This memorial for Harold A. Mulford, Jr. will neither begin nor end with the standard statement about how much we have lost with Hal’s passing on June 28, 2012 just short of “four score and ten” at age 89. Tapping a perhaps less common tradition, let us celebrate some of the unique gifts that alcohol social science gained by his travels with us.
Hal Mulford’s life has both storybook qualities but as a scholar, features that are absolutely unique. Born on an Iowa farm and growing into a strapping handsome man, Hal was a hero in the Good War, with a medal-producing record of laying down the enemy with major artillery during D-Day and then fighting on through the Pacific Theater to nearly the end of the War. After marriage and the beginning of his family, and a GI Bill bachelor’s degree from Morningside College in 1947, his eventual education at the University of Iowa led him to a doctorate in sociology in 1955. Here he was substantially influenced by Manfred Kuhn, founder of what is known as “The Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction” wherein the somewhat elusive tenets of this perspective are put to hard-nosed empirical test. Hal’s work continually reflected this perspective; my attempted summary of the core of his life’s work would center on his efforts to construct the symbolic and interactional world of the deviant drinker and alcoholic through scale construction.
Following a brief stint as an apparently overloaded sociology instructor at Northwest Missouri State College, Hal received a surprise invitation to return to his Alma Mater, where he ended up spending the remainder of his career. His appointment started and remained in the Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry where he quickly earned a full professorship. Others often joked about his “garret” in the State Psychopathic Hospital, describing both a sort of ivory tower and the splendid isolation of having a full time tenured assignment as a research professor. > > > > Read More
