Autobiography
of R. A. Katzell
If I had to name the single most
important factor that shaped my career I would have to say Circumstance. Or call
it, if you prefer, Opportunity, Luck, Chance, or God's will. That is, not to say
that other processes don't count. For example, Hard Work. A modicum of talent
doesn't hurt, either. And people are of course important, as instruments of
circumstance.
But without opportunity, all the
effort and planning in the world would count for naught. It is the necessary
condition through which other factors must operate. In my view of work
performance, Opportunity is a moderator variable which takes on values of 0 or
1.
Speaking of people, as I just did,
this conclusion which I draw out of my personal experience coincides with that
of two of the major influences in my life. One was a man of science, my
principal mentor Douglas Fryer, who early in his career investigated the role of
interests in vocational adjustment. Somewhere in his writings, after analyzing
a number of case histories, he noted that chance far more than often than plan
shaped vocational choice.
And in its small way, my life also
affirms the insight of that giant of literature, Leo Tolstoy, who viewed human
strivings as but elements in a grand design.
I am of course, to a large degree
the psychological creation of those and other teachers: a father who instilled
the value of knowledge; a mother who kindly but inexorably pressed for
perfection; my first wife, who formed ambition; my present wife, who epitomizes'
love and goodness; my Jewish elders, who transmitted an ancient reverence for
scholarship. But, as I said, these and other people were the instruments of
Circumstance: after all, I didn't choose to be born into a Jewish family. If
given a choice, I wonder how I would have opted!
But let me more specifically describe the
circumstances associated with my career choices
. First, as to how I came to psychology altogether. To do so, I must go back
a bit into my family background. I was born in Brooklyn, New York into what I
suppose might be termed a middle class family. You must realize that what was
middle class in 1919 is different from what it is today. My father owned and
managed a small textile factory. A native of Russia, he lived as a youth in Belgium.
and France before emigrating to New York shortly prior to World War I. Although
his European education carried beyond our secondary school level, he never had
the opportunity to complete the engineering training to which he had aspired. My
mother was raised in Millville, New Jersey and later New York City and, like
most girls of her class at the time, gave no thought to college.
Their mobility aspirations
naturally became lodged in their one and only offspring. At the time little
Jewish boys were expected to climb the socioeconomic ladder either by entering
the family business or a profession. The former route was entertained only if
the business was prosperous, which, in spite of his Herculean labors, my
father's unfortunately was not. This left the professions. In the limited
perspective of most families like mine, this usually meant law, medicine,
accounting, or teaching. Professions like chemistry, architecture mechanical
engineering, or journalism, were somehow beyond the pole.
My earliest recollection of a vocational choice was that of a judge . This
was firmly based on the prognosis of a visitor, who had observed me arranging a
group of my five year old playmates. (For years afterward, when asked by kindly
adults what I was going to be when I grew up, I would assert,
A judge." Of course, I had not the foggiest idea of what that
entailed, but I believed that I would be able to accomplish all sorts of
wondrous things, like procuring for my aged grandmother an electric auto and
liberation of all the draft horses, a kind of equine Emancipator.)
By age 12, when required to write
a school essay on my vocational plans, I had come to realize that one didn't
simply become a judge: preliminaries included completing college and law
school, and serving a period as a lawyer. So for the following two years, my
ambition was to become a lawyer.
Circumstance again intervened. My
father, always a hale specimen, succumbed suddenly at age 42 to complications
following a simple appendectomy. With the demise of my principal supporter, my
career visions at age 14 shifted briefly from law to mendicity, until reassured
by my mother that between my father's life insurance and her intended employment
I would somehow be able to go to college. However, I now resolved to devote my
life to averting additional such tragedies by becoming a doctor. That decision
was doubtless abetted by my having recently seen a motion picture, Symphony of Six Million , in which a New York boy
became a surgeon who achieved fame in spite of his valiant but vain efforts to
save his father's life.
Through high school, I continued
to say that I wanted to become a doctor, although my reasons became increasingly
vague and perfunctory. I enrolled at New York University's University College
partly because a cousin who had attended recommended it as a place to get a good
pre medical education, but more because my best friend was going there and,
moreover, it had the most attractive campus in New York City (I was not about to
leave my mother alone by going to college out of town).
On arriving at N.Y.U. in the fall
of 1935, and being required to select a program of studies, I opted for pre med largely because it seemed less irrelevant than
any thing else I could choose. But, by the end of my first semester, the idea of
becoming a college professor had taken root. I still have no explanation of why.
