Superkid

Kenneth Wolf, II, expects to have his Ph.D. in chemistry when he is 16. He will probably get it, too. At Cleveland's Western Reserve University he leads mathematics and organic chemistry classes full of students years older than he is. His classmates at first kidded him relentlessly, especially about girls, but finally Kennie told them off: "The subject of girls becomes interesting only when the body matures," he explained. "Mine hasn't. It will later."

Kennie was kicked out of grade school because, said the principal, "he disrupted the class, asked too many questions, volunteered too many answers." Dean C. William Huntley of Western Reserve, a child psychologist, decided that college was the place for the boy. On I.Q. tests Kennie scores about 182, which means that his "mental age" is about 20. When he entered college last autumn, his fellow students regarded him as a repulsive little smart aleck. Since then he has become less offensive to them. He is still enough of a small boy to raid the sugar jar in the chemistry laboratory. But when he was questioned about his chemistry, Kennie answered, "We're running the oxidation sequence on methanes. Little work with the aldehydes and ketones."

Kennie's intellectual, Russian-born parents are both leftish lawyers. During World War I, Father Wolf defended Eugene Debs and other "seditious" characters. Little Kennie first amazed his parents at four months--by speaking a whole sentence. Just after his first birthday he tackled a first-grade reader. When he was 22 months old, his mother heard a Liszt air coming from downstairs. She thought Kennie had started the player piano, but she found the baby pounding out the melody himself.

Since then music has overshadowed even chemistry as Kennie's greatest interest. "I suppose there are eleven compositions now I'd be willing to claim," he admits. His symphony has never been played: "It's not necessary. I can hear it." After he gets his Ph.D., he hopes to study with Composer Paul Hindemith. Kennie is now the only outsider allowed to attend rehearsals of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra.

Folklore holds that child prodigies usually come to no good. Kennie's parents and Psychologist Huntley think otherwise. Group studies of bright children (e.g., by Stanford's Lewis M. Terman) show that they usually turn out healthier, wealthier and wiser than average children.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.