You must read this book. It's about Mo Burg who was sort of a
third string catcher, professional catcher, but was a Princeton
graduate. And he was traveling around professional baseball teams in
Japan in the 30's and he visited a hospital there and took
early videos or early movies of the Tokyo Harbor that eventually got
into out war plans. But read the book, wonderful, wonderful book. But
MacKinnon was doing this, gathering data. And so he came back after
there and set-up the OSS, and they were using assessment devices to
assess he would say participants in irregular warfare or soldiers in
irregular warfare. That was his description. And I have, if you ever
want to see, I have all
Page 22these early slides. He gave
me his photographs. He brought in his photograph album of all the
assessment experience they did in Washington and he said, "You
see this young person here?" Well, that's Mo Stein.
And Mo Stein was the 70's psychologist. See this guy here?
This is so and so. So I said, "Don, do you mind if I take
pictures? I'll give them back." He said,
"No, no, no." So I got slides made of the photographs.
And one of the things I was able to do with that was Mo Stein, when he
retired from NYU, I gave him a set of those. He couldn't
believe it. He had not seen—did not know they existed or
didn't remember they existed. And he's going
through this weeping, watching himself as a kid. So MacKinnon was here.
MacKinnon had talked about his OSS experience. When the war was over, he
got a Carnegie grant and he went from Bryn Mawr up to Berkeley to set-up
the Institute For Personality Assessment Research and then brought in
people to study creativity. And why creativity? I said, "Don,
why creativity?" He said, "Well, you know of all the
people I've assessed, leaders, scientists, there was one
common trait that went across their—the effective people,
there was one common trait, and that's creativity."
New applied perspective on creativity. So thanks, Don. I'll
file that one away, too. So he had part of the assessed poets, the
assessed writers. He did architects. MacKinnon's was
architects. He said the architect was really the creative person because
they had real world constraints. You had to be creative in those real
world constraints. So he did all that set-up in the 50's,
60's, retired from there, and then came here in the early
70's. And he was here for a year. My personal turbulence was
going on. And I brought him back several times as we ran these
creativity weeks symposia that we did for ten years. And he would come
back, and I got to know Mary his wife, a sweetie. And whenever they
would come here, I would have—this is before liquor by the
drink—I knew that every night at 5:30, they had a vodka
martini. So whenever I would check them into the hotel, he would look at
me and I'd say, "Check the cabinet."
He'd smile. A little vodka and a little vermouth and the
olives. 70's, you know, they were wonderful people. He was
Harvard trained, Harvard educated. I think he went to Bowdoin College as
an undergraduate and then went off. So he was just a great human who
influenced my life and my career greatly around creativity, around
helping with my personal divorce and then also saying go back to
college. In his phrase, "Go back and do Ph.D." He
said, "I know you're great, because I've
worked with you. I know you're good, you can make a
contribution. David Campbell knows you can make a contribution, but
other people don't. If you open up the trunk, we know that.
But you've got to get that trunk into certain places and the
way it's going to get you there..." He used the
analogy of the
Page 23baggage tag. And that baggage tag
has to say Ph.D. So with his encouragement and David and Ken Clark
giving me the time off, I went back and did the Ph.D. And MacKinnon came
over to visit me in London.