MY FIRST YEARS

I had just been appointed to Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University in 1949 when I got a letter from Hugh Waskom, the new Psychology department head at Florida State, offering me an Associate Professorship. What really convinced me was that W. N. Kellogg had already promised to come as a full professor, and Kellogg was a very distinguished psychologist indeed! When I arrived in 1950, I found the remnants of the excellent teaching department of the Florida State College for Women, that now wanted to reestablish itself as a university department but didn't really know how.

The most important programs were those in Child Development and in Educational Psychology, both held to be topics appropriate to the education of young ladies. Ralph Witherspoon was Director of an Institute of Child Development, in which Doug Smith was the member from the Psychology Department. They maintained a Preschool, which my kids all attended, and some of their most important duties seemed to be giving talks to parents' groups in town. The Institute and the Preschool are now defunct, and Educational Psychology was later taken over by the School of Education. (When our department went back into the educational psychology business in 1960, under Will Nelson, we had to call our program "School Psychology" and define its mission accordingly.)

All faculty members taught a four-course, twelve-hour load. After a semester, I had my fill of constant teaching, and approached the Office of Naval Research about a contract for basic research in vision. When I took their favorable reply to Waskom, he said he thought it might be fine, as long as it wouldn't interfere with my duties.

The Office of Naval Research was on my side, however, and required that my teaching load be cut to six hours. Dean Ed Walker was anxious to encourage real refereed research in the University, and this established a departmental precedent of reduced teaching loads for research. I am proud of the fact that mine was the first research contract generated within the University (1951), according to Rod Shaw, the university business manager. (As opposed to a few other ones brought from other universities to other departments by new senior faculty.) Lloyd Beidler's research contract in the Physiology Department followed the next semester. It was clear to us that we were launched as a REAL university, i.e., a research university.

Kellogg had left Indiana University in a huff because B.F. Skinner had been made department head instead of him. He told me he was through with research, which he concluded had got him nowhere, and was just going to teach and go sailing. But as soon as he discovered the porpoise, while sailing, he immediately began the marvelous research program that established echolocation by that animal, and that became the basis of a whole area of marine research. We did well to name our building after him.

Beside Kellogg, the other faculty member who came in 1950 was Dan Kenshalo, who was then a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis. During the first two years he was at Florida State, Dan completed his research and dissertation while he taught a full twelve-hour load including an Animal Experimental course of three hours plus an additional laboratory. That prodigious feat stands as a reproach to all of us who complained about our heavy teaching loads.

In 1950, James C. Smith was a new graduate student in the Department, from Auburn University where he had taught mathematics, and Wallace Kennedy was an undergraduate senior!

It was Kenshalo who got John Paul Nafe to come to Florida State in 1954 as our first Distinguished Professor of Psychology. With Nafe, Dan began the program of research in the cutaneous senses that has proven so successful over the years. Dan's dissertation had been done on rats learning a water maze.

During the first years after 1950, the Psychology Department was one of the few centers of research and graduate teaching on the campus. The second Ph.D. degree ever given by Florida State was to a Psychology graduate student, Robert Hattwick, in 1954. (The first was to a Chemistry graduate student one semester earlier.) I am proud, too, of the fact that I was Hattwick's major professor.

RESEARCH SEMINARS

At first there were no research seminars. There was a University Sigma Xi "club" made up of members of that research society who found themselves at Florida State, and its monthly meetings were the only place where there were enough research people from all departments to support a series of talks on local research. It was an important function then, and by 1955 we showed enough ongoing research that the national office established us as a real chapter of Sigma Xi. But as departmental and specialized seminars appeared, Sigma Xi lost its special significance.

Waskom's first attempts at a Psychology Department seminar were more like social teas, with ladies (female students) formally pouring tea and coffee from silver services in Longmire Lounge, with Talks followed by Discussions. But Kellogg and we other new members knew what a research seminar was; Waskom learned, and the monthly Psychology Department seminars became indispensable for the faculty to hear from one another, as well as for the students' education.

