Carl Iver Hovland was born in Chicago on June 12, 1912,
to two Lutherans of Scandinavian descent who, unlike Carl,
both survived into their nineties－Ole C. Hovland (1871-
1967) and wife Augusta Anderson Hovland (1876-1970).
Carl's younger brother Warren described both parents as
"deeply religious." Augusta had immigrated alone from
Sweden at the age of twelve, and had never had any fur-
ther formal education. Ole had grown up on the Minne-
sota farm of his immigrant parents－Iver Christenson
Hovland, who had been a shoemaker in Norway, and Marit
Olsen Schjeie, whom Carl's older brother Roger described
as "a sharp, quick-witted Norwegian lady, proud of her ten
children." Carl's father Ole left the family's Minnesota farm
to become an electrical engineer and inventor in Chicago.
The traits for which Ole is commended in an article in the
Bulletin of Automatic Telephone Engineers are similar to those
that everyone came to admire in his son Carl. One of
Carl's two brothers (long-lived like their parents), Roger
(1907-94, six years older than Carl) followed his father into
an engineering career, and C. Warren (born 1918, six years
younger than Carl) became a professor of philosophy and
religion and chair of the Department of Religious Studies
at Oregon State University, where a building is named
"Hovland Hall" in his honor.
Carl's son David Alan Hovland (born July 18, 1941) and
his daughter, now Katharine Hovland Walvick (born De-
cember 12, 1942), both manifest intellectual aptitudes remi-
niscent of their father's. David obtained his Ph.D. in psy-
chology from Harvard where I, who had been his father's
advisee at Yale, served in turn as David's advisor until I
moved to Stanford in 1968. David and his wife Carol now
live in Austin, Texas, where David is a professor at Park
College. Kathie received a Wellesley B.A. in mathematics
and became at one time the youngest woman life master at
bridge. She represented the United States in several bridge
olympics around the world, winning Bronze Medals in the
Canary Islands and Geneva. She and her attorney husband
Walter now live in McLean, Virginia, outside Washington,
D.C., where she is senior legal editor for Dickstein Shapiro
Morin & Oshinsky LLP. David and Kathie each have one
son and one daughter, all now grown.
A cousin, Mary Hovland Jenni, though never having met
Carl, developed a keen interest in him and his work while
pursuing her own doctoral studies in psychology at the
University of Montana in the 1970s. She contacted several
of Carl's family members and former colleagues, asking
for their recollections of him. Much of my information
about his family and childhood comes from her unpub-
lished report (Jenni, December 1974). Carl was described,
she said, as "a brilliant child, shy, quiet, introverted, unath-
letic, troubled by illnesses." Carl's first-grade teacher re-
portedly said that Carl "lived in his own dream world and
did not relate to the group" (Warren Hovland's letter to
Jenni of November 4, 1974). Everyone agreed that Carl
found satisfaction in learning and scholastic achievement,
and many spoke of the early emergence of Carl's love of
music and his impressive proficiency on the piano. During
college, Carl partly supported himself as an organist for
the Lutheran church, though his formal association with
the church otherwise ended during this period.
It was a shared love of music that brought together Carl
and Gertrude Raddatz, his wife-to-be. Gertrude was born
in Chicago on September 13, 1911, the first of five chil-
dren. Carl and Gertrude both attended Chicago's Luther
High North, studied piano with the same teacher (Esther
Kittlesby), and enjoyed playing piano and organ duets.
Gertrude went on to study piano at the American Conser-
vatory in Chicago and then to teach piano－until her hands
became too crippled by her rheumatoid arthritis. Carl and
Gertrude were married on June 4, 1938, when Carl (whose
mother reportedly had told her sons that a "boy" should
not marry until he was thirty) was about to turn twenty-
six.
Manifesting the engineering aptitude of his father and
older brother, Carl experimented with 3-D photography
and designed and built his own high-fidelity systems. He
developed such expertise in sound reproduction that his
advice was reportedly sought by professional audio engi-
neers. (Once, while I was still a graduate student, Carl
took obvious pleasure in inviting me to challenge his new
system's capabilities with selections from his extensive col-
lection of classical records. It was my first exposure to the
just perfected stereo reproduction of sound and to the
astonishing realism it could achieve.)
Until the untimely deaths of both parents, the Hovland
home－in addition to being filled with music－seems to have
been a consistently warm and supportive one. Kathie wrote
to me of her "strongest feelings" about her father－ "awe
and pride in his brilliance and his accomplishments, joy in
the tender memories of our togetherness (including play-
ing piano duets, my Ôhelping' with his experiments . . .
discussing everything from my academic goals and achieve-
ments to my boyfriends, listening to operas from the Met
on the radio on Saturday afternoons, and my driving him
to New York to Sloan Kettering Institute for cancer treat-
ments), and admiration for his proud, quiet strength and
courage (especially after my mother died and toward the
end of his life)." She concluded, "I have nothing but super-
latives to say about my father. He was the very best!" (let-
ter of August 23, 1988).
www.psychspace.com心理学空间网
