinicians read and rate. When we went on excursions with this group, the staff got together afterwards and we'd concentrate on one person. Each staff person would say what they had seen that person doing and that was all written down. That's all in the records, but unfortunately it has to be translated into ratings in order to be made into data.
That's one of the other things, you see: we have to be very care ful about individual descriptions. In my chapter on drinking I have quoted, to some extent, from what people have said. I've been very careful to quote people who are dead, mostly. This is what you have to be very careful about.
We would love to do more case histories, I think they're the most important part of this program. But it's just practically impossible. In fact everybody who comes in now signs something, saying that his data can be used. But a person might say this year that it's all right to use this , and a year from now he might change his mind , and it could be a problem. We are talking now about the possibility of using some case material, and using the person himself to be a co author. In other words, we would like to use some more personal and
79
individual material.
I think I mentioned that at the last reunion some of them felt that they would like to have more input. On our questionnaires we have asked: Is there anything special that you would like us to in clude in the interviews which are coming up? Some of them made suggestions of certain subjects that they'd like to discuss.
The "Lunch Study"
Riess : In a symposium in 1969 you included some of the subjects on stage, talking about themselves. How did that work and how did you decide which ones?
Jones: The man I chose is a pediatrician. I thought he was the kind of per son who was identified with the study, who knew what it was about and would be able to present this in a talk. He's just been in for the follow-up, this man. (Maybe this is a diversion, but I have lunch with them [the sixty year old Growth Study members]). He's been in recently and he asks me questions about Harold, about Nathan Shock, Herbert Stolz, and Judith Chaffey. This is good stuff and I write it down, you see, afterwards. I write down what they've talked about and whom they've mentioned and how many of the other study members they've mentioned and how interested they are in what we're doing, and where they fit in.
Riess: So, you see whether they mention anyone, then which people are impor tant to them.
Jones: Which people in the study they remember. Some of them remember a dozen or more and some don't remember more than one or two. This tells you a good deal about them, you see. Then I get to see them as couples. Now there's a chapter in the book on marriage, and one of the things the author Skolnick says is that they talk to these people separately. They don't observe couples together. Well, I only ob serve them during the noon hour, but I do get a little feeling of their relationship to each other as couples. I write this up and I hope this is going to add something.
For example, one couple who came in, he's retired — and this is true of many retired couples that I know who are not in the study — and she uses the telephone and he's at home all the time and it annoys him. And he told me this. "Now what are they going to do about it?" I said, "I know another couple who had this problem and they got separate phones." He said, "Well, we could get an extension, we could put an extension upstairs." [laughter] This kind of thing.
80
One husband also told me — I knew this — that Herbert Stolz had sent the men their nude pictures. Pictures were taken of the boys in the nude every six months in adolescence. They were sent copies of these pictures later in life. This man said to me, "I have never shown my wife these pictures of me in the nude." This tells you some thing, doesn't it?
Riess : Maybe you don't know what it tells you, but it tells you something.
Jones: At least I write it down. You see, I try to avoid anything that I think the interviewers are getting. They have two interviews during this day. One is called a structured interview, which talks about their jobs and their children. The other is a clinical interview, which is more personal. Then they have lots of tests. I try not to cover that sort of thing, mine's all spontaneous.
Riess: So yours is just taking care of the relational part of the whole study?
Jones: Public relations is what I hope I do. [laughs] I am now the one to give them their copy of the book. Some ask me to autograph them. Then I write a short note of appreciation to them.
Riess: I don't mean just, but —
Jones: Yes, but that's what I'm doing. But I think I do get a little data out of it. I must tell you I haven't written up, but I decided I should, which of the people embrace me, the men and the women. It's their pattern, it hasn't anything really to do with me, but some are very effusive and some just shake hands.
Riess: Do they call you Mary or Dr. Jones?
Jones: Some of them call me Mary and some of them call me "Doctor." I always say, "After all these years I'm 'Mary.' ' But it isn't easy for some people, you know, to change and this is interesting.
Riess: If you're interviewing both halves of the couple — Jones: I'm not interviewing, I'm just talking to them.
Riess: Just talking, okay. But one half you know from the study and the oth er half you know, from since when?
Jones: If they came to reunions. Also, I interviewed most of them in their homes in the early 1960s. They were interviewed, they're in this book, [laughter]
Sometimes the husbands and wives come in separately. They can't come at the same time. One woman came in — her husband had been in —
81
and I had a feeling that because she was only the wife she found it a little more difficult to talk intimately. I had a feeling that she was afraid of giving away maybe some things that he wouldn't have talked about. I just wonder how they feel about coming in as a spouse. Apparently having been associated with this study makes some of the study members feel very, very close to the thing and feel that what they're doing is very important, and they take it very seriously. They come in to work from nine to five. You know, it's a long hard day. I'd wondered how the spouses feel about it.
Riess: Have you pursued it with any of them?
Jones: Yes, and some of them complain about how long and hard it is. .I/jo only there during the noon hour. Once in a while, I happen to be there when they're leaving. I try not to be, because there's a schedule: somebody greets them, and at the end they sign something which says that this can be used, so I try to be away when this is go ing on. But once in a while I happen to be around when they're leav ing or when they're waiting in the waiting room for something else to happen, and a couple of them have complained about how hard it's been. In fact they've had to cut the program down a little bit because it ran too late.
Riess: I guess maybe you haven't completely figured out yet why people keep coming back and back and back.