PSYCHOBIOLOGY

I had known Lloyd Beidler when he was in the Biophysics Department at Johns Hopkins, and we continued our interest in one another's research programs at Florida State. Sometime in the first years after 1950 we started an informal weekly seminar with those of us who were interested in research connecting the areas of physiology and psychology. We met at night in the upstairs psychology classroom that is now the histology laboratory. After a year or two we thought we ought to call the group something, and Dexter Easton said he had heard of a word with amusing connotations, "Psychobiology." It was a new word to us, but we thought that it was funny so we began to call ourselves that. As the years went on and the group became more cohesive and permanent, we used the name more and more seriously. The seminar was a forum for our own informal reports and arguments and it served as a bridge between the Psychology Department and the Physiology Department, now part of Biological Sciences.

The early Psychobiology Seminar was important. No academic credit was associated with it--it was completely unofficial and voluntary, done because the participants wanted to do it, with little distinction between faculty and students. It was an affirmation of the idea that science is interesting and worthwhile, and does not require official direction or recompense. Through the efforts of Lloyd Beidler and Dan Kenshalo, this spontaneous research activity was officially recognized as a "Center of Excellence" about 1966. But I think some of our fervor was dissipated when Psychobiology became an official part of the University, emphasizing funded programs and off-campus topics rather than our own work. Of course, it was great having the money and the post-docs!

One result of making Psychobiology an Official Program was that there was now no informal seminar for research. So Mark Berkley, Ted Williams from the Institute for Molecular Biology and I got up a Vision Lunch-Seminar in 1967 for ourselves and our students, copying the informal format of the departmental lunch-seminar at Brown University. When William Rushton came in 1968, he was enthusiastic about the arrangement, which seemed quite novel to him. After Mat Alpern spent his year here with Rushton, he took the idea back to Michigan, and I have been amused to hear of Vision Lunch Seminars at other Universities, set up by Mat's former students as well as by ours. Our own was the first.

The loss of Rushton in 1976 and the addition of new members studying senses other than vision resulted in renaming the Vision seminar the Sensory Processes Lunch Seminar. It has been a pleasure to see other informal non-credit voluntary research seminars subsequently set up in our Department.

LABORATORY FACILITIES

In 1950 the teaching laboratory for human subjects was excellent for that time. room 323 was supplied with large benches, and an adjacent room (now joined to 323) held cabinets of supplies: color wheels, inductoria, telegraph keys, memory drums, and all of the old equipment that had been state of the art in the 1930's. In addition, room 315 had been made sound-and-echo resistant and had a piano, for auditory research. What is now the corridor to KRB on the third floor was the black-painted dark room where I did my ONR research.

Room 324 (Madsen) held a large bank of storage batteries that were connected to all classrooms and laboratories; one could patch-cord DC voltages up to 50, for electrical apparatus in those days before portable power supplies. The batteries were charged by a huge rectifier vacuum tube about ten inches in diameter, connected by a complex telephone jack system that filled the front half of room 318 (Smith). One of the classroom panels that was connected to the battery room still remains. It is below the chalkboard at the front of room 214.

Waskom told me that all of that had been supplied when the building, then the Education Building, was rebuilt in 1935 with Federal Emergency Relief funds during the depression. The old wooden interior of the 1918 building had been collapsing, and a new reinforced-concrete interior was built with the third floor designed to be a model Psychology Department, money no object. In 1950 the Education School still occupied the first floor of the building, their Art Education Department occupied the fourth floor, and the Florida Board of Control (now Regents) occupied the east half of the basement. Ours was the third floor. Education filled up the bits and tags of space in the rest of the building.

The result was that the Psychology Department had to be scattered about the campus when it expanded. Kenshalo and I were in the then-new, now-old Music Building, later in the tiny Demetree House where the Mecca parking lot is now; Richard Husband joined us there in 1953. But the important extra space was at the "west campus."

THE WEST CAMPUS

After World War II the city of Tallahassee was left with Dale Mabry Airfield, some of which it used as the municipal airport. The housing and barracks part of the base were rented to the University for a nominal fee to use temporarily for the expansion from women's college to university, and this clutter of temporary housing was called the West Campus. 

The Psychology Department had two locations there. In 1950 the first was a small garage where Dan was expected to set up an animal experimental laboratory. It couldn't be done, so he was moved to a larger one-story barracks in the farthest comer of the West Campus. There was enough room there for the animal laboratory as well as for a Department shop and photographic dark room.

One of the conditions I had made to come to Florida State was that we had to have an engine lathe and a photo enlarger. Waskom came through the next spring, and these became the nucleus of our shop and photographic facility. We collected all the tools in the department, and with the addition of a drill press and band saw from my ONR contract, we all made our apparatus for research.

