Hyde Park High
Paul paid tribute to the high school systems in both Gary, where he was allowed to skip grades, moving from class to class, and Chicago. From 1928 to December 1931, he attended Hyde Park School, only a short distance from the University of Chicago, where he encountered teachers from whom he claimed to have learned much.
In 1982, unable to attend a reunion, Paul sent a note that read, “All I am or ever hope to be I owe to Hiram Benjamin Loomis and Beulah Shoesmith.”33 Hiram Loomis had been Principal of Hyde Park School since 1905, leaving only when he reached the mandatory retirement age of seventy, in 1933. When Paul arrived he was sixty-five, with twenty-three years' service in the school, and a figure to be reckoned with, well known in the local community. He had insisted that his teachers be in the school for seven periods a day, stopping them from drawing their salaries and disappearing after lunch to take second jobs.34 He had also tried hard to stop secret societies from playing a role in the school, having once called for the re-election of all officers when he found they were members of such societies. In the fall of 1928, just before Paul arrived, he had insisted that any student holding an office or honor had to swear before a notary that he “never had, does not, and does not expect to belong to any secret society, while in Hyde Park School.”35In Paul's junior year, a reporter painted a picture of life at the school based on what he had heard milling around among students at lunchtime. Seventy- five percent of them went outside the school for lunch. One group of girls discussed the money they could make from taxi dances, and he noted that many a quarter was diverted from lunch to buying from neighboring stores some obscene postcards such as war veterans would remember having seen in Europe.
Yet not all was bad:We noticed a lot of the students wandering over into Jackson Park. A few of them stole away to slyly hold hands on an obscure park bench, but the majority simply walked about, with one eye on a wrist watch to keep tab on the time. Many, many, high powered automobiles drove off with boys and girls in their teens at the wheel. Three or four girls had smart appearing roadsters with older men in the driver's seat call for them.
A school skip, that's a dance you know, was in progress in the gym. The postures were about the same seen in any well conducted dance hall. There was very little pairing off after the dance—a group of girls went their way as did the boys.36
The reporter concluded that one of the advantages of a public school was that “students rub elbows with one another and develop character in a way that cannot be taught in books. No better, no worse than any other school, Hyde Park High.”
However, though the paper's portrait of the school was not unflattering, Principal Loomis was not happy, and the following week, in a letter to the editor, he responded to the allegation that some students might be buying obscene postcards by expressing his willingness to cooperate with the police to stop their sale, asking the journalist to help identify the offending stores. He observed that objectionable books were being sold—translations of French and Italian “classics.”37 In the same issue, a number of students defended the school, complaining that the journalist had insulted the 95 percent of students who did not engage in these activities. Interestingly, one of them observed that Hyde Park was a district where parents could afford a few luxuries, such as the cars the reporter had seen. These reports make it clear that Loomis presided over a school that attempted to maintain a high moral tone in a district that was not suffering as much as many from the ravages of the Depression. This was no doubt particularly significant given that the Chicago school system, mismanaged for many years, faced financial problems; from December 1929 onward, teachers worked days for which they went unpaid.
Some were reduced to breaking point by their contact with the children of poor and unemployed families. By May 1932, shortly after Paul left Hyde Park, the city owed its teachers, on average, $1,400 each.38 Paul may have attended a public school, but he was spared the worst effects of the Depression. What is not apparent from these reports, though it can be inferred from the lists of names and photographs in the yearbooks, is that the school had a significant number of students of Jewish origin.Described as the “Grand Old Man” of Hyde Park School, Loomis was praised by his assistant as strongly as he was by Paul:
Mr. Loomis's everlasting kindness, his patience, his fair decisions, and his charmingly modern mind, have endeared him to the thousands of teachers, former pupils, and to those other thousands who have known him through the school. Mr. Loomis is retiring only because he has reached the retirement age—he will be 70 this summer. No question was too trivial for him, and no interruption ever bothered or vexed him. He was invariably kind to the shabbiest student with the lowest grades, as he was to the district superintendent. And one last memory is of him standing out in Jackson Park near the baseball diamond, his curly white hair and “Vandyke” shining in the bright sun, umpiring a baseball game with all the joy and excitement of any of the pupils, and with the skill of a big leaguer. His three sons and two daughters are all graduates of the school.39
Even allowing for the hyperbole that one would expect on the occasion of someone's retirement, this strongly suggests that Loomis may have contributed significantly to Paul's education.
After the principal, the other teacher Paul picked out for praise was Beulah I. Shoesmith, another long-serving teacher at Hyde Park School, having taught mathematics since 1910.40 A graduate of the University of Chicago, she established a national reputation in mathematics education. She began the school's participation in mathematics contests, and the school won the Wilson Junior College contest, a Chicago-wide mathematics tournament, for eighteen consecutive years.41 In school, she was known as Beulah “Isosceles” Shoesmith, on account of her having regularly set her new class in plane geometry a difficult problem that only the best students could solve, involving an isosceles triangle.42 Princeton physicist Jay Orear has written that when she taught him, the school trained around ten students to compete in mathematics tournaments and that they always won the top three prizes, something that was effectively impossible to achieve by chance.43 To support interest in mathematics, she argued for the creation of mathematics clubs, making her case in an article that was still cited almost a decade after its publication:
Miss Beulah I.
