ABSTRACT
Following in the tradition of gifted education’s Midwestern roots, Paul Witty was much like his predecessors Lewis Terman and Leta Hollingworth, who hailed from Indiana and Nebraska, respectively. Witty was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, before the turn of the century on July 23, 1898 and even lived in Nebraska for a short time during his childhood. He was the youngest child of William and Margaret Witty, and at the time of Paul’s birth, William was employed by American Telephone and Telegraph. Raymond, Paul’s older brother, died in 1906 of pneumonia. As a child, Paul worked odd jobs and used the money to buy books. By the age of 12, he had secured a large number of books, which displayed his wide variety of interests including horses, dogs, and airplanes (D.C. Heath, 1946; Witty, n.d.). In 1916 Witty graduated from Wiley High School and then attended Indiana State Normal School (also known as Indiana State Teachers College) while working as manager at Hotel Tuller, where his family resided. Limited information is available regarding Paul Witty’s youth; however, by all accounts he was heavily infl uenced by his mother, to whom he attributed his “consuming interest in children” (D.C. Heath, 1946, p. 6). Mrs. Witty was involved in community activities, and she passed this sense of advocacy and responsibility to children along to her son, who would devote his professional career to studying and advocating for them. His mother also infl uenced his great interest in teaching and reading at a very young age with “a few beloved pictures books which my mother read again and again to me” (Witty, n.d., p. 1).