Jones: I mentioned this to Millie Almy who's in the Education Department and on the advisory council of the Institute. I said, "I don't know why they are willing to come back." She said she was associated with a study similar to this at Harvard for a while, the Stewart study. She said there was a woman who was in an auto accident about a hundred miles away from Cambridge and she phoned back to Dr. Stewart to ask for a good physician in the town where she'd been injured. Millie said there's something about these studies that people feel is impor tant, and their associations with the staff are really of value.
Riess: Would you go even further to say something about how people like more organization in their life?
Jones: Yes, they like to talk about their problems and their attitudes. It gives them a chance.
Helping the Study Members
Riess: Compared to the general population, people who would be sixty years
old today wouldn't be among the most psychologically enlightened, would they?
82
Jones: No, it wasn't the thing then, the way it is now, to belong to EST or — [laughs]
Riess : But now, do you think compared to the general population, your sixty- year-olds are fairly hip about themselves and these psychological processes, and about what's being looked for?
Jones: It depends pretty much upon their individual experience. People who have had problems tend to be more hip, because they've had to do some thing about it.
Riess: Maybe your people have been able to go out and seek help more effec tively.
Jones: They have, some of them. This is one of the things we know about them, which ones have sought help.
Riess: As a long term positive effect, you reared a population of people who know how to seek help?
Jones: I'm amazed at some people, who even at this stage don't face them selves, don't know how to talk about themselves, and others who just let it flow out. Of course, there is everything in between.
Riess: In that noon hour, how free do you feel to facilitate that talking it out, for those who seem to have difficulty?
Jones: I try not to interfere with what the clinician is doing, the inter viewers. But I think we often get to some problems, and individual problems. I'm especially interested in their relationships to their parents who are still living and those who put their parents in nurs ing homes, and their attitude about this. You know, there's a three generation, in fact a four generation, in some cases, spread. I'm not only interested in what their youngsters are doing, but also what they're doing with their parents and their attitudes toward them.
Riess: You knew those parents too.
Jones: Sure. There aren't many of them left, but I know them.
Riess: It sounds fascinating to be an observer.
Jones: Oh, yes. I feel like I couldn't have had a better life [laughs] in regard to my job.
Riess: I was going to ask you, what was the most satisfying thing in your life?
Jones: My family came first, but the job certainly has been very important. I never thought too much about having a career, it just kind of hap-
pened, and it's been just wonderful. The same about annuity, it's wonderful to have. I mean when I was working I didn't think this was going to add up to money in my old age, but it has.
Riess: That is reassuring.
Jones: Yes. [laughs] In addition, I get an annuity as a widow. I'm not wealthy, but I'm not worried about money. But I didn't think much about this when we were working, that wasn't why I was working at all. As I say, I wouldn't work full time until it seemed a good thing to do.
Riess: What parts of it were drudgery in the work?
Jones: I guess, writing it up. The actual contacts were fun, but I would say that writing stuff up is work, I don't enjoy writing.
Riess: Have you thought about how the whole thing has affected you?
Jones: I think I know a lot of people, and a lot of kinds of people, that I never would have known otherwise. I think it gives me a better, I hope, a better understanding of mankind. Even though our group was white and predominantly middle class.
Riess: If you saw in the study somebody who was really in trouble, what did you do?
Jones: Judy Chaffey was the person, she was their counselor. I would say that we usually turned over problems that we knew about to her.
There was a woman in last week who used to think that she was not very bright, and she would express this as a "dumb thing like me." She didn't tell me but she told the interviewer this time, that she had dyslexia, which is" not being able to see words properly, and that she didn't discover this until ten years ago. Now, whether we should have discovered this, or whether anybody could have discovered it way back then, I don't know. But this we feel badly about, that we weren't helpful. She didn't tell it to me, so I wasn't able to find out, but probably the interviewer found out how she discovered it and if it really is true and so forth.
What I do when I prepare for seeing them — I have somebody today at 11:45, a couple — we've had these newsletters prepared for each reunion, and I go over those and refresh my mind on what they did dur ing the war and so forth. Then I get out pictures of them from child hood and from the reunions if they came and then I show them these. Sometimes they'll say, "Oh, I never saw that picture before. I wish I had that one." Then I'll get them a copy. Those who have had di vorces, or children who have had problems, I have to be careful what I say, but at least I know something about their background, when I meet
84
with them.
Riess: So, that's something about the emotional involvement. I guess these people really aren't "cases" for you at all. What I was thinking is that sometimes you might "be unable to act in whatever your appropriate role was. Not that you couldn't figure out what to do with the person's problems, but that you realized that you were acting more like somebody's mother than somebody's observer. Within the Institute was there some sort of system for helping you sort that out, or deal with that?
Jones: In the case of the people in the Oakland Growth Study, we saw them al most every day and I think we acted like mothers, whether we should have or not. That's been a big question: what has being in this study done to these people. For example, they had intelligence tests after intelligence tests — does the practice effect show? In general, ap parently, it doesn't. [Present and Past, p. 144]. But that is a question: how much should you change their lives when you're studying them?
Riess: Was that a question that you addressed at the time, systematically?
Jones: No, I don't think we did. I think we were human beings, we couldn't. I think we hoped that we had done something useful. Judith Chaffey, when she was counseling, was very helpful. There were young boys who had no idea they could go to college, they couldn't afford it. She found out how to get them scholarships, jobs or something. Harold and I infrequently gave garden jobs to boys.
I don't think you can be standoffish in a situation like that.
According to this [book] it hasn't made any difference in their intelligence, their ability to answer questions on tests. Jean Macfarlane has a group who had been interviewed and a group who had not been interviewed.
Riess: I