No one among my family or friends was in education. Had I read Upton Sinclair's The
Goose Step it would have confirmed my impression that this was a field to
which Jews would be well advised not to aspire. Perhaps it was because my
professors (all men) served as father figures in my young life, which for
several years had lacked close contact with an adult male.
In any event, I remember looking
up my freshman history teacher
one day after class to ask how one became a college professor. That was in
the depths of the Great Depression and he, being both sympathetic and untenured,
replied with difficulty . But then he added some serious advice
and information, which served to strengthen my burgeoning inclination toward
that kind of career.
I remained nominally a pre med for a while longer,
mainly because I was primarily interested in the natural sciences anyway. I
declared Biology as my major, and had visions of doing graduate work in the
field.
It wasn't until my junior year
that I was exposed to Psychology. In those days, it was not one of the standard
subjects. Few of my classmates majored in it and many graduated without even
taking the introductory course. I took it because it was required for
certification as a secondary school teacher in New York, for by then I realized
that I had better hedge my hope of becoming a college professor. I now had three
plans in view: preferably to become a college professor of biology, next to become a
professional research biologist (probably with a government agency), or, failing
the others, to
become a secondary school teacher of biology or general science.
As I proceeded
through my full year introduction course in psychology, I became increasingly
interested in the subject, which was treated with the natural science emphasis
of the day. To no small measure, that interest was due to the stimulating style
of the instructor, Edwin R. Henry, I supplemented by the fact that the course
also featured a lab, afforded an opportunity to get one's hands onto some live
data. The intrinsic interest of the course content was also complemented by some
extrinsic rewards (de Charms, Deci, et al. please note). These comprised two
main sources: top exam grades (high achievement?) and recognition (e.g., Henry
bet cigars with other instructors that I would beat their nominees in the course-wide objective final exam). For my senior year, I registered for enough
psychology to finish with a minor.
By the last term of my senior
year, I began considering doing my graduate work in Psychology, instead of
Biology, again with the idea of using it as a springboard to college teaching.
What finally decided me in that direction was notification by Fryer, then
department chairman, that they were prepared to nominate me for an award in the
N.Y.U. Graduate School if I wished to apply. The combination of intrinsic
interest, recognition, encouragement, and cash was irresistible.
Because my undergraduate background in psychology was rather scanty, I
decided with Fryer's encouragement to take some basic graduate work during the
summer of 1939, which preceded my matriculation in the N.Y.U. Graduate School.
N.Y.U. did not offer such courses, so I enrolled at Columbia in
Experimental Psychology with I.A. Jackson and in Applied
Psychology with A.T. Poffenberger.
Those choices were
prophetic. Experimental psychology represented my prevailing orientation toward
natural science. Applied psychology was a developing thrust at N.Y.U. and I
had picked up some of it from Fryer and A Henry. Like most graduate schools
at the time, N.Y.U. did not offer a course in it, so I wanted to take advantage
of the opportunity to study the subject with Poffenberger, one of its leading
exponents.
Henry later
became President of APA's Division 14 (1956); his premature death in 19-
explains the regrettable absence of his autobiography from this volume.
My With dual interest in experimental and applied psychology was soon to be
ideally realized. That fall Fryer received a grant under a program concerned
with selection and training of aircraft pilots administered by the National
Research Council. I was thrilled to be appointed a research assistant on the
project, which had to do with measuring patterns of muscular activity while
operating simulated aircraft controls. Not only did the work combine my
interests in biological science along with experimental and applied psychology,
but it afforded me an honest to goodness job, and at a university, no less!
I remember excitedly thinking as I walked to the campus on the morning
the appointment was to take effect, Yesterday
I was a nobody; after today I will be Somebody . I considered myself to be
launched at last on my chosen
career. I had recently turned 20.
As I look back on it, I think that my appointment was due not only to my
academic qualifications but to my diligent attitude. I have already mentioned my
decision to improve my preparation through summer study. Another example was my
volunteering to serve as a lab assistant in order to acquire some instructional
experience. I feel sure that such conscientiousness was not unnoticed by the
faculty. But that was not my motive: I think that I genuinely was concerned with
improving my qualifications and fostering my achievement. That motivation has
stayed with me the rest of my life, and I have often taken on assignments, paid
or unpaid, because I believed that I could learn something from them. I recall
an incident some ten years later when my wife to be asked how I had been able to
accomplish so much at my age (she was not unbiased), and I was able to reply,
by doing two or three things at once . While that
Type A" syndrome doubtless has abetted my career, it also cost me a
coronary infraction later in life.
