Donald P. Hayes in 1976
This is a biographical page about my father, Donald P. Hayes, (1927-2006), who was a Professor of Sociology at Cornell University, the husband of the former Florence Colburn, and father of five children.
Source material
This link is to a biographic obituary that ran in the Ithaca Journal. It was written by family members, based in part on material dictated to us by my father.
My father's web page at Cornell University is here.
I made a page to archive some data and analyses my father produced as part of his "LEX" project, an effort to measure the difficulty of texts in a scientific, reproduceable way. It is on a server at Cornell, located here.
Like many academics, my father put some of his scholarly papers on line, to ensure rapid and easy access by other scholars. A portal page for these papers is located here. I have since placed some other papers on a sister page to this one, located here.
Many of the digital pictures below were produced by my sister Margaret Hayes Spellman. Thanks also to my mother, who read through a draft and provided many factual additions and corrections.
Childhood
My father was born November 30, 1927 in Baltimore, MD. His parents, E. Pearce and Lily Hayes, were Methodist missionaries who spent most of their time working in the vicinity of Foochow (now called Fuzhou) in China. Part of their job was to return home periodically and make contact with the local Methodist churches who funded the mission with their contributions. My father was born during one of these visits. He was taken to China as an infant and lived there to the age of eight. His brother Bruce, four years older, was there, as was his sister Anne, eight years older, until she went off to Shanghai for high school.
My father told me that when he was little, a Chinese servant was assigned to look after him, and she and many others spoke to him in Fuzhou Chinese. He retained a faint passive knowledge of this language into adulthood, as I learned when we visited a Fuzhou restaurant once in Los Angeles. This picture shows a nearby pagoda, whose location (or continued existence?) is unknown to me. My father told me that he climbed to the top as a child.
[ xxx insert scan of pagoda picture here]
In 1985, at the request of family, my father wrote a brief document with his childhood recollections of China, which is posted here: DPHChinaMemories.htm.
In 1937, the first stage of World War II--the Sino-Japanese War--broke out, and it was no longer possible for the family to say in Foochow. My grandfather returned to China alone, and the rest of the family settled in South Pasadena, California, where my father attended public schools.
My father told me that domestic relations in the South Pasadena home were not entirely serene, and indeed he may have been a rather difficult son/little brother. However this may have been, when my father was 15, it was arranged for him to leave home, living and working with family friends on an orange ranch in Claremont, CA. The next year, at age 16, he was employed as a dorm counselor, athletics supervisor, and bus driver for a local private school. (This was during World War II, when all sort of responsible jobs must have been filled by 16-year-olds).
Family pictures: parents and siblings
I can't find childhood pictures, at least for now. This picture shows my father's parents in about 1972. My grandfather had by then retired, I believe, from his second career, which involved lecturing and fundraising based on his experiences in China. His lectures may have been made more vivid by their rather frightening final experiences there, which involved a period of house arrest.
This picture, from the same time, shows my grandfather and my uncle Bruce (ca. 1923-2005).
Bruce likewise had China stories to tell: during World War II, the OSS, taking advantage of his knowledge of Fuzhou dialect and many local friends, dropped him off by submarine on the Fuzhou coastline, where he served as an intelligence agent. The Fuzhou area was Japanese-occupied territory.
[ xxx need an Anne picture]
Young adulthood
In 1946, my father graduated from high school and enlisted in the United States Army. The war had just ended, but there was still plenty for the army to do in the chaotic environment of the new Europe, and my father served with the 88th Division on a peacekeeping mission at the Italian-Yugoslav border. He was shot at, briefly, and enjoyed a leave in which he was able to visit Switzerland.
He left the Army in January of 1948, came home to California, and lived in an apartment just behind the home of his sister Anne and her new husband Milton Valois. He would walk through a gap in a fence for meals with Anne and Milt. He attended Pasadena City College for the Spring semester and was apparently bored by the slow pace of instruction there. During the spring, he made informal inquiries and was admitted on an ad hoc basis for the following Fall at Pomona College in Claremont. His attendance there was made possible by the U.S. "GI Bill," legislation that gave veterans help in paying their college tuition.
My father met my mother as a Pomona freshman in an economics class and they married after two years, in 1950.
This picture shows them with my mother's parents, Guy and Caroline Colburn.
Guy Colburn was a professor, too, of Romance Languages, at what is now called California State University at Fresno. He taught Spanish, French, Latin, and occasionally Italian.
I believe the picture below is one of the first places my parents lived.
My father worked various odd jobs at the time, including (as the picture shows) as a painter. He also spent some time behind a fish counter.
