Winthrop Niles Kellogg was born in 1898 in Mount Vernon, New York, and died in 1972 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He spent approximately 40 of those 74 years actively engaged in research, a career that produced more than 130 publications, including two books assured as classics by their primacy in their respective areas, if not in fact by their quality as experimental investigations. Those books are The Ape and the Child (Kellogg & Kellogg, 1933) and Porpoises and Sonar (Kellogg,1961) and both were ground-breaking projects in psychology. (p. 461) WINTHROP KELLOGG AS A STUDENT Kellogg began his college days at Cornell University in 1916 but left after a year for the Great War in Europe. For 2 years he flew in England and France in the U.S. Army Air Service as part of the American Expeditionary Forces where he earned the prestigious Croix de Guerre. After the war he continued his undergraduate work at Indiana University where he met and married Luella Dorothy Agger in 1920. He graduated in1922, having majored in philosophy and psychology, and for a while tried his hand at several jobs, including a brief time as a journalist. His wife's uncle, Eugene E. Agger, himself a university professor, felt Kellogg's talents and personality were well suited to an academic career and encouraged him to consider such an option, Accordingly, Kellogg enrolled in psychology at Columbia where he received his M.A. degree in 1927 and his doctorate in 1929. His dissertation, which was directed by Robert S. Woodworth, involved a comparison of psychophysical methods (Deese,1973). THE INDIANA UNIVERSITY YEARS Kellogg was an active researcher as a graduate student, publishing five articles in 1928-29 in addition to his dissertation, and only one of those was coauthored. Three more articles appeared in 1930 and another five, the following year. This level of productivity was maintained throughout his academic career. He began that career at Indiana University as an assistant professor in 1929. The following year he was promoted to associate professor, and in 1937, to full professor. Kellogg remained at Indiana until1950, although there were brief periods elsewhere-summers spent as a visiting faculty member at Columbia University in 1933 and 1934 and at the University of Southern California in 1948, 1959, and 1961. In addition, most of the 1931-32 academic year was spent at Orange Park, Florida, as the result of a research leave funded by the Social Science Research Council. It was during that period that the ape and child study was conducted. However, the time at Indiana was devoted largely to research on conditioning and learning. This research was carried out in a special dog conditioning laboratory, a facility which was completed in 1936 and proudly described by Kellogg (1938a) in an article in the American Journal of Psychology. p. 462 THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY YEARS Kellogg left Indiana University to accept a position at Florida State University. Apparently for some time he had wanted to move to Florida and sent letters to several universities in the state notifying them of that wish. Florida State University had only recently emerged from its role as a women's college and was eager to begin building a major university. That university made Kellogg an offer, and although it was below the salary he had been receiving at Indiana, he accepted it, moving his family to Tallahassee in the summer of 1950. That move marked the end of the dog conditioning studies and signaled the beginning of a whole new focus of research. After a single paper on conditioning in salt-water fishes (Kellogg,1952), he turned his attention to the study of porpoises, something that would occupy much of the next 13 years of his life... Kellogg... found himself as the senior person in the psychology department, and in terms of his visibility nationally, he was likely one of the most famous professors on the campus at that time. He worked hard to build an excellent doctoral program in psychology and began that task by completely restructuring the undergraduate and master's degree programs. More than anyone else he was responsible for the acquisition of the matching funds from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to build the psychology research building at Florida State, the building that now bears his name. He also aided in the recruitment of new faculty, argued for the needed growth of the department, and in general used his considerable reputation as a scientist and scholar to enhance the psychology programs. At the same time he was conducting a very active research program with his graduate students on the sonar abilities of porpoises. p. 463 - 464 STANFORD RESEARCH INSTITUTE AND RETIREMENT In 1963, Kellogg officially retired from Florida State, although he would return to that campus on several occasions in temporary faculty positions. In 1962, however, he began his association with the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) at Menlo Park, California, where he established two large research projects. One was funded by NSF and involved investigations of sonar in sea lions, while the second was funded by the National Institute of Health and involved echolocation in blind humans. The grants were for long-term projects, but it is unlikely that Kellogg ever saw his involvement in the projects beyond the first year or two. He hired two of his doctoral students from Florida State to direct the investigations - Ronald Schusterman for the sea lion studies and Charles Rice for the human echolocation studies. In February of 1965, Kellogg resigned from SRI. He and Luella spent much of their remaining days together traveling to various parts of the world. Their deaths came in the summer of 1972, his on June 22, hers on July 17. |