What finally determined the direction of my career, as it did for so many other
psychologists, was World War II.
In 1940, 1 learned that the Navy was appointing junior psychologists as
ensigns. The winds of war were already blowing, so I decided to apply. However, I failed to qualify on medical grounds, a circumstance which
also excluded me
from a later military service and permitted me to conclude my doctoral studies
by 1943. That year, Ed Henry brought to my attention vacancies for civilians as
personnel psychologists in The Adjutant General's Office. Henry was already employed
there, and after the war rose to become its chief psychologist. I applied, was
appointed, and spent the remaining two years of the war in that organization.
AGO was, in effect, the personnel department of the Army, responsible for
devising its personnel policies and procedures, and monitoring their
implementation. It had a similar mission as well for the millions of civilians
employed by various Army offices, arsenals, warehouses, etc., and it was to that
civilian personnel section of AGO, headed by E.E. Cureton, that I was appointed.
This afforded an excellent
opportunity to sharpen my research and consulting skills in personnel
psychology. My job consisted essentially of visiting various field installations
that had indicated an interest in assistance with regard to their personnel
selection, placement, and/or promotion program , and helping to devise,
validate, and install systems that would be of assistance. Apart from the
professional experience, the work contributed to the worldly exposure of the boy
from Brooklyn, since it entailed travel to all parts of the U.S. and contact
with people from diverse backgrounds.
By the time the War was winding
down, I had pretty much decided that I wanted to go back to being a college
teacher (I had attained the exalted status of Instructor during my last year at
N.Y.U., along with a similar position on a part time basis at the City College
of New York). However, I now was clear that I wanted to build on my war time
experience and locate a vacancy expressly in industrial psychology. Thus did the
world of experimental and physiological psychology lose a member.
In the spring of 1945, I learned
of such a vacancy, if memory serves me right, from R. J. Wherry who then was
also at AGO. The position was at the University of Tennessee. It sounded
promising: they were planning to expand a small department, to build up graduate
studies, and to mount a teaching and research program in industrial psychology,
in order to keep pace with the growing industrialization of the region.
I decided to apply, although the idea of relocating to Knoxville held no
personal appeal. After all, the job came first (advice I continue to urge on my
students).
The next three years were spent
there pleasantly and rewardingly. However, I decided not to refuse a similar
opportunity that developed in 1948 at Syracuse University. I think in retrospect
that the main reason was the desire of my wife, whom I had married in 1941, to
be associated with what we then regarded as a more prestigious institution. As
things turned out, it was not a bad decision: as I had hoped, there were more
and better graduate students, a larger, more diversified faculty, and better
opportunities for industrial work. But life personally and professionally had
been going well for me at U.T., and decision might just as well have turned out
to be disadvantageous as otherwise.
Once settled in Syracuse, our
marriage, which had shown occasional signs of instability all along, began to deteriorate
seriously.
As marital matters continued to worsen, circumstance
again intervened this time via Richardson, Bellows, Henry and Co., Inc. That
consulting organization was formed late in 1945 by 13 psychologists (plus one
accountant), most of whom had been associated with AGO or other government
agencies during the War. The idea was to make available to private industry
and peace time government the benefits of wartime experience and research in
personnel psychology. I had been invited to be one of the founding stockholders
and directors, and had been doing occasional work for the organization since its
founding.
After the War, Fryer had returned to N.Y.U., which was undergoing revitalization
in psychology under the leadership first of Lyle Lanier and later of Stuart
Cook. R.B.H. had located its headquarters in New York, so Fryer, also one of the
occasionally engaged directors of the firm, found himself increasingly involved
in its work while also heading up N.Y.U.'s program in industrial psychology. In
1951, R.B.H. proposed to send Fryer overseas for a year to supervise a major project. I
was contacted to come to New York to substitute for him both at R.B.H. and N.Y.U.
This I was glad to do, as a way of gaining some valuable experience as well as
needed income. The possibility of straightening out my deteriorated marital
situation when away from Syracuse also was attractive. So I requested and was
granted a year's leave of absence from Syracuse University to undertake that
dual assignment.
