This year, CPN honors the work of Rue Cromwell by bestowing on him its ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’.  At the Gala Banquet of the Memphis conference, Dr. Cromwell was presented the award by one of his former students, Dr. Ken Sewell.  When approached by the Chronicle for biographical information, Rue indicated that he already had some on file, in particular, a “Color Bio” (written in a style much like the color commentary one hears on televised sports).  When it was received by the Chronicle, the delightful piece was too lengthy for a single issue, but too much of a gem to edit down.  It was decided instead to deliver the bio in two parts.  What follows is Part I of “The Color Bio of Rue Cromwell, by Rue Cromwell.”  Part II is scheduled to appear in the Spring 2005 issue of the Constructivist Chronicle.  Enjoy.

Rue L. Cromwell grew up in Indiana among hills created by the southern boundary of the ice sheet.  The closest playmate was over a mile away.  Very early he found swimming the stripper holes and roaming the forests and creeks were more fun that coaxing cows all day away from a broken pasture fence. Lots of time there was to think and dream.  Then he entered a rural one-room brick schoolhouse.  With this lucky circumstance he could listen to the seven upper grades recite before the teacher, later on review what he had overlooked from the lower grades, and compete with all grades in the weekly spelling bee.
      
Moving closer to Linton, Indiana (and now into a two-room school house) at the onset of World War II, Rue joined a newly started Boy Scout troop.  Suddenly, however, he was beset with running the troop, as all able-bodied Scoutmasters and would-be’s left for military service.  It was a miserable time. What he later learned about effective rearing and discipline would have been helpful.  As Rue was training his group for statewide first aid contest news came of President Roosevelt’s death.  The Scout work led to Rue’s being appointed for four consecutive summers as Waterfront Director for the regional summer camp.  Since this position involved management, program development, and safety, as well as swimming, life saving, rowing, and canoeing instruction, a “proxy name” of a person over 21 was entered for the record.  At a tall 129 pounds Rue was arguably viewed as the “skinniest waterfront director” in the United States. 
      
Cromwell was nailed with only one breach of conduct during those four years.  Coming in after midnight from his night off, he and a fellow staffer ate over a gallon of ice cream from the kitchen freezer in the mess hall.  Among other disciplinary actions Rue was required to lead songs at lunchtime for the rest of his career of in summer camping.  This song-leading career ended in the summer 1949 with Rue drilling a cadet platoon at ROTC camp on the grounds of Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
      
 As these four Scout summers came to finality two brief but significant challenges came.  First, the Boy Scout honorary society (Order of Arrow) scheduled its first national convention at the nearby Indiana University.  Rue played a major role in local arrangements and hosting.  Second, at the end of that final summer Rue filled in as the Waterfront Director for the regional Girl Scout camp.   That was another story altogether.
      
 When Rue entered Indiana University midway in his summer camp staff tenure he was torn among three career choices:  (a) his major desire to seek appointment and enter the U. S. Military Academy at West Point; (b) to major in psychology, because a local truck driver said it was “deep.” No psychologist was to be encountered, and no psychology book existed in the local public library.  The same anonymous truck driver urged Rue to get as much math as possible in school; and (c), to continue in the Boy Scout movement on a professional level. 
      
The dilemma resolved itself during Rue’s first year in college. He learned that professional Scouting was primarily fund-raising rather than working with kids, camps, and nature, so that option was eliminated.  As for the other two, Rue entered college in 1946 along 1000s of veterans returning from World War II with support of the GI Bill.  In his college rooming house Rue was the only “non-vet” youngster.  The veterans were resentful of the time they had lost in service, of the chaos, cruelty, and loss of personal control in war. When they learned of Rue’s newly arrived letter of competitive award to West Point they proclaimed to each other the futility of wasting one’s life as a peacetime Army officer.  Quietly they retired for a meeting and vote.  The decision was to brainwash Rue out of his military career idea.  Their project involved not only intense discussion but also lots of double-dating and generous loaning of their cars whenever Rue desired.  Rue soon decided that Indiana University was where the diverse academic stimulation and the girls lay. 
      
