[1][2] He entered Stanford University and earned a BA in Psychology, after which he traveled to New Zealand to study Maori music.

Then he decided to study anthropology at University of California, Berkeley where he was trained by Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie and Melville Jacobs, writing his dissertation as a grammar of Tübatulabal.

His proficiency in Indigenous languages became so good that he was able to correspond with Leonard Bloomfield in Ojibwe, letters later published in the journal Anthropological Linguistics.

[4] During his tenure at Indiana he managed the United States' largest Army Specialized Training Program in foreign languages.

In 1944, he persuaded Indiana University to host the International Journal of American Linguistics (IJAL), which had stopped being published in 1939, shortly before the death of its first editor Franz Boas.