Lawrence Joseph Stone, 1912-1975
At a Meeting of the
Faculty of Vassar College
held
May eleventh, nineteen hundred
and seventy-seven, the following
Memorial
was unanimously adopted:
Lawrence Joseph Stone received his undergraduate degree
from Cornell and his Master's and Doctoral degrees from Columbia.
He taught for various periods at Columbia, Sarah Lawrence, and
Brooklyn College, before coming to Vassar in 1939 as an instructor
in the Child Study Department. With the exception of two years
spent in the Dept. of Psychiatry of the U.S. Public Health Service
during the war, Joe was an integral part of Vassar life until his
untimely death on December 13, 1975.
Joe's original training and research had been in Experimental
Psychology; he was hired by the Child Study Department at Vassar
because of the work he had done at Sarah Lawrence filming children
for a study of normal personality development. As a result of his
early teaching at Vassar, Joe's enduring professional interests
emerged: Personality Development, Projective Techniques, Psycho-
therapy (he maintained a small private practice for years), making
films about personality development in normal children, and Child
Advocacy (he found it ironic that the American Psychological
Association had proclaimed a code of ethics for the handling of
laboratory animals many years before they took similar action
with respect to human subjects).
The Vassar Film Program begun under the auspices of
Mary Fisher Langmuir (now Essex), then Chairman of the Child
Study Department, became a unique vehicle for the teaching of
Child Development courses across the country and in Europe. Joe
made 34 films in his lifetime, including many which won professional
awards; 10 films were produced at the request of the Office of
Economic Opportunity for use in training Head Start personnel. His
final three films were made in Israeli Kibbutzim, adding to the
cross-cultural perspective that he had already introduced in films
of Greek and Austrian communal child—rearing.
Because of Joe's many and various professional interests,
he was particularly suited to introduce a wide range of nontradition-
al courses in the Child Study Department, and he was a stimulating
teacher. (The enduring quality of his influence in the classroom
and in the field was recently made visible by the more than 300
former students and colleagues who returned to Vassar for the
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conference in his honor in March of this year.) The fact that
the Department has always included an outstanding Nursery School
provided both an empirical and theoretical basis for the study of
children, which taught both students and incoming faculty members
the importance of accurate observation of child behavior, in
evaluating the validity of a particular theoretical orientation.
The times and the state of the art dictated that the primary
orientation of the Child Study Department through the l940's and
l950’s was toward the training of teachers and the preparation
of young women for motherhood. It is a testimony to Joe's
flexibility that, by the time of the merger of the Child Study
and Psychology Departments in 1965, the curriculum of the Child
Study Department had already moved in the direction of more
rigorous study of psychological development throughout the life-
span.
In addition to numerous articles and reviews, Joe Stone's
text, Childhood and Adolescence written with Joe Church,
essentially revolutionized the writing of text books in the
field. Its radical departure seems very obvious now, but it was
the first text to present the individual as an integrated organism
developing over time. The traditional text had sliced the child
(or our knowledge of him) into such areas as perceptual development,
cognitive development, and social development, leaving it difficult
if not impossible to see how development in one area influences
behavior in another. The "Two Joe's“ were beginning work on the
Fourth Edition of Stone 8 Church at the time of Joe's death.
Over the years, Childhood and Adolescence has been translated into
Spanish, Dutch, French, and other languages.
Joe's last major publication, coauthored with Lois Murphy
and Henrietta Smith, was a monumental work which again provided
a breakthrough in the field of child development. Entitled
“The Competent Infant,“ this volume not only pulled together the
major contributions to research in infancy, historical as well as
contemporary, in a selection of readings, but also contained
beautifully lucid criticisms and directions for future research
in the chapter introductions.
The punning (many of them “Groaners"); the twinkle in the
eye; the pointed but never malicious wit; the pain over misuse of
language; the love of jazz and his delight in knowing obscure
musicians and their works, his encyclopedic knowledge of psychology
and his personal acquaintance with people who were doing important
work in the field, both those who were well-known and those who
were just beginning; his persistence in the face of obstacles
(which were sometimes us); his delight in children and children's
easy responsiveness to him; and his joy in lavishing the good
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things of life on his colleagues in the form of huge thick rare
steaks. All of these things stand out in our memories of Joe.
He delighted in the role of Paterfamilias, both with his own
family and with his colleagues and friends. He frequently used
his ability as a raconteur and his seemingly infinite knowledge
of jokes--old and new, good and sometimes bad—-to lighten moments
of stress or tension.
In his last years, Joe's big house on Raymond Avenue was
alive with wave after wave of daughters, sons-in-law, and S
grandchildren. These years seemed an almost ideal fulfillment
for so uxorious, gregarious, epicurean, fun-loving, child-loving,
and jazz-loving a man.
Respectfully Submitted,
Henrietta T. Smith
Anne P. Constantinople
Stephen Sadowsky