At the end of his freshman year Rue was hired as a research assistant, assistant surgeon, anesthetist, and resident caretaker in the experimental dog lab of Professor W. N. Kellogg. “Keep the name Rue,” he said. “It will help get you better known.  But add a middle initial.”  The apartment of the dog lab became Rue’s domicile for the undergrad duration. The only infraction suffered during that era came after midnight when Cromwell administered Vicks VapoRub to an operated dog unable to breath owing to congestion.  The treatment was successful, but Rue received a severe reprimand and a stiff lecture on controlling variables in experimental research.”
      
In his sophomore year Rue was elected to Psi Chi, the undergraduate psychology honorary society.  Professor B. F. Skinner, then department chair, conducted the induction despite the use of a candle and occasional dualistic language in the ceremony text.  During the following year Skinner was gone (to Harvard) and Rue became president of the Psi Chi chapter.

In 1950 Rue, along with receiving an AB degree in psychology, was also awarded a commission as second lieutenant in the U. S. Army Air Force (soon to become the U.  S. Air Force).  In a summer of quick successions he reported to Selfridge Air Force Base near Detroit for duty. The Korean War broke out. Cromwell was then discharged from the Air Force because he had been admitted to a clinical psychology graduate program.  Clinical psychology had been declared a COS (critical occupational specialty) by the federal government because of the onslaught of World War II veterans entering VA neuropsychiatry treatment centers. Next came a wedding, a quick honeymoon at Indian Lake on the way to Columbus.  Finally at the Ohio State University Cromwell settled into the life of a first year graduate student.  This was two years after a then rotund George A. Kelly had arrived as Director of Clinical Training.
      
The Ohio State University Psychology Clinic in Arps Hall had already become historic.  Henry Goddard founded it and Carl Rogers had later held the directorship. Cromwell began his master’s research with Kelly.  Rue had derived some hypotheses from Freud’s statements about memory, repression, and pleasure principle.  Although Kelly was in the middle of writing his two volumes he accepted and encouraged a study that was in the face of current assertions that nothing in Freud’s theory was testable.  Eventually, however, a bit of personal construct theory also entered the thesis.   For Cromwell, however, it was the worst of times. Kelly found Rue’s writing style intolerable. Also, while away in Chillicothe on VA internship Rue joined two-thirds of the graduate student body in flunking the psychology qualifying exams (generals) on the first try.
      
Before entering graduate school Cromwell had decided to work with numerous professors to broaden his personal knowledge.  So, after the master’s thesis he shifted to Professor Julian B. Rotter for his PhD dissertation. In addition he did an animal study with Professor Delos Wickens. With Rotter’s research team a dissertation problem was developed to examine how various expectancy/reinforcement value combinations compared with the objective actuarial frequencies of expected value pay-off.  Findings indicated that adults veered to choosing conservative “sure bets” and venturesome “long shots” rather than intermediate combinations of expectancy and reward.  Actuarial outcome of pay-off was, of course, equal for all choices. 
      
After an accumulated psychodiagnostic year and a solely outpatient psychotherapeutic year in the VA program (with Kelly, Rotter, and other professors as consulting supervisors) a highly stimulating summer was spent as psychologist at the Ohio Bureau of Juvenile Research (BJR) (later to be called the Ohio Juvenile Diagnostic Center; JDC).  Henry Goddard had conceived this state agency near the time he translated the Binet test into English.  The courts and other agencies referred children and youth to this residential facility.  They participated in a strictly 60-day period of residency and study with an interdisciplinary (mental health/social/educational) team headed by a psychologist.  As the 60 days drew to a close the results, conference notes, and reports from team members were used by the psychologist to develop a written plan for future living placement, psychological treatment, school placement, and educational goals.  The report, with its itemized recommendations was presented to the judge or other referring authority.  Usually the psychologist also met with the referring authority to defend on or more specific items of recommendation.
      
