Professor of play won over academia
young teacher, Shirley Hicks, and broke off an engagement to woo her. She was charmed, no doubt, by his looks and enthusiasm. In his ebullient youth, and until he was well past middle-age, he had a shock of fair hair which he endearingly and frequently flung off his face.
Granted a Fulbright Scholarship, he travelled to the United States and the University of California at Berkley. He and Shirley married in Las Vegas.
He returned to New Zealand to find a struggle over his dissertation, still being considered. The problem was the relevance of jokes and rhymes children whispered to each other that he had included, particularly one. He had described a game in which a child pokes an iodinestained finger through a hole in the bottom of a tin and a bit of surrounding bandage and whispers ‘‘My father cut my finger off’’.
He was obliged to revise what was the country’s inaugural educational psychology PhD thesis, begun in 1949 and only accepted after five years.
He hoped, with his exceptional educational credentials, that he could remain as a teacher and researcher in New Zealand but, after a time teaching at Miki Miki, a tiny school in the Wairarapa that is now closed, he decided there was no opportunity for his development here.
The study of play was not necessarily seen as a legitimate area for research, even considered a waste of time, though he was ultimately honoured and appreciated in New Zealand education and psychology circles.
But then, a young man with big ideas, he needed more.
He was snapped up by Bowling Green State University in Ohio where he became a professor in the psychology department and where he worked for a decade. He resurrected the children’s rhymes and jokes he had been forced to weed out of his thesis in New Zealand and began to study their meaning as play.
After his time in Ohio he spent a decade at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, and in 1978 he became head of the graduate programme in human development and professor of folklore at the University of Pennsylvania.
Sutton-Smith’s academic work was characterised by interdisciplinary flair embracing research into the history of play, psychology, education, sociology, cross-cultural studies and folklore. As well as the plethora of books, 350 of his papers were published in academic journals and he travelled and lectured throughout the world.
He was a consultant to toy and television companies. His own books and papers and others he collected are the key contents of a Rochester, New York, museum, the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play at the Strong National Museum of Play.
Sutton-Smith remained physically active and played tennis into his 80s. He retired to Sarasota, Florida. He suffered from Alzheimer’s and spent his last few months in a nursing home. A Life Story tells of a New Zealander who helped to shape their community. If you know of someone whose life story should be told, please email obituaries@dompost.co.nz.