MY FATHER'S INITIAL CAREER AS AN ANTHROPOLOGIST

Growing up before the Great Depression, my father took advantage of his family's wealth to travel through Europe. (They lost their wealth as a result of the Depression). In fact, he bought the painting of Diogenes at that time in Paris. He traveled through Eastern Europe and filled a notebook with notes and drawings that he planned to use when he returned to the States and studied for a doctorate in anthropology and archaeology. Here are a few pages from that notebook of drawings that he made in Dubovaci, Serbia.

Back in the states and studying at Antioch College in 1932 (where he met my mother) he excavated mounds in Illinois and Ohio. Here is a page from his description of findings at the mounds in Xenia, Ohio, near Antioch.

When the Roosevelt administration established the WPA (Works Progress Administration) to provide employment during the Great Depreassion, he got a job based in Saint Louis to excavate sites in Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky. Here are some title pages from publications of his work up until 1942 when he joined the Red Cross as his military service for the war.

And here is an article at that time about his excavations in Kimswick, Missouri. One can now visit the Mastodon State Historic Site in Kimswick that resulted. When Kiki and I visited the States a few years ago, we went to another site where he worked and the curator of the museum still remembered him as having been responsible for the excavations.