All but Kellogg. He quickly made contact with the FSU Marine Laboratory at Alligator Harbor, for marine facilities, and made arrangements with the Undersea Warfare program of the Navy in Panama City to get the necessary sophisticated sound gear for his porpoise echolocation work.

Waskom did not discuss funds with his faculty at that time, and it was years later that I realized what a large part of the department's budget went into the lathe and enlarger. We should have guessed, though--for years Kenshalo and I, who got research funds from off-campus sources, supported the department's shops from our individual research budgets, without any departmental contribution. We made scientific apparatus using hardware cloth, pine boards, war surplus lenses and scrap metal. I report with pride that with it we conducted published research and trained graduate students.

In fact, some of us learned so well that we became real pack rats, storing potentially useful junk long after we became able to purchase proper instruments from research money. Jim Smith, particularly; for years his store of war-surplus parts was a last-chance resource for new apparatus construction.

When a new Education building was completed about 1959, that School moved out and we took over the whole building except the two northeast rooms on the ground floor, where the Purchasing Department replaced the Board of Control. They moved to Dodd Hall in a few years, leaving the entire building to the Psychology Department, and the building was so renamed.

THE FIRE

The whole top floor of the Psychology Building was given over to research. It seems to me now that it must have been a weird place, with apparatus of wood and string, homemade electronic devices, a few altered oscilloscopes and beat-up old furniture. Then one night an air conditioner overheated and we came to work the next morning to discover the top floor was in ruins. Some things were burned up, and the Tallahassee Fire Department had wrecked the rest with water damage. A blessing! Fourth floor work was interrupted, of course, but the State self-insurance representatives came around, inquiring what each destroyed item had been and what replacement would cost. By the time the fourth floor was rebuilt most of the items had been replaced; home-made apparatus and make-do junk now became new professionally built instruments and the laboratory took on an appearance appropriate to the good level of science that was conducted there.

WASKOM-GROSSLIGHT INTERIM

In the late fifties, Larry Chalmers was an Associate Professor in our department who taught the Honors course. He was very popular with the students, with the result that the Administration took him out of the Department to head up the whole Honors program. He proved to be an excellent administrator, and rose rapidly to be Dean of Arts and Sciences. Chalmers and Waskom had developed some antagonism over the years, and Chalmers soon removed Waskom as Department Head. Chalmers appointed me Acting Chairman of the Department for the year 1965-1966, during which time a committee under Dan Kenshalo searched for and found an excellent permanent Chairman in Joseph Grosslight, from Kent State University. Waskom retired in 1966 and moved from Tallahassee. Waskom's difficult and good work making the transition from Women's College to University has not been adequately appreciated since then.

At the time, Psychology was part of the Social Sciences division of Arts and Sciences. The only significant things I did as chairman were to encourage the clinical people to organize their own program, and to divide the representation of the department so the experimental faculty belonged to the Natural Science group of Arts and Sciences, leaving the non-laboratory subjects in the Social Sciences group. The latter effort came to naught when the new President Marshall removed the social sciences from Arts and Sciences and made them a separate school equal, administratively, to Arts and Sciences. Under our new Chairman Grosslight, the entire department voted to be in Arts and Sciences in spite of heavy pressure from the President to join his new College of Social Sciences.

KELLOGG RESEARCH BUILDING

Before Larry Chalmers left Psychology for the administration, he had become convinced that the Department should build a new research building with some of the federal funds that were readily available in those days. He made several trips to Washington and the Department submitted a proposal. The result was that the Department's proposal for matching funds was approved by the University, the National Institutes of Health, and by the State legislature. When Larry left, Dan Kenshalo took over the liaison with the State Architect, and with some harassment from the faculty, Dan and the architects designed the Psychology Research Building. It was great! Each faculty member specified the rooms he wanted and their arrangement. The architect then gave them to us.

All of this went on from 1960 to 1963, and I missed much of it because I was in Cambridge, England, the year 1962-1963. Notwithstanding the bronze plaque on the first floor of the new building, it was not finished until 1965, when we moved in. It is worth noting that the building was designed under NIH space guidelines for the number of faculty, students and staff that were predicted (in 1960) for the year 1970. Because of Joe Grosslight's successful recruiting, there were exactly twice as many faculty, staff and graduate students in the Department by 1970 as had been predicted. The laboratory became overcrowded and has been ever since.

