Greenville Goodwin - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Goodwin was born in Southampton, New York to wealthy parents. He contracted tuberculosis when young (when there was no cure) and was sent to the Mesa Ranch School in Arizona for its dry climate, believed to be more healthful. This was the start of his long relationship with and interest in the Southwest. The dean, Byron Cummings, suggested that he study at the University of Arizona.

He attended classes at Arizona, but found that he was not interested in earning a degree. Goodwin moved progressively to live for the next decade near Apache communities at Bylas, Fort Apache, Canyon Day, and Cibecue. He talked extensively to the people, especially the elders, and they began to accept his attention. He studied informally and was largely self-taught, although he did some graduate work at the University of Chicago in 1939, when he completed his monograph on the social organization of the Western Apache.

Read more about this topic:  Greenville Goodwin

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:

    Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!”
    David Elkind (20th century)

    In the two centuries that have passed since 1776, millions upon millions of Americans have worked and taken up arms, when necessary, to make [the American] dream a reality. We can be proud of what they have accomplished. Today, we are the world’s oldest republic. We are at peace. Our nation and our way of life endure. And we are free.
    Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)

    Until we devise means of discovering workers who are temperamentally irked by monotony it will be well to take for granted that the majority of human beings cannot safely be regimented at work without relief in the form of education and recreation and pleasant surroundings.
    Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)