As the year was drawing to an end, R.B.H. proposed that I stay on permanently,
although Fryer was returning to resume his previous relationship with them and
N.Y.U. I was by then heavily involved in some interesting projects, principally
with General Electric as a client, which I was reluctant to discontinue. Also I
learned that Syracuse was not yet prepared to effect a sorely needed integration
of its fragmented faculty and programs in psychology. So the move was made
permanent, although with Fryer's return my association with N.Y.U. was reduced
to occasional teaching of a graduate course in industrial psychology as an
adjunct associate professor.
By
now my substantive interests had become strongly oriented toward applied social
psychology to what more recently has become known as
organizational psychology. I was now working on leadership and
supervision, on employee attitudes, on community relations, and on work
motivation. This movement was by no
means idiosyncratic, since the whole I/O field had been growing in that direction
and away from the differential psychometric tradition which had been dominant between
the two great ways. That growth illustrated a thesis which I advanced in 1964(?)
at an APA symposium chaired by the editor of the present volume. My contention
was then (and still is) that I/O psychology undergoes fashions which reflect the
cultural ambiance of the times--that it (like I suppose most or all other fields of knowledge) follows,
more than it leads, intellectual developments. I therefore counseled my
colleagues that, being
aware of this, we should more deliberately devote at least some of our attention
to futurism, to anticipating problems, needs, opportunities and directions in
the years ahead. Even if we don't do this collectively, it is something which
young psychologists should in their individual professional lives attempt to do.
Let's not just be ripples stirred by the times, but parties to making the waves
of the future.
By this time (1952) my wife and I
had decided to dissolve our marriage, it not having been helped by our
relocation. I was still occasionally returning to Syracuse to complete work on a
sponsored research project, and on those occasions was
associated with a young female psychologist who had been an
administrative assistant while I was director of the University's Psychological
Services Center. She now claims that she had made herself indispensable. In any
event, after my divorce in 1953, Mildred and I were married, whereupon she
became known as Kitty . She
later completed her doctorate in psychological measurement at Columbia, and is
currently a staff consultant at the Psychological Corporation and also
a prominent member of Division 14 of APA.
Some have counseled against marrying a person in the
same profession, but our experience would lead to the opposite conclusion.
The experience at R.B.H. was
priceless. It embraced the gamut of issues, covering selection, performance
rating, individual appraisal, job analysis and evaluation, leader behavior,
training and development, employee and managerial attitudes, work motivation,
and community relations. Clients were diverse; in addition to G.E., they
included Esso Standard oil, Seagrams Distillers, Pillsbury, Mills, Standard
Pressed Steel, Architectural Tiling, Mesabe and Iran Range Railroad, and several
government and military agencies. The problems ranged in level from immediate
application to long range R & D. Some even lent themselves to publication.
The variety of challenges confronting a practicing
I/O psychologists constitute a cogent argument for breadth of training and
experience. We are perhaps the last generalists in an increasingly fragmented
discipline.
Like all jobs, this me had
its drawbacks in addiction to its assets. As a vice president and member of the
firm's management, I had to concern myself with meeting a payroll in addition to
technical problems; also, work frequently involved protracted periods away from
home. And the constant pressure on a consultant to be billable meant that there was insufficient time to
renew intellectual capital by extensively reading the technical literature.
Nevertheless, the plusses continued to outweigh
the minuses, and I remained in this post for a period of six years without
growing restless. This time, it was my Alma Mater (in more ways than one) which
intervened. Fryer had died a few years before and they decided now to rebuild
the doctoral program in Industrial Psychology, one of the nation's oldest. The plan was
to develop a cooperative program of research and education between the Graduate
School of Arts and Science and the School of Engineering, and I was invited to
head it up under a joint appointment between the two schools. Although the
salary fell short of what I was earning at RBH, I accepted anyway, thereby
confirming Maslow's prepotency theory of motives. Throughout my
years in industry, I had always thought of myself as a professor on leave, and
this seemed like an ideal opportunity to return. The year was 1957.
The decision was a sound one for
me. My career has flourished reasonably well, I think; I have a sense of
fulfillment and job satisfaction; on the behavioral level, I have decline
overtures regarding possible moves elsewhere.
There remain three more things I'd like to tell pertaining
to the following two decades plus: my areas of research and scholarship, my involvement in
professional affairs, and my stint as department head.