Graduate school; starting a family
My father graduated from college in 1952 and decided to go to graduate school in sociology. He had (and retained) an interest in sociological work that was quantitative and rigorous, modeled on the natural sciences, and for this reason chose the graduate program at the University of Washington in Seattle.
At Washington, my parents lived for several years in university graduate student housing and started a family. There were a total of five children, born in the 1950's and early 1960's: Margaret (Peggy), Bruce, Leslie, Louise, and Judith (Judy). The picture below shows my father carrying me and pointing out something to Peggy.
The family was supported by a series of part-time positions, first as a reader, then as a research assistant, then as a pre-doctoral associate (teaching one course), then finally as a acting instructor (responsible for two). My father also took outside jobs, gathering data for the Census Bureau and commuting by ferry to Bainbridge Island at a local community college.
My father finished his Ph.D. in 1959, with a dissertation entitled The Effects of Six Conditions on Consensus Achievement. His academic adviser was Charles Bowerman. In 1958 he had received a three-year fellowship from the Commonwealth Fund., the first year of which funded the completion of his dissertation. After this year, he spent a year (on a different fellowship) at the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University. The family rented a house on Alpine St. on the western edge of Cambridge, where the children first encountered snow in serious quantities for the first time. The following year, the family returned to Seattle for the two remaining years of the Commonwealth Fellowship, moving into a newly built house at 12014 33rd NE, where the three oldest children began school. Daughter Louise was born in 1961.
Career as professor
My father got his first tenure-track job at the University of California at Riverside in 1962, where his youngest daughter Judith was born. However, the family stayed there only a year, during which time he was recruited to the department at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. This was a big move, since all of the family of both of my parents lived in California. The prospect of living in the cold and snow was also the subject of dire warnings, I believe. However, there are times of the year Ithaca looks pretty nice:
This shows the house my parents bought on moving to Ithaca in 1963. The house is still there (103 Midway Road), though the beautiful elm tree succumbed long ago to the Dutch Elm disease epidemic. The vehicles are a huge 1962 Pontiac station wagon, suitable for a family of seven, and a backup car, a 1955 Chevy.
My father in 1965, aged 37.
Teaching and Administration at Cornell
My father liked the department at Cornell very much. In 1967, his old undergraduate college, Pomona, made him an offer to return as a Full Professor, but he stayed at Cornell, waiting out the long tenure process (he was promoted in 1969).
During his Cornell career, he served in various positions of responsibility in his department: as director of the Social Psychology Laboratory, as Director of Undergraduate Studies, as Director of Graduate Studies, and for seven years (two terms) as Chair. In faculty recruitments as Chair, he advocated candidates with quantitative expertise and a natural science orientation. He also oversaw the department’s move from White Hall to the newly-built Uris Hall in 1973. He taught Sociology 101, "Introduction to Sociology," for a number of years, and created the course Sociology 102, "Microsociology".
He also served the University in various capacities, as Secretary of the Graduate Faculty, on the predecessor to the University Senate, and on the Dean’s Advisory Committee. He served on the Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Admissions Committee for over 20 years and the Human Subjects Committee for over 25, giving up these assignments only in 2005. He retired in 1997, but kept an office in the department, continuing his research and committee work to near the end of his life.
Research
My father's research during his earlier years at Cornell had two major themes. He had an interest in breaking down observations of people into their constituents, simplifying to the point where precise measurements and controlled experiments were possible. For instance, a 1972 paper with Leo Meltzer showed that experimental subjects can make accurate judgments of affect in a three-way conversation by attending only to a panel of lights, which were illuminated during the time the participants were speaking. He was also interested in possible biological influences on human behavior. In a research collaboration with Loren Cobb supported by the NIH and NSF, he monitored subjects living in isolation for long periods in the Social Psychology Laboratory, finding that biological rhythms with a range of periodicities governed the subjects’ propensity to engage in spontaneous speech.
Gallery: Lab Equipment for Social Psychology in the 1960's
The Cornell Datalogger, as described in a 1969 article in Administrative Science Quarterly. The equipment consists of "(a) a detector and associated amplifiers to pick up signals such as voice, heart rate or an observer's coding behavior; (b) an analog-to-digital converter and multiplexer which samples the incoming signals and converts them into digital readings; and (c) a digital tape recorder [on left] which accepts the multiplexed signals and records the information on computer tape." The article concludes, "It appears that social psychology is on the verge of moving out of its paper-and-pencil era into an era of instrumentation. With such instruments, parametric measurement of greater reliability and precision will be possible, and the consequence of such development in other sciences has historically been a rapid advance in theoretical sophistication."
