By Fred Fuller
I was quite surprised a few days ago to see a composite photo of the 1926 graduates from Marine City High School, in Marine City, Michigan, which featured a name I was familiar with: Rollo May. Could that be the same Rollo May whose books I studied at college, I wondered, and who was kind of a philosophical hero of mine? Rollo May is a somewhat unusual name, so I thought there was a good chance it was him.
The composite photo was posted on the Cottrellville and Surrounding Communities Genealogy and History’s Facebook page, but without any apparent recognition of the fame that one of those graduates achieved. Cottrellville Township surrounds most of Marine City on its south and west sides, in St. Clair County, Michigan, where I live.
The Facebook post did give short biographies of all the graduates in the photo, which was quite impressive. Here’s what it said about Rollo May:
“Rollo Reese May (1909-1994); son of Earl Tuttle May (1880-1949) and Mary Marth Washington “Matie” Boughton (1884-1974). Rollo married Florence Virginia DeFrees (1912-2001) in 1938.”
I then checked the Wikipedia entry for the famous Rollo May: His middle name was Reese, his birth and death dates were the same as in the Facebook post, and so were the names of his parents and his wife. The graduation photo looked like it could be him as a young man.
But as a genealogist, I am trained to be skeptical. The Wikipedia article said he was born in Ada, Ohio. However, it also stated he attended Michigan State University, which suggested maybe he did live Michigan when he was older.
To look for proof that it was the same guy, I turned to U.S. censuses from the early 1900s.
Rollo R. May was listed in the 1910 census, living with his parents and siblings in Tecumseh, Michigan, which is southwest of Detroit near the Ohio border. He was listed as 11 months old, which is consistent with the famous Rollo May, who was born in 1909. His parents’ names were the same as in the Facebook post and the Wikipedia article—Earl T. May and Matie M. May.
In the 1920 census, the same family was living in Saginaw, Michigan, and Rollo was 10 years old. In the 1930 census, they were living in East Lansing. Rollo was 20 and was probably in college there at Michigan State University.
There was no census listing Rollo in Marine City, but the censuses are only taken every ten years. In between 1920 and 1930, he must have lived in Marine City. His father was listed in every census as a “Secretary” working for the YMCA. Wikipedia says his father was “a Men’s Christian Associations Field Secretary.” The family apparently had to move a lot.
Wikipedia says Rollo’s parents divorced, and his childhood could have been difficult, which might have influenced his later work. I found a Michigan Divorce Record online that showed his parents divorced in 1934 in Ingham County (the county in which East Lansing is located). Rollo was hardly a child at that point—he would have been 25—but his parents may have had a difficult marriage for many years before they divorced. All the facts lined up. The famous Rollo May must have graduated from Marine City High School.
Rollo May majored in English at Michigan State University, but was expelled due to his involvement in a radical student magazine. It was called The Student. He and a friend co-founded it. He later said he was quite a rebel at that time, “and we went after what today would be called the power Structure. There was evidence that the State Legislature used the college to cover up graft, and we said so in an editorial.” The resulting controversy got him expelled.
May then transferred to Oberlin College in Ohio to complete his Bachelor’s Degree and eventually obtained a PhD from Columbia University. He taught at Harvard, Princeton, and the New School in New York City. He also wrote fifteen books and became a cultural icon in the 1970s. He’s now known as one of the most influential American psychologists of the 20th Century, popularizing a humanistic, spiritually based psychology.
In 1938, May earned a divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and he served as a Congregational minister in New Jersey for several years. It was after that when he decided to study psychology and got his PhD at Columbia. He became a psychotherapist and eventually challenged the standard practices and theories of psychotherapy in the 1950s. He came to believe that psychological problems were not caused simply by individual childhood trauma, as Sigmund Freud had theorized, but that the widespread anxiety of modern times was due to “a state of disunity and traumatic change” in our culture.
He believed that the conflicts most likely to cause anxiety are of an ethical nature, because of our social responsibility as human beings. This approach was known as existential psychology, and May was one of the main academics to popularize this viewpoint in America.
His most popular book was Love and Will, which was published in 1969 and became a bestseller. In 1970, it was awarded the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for humane
scholarship. There is much more that could be said about Rollo Reese May, but my main message is that after graduating from Marine City High School, he went far.