Shoesmith, of the Hyde Park High School, Chicago, Illinois, in an article on mathematics clubs reports that the study of algebraic fallacies in her club created such an interest that pupils outside the club asked to be allowed to visit the club meetings; and that so much enthusiasm was aroused over the working out of original proofs for the Pythagorean Theorem by the advanced pupils, that the plane geometry students began to inquire when they would be allowed to study this entertaining theorem. Such lively interest as is reported from these clubs is the need of every high school mathematics department.44The problem to which mathematics clubs provided the solution was the need to offer greater variety than was possible in the classroom. In her article, she explained:
In addition to the problem of arousing the dull or the indifferent pupil from his lethargy there is the difficulty of keeping the brighter and more original at concert pitch, so that while we are attempting to create interest we may not kill that which already existed. While more intensive work on the subject in hand may be assigned for extra credit to these more ambitious pupils and other devices may be used to retain their interest, still it is a lamentable fact that the amount of uniformity necessary in classroom work makes it difficult to bring out the capacity of the individual pupil. Yet we owe it to the excellent student to hold his interest and by opening up to him new fields of thought inspire him to the development of mathematical power of which he may be unconscious. The mathematics club is at least a partial solution of this difficulty and the work of such a club reacts favorably on the attitude toward mathematics throughout the school.45
She clearly maintained this concern for brighter students while Paul was there, for shortly after he left Hyde Park, she presented a paper to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, titled “What Do We Owe to the Brighter Pupil?”46
At Hyde Park School there were two mathematics clubs, entry to which was based on course grades.
For younger students there was the Euclidian Club, and for seniors it was the Pythagorean Club, which she described in the following terms:When the possibility of organizing a small club was proposed these pupils were very enthusiastic. From the high-school student's point of view it was of course imperative that the club be equipped at the outset with constitution, a name, and a pin. Regular program meetings, usually an hour and a half in length, are held every two weeks at the close of the school day. The president, usually a Senior mathematics student, presides at the meeting. The program committee confers with the mathematics faculty in regard to the subject-matter of each program and urges club members to propose problems and topics of special interest which they may wish to hear discussed. At each meeting programs for the next meeting are distributed so that members may be informed two weeks in advance of the topics which will be up for consideration. A committee on proofs passes on the validity of original solutions and sees to it that these are written up in permanent form and preserved.47
Shoesmith retired from Hyde Park School in 1945, teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology for five years more. On her death in 1959, she left an estate of just over $1 million, designating $50,000 to fund a scholarship at the University of Chicago.48 Paul was at Hyde Park School during the stock market boom and the Great Crash of 1929, taking a strong interest in what was happening. He recalled helping Shoesmith to pick out stocks, “Hupp motors and some other losers.”49 He was not alone in being surprised to learn that she had left so much money, for her success contrasted with the demeanor of someone he remembered as wearing the same dress every day.50 Shoesmith taught him algebra and geometry, followed by “advanced courses in Solid Geometry and College Algebra.”51 Paul recalled that he skipped trigonometry on the grounds that the old-fashioned version taught there was too boring.
A trigonometry class, did, however, feature in a short story he wrote that appeared in The Scroll, a magazine produced by the Hyde Park School Story Scribblers’ Society.52 It was a dialogue in which one student was telling another about falling in love with one girl in summer camp, and then with someone who was in their trigonometry class, and needing to be told by his friend to be more realistic. Though he clearly performed well, Paul later claimed to have been something of an underachiever, because it was not the “done thing” to be seen to work too hard. This perhaps explains why, though he was a member of the Euclidian Club in 1929, he appears, on the evidence of his yearbook, not to have got into the Pythagorean Club.For all his praise for the Gary school system, he considered the move to Chicago, and to Hyde Park High, to have been very significant. He noted that had his parents not moved away from Gary when he was eight, “I could be a spot-welder; or a master printer; while at the same time contributing at the frontier of Shakespearean studies.”53 He dated his success in mathematics and physics from his time at Hyde Park School and attributed it to Shoesmith’s teaching. The hours spent in the Gary library, and with his family’s books, reading the nineteenth-century literary classics were, he seems to be saying, being left behind.
The evidence from his school yearbook and his Chicago transcript (which records his high school credits) suggests a more complicated story of someone who, though interested in mathematics, was still inclined to the humanities. He took more than the required year of algebra, attending virtually all the mathematics courses that the school offered (two courses in algebra and courses in plane and solid geometry), and there is no reason to question the influence that Shoesmith had on him. However, there is no evidence that he took any particular interest in science at Hyde Park High, for he took only a semester’s general science and did not take any of the more specialized science courses offered (which covered botany, zoology, physics, chemistry, and astronomy). In contrast, he took two and a half years of history, well in excess of the required one year. His choice of subjects to study gives no hint of his later interest in the natural sciences, which was aroused only at the University of Chicago. Social studies and economics were offered at Hyde Park High, but Paul took neither of them.
The picture of someone inclined to the humanities is reinforced by his other activities. For three years he was a member of the school’s literary club, The Story Scribblers’ Society, entry to which was based on a writing contest, and he was also on the staff of the school’s literary magazine, The Scroll. He was also involved with The Weekly, the school newspaper, accounting for his half-credit in journalism. Paul referred to this in a letter he wrote to Norman Davidson, an eminent chemist who was two years behind him at Hyde Park.
I believe that you were two years behind me at Hyde Park High....
I remember this because retiring editors of the school newspaper conducted kind of an I.Q. Competition to select new members. Having the usual dollop of arrogance of smart nerds, I was surprised and interested to learn that there were other bright guys. (As Barnum didn’t quite say, “There’s one born every minute.”) It is a story on me rather than you.54
Paul was in Sigma Epsilon, the school’s honor society, for all four years at Hyde Park School. In his final year, though he did not get into the Pythagorean Club, he was in the English honor society. This is not the picture of a mathematical prodigy, but of a student who loved reading and writing; he was to approach economics not from science but from the humanities. He was involved in some sport—the yearbook lists him as being in track for three years and in basketball and fencing in his senior year—and as with over half the school, he was in the Civil Industrial Club, a service organization.