Returning to the Ohio State campus for his final year Cromwell was, to his surprise, appointed Assistant Instructor and Clinic Coordinator of the Psychological Clinic in Arps Hall. Rotter had become director, and it was Kelly’s turn to supervise practicum.  Cromwell’s job as Clinic Coordinator was to perform intake examinations on all clients, manage the clinical file of each case until it had been closed, come to Kelly’s weekly meetings with his clinical supervisees, present to the group each of the available cases,  and participate as the case was discussed and assigned by Kelly.  When discussion was complete the students were dismissed to meet with their assigned cases. Later Cromwell sat in on the post-contact supervision.
      
A unique experience in Cromwell’s career was in that window of time when he sat with Kelly in his office, waiting for the respective clinical students to complete the initial contact with their clients.  It was a time to engage at length in theoretical, research, and clinical conversation.  Some of the well known traits and views of Kelly were evident.  In his clinical teaching, as Kelly often said, the student was always to be given autonomy and wholehearted personal support in his actions and decisions.  Such actions and decisions may be traditional, idiosyncratic, or even blundering when with the client, but, on the other hand, Kelly reserved the right to say how he “likely would have done it.”  The weekly conversations of Kelly and Cromwell moved seamlessly among clinical aspects, laboratory research implications, and theory.  Kelly’s great joy was to involve personal construct theory in the discussion, but he could not resist veering away from PCP to an interesting new idea.  In these conversations Cromwell experienced personal construct theory as an ongoing changing dynamic rather than the postulates and propositions that became locked into place in the pages of the two volumes.  Kelly had an insatiable appetite for new ideas, a joy in reconstruing each idea in alternate ways.  Always with a six-inch slide rule in his shirt pocket he was quick to translate relatively abstract variables into some quantitative model.
      
Only once during his year as Clinic Coordinator did Cromwell incur disquiet.  It was an era when clinicians and teachers were expected to be appropriately costumed. For both women and men it was business dress; no unique hairdos, no beards, no open collars were acceptable.  One day an attractive young woman walked in without appointment to seek clinical help just as Cromwell dropped by the Clinic from the rat lab to pick up his mail and messages.  He had just “run his rats” and was garbed in a dirty stained tee shirt and jeans.  Kelly and the clinical faculty found no humor, even though clinical services, as per policy, were promptly rendered.
      
Before the days of “equal opportunity rules” professors gave generously of their time and personal resources to go to national meetings to seek job opportunities for their graduates.  These efforts resulted in Cromwell becoming an assistant professor at George Peabody College (now of Vanderbilt University).
      
In 1953 Peabody College acquired a large federal grant to launch a graduate training and research program in the then highly neglected area of mental retardation.  It now remains as the longest continuously funded research project at NIMH.  In its beginning, since no senior person with expertise in both mental retardation and research methodology could be recruited, the position was split into two entry-level positions, one in experimental child psychology and one in clinical.  Mental retardations was to be learned “on the job.” The grant began in 1953.  Cromwell completed his Ph.D. degree in 1955 and joined the program.  The first dissertation under Cromwell’s supervision was in 1957.  This research and training program now remains as the longest continuously funded project of NIH.
      
The unique attraction of the position to Cromwell was the chance and challenge to supervise doctoral advisees immediately.  Both Kelly and Rotter had provided ample role models for a collegial collaborative style of supervision.  Cromwell’s research focused upon hyperactivity and also the responses of children to success and failure.  During this time Cromwell also found time to conduct a study on extremity ratings using personal constructs.  This study had emerged from the weekly talks with Kelly on clinic practicum days.

...end of Part I
      
See the upcoming Spring 2005 issue of the Constructivist Chronicle for Part II, the conclusion of Rue’s ‘Color Bio’.

Rue Cromwell (right) receives CPN's Lifetime Achievement Award