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Papa Franz. It was as a physicist that Boas began his scientific career. Born 77 years ago to a family of German Jews in Minden, Westphalia, he won his Ph. D. at Kiel with a thesis on "The Nature of the Color of Water." The young physicist liked geography, thirsted for travel. He wanted to go to Greenland on a ship which was to bring back a corps of meteorologists. His father refused to finance this junket. Boas financed it himself with a newspaper contract for travel articles. When he reached Baffin Land he was so interested in the Eskimos that he unpacked, stayed a year. When he had finished a book about them, he was an anthropologist for life.
After a year in the University of Berlin he went to the U. S. to marry Marie Krackowizer, daughter of a distinguished Austrian surgeon. For a while he was associate editor of Science. Thereafter he joined the faculty of Clark University, was in charge of anthropology at Chicago's World's Fair. On expeditions to the north Pacific Coast he studied Indian art, music, religion, the secret societies of the Kwakiutl. His Tsimshian Mythology is regarded by experts as a classic concordance of North American myths.
In his first years at Columbia, Boas was something of a storm centre. To his German-trained scientific mind the idea of popularization was repugnant. He snorted savagely that some of the students which his own renown was attracting had no business to be anthropologists. Lately he has softened, has even written a few books for popular consumption, notably Anthropology and Modern Life.
Dr. Boas still speaks with a thick German accent. The entire Department of Anthropology calls him "Papa Franz." He has no hobbies except playing the piano, which he does very well, and his six grandchildren, who go to him with personal problems and tough Latin passages. His old age has not been happy. One of his five children died of infantile paralysis, another was killed in an automobile crash. His wife died two years ago.
In 1931 Dr. Boas went back to Kiel to renew his Ph. D. (German Ph. D.'s are good for only 50 years). The university officials gave him an honorary M. D., the only honor they could think of that he had not received. After the Nazi ascendancy the square before Kiel University was lit up by a great bonfire, and the Boas books were thrown into it. Commented "Papa Franz": "If people want to be crazy, what can you do about it?"