William Mulloy - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Mulloy was born May 3, 1917 in Salt Lake City, the only son of William Thomas Mulloy, Sr., a conductor on the Union Pacific Railroad, and Barbara Seinsoth Mulloy. His older sister, Mary Grace Mulloy Strauch, recognized and encouraged his early interest in archaeology. On the occasions of his childhood visits to her home in Mesa, Arizona, she would drive him to the town dump where he spent days at a time conducting his own stratification studies and enthusiastically reporting his results to her family at suppertime.

Mulloy earned a BA in anthropology from the University of Utah, where he had distinguished himself both in the classroom and on the wrestling team. From 1938 to 1939, he worked for the Louisiana State Archaeological Survey as a field archaeologist. In the Louisiana bayou, he contracted malaria. From Louisiana, Mulloy went to Illinois where he began graduate studies at the University of Chicago, then one of the world's foremost graduate schools of Anthropology and Archaeology. In the summer of 1940, Mulloy supervised archaeological fieldwork at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. There, among the field crew, he met his future wife, Emily Ross, an archaeology major at the University of New Mexico.

His graduate studies were interrupted when, shortly after the Attack on Pearl Harbor, Mulloy enlisted in the US Army. At Camp Roberts, California, he served first in the Field Artillery Instrument and Survey School. Recognizing his talent and intelligence, the Army sent him to Officer Candidate School in North Dakota. In 1943, Mulloy received his commission in the Counter Intelligence Corps. An outstanding linguist, Mulloy first learned Japanese and then became a Japanese language instructor in order to prepare US military officers for the invasion and occupation of Japan. As a reserve officer, Mulloy advanced to the rank of major.

After World War II ended, Mulloy returned to graduate studies in Chicago with his wife, Emily, and their infant daughter Kathy, who was born in 1945. As a graduate student, he worked in the steel mills, in the railroad yards and as janitor in an apartment building in South Chicago. After earning an MA from the University of Chicago in 1948, Mulloy accepted a teaching position in what was then the Department of Anthropology, Sociology and Economics at the University of Wyoming and moved his family to Laramie, where both his son, Patrick, and his second daughter, Brigid, were born.

Five years after joining the faculty in Wyoming, Mulloy returned to Chicago and successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, A Preliminary Historical Outline for the Northwest Plains, still a standard work in the field of North American Plains Indian society. The University of Chicago granted him a PhD in 1953.