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

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The CHRONICLE Of course there were limits to the freedom allowed. When we abused our independence and tried smartly to take advantage of the democratic family, my father had a way of landing on the right spot like a streak of greased lightning, which discouraged further experiments with fresh- ness and impertinence. But such occasions were so few that I can with difliculty remember only two or three of them. We were not brought up on thunder and lightning. Perhaps one story will put the matter clearly. Falling into a fit of ill-temper once when I was a lad of ten, I was startled to hear my father cry out as if in alarm, Where is Harry? Here I am, I said. No, he decisively replied, You are not Harry, Harry is lost somewhere, go find him! So, I wandered off through the house until I had gotten a good grip on myself and could return, smiling, to report, Here he is. I found him. That method of appealing to our best, instead of thundering against our worst was characteristic of our home government. We were taught to obey an inward monitor, so that when I first heard the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light, I knew, without being told, what it meant. To be able to go it alone, think for ourselves, depend on ourselves, govern ourselves from inside out, and in a pinch stand up for our judgment against all com- ers--this was taken for granted as the ideal to be sought for and if, as we grew older, the practice of this independence led us to differ from the paren- tal judgment, my father did not shrink from that consequence. I have never known him to try to decide anything for me that he thought by any possibility I could approximately decide for myself. For another thing, trained as we were for independence, we were just as insistently trained for service. I cannot recall having the idea even dimly present in my mind throughout my boyhood that wealth or fame or any such external guerdon was a prize to be striven for. It was taken for granted that usefulness was the only legitimate excuse which anybody could give for being alive, and that, of course, we were all to look forward to hard work, done as efficiently and as unselfishly as we could possibly manage it. This ideal of life was not so much instilled in us as a doctrine, it was assumed as a matter of course and was constantly before us, exhibited and illumined in the way our parents themselves lived. The master passion of my father's life has been the investment he has tried to make in the boys and girls who have come under his influence. The real-estate he has cared most about has been staked out in developing personalities whom he has helped. As for material rewards, I am sure that at any time in the last half-century he could have said about his teaching what Professor Palmer said 3 'fHarvard University pays me for doing what I should gladly pay for the privilege of doing, if I could only afford it. In these two main phases of our training at home--personal inde- pendence and unselfish service-I suspect that we have the determining 5

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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

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The CHRONICLE qualities of my father's life. Around these two foci has been drawn the ellipse of his character. Many elements within that circumference which we have intimately enjoyed in the home I may not speak of. hereg his saving sense of humor, his infinite respect for the sacredness of other people's personalities, and, most notably in his training of his children, his ingenuity in doing us good without our knowing it. When, for example, growing unwary and unwise, I needed parental counsel, as every youth sometimes needs it, he did not bring me up on the carpet and read me a lecture. He took me fishing with him down the Niagara River, and what he had on his mind naturally percolated into mine in the course of the day. Painless dentistry is clumsy compared with his painless impartation of sound advice. I am writing this in Jerusalem, and it would not be fair to the facts if I did not add that the One who long ago lived and taught here in the Holy Land has had a masterful share in making possible the kind of home in which we were brought up. The religion to which we were accus- tomed from our youth was centered in the practical application of the Christian spirit to daily life. If, as he lays down his active professional Work, my father finds many rising up to call him blessed, there is nothing accidental about so desirable a reward for fifty years of teaching. He has taken very much in earnest a description of religion written long ago, What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with Thy God. Harry Emerson Fosdick. 6