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This article explores the life and career of sociology writer Ruth Shonle Cavan. Her career is the tale of an extraordinary person seeking and finding congenial outlets for her talents. Her secret seems to be a blend of sound intuition, a probing, inquiring mind, solid preparation, and strong motivation. She combines a clear sense of what is important with a strong drive to understand key issues, to coordinate her insights with others, and finally to fashion the whole into a well crafted book or paper. As a young girl in Tuscola, Illinois, Cavan wrote incessantly. In high school, she wrote for a school literary magazine. In 1916, she entered Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois to become a teacher, but again she was drawn to writing. She enrolled in courses in fiction and expository writing, entered another essay competition, and won first prize. Sociology was more than an outlet for her talents. It provided as well a new way of viewing human beings. She began to see that everyone is subject to vast structural and cultural forces that offer little opportunity for personal control.

Since this society is oriented toward a specific theory, I thought I ought to say something about theories in general and our little theory in particular. Let me get that off of my chest. I am not overly fond of terms like "theory" and "theorist," both of which seem to suggest the importance of the person who claims the identity more than anything else. They are pompous terms. To the extent that we are thoughtful about what we are doing and how we are going about it, all sociologists are theorists and methodologists. But if that is all we are, then we are literally people of no substance. We have no substantial knowledge of or concern for the empirical world. The little theory we share is extraordinarily empirical. It is, as one of its most prominent practitioners called it, a "grounded theory" (Glaser and Strauss 1967). I confess that several years after receiving my degree I had no real sense of what symbolic interaction was and how it might differ from other theoretical orientations. Arnold Rose enlightened me on this when he asked me to submit a paper for a new collection he was editing (Rose 1962). I was pleased and flattered. Rose was a mentor of mine, and I had never before been asked to contribute to an edited volume. But I was unsure of what would be appropriate for a book about symbolic interaction. I screwed up my courage and asked Arnold: "Exactly what is symbolic interaction?" He shrugged off my ignorance, turned on his heels, and muttered over his shoulder, "It is what they do at Chicago." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of 116 small communities in Central Illinois indicates that their ability to provide citizens with adequate goods and services is closely related to their ability to hold population. The outlook for firmness in growth of population, however, is not particularly optimistic, considering the size of some of these communities. If a community is fortuitously located near a large city, its prospects for growth are greatly enhanced. In this case, the community may lose its identity, however, and become a "bedroom' town. Distance from a larger community no longer seems to afford protection to local markets and thus makes it increasingly more difficult for small communities to offer a great variety of goods and services. Although there were marked similarities among these communities, some of them did not fit the pattern. Undoubtedly many factors such as community pride and entrepreneurial spirit account for these differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sample of 77 clergymen and 136 lay leaders, all of them members of the Lutheran Church in America, was taken in northern Illinois. It was found that even in this relatively conservative denomination, clergy, tended to give more liberal responses than laity on a variety of social and political issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on professor Robert F. Winch, who has received four E.W. Burgess Award for his significant role in family research. The U.S. National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) honored Winch with the award at the 1968 Annual Meeting of the NCFR in New Orleans, Louisiana. Winch dedicated his career for the study of family sociology and is presently working as professor of sociology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The article also includes information on some of his important works on the sociology of marriage and the family.