In recent years my substantive
interests have centered around two subjects. The principal one concerns worker
motivation, attitudes, and satisfaction. I
have already explained that this interest took wing in the post War Zeitgeist
of democracy and humanitarianism. That interest has persisted in me for more
than 25 years, although, more recently it expanded to comprehend organizational
in addition to into a group and job related factors.
The second focus took hold in the mid 1960's and remains somewhat active.
I refer to psychological problems associated with employment of disadvantaged
groups, especially problems of selection and motivation. As in the case of the
first topic, my involvement in this one was also stimulated by external
circumstances. Like most psychologists, I was always ideologically opposed to
discrimination against people on grounds of race, religion, sex, or national
origin. And, like most of them, I did nothing in my professional work to
implement that attitude. My consciousness of these issues was raised by many
events, but let me mention, just three principal ones.
First, when I became head of the
N.Y.U. Psychology Department in 1963, the departmental administrative assistant
was a Negro women named Gustavia Pagan. Her involvement in the burgeoning civil
rights movement served to heighten my awareness of and interest in the
psychological, as well as moral dimensions of the issues.
Second were conversations
initiated by my colleague, Richard Barrett, regarding the question of whether
selection techniques such as psychological tests were in fact equally valid and
fair for use with various ethnic groups. Recognizing that the issue was
important both technically and socially, and that there was little published
research evidence bearing on it, we decided that we would attempt to obtain a
grant for an investigation of it. This support was given by the Ford Foundation
for a study compiling and analyzing relevant data already available in
company records. The results were published in 1968 in a monograph entitled Testing
and Fair Employment, co authored with our collaborators J.T. Kirkpatrick and
R.B. Ewen, and probably the first comprehensive survey of the subject. The
principal implication, that employment tests may not always work the same way in
all ethnic groups, still stirs controversy among psychologists. Whatever the
final answer, I'm glad that we helped bring the issue to light.
The third event was an invitation
issued in 1967 by Richard Shore of the U.S. Department of Labor to join a panel
to advise on the content of an order on how personnel testing should be
conducted in order to comply with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act Of 1964. The
Labor Department later established a standing Advisory Committee on Testing and
Selection, which I co chaired with Howard Lockwood. That Committee played an
important role in drafting the OFCC testing orders of 1968 and 1971, as well as
the more widely known EEOC guidelines of 1970 in collaboration with William
Enneis. These were the beginnings of a series of involvements in various
committees, advisory groups, consultancies, and court cases concerning testing
in relation to equal employment opportunity.
Another aspect of my life at N.Y.U.
took place between 1963 and 1972, when I served as Head of the Department of
Psychology. Stuart Cook, who had been instrumental in rebuilding the Department
from 1950 to 1963, decided that after all those years it was time to fulfill a
family commitment to locate in the wide open spaces, which New York could not
quite provide. I accepted with some misgivings the proposal of the search
committee that succeeded him. I knew that it was a massive administrative
responsibility, with a faculty of some 40 fulltime members, about 200 doctoral
students several hundred undergraduate majors divided between two centers, plus
sundry research programs, clinics, shops and other fulcra of activity, each with
its associated agenda, staff, finances, and problems; to do this would necessarily
entail a major reduction in my teaching and research activities, including
severing my tie with Engineering. But someone had to do it, and no well qualified alternative was in view, so I decided to give it a try. I also had a
vague idea, like Douglas McGregor did when he took the Antioch president, that
it might serve as a kind of laboratory for testing my views on organizational
psychology. Besides, there is something irresistible, I suspect, about heading
the department where one was once a student!
The assignment turned out to be even
more of a challenge than I had thought. During
the first part of my tenure, opportunities abounded to obtain much needed
funding for programs and facilities.
Accordingly, I found myself embroiled
in applications, site visits, and negotiations both within and outside
the University. Fortunately there was some tangible payoff to all this, which,
of course, was additional to the normal administrative routines. A major
building was renovated and equipped so that the Department at long last had
first class laboratories, offices, and classrooms; a number of visible, active
people and also some very promising juniors were recruited to the faculty;
grants were obtained or received for graduate training in several specialty
areas; some important research was funded and completed; the undergraduate
program was revised, etc. In short, we built on
the solid foundations of a good department that had been constructed during the
post War years.
As the decade of the '60's was drawing to a close, a
new set of challenges emerged. This was the period when America was
greening , when faculty and students everywhere were questioning
the established order and N.Y.U. was no exception. Administrators (including chairmen)
were beleaguered by innumerable perplexing issues over and beyond those with which they normally had to
deal.
