Luther Gulick and his family left Japan in the summer of 1904, temporarily settling in Oakland, CA., where relatives were living. Taught to speak “King James English,” young Luther initially experienced difficulty with the American vernacular; however, before he had a chance to properly adjust, the family moved to Germany in 1905.

Establishing themselves in Marburg, Luther was enrolled in the Marburg Oberreal Schule, learning German. The next year, when he was 14, he returned alone to the United States where, after another brief stay in Oakland, he won a scholarship to the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, spending the next three years there.

Encouraged by his older sister, Sue, Luther applied to and was accepted by Oberlin College where he quickly plunged into adulthood. To pay for his upkeep, he  worked a variety of jobs, eventually building up a yard maintenance business with three employees and his own stock of equipment. Over time, he took over most of the college concerts, and other special events – he sold tickets, did the advertising and hired ushers.

In summer he did various odd jobs, from door-to door selling  to stoking on a coal-burning ore boat which he called “the dirtiest job I ever had.” At Oberlin he majored in political science, being greatly influenced and attracted to that field by Professor Carl F. Geiser of the Political Science department. Addressing Professor Geiser decades later in a letter, Gulick wrote almost apologetically:

“Lippus Brandolinus, in his Comparative Republicae et Regni said, ‘no one can ever have any solid quiet and tranquility, if he sets out to be a good citizen.’ The same is true of one who is a ‘good teacher.’ Those of us, who in the course of events, with all our growing pains and troubles, became your students are those who stole away your solid quiet and tranquility.”

In the course of his coursework in political science, Gulick read books and articles by Charles Beard, a pioneer in public administration (more on him later).  In Gulick’s senior year, as a member of a committee to select a commencement speaker, he was instrumental in inviting Beard. When they met, each man was impressed with the other and established what would become a long lasting friendship.

Prior to graduating in 1914 with honors, Gulick met and became engaged to classmate Helen McKelvey Swift, daughter of a Congregational minister. Their plans, according to Gulick were “to finish our graduate work, she in education or social work and I probably at Oberlin Theological Seminary, before getting married. We then thought of going to Japan or China in missionary work. Nothing was settled, however, except that we would get married as soon as it was economically possible, and for this I had to have a profession and a job.”

Enrolling in the Oberlin Theological Seminary for an M.A. in philosophy, Gulick experienced a change of heart during the first year, deciding to pursue a course that differed from that of most of his family members:  “the decision to devote my life … to public law and government came about not as a rejection of fundamental religion but as an alternative, and what seemed to me to be for my generation a more productive and revolutionary way to achieve the goals of human welfare and dignity in the progressive unfolding of the Universe.”

Gulick would follow this new calling for the next eight decades  — and posterity is much in his debt.