The Clinical Psychology Program at Florida State University had its origin in a Binet testing kit carried around to various area schools by Dr. Hugh Waskom. He was an educational psychologist in a department with mostly child and educational psychologists. The department was located in close proximity to the College of Education, and offered mostly service courses for women teachers- and home economists-to-be.

The testing, a service to the local schools in identifying special-needs children, eventually led to the development of a captive school for uneducable children, and to the beginnings of an on-campus clinic in the observation facilities built by Dr. Conradi in the early thirties. Gretchen Everhart, for whom the school was eventually named, was a student and protégé of Dr. Waskom.

Out of this service to education and to the community, the Child Development and Child Clinical Program emerged after World War II, with the hiring of Ralph Witherspoon and Walter D. Smith, both developmental psychologists from Michigan. They were soon joined by Glenn Terrell and Ralph Mason Dreger, who added real strength to the child-clinical area.

At the same time, a group of World War II veteran faculty members, only recently back from the war and still showing the impact of heavy-duty combat, started an interdisciplinary mental health clinic supported by the County Health Department and manned by FSU faculty from Social Work, Marriage and Family Living, and Psychology. This program drew a group of older, veteran students from the same severe background, and with war-weary faculty and -students, it was a wild and woolly period. The faculty were all self-trained, self-proclaimed clinicians, with only the child faculty, Theron Alexander and Ralph Dreger, having legitimate; certified training.

As thus the program went until Joel Greenspoon came in 1955 with his background as a guerilla fighter and training as an Indiana experimental clinical graduate. Homer Reed, with an interest in neuropsychology and a graduate of Purdue's clinical program, joined the department in 1956.

The attempt to make an experimental program out of the new clinical program got a huge shot in the arm by two unlikely faculty additions, Winthrop Kellogg (1950), who believed that any behavior was a legitimate subject of research, including neurosis, and Dick Husband (1954), who believed that any field of practice can be defined, regulated, and certified.

In the ensuing growth period, there was a mass exodus of the WW-II clinicians. A totally new breed of graduates, were hired from APA-approved programs and internships - Kennedy, Hokanson, and Rychlak. An Adult Clinical Program attached itself to the Child Development Program, founding the Human Development Clinic, the predecessor of the current Psychology Clinic. This effort was supplemented by a strong Education and Measurement Program by John Anderson and Barron Scarborough.

These were tense years, with a very strong division between the applied and experimental areas of the Clinical Program, but forces outside of the Department, APA and NIH as well as the VA, kept the balance in check. The Clinical Director favored an experimental program with no applied training below the internship level, which did not sit well with a number of the training directors of the VA, who at that time were the major recipients of our training.

The dissidence within the Department resulted in the APA placing the Clinical Program on probation and the NIH fellowships on a one-year wind down. The Clinical Director resigned and Dr. Waskom decided to step down. Howard Baker, as Acting Chairman, allowed the Clinical Program to nominate an Acting Clinical Director, Kennedy, to try to get the program off probation.

Within the year, a new Departmental Chairman, Joe Grosslight, was appointed, and a new Director of Clinical Training was hired, Charles Spielberger. Huge resources and great expansion followed these appointments, with the clinical faculty getting to an all-time high in numbers and with a high level of productivity. The training grant went to an all-time high, the local, supported clerkships and contracts provided half a million dollars in student support, and the Psychology Clinic expanded into a regional facility with a very large grant from the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation.

The Clinical Program moved away from being captive of the VA into providing a very broad-based internship program. The entering class of clinical students was about twenty per year, with ten to fifteen going on internships. Ned Megargee and Jack Hokanson teamed up to take on a large, longitudinal project at the Federal Correctional Institute (FCI). The relationship with the Florida State Hospital blossomed, as a former graduate and adjunct of the Department, John Foreyt, began a psychologically run behavior ward, a first time for this very traditional hospital, which, at that time, had two MA psychologists and seven thousand patients and now has 16 Ph.D. psychologists for about one thousand patients.

In 1972, Charlie Spielberger resigned as Clinical Director and moved as a Distinguished Research Professor to the University of South Florida. Wallace Kennedy assumed the Clinical Directorship as well as retaining the Directorship of Graduate Studies in order to free up a line for the hiring of a Research Professor. Lee Sechrest was hired in that role and Don Driggs assumed leadership of the Psychology Clinic. The Social Program began to interact closely with the Clinical Program under the leadership of Bill Haythorn.

When Don Driggs retired as Clinic Director, Louise Goldhagen, former Assistant Vice President of Student Affairs, assumed leadership of the Clinic, and generated an outstanding amount of student support as well as greatly increasing the service of the Clinic.

From 1982-1985, Robert Klepac became the new Clinical Director. When he left to go to the Air Force Hospital in San Antonio, Ned Megargee became Clinical Director and Ellen Berler became Clinic Director in an effort to alter the focus of the Clinic in keeping with APA recommendations and the faculty wishes. The change reduced the service load of the students and increased the supervision ratio as well as reducing the student support, some of which was matched by the Dean of Arts and Sciences in University funds.

The 1990 APA Site Visit, reflecting on the three-year term of Dr. Megargee, gave the program top marks. The program continues as one that offers its students the kind of training and experience that gives them the top pick of internships across the country, and excellent job opportunities with 4/5 in the predominant practitioner area and 1/5 in the scientist university area.