Dr. Harry Wachs

Dr. Harry Wachs For over 65 years Dr. Harry Wachs has been a pioneer in the field of developmental optometry dedicated to helping children and adults all over the world learn to think and develop. Dr. Wachs was born in Pittsburgh in 1924 and grew up in small town as the son of a storekeeper in the garment business, moved to Chicago at 2 where his father worked in a department store until the 1929 crash, and then moved back to New Kensington, Pa. where he grew up. He graduated high school in1942 and enlisted in the Army Air Corp in January, 1943. Only 19, he became a lead bombardier. When he came back from the war, in the summer of 1945, he decided to become a doctor and went to optometry school for three years and nine months at Pennsylvania College of Optometry in Philadelphia. That was his formal education. Harry wasn’t too interested in selling glasses and opened one of the first clinics for contact lenses, an innovation of the 50’s. But he soon met Arnold Gesell, a pioneer in developmental psychology and discovered that eye sight only offered the pathway to the mind; it was vision which led to comprehension and thought. Soon he was carving his own educational pathway, studying movement and child development. Alone in Pittsburgh, Harry started to read about Jean Piaget. While the work of Piaget was just becoming known in the United States, he decided to go to Geneva to meet and learn from him in 1962. There, he was introduced to Hans Furth, a psychologist at Catholic University who was amongst the first to translate and bring Piaget to the US. The two formed a lasting professional and personal relationship. Together they started a school for thinking in West Virginia, about which their book Thinking Goes to School, published in 1974, is based. Wachs went on to work with Furth over many years to develop the methods to advance children’s development through experiences which enhanced cognition based on Piaget’s stages of cognitive development. In 1977, Furth invited Harry to join him at Catholic University. It was then that he and his wife, Ruth, move to “Huntingfields,” their beloved farm in Huntingtown, Md. After three years at Catholic, George Washington University offered him a job in the School of Education’s Reading Center where he started the Vision and Conceptual Development Center in the early 80’s. Wachs encountered and mentored many unusual and extraordinary people at the Center, among them Saudi princes, optometrists from all parts of the globe, and Joe Gibbs, the coach of the Washington Redskins, amongst them. These associations took Wachs to work in Saudi Arabia, Italy, Israel, and New Zealand -- to name a few of the many places he and his wife travelled, and to take a position with the Redskins during their Super Bowl years. In the 90s, he began to work with children on the autism spectrum. The result of that work culminated in the publication of a second book he co-authored with Serena Wieder, Visual/Spatial Portals to Thinking, Feeling and Movement. Wachs is survived by his three children Bruce (Judith) Weissman; Sherry (Harvey) Schweitzer; and Hallie (John) Cohn; and grandchildren Sarah and Rachel Cohn and Hanna Schweitzer.