The bone conductance microphone, described in a 1967 article in American Journal of Psychology. A more sophisticated version of this apparatus was used in the later collaborations with Loren Cobb: the bone-conductance microphone was used to gate the signal of a hat-mounted boom-mounted microphone, and both were fed to a small FM transmitter. This permitted experimental subjects to move about freely, eliminated room noise, and traced speech to a particular individual.
My father was also interested in research that could have an influence on society. In a study with Judith Grether, he found that summer vacation plays an important role in differences in student achievement, with at-risk students falling behind their peers more during the summer months than during the academic year; this direction was later pursued by James Coleman and others. Another project, which dominated his work in retirement, was the investigation of the richness of the vocabulary included in schoolbooks. My father gathered thousands of texts from libraries and archives ( see http://www.soc.cornell.edu/hayes-lexical-analysis/schoolbooks/), developed replicable measures of lexical difficulty, and compared these measures with time series verbal test scores. His view concerning what these data showed was that simplification of schoolbook vocabulary over the decades has been harmful to students, reducing their vocabularies and general knowledge. He applied the same research techniques to other questions: the intelligibility of scientific articles, and (in collaboration with Margaret Ahrens) to the "motherese" hypothesis in child language acquisition.
For a scholarly bibliography, with links to PDF copies of a number of his papers, see Scholarly articles by Donald P. Hayes.
Life in Ithaca
Ithaca was very remote from where my father grew up but was in many ways the ideal place to lead a good life. In the Cornell Department my father had several friends of similar age and interests. Housing was attractive, leafy, and affordable, and the Ithaca city schools were strikingly good. Until his back went bad in later middle age, my father played golf with his friends on the beautiful Cornell golf course, often taking an adolescent child along as caddy. The surrounding region of Upstate New York is lovely, and my parents often took their kids on the now-obsolete activity of the "Sunday drive."
Aerial view of Ithaca, N.Y.
I think my parents must have been very busy (my mother started working full time as a university librarian in 1971), but in general the family sat down together, nightly, to eat dinner. My parents took a sincere interest in what their kids had to say, both at the dinner table and in general. They were also sympathetic and supportive of their children's projects. I remember in particular their willingness to have a harpsichord kit assembled by their son on the dining table over a period of several months in 1969 , which must have been quite disruptive...
The family was (to put it immodestly) brainy. All seven went to selective colleges and got at least one postgraduate degree, a total of nine among us. Two of my sisters served as editors of the Harvard Law Review. My parents encouraged us academically but didn't, I think, put undue pressure on us.
The long period in Ithaca was interrupted from time to time for six-month sabbatical leaves spent in England, the first in Oxford during the Spring semester of 1970-1971, the others in London during Spring 1977 and Fall 1983.
Wanderlust
My parents liked to travel, and were aided in this by my father's willingness to drive for great lengths of time, often as my mother read murder mysteries to him.
They twice drove to California (1965, 1967) with all five children to visit relatives and do sight-seeing, and spent many weekends (first with kids, and later by themselves) driving long distances from Ithaca. I recall an extreme case, in which they obtained permission to drive on a private road that took them to the shores of Hudson Bay in Canada.
On a larger scale, they liked to travel to other continents; this picture was from a visit to the Soviet Union; other less-usual destinations were Turkey, Syria, and East Africa.
Later life
My parents continued to travel extensively in retirement, focusing especially on archaeological sites in the Mediterranean. They hosted large gatherings of their children, inlaws, and grandchildren at holidays and in the summer, both in Ithaca and in large rental houses in vacation areas of the Northeast.
My father with his granddaughter Rachel Gross. He wore many hats in later life, to prevent incipient skin cancer from developing, and often spent time shopping for them after leaving a hat at home.
My father developed an interest in the long-standing hypothesis that the works attributed by orthodox scholarship to William Shakespeare were not written by "the man from Stratford". In his last years he wrote a brief paper that makes use a tool from his professional work trying to get more insight into this question.
Other traits
As hobbies my father enjoyed photography, golf and tennis, as well as design—the layout of the Social Psychology Lab and of his second home in Cayuga Heights (built 1976), and various pieces of furniture. He was skillful with tools (for instance, he built my childhood bedroom) and particularly liked any sort of apparatus that included a small internal combustion engine. This picture shows him as a senior-citizen motorcyclist.
He had a pleasing habit of splitting up chunks of food (oranges, kippered herring) and distributing bits to family members; in this picture the recipient is grandson Charles Spellman.
He was fluent and comfortable in conversing with anybody, of any nationality, background, or level of education. He seldom displayed anger, and was patient and nurturing with his children. He had a gift for optimism, a trait which was evident at times even during his last years of illness, and which affected other people very positively.
Last updated July 17, 2007