For twenty years it was just called the Psychology Research Building. Then someone had the happy idea that we should honor Winthrop Kellogg by naming the laboratory after him, and that was done at a small ceremony in 1982. The deans, the Chairman of the Board of Regents, and a popular naturalist, Jane Goodall, contributed to the luster of the event.

THE SHOPS

As mentioned above, an engine lathe and enlarger constituted the nucleus of the Department shop at the old West Campus. When we replaced the Education School in what then became the Psychology Building, a proper shop was set up in room 426 where Histology is now, and a dark room was built in room 412. For our research we did all the apparatus construction and publication graphics ourselves. A major task in graduate training was to teach the students enough shop work and graphic skills that they could actually do research on their own after their degrees.

A big advance occurred when the Research Building was built. It included a complete general-purpose machine shop furnished with precision machine tools and accessories, and a sheet-metal shop. Now the necessary environment for a professional instrument maker became available.

As grant money became available, some forward-looking faculty began to resent time spent in tasks that could be done by technicians. About 1960 Dan Kenshalo hired an electronics technician on his grant, and in 1962 the Department hired a tool-and-die maker to construct apparatus. When Psychobiology funds appeared, a Biomedical Engineer and electronics men were added. I myself was skeptical of all this. I thought that the scientist should do everything himself, so he knew his experiment completely, and the first few subsequent years seemed to me to confirm that opinion. I was amused by the grandiose projects that now were generated, then frequently aborted, serving no purpose but the political one of sustaining a large payroll. But gradually some outstanding personnel were hired and we learned how to work with them. The technical support for the department eventually reached a level that is probably unique for a Psychology Department. We became able to do research that is technically beyond the capabilities of any individual psychologist.

IMPORTANT PERSONS

Most of the support personnel were competent, but there were a few who were so outstanding that they changed the shops permanently. First among these was Graham Oliff. A retired naval engineering officer, he brought an unusually broad range of high technical skills to the job when he came in 1965. He approached each job with certainty that it could and would be done, and done right. His apparatus was original, precise and beautiful. With his designs, he did much to educate the faculty and students and raise their standards of precision and elegance. Under Oliff's direction our original apparatus became reliable and professional, the envy of departments at other universities. If one man can be credited with establishing the superb traditions of our department shops, it is Graham Oliff.

A similar transformation was worked in 1975 in the electronics shop by Paul Hendrick. Before he came, our electronic apparatus was usually cobbled together from commercial boxes and vacuum tubes, with wires soldered in irregularly, and we operated for the most part with modified military surplus parts and equipment. Before Hendrick came, repairs were always pretty chancy.

Hendrick insisted on logical arrangements of components and compact, professional appearance in new apparatus. He brought us through the transitions from tubes to integrated circuits, from wires to circuit boards, and kept the shop up-to-date on current equipment and techniques. He also taught us to expect that anything electronic can be repaired correctly.

At first we had a succession of "biomedical engineers" of varied usefulness, but the great value of the position did not appear until Ross Henderson came to us. Henderson was academically trained as a genuine biomedical engineer, and he had the soul of a scientist. He became the gear that meshed the computers with all the shops, and the catalyst for new instrumentation. Henderson brought us to the cutting edge of biomedical technology. Henderson and Hendrick together worked wonders in the electronics shop. The design processes were computerized, and construction techniques were made modern. Using psychobiology and departmental funds, an inventory of test instruments, parts and supplies was acquired for new construction as well as for repairs. We can boast now that our apparatus is state-of-the-art.

Major problems of any research department are keeping tabs on laboratory space usage, and organization of the great mountain of apparatus and equipment necessary for research. These tasks are handled in our department better than in any other I've been in, by Stan Warmath. When Stan finished his Master's degree with Mark Berkley in 1978, he concluded that what he really liked about research was the technique and the hardware, so he took on the job of Manager of the Laboratories of the department. Over the years he has made life very much easier for faculty and students, and has become our interface with the university maintenance and record functions. He is indispensable.

The efforts of these outstanding people do leave us with a problem. When our graduate students take jobs elsewhere, they invariably complain about the inadequate facilities at their new institutions.