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Just at the end of his stellar career of public service through psychology, Nick Hobbs received very appropriate honors showing that psychologists and many others knew what a precious national resource his life had been. Only days before his death from cancer on January 23, 1983, he participated in the dedication of the Nicholas Hobbs Laboratory of Human Development of the Peabody College for Teachers of Vanderbilt University, part of the Kennedy Center for Research on Education and Human Development that he founded and directed at its beginning. Two years earlier, he had received two parallel American Psychological Association (APA) awards—one for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest and another for Distinguished Professional Contributions “utilizing psychological knowledge in the public interest and social policy.” (See the January 1981 issue of the American Psychologist, pp. 64–66 and pp. 70–73, for the citations, biographical notes, and complete bibliography.) As the citations and testimonials on these occasions variously noted, Nick gave creative, responsible, and effective service to the institutions that he helped administer, to the Southern region from which he sprang, to the APA, and to the profession of psychology, but above all to the nation’s children and youth, especially those who grew up with disadvantage and difficulty.

Nicholas Hobbs was born in Greenville, South Carolina, on March 13, 1915, and graduated from the Citadel in 1936. From there he went to Ohio State where he worked with Sidney Pressey and Carl Rogers. After a wartime stint during which he directed a psychological research unit in the Aviation Psychology Program, he returned to take his PhD in 1946. Thereafter he directed the clinical psychology program at Teachers College, Columbia University, for 4 years with the serendipitous result of acquiring from among his graduate students a lifetime partner in Mary Thompson, whom he married in 1949. After a brief interlude as department chair at Louisiana State, Hobbs moved to Nashville in 1951 where he based the rest of his career as a psychologist (with forays to Washington). Initially, he served as chair...