Fosdick Masten Park High School - Chronicle Yearbook (Buffalo, NY)

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To ank Sheldon Fosdiek, LL D The best beloved member of our class We affectionately dedicate THE SENIOR YEAR BOOK 1 9 2 6 ,J IHHI Q. la, ,A 'fb 13' vi'- fa - My , ' 01 ., ,f .i sw ! 1 There is a success that is greater than wealth or titles. It comes through making one,s work an in- strument of greater service, and larger living to one's fellow men.

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The CHRONICLE My Father HE editor has faced me with a delicate and difficult task, in asking me to write an appreciation of my own father. The things which a son, who has such a father, most intimately feels about him cannot even be said, much less printed, and instead of writing about the meaning of his fatherhood to his own children, I should probably do better if I silently appealed to the imagin- ation of those who have known him in the school. They might guess, if they tried, what kind of father he would be in his own home. The love and respect which have accumulated around him during the half century of his teaching in Buffalo are fundamentally due, if I understand the matter, to the entire genuineness andstraight-forward ness of his character, to the absence in him of any duplicity and guile. The first thing that any child of his would think of saying, therefore, is that what he has seemed to be to generations of his students he really is, and that by far the most powerful factor in his influence over his children has been not any words of his or methods of discipline, but the simple, towering fact that we trusted him absolutely, knew that his deeds would always tally with his professions, and that there was no crooked way in him. There are, however, some specific things that can be said about his methods of dealing with his children, which, practised on a larger scale in the school, he used on us at home. For one thing, his children were trained to be independent. We were undoubtedly taught to obey, but we were insistently taught also that the proper object of our obedience was inside us, not outside. I recall no rules in the home, of the external, authoritative sort, but I recall all manner of appeals to our sense of honor, our self-respect, and our independent judgment as to what was right or wrong. Even when we asked him what we ought to do, my father would repeatedly return the question by inquiring what we thought of it ourselves. In our very early childhood we were often called into the council of the family on important decisions affecting the whole household, as though our parents, instead of being an autocracy to govern us, were members of a democracy with us. I did not understand it then, but I see now that all this was inten- tional-a program for educating the children to independence of thought and judgment. At least I think it was that. My father knew nothing of the then non-existent new psychology, I am not sure how much technical- ly he knows about it now g but when I attend modern seances on the latest methods of bringing up children, I am amazed to hear them called new. All the best of them were in full blast in our home a long generation ago. 4