Early Years
Leona Tyler was born in Chetek, Wisconsin on May 10, 1906. Her father, Leon M. Tyler was an accountant and house restoration contractor and her mother, Bessie J. Carver Tyler managed the home. Both her parents graduated high school, but neither attended college. Early in life, her family moved to Mesabi Iron Range, Minnesota. The mining communities consisted of hard-working immigrants, mainly Scandinavians, Italians, and Yugoslavians. The tax revenues from the then productive mines provided well for the local schools, and her family encouraged Leona's evident talents in academic studies as well as the piano. Her academic progress was rapid. Her major was English, but she was also interested in science. In chemistry classes, the style and order of the Periodic Table sparked her career-long appreciation of orderly and mathematical ways of dealing with questions. Psychology was a natural choice with her humanistic views and her convictions about empirical and quantitative evidence in organizing knowledge. Psychology came late, however. For thirteen years after graduating, Leona did what so many intelligent and gifted women did in those days, she taught school. It was the essays written by her students she found, were interesting and disturbing as they revealed the pressures and forced choices that impacted and controlled the development of their lives. This experience is what led to the major theme in her professional life, individual differences and individuality.
She graduated from the high school at the age of fifteen. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Minnesota at the age of 19. Although her major was English, she was also attracted to science. After graduating she taught English and other subjects in junior high schools in Minnesota and Michigan. She completed her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1940.
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