(7 of 11)
Like many of his own students, Sam Gould represents the first generation of his family to seek and get a college degree. He grew up in Connecticut's Housatonic valley, where his Lithuanian-born father was a wholesaler of paper, twine and groceries in the small towns of Ansonia and Shelton. It was not a wealthy family, and Sam worked at odd jobs to save money for college—only to discover that his father, in hopes of doubling the investment, had lost it all on a stock-market fling.
Nonetheless, Gould worked his way through Bates College in Maine. He anchored a debate team that won the Eastern Intercollegiate Debate League championship against competition from Yale and Penn. He was president of the dramatic society and a varsity track man—for his 50-sec. time in the quarter-mile leg of the mile relay, he says, "they wouldn't even give me a suit today"—was a cheerleader, class-day and commencement orator. With all that activity, Gould tutored children at a private school, worked part time in the Bates president's office and still managed a B average. When he graduated in 1930, the campus yearbook named him both "most talented" and "best dressed" man in the class.*
Radio Appreciation. With his college savings of $500, Gould went to England in 1930 for four months to study literature at Oxford; the Depression forced him to return home and find work. After a year of boredom as a telephone-company traffic manager, he accepted a job teaching English at a Hartford high school. To make ends meet, he took a summer job as an announcer, producer and scriptwriter for Hartford's radio station WTHT, then organized a radio-appreciation course for his students. In 1934, while on a year's leave studying English at Cambridge, he met a young Finnish woman, Laura Ohman; they corresponded, were married two years later. (They have one son, Richard, who studied at Harvard and Berkeley, is now assistant curator at New York City's American Museum of Natural History.) Gould completed his credits for an M.A. at N.Y.U., started Ph.D. studies at Harvard, but financial pressures forced him to give them up.
During World War II, Gould ended up as a lieutenant commander in charge of Admiral Arthur Radford's office aboard the carrier U.S.S. Yorktown in the Pacific. In 1946, he was hired to set up a radio, TV and theater section for Boston University. It was a demanding job. Gould had to recruit a faculty, teach 18 hours a week—and start an educational FM station. He also found time to co-author a book on Training the Local Announcer. Gould then spent two years as assistant to B.U. President Harold Case, learning some of the subtleties of running 15 schools within the university—a handy foretaste, in miniature, of his S.U.N.Y. job. Eventually he decided that he did not want to "always be a No. 2 man," and in 1954 accepted the presidency of Ohio's Antioch College.
Formal in Underwear. Gould found his five years as head of Antioch "a wearying experience." He endeared himself to the faculty by defending an art instructor accused by McCarthy-era congressional investigators of Communist ties, and by fighting against loyalty oaths required for federal