Haring, Norris

Biographical Information

When Haring was a young man, staying on the farm was an option, but he wanted to seek his fortune in other endeavors. Before he could seriously start his own pursuits, world events (i.e., World War II) shaped his early adulthood. His color blindness kept him from joining the service as an air cadet, so he moved to California to work in a defense plant building B-25 airplanes. Soon after, in 1942, at the age of 19, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned to the Air Corps, the predecessor of the U.S. Air Force. After basic training, he was assigned to a chaplain as a clerk typist. His high scores on the army test battery, however, qualified him for the Army Specialized Training Program, and the Army sent him to the University of Pittsburgh to study engineering. Before he and his unit completed their training, the Specialized Training Program was dropped, and Haring was assigned to the 94th Signal Corp at Fort Dix, New Jersey. He was then sent to Europe, and his unit crossed the English Channel at Omaha Beach shortly after D-Day. He spent 3 years in the European theater seeing more than a little action.

He was discharged from the Army in January 1946 and enrolled in college. He attended Kearney State Teacher's College (now the University of Nebraska at Kearney), majoring in music and English. While there, he directed the marching band at the Boys Training School, a residential facility for wayward young men. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1948 and then enrolled in graduate school at the University of Nebraska. He studied educational psychology with an emphasis in counseling and took his master's degree in 1950. While he was working on his master's degree, he was involved in a preschool program designed to identify children who were gifted. He met Dorothy through his work with her niece, who attended the preschool program. They were soon married.

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