Jane Wilson Kessler

In a whirlwind of events that was not uncommon in the make-up years following World War II, Jane Kessler was discharged from the Navy in 1946 and in 1947, became the first-ever staff psychologist at the University Hospitals of Cleveland, Ohio. Upon completion of her doctoral degree from Western Reserve University in 1948, her position was elevated to that of chief psychologist for the hospital's Child Psychiatric Clinic. It was there that she took on an early professional challenge-one that would shape the direction of her career as one of the country's leading child psychologists and advocates for the mentally handicapped.

As part of the residency, Kessler was asked to plan, execute and evaluate a neurological procedure that was designed to increase the blood flow to the brains of developmentally disabled children using a form of shock therapy. She tested about 500 children-vigilantly collecting evidence that would prove the procedure's complete ineffectiveness to a skeptical medical establishment.

"In those days, women rarely questioned male authority in the medical hierarchy. Besides, I was 27, newly married and pregnant, so it couldn't appear as though my findings were an empathetic reaction to a pretty barbaric procedure. I had to overwhelm them with data."

Ten years later, Kessler was able to address the existential problem she had exposed with a practical solution. With the support of Western Reserve University, she founded an interdisciplinary clinical facility that evaluated and treated children with developmental disabilities.

"When we started the Mental Development Center in 1959, there were no programs for the mentally challenged. Nobody paid any attention to them-they were very much third-class citizens. In schools, if they had any programs at all for them, the classes would be in the basements, with very little interest and no resources. And that changed. We were one of the first-if not the first in the nation-to get started."

Her career at WRU-now Case Western Reserve University-began in the academic trenches and ended with virtually every laurel that can be bestowed on a faculty member.

"I started out as (Dr.) Ben Spock's teaching assistant, which should have been a plum job, but wasn't. He was so famous (from his best-selling book Baby and Child Care) that the course was wildly popular-often, overenrolled. He also missed a lot of classes because of lecture tours and interviews, so I had to fill in-often, on short notice. When Ben left Cleveland, his going-away present was a little wooden boat on which my son learned to sail."

Dr. Kessler was a faculty member of CWRU's Psychology Department for over forty years. During that tenure, she served as its chairman twice, directed its clinical training program, and was president of the university's faculty senate. The only break came in the form of a sabbatical, during which she wrote Psychopathology of Childhood (Prentice Hall-1966), which, for many years, was the most widely taught graduate text in that field.

Elizabeth Jane Wilson was born on March 9,1921 in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. Her father, Dustin W. Wilson was a chemical engineer from Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, and her mother, Mary Elizabeth Nelson was a homemaker from Salem, Massachusetts. Her father's career required the family to move frequently. "By the time I got to high school, we had moved ten times," she said in a recent interview. "With so much upheaval, I found security in my studies."

She graduated from Scarsdale High School in 1937 and entered the University of Michigan as a 16-year-old freshman. It was there that her frequent academic accelerations caught up with her. "I had intended to follow in my father's footsteps, but the Organic Chemistry course was completely over my head. The professor took pity on me by proposing a bargain that I readily accepted. He would pass me if I promised to change majors and never take another chem class! I was thriving in the Intro to Psychology class, and the rest is history."

After earning a Master's Degree in Psychology from Columbia University in 1943, she entered the WAVES that same year with the rank of lieutenant, junior-grade. "Even though I was only 22, I had so many degrees that the Navy felt compelled to make me an officer." She spent the next three years at various base hospitals dealing with the assessment and treatment of battle- related psychological and neurological trauma.

Dr. Kessler married twice-both times, to psychiatrists. During the war, she married Dr. Bernard Diamond "mainly, to get out of the barracks." The marriage did not survive their frequent physical and emotional separations. When Jane returned from a posting at the Picatinny (New Jersey) Arsenal to find that her husband had donated their dog to the war effort, she asked for a divorce. A life-long pet lover, this was the last straw, and in terms of the marriage, the shortest.

In 1947, she married the Cleveland psychoanalyst, Morris M. Kessler. "We were both in training analyses at the time-Morris, with Maurits Katan and I was with his wife, Anny. The Katans were our matchmakers-not very Freudian, but very Viennese!" Jane Kessler had one son, Martin, a conductor and music educator. Dr. M. M. Kessler died in 1973.

When she retired from CWRU as Lucy Adams Leffingwell Distinguished Professor and Humel Hovorka Prize winner, Jane Kessler pivoted in an entirely new direction. She and a colleague purchased a struggling neighborhood bookstore called Appletree Books in 1992, and she ran it-often as its sole sales clerk-until well into her 90's. Her renown as a successful bookseller had completely eclipsed her former professional achievements by the time she sold the business in 2015. "We had lived through the onslaught of the big box bookstores and came out okay on the other side. It was like 'You've Got Mail', only this time, 'The Shop Around The Corner' won," she was fond of saying.

In reflecting on her careers, she was characteristically modest. "I was often in the right place at the right time-youngest-this, first woman-that, et cetera; so, with Appletree Books, it was nice to be the oldest at something."