Savin-Williams, Ritch C.

Born in 1949 to Joy Joan (Savin) and Francis Charles Williams, Ritch C. Savin-Williams was raised on a farm in Clever, Missouri, north of the Ozark Mountains. Clever, with no stoplights, fed more cows than people (n = 282) and boasted a grain elevator as its prime attraction. His family rarely subsisted above the poverty line, and the hard work necessary to feign middle-class status taught Savin-Williams temperance and resilience, traits that would later influence his research by focusing his attention on positive rather than deficit models of youth development and by nurturing an identification with the disenfranchised.

Savin-Williams's youth was consumed with academics, farming, religion, and sports. His Future Farmers of America (FFA) projects included Hampshire hogs and Hereford cattle, which he dutifully named, thereby forestalling their consumption; eventually, he became president of the local FFA chapter. He was obsessed with baseball's Kansas City A's (and later, the Royals) and lettered in every available sport. Deeply inspired by religion, he delivered sermons by age 12, was designated Sunday school superintendent by 14, and was appointed church deacon at 15. Raised in a conservative religious and political environment, his burgeoning teenage liberalism often collided with prevailing views. Foreshadowing his lifelong pursuit for truth and outsider status, he preached about the humanity rather than the deity of Jesus, the superiority of Motown over country music, and books over beer. Before graduating as class (n =30) valedictorian, he was editor of the school newspaper, and when presented an award for outstanding citizenship, he publicly accepted it with his shirttails out. Despite these occasional sneering rebellious acts, he was considered a “good boy” who would likely enter the ministry in Clever.

As a state scholar, Savin-Williams attended the University of Missouri, Columbia (1967–1971), maintained concurrent jobs (catering waiter, youth minister, resident adviser), and dabbled in several academic majors, including political science and philosophy, before fortuitously falling into psychology. Assigned to typing manuscripts for work-study in the psychology department, he overheard Professor Robert Boice, an animal ethologist, searching for a research assistant who, unlike the predecessor, would not unrelentingly and catastrophically drop the squirming, slippery Rana pipiens frogs on the lab's concrete floor. Impressed when Savin-Williams volunteered that he was raised on a farm and loved frogs (actually, he hated typing more), his life trajectory became drastically altered. Soon, Savin-Williams was recording dominance behavior (tongue lashing, mounting) among frogs and offering (notably unsolicited but usually appreciated) observations about research design and hypotheses (number of frogs per pen was important, removal of those who had eaten their mealworm unintentionally introduced an additional independent variable) that broadened Boice's research and resulted in three early-1970s publications for the undergraduate Savin-Williams. One of these, based on a test of tonic immobility (time taken to “go limp” after being pinned), necessitated Savin-Williams sneaking into his dormitory 12 wild frogs he had captured on his parents' farm during Thanksgiving [Page 950]break. From this study, he learned two lessons: It matters which subjects you study (sample selection: the laboratory “tame” frogs took much longer to demonstrate tonic immobility) and direct observation as a preferred methodology. To this day, he proudly displays a hanging mobile of dehydrated frog corpses.

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