These two sets of incremental
burdens enlivened my life, but they took even more time and attention away from
my primary professional concerns than I had been prepared to give. Although I always
kept a finger in some scholarly project or other, it was usually at the expense
of what I should have been devoting to other things (like my health and
recreation); moreover, the quality was not always what I would have wanted it to
be. When in the early 170's a third type of challenge arose on the horizon--the financial crunch on higher education--I decided that I had had enough of administration and that it was time to
get back to being a full time gentleman and scholar. However, although I am
sometimes wistful about what might have been had I been able fully to pursue my
technical work during those nine years, on balance I feel that they were useful.
I learned a lot about managing and about human nature is in vivo, and
still derive considerable vicarious satisfaction from the attainments of my
department and students.
The final set of activities that
might be worth describing are those concerned with professional affairs.
Although they amounted to something of a groundswell during my N.Y.U. period, my
earliest involvement was when, as a graduate student in 1941, 1 joined the
American Psychological Association and attended my first annual convention. It
was memorable in numerous ways. For one thing, it was held at what was then
Pennsylvania State College, and entailed my furthest journey from home via a 7
hour bus trip. Also, as Fryer's protg, I was introduced to several of the
luminaries of the era, including R.S. Woodworth and R.M. Yerkes; APA's total
membership then was less than a tenth of what it is now, and only a few hundred
attended the convention. I avidly attended many of the sessions (I still do this
some 20 conventions later, although maybe less avidly); one that still comes to
mind was a symposium concerning the uses of factorial designs and analysis of
variance--it's hard to realize that they were then still novelties.
After the war, I gradually became
more active in professional societies, as a program participant (e.g. at
A.P.A.'s final campus convention in 1950, again coincidentally at Penn State),
as a committee member (my first was as Chairman of the New York State
association's committee on ethics in 1949), as a diplomat and later examiner of
the American Board of Examiners (it may be of small historical interest that I
was the first person to be boarded
in I/O psychology via examination, also in 1949; earlier diplomats were all
"grandfathers"), and as an association officer. The last may be worth
further commitment, since, by touching on my presidency of Division 14, it
closes the circle of this autobiography.
It may be instructive to consider, in terms of my career, how one gets
elected president of a professional organization. Basically, I think, there are
two routes. One is a political" one, that is by rising through: the ranks of
service, gaining visibility and indebtedness along the way.
This is the route that brought me in 1958 to the presidency of the New
York State Psychological Association: starting with the aforementioned
chairmanship of the ethics committee, I served in such capacities as secretarytreasurer
of the Personnel Division, member of the Board of Directors, and co-chairman of
the New York inter-society council on legislation.
The other is the professional route. It
involves doing some professional things which bring one favorably, to the
attention of one's colleagues. In the case of my election to the Division 14
presidency, I had published or read a number of papers by 1960. But while these
may have been a necessary condition to my election, I don't believe that they
were sufficiently dramatic either in number or impact--to have been sufficient.
Two things happened which did generate additional visibility. I was asked to prepare the
chapter on industrial psychology for the 1957 Annual Review of Psychology; since
that was only the eighth volume in the series, authorship of one of its chapters was even more
distinctive than it is today. A year or two later, the Division 14 program
committee chaired by Mortimer Feinberg set up a session in which I, as a
representative I/O Psychologist, was grilled by Mike Wallace. Wallace at the
time had a popular TV show in which he did that kind of thing with various guest
personalities . That APA session drew an overflow crowd, and I
gather that I gave a pretty good account of myself and of the field.
On the basis of my
experiences, I commend to budding I/O psychologists active involvement in the
affairs of their professional societies. You can thereby have added impact on
the development of your profession, you can learn a lot, and you can make
contacts that may benefit your employer, colleagues, and students.
On re reading this account of my
life, I was reminded of a remark of Vernon Gomez, Gomez, better known as Goofy,
may be remembered by some of you as a stellar pitcher on some of the great New
York Yankee teams of by gone days. Once when asked by a reporter for the key to
his success, he replied clean
living--and a fast outfield.
That remark succinctly sums up the
lesson of my life. To some extent, our achievements are attributable to a "fast
outfield"--the people and events which constitute what earlier I called
circumstance. But they also require some hard work and deprivation: Gomez's
clean living .
"Goofy" indeed.
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