A friend forever

Nicholas Valenzuela Arizona Daily Wildcat Graduate student Claude Price came up with the idea and started the first Friendship Database on the Internet here at the UA. Price said he believes that friendships are very important and they are a vital role in everyone's life.

The 73-year-old University of Arizona psychology graduate student is compiling a database of philosophical and psychological concepts of friendship from all cultures and historical periods on a campus Website.

He set out three years ago to make a definitive database of the concept of friendship.

"It needs to be dug out, promoted and celebrated," he said. "We need to know more about the dynamics of friendship. (This way), we could deal better with teenage kids."

By having the Web page, Price hopes other researchers will use the resource and get involved.

Price said he was surprised to find that the UA Main Library lacked a resource to help people understand the art of friendship

"The worst and most painful was when I started to poking around the library and there was no friendship database," he said.

The Friendship project, www.u.arizona.edu/~cdp, collects sophisticated and simple takes on relationships on the Website.

Over the past three years, the project has employed a varying number of UA students to do research, data entry, and Web design.

Eric Christenson, UA a history senior who serves as the Website manager for a year, described Price as an intelligent and caring individual.

"He is one of the most sincere and complicated men I've ever met," he said.

After being discharged from the U.S. Army for health reasons, Price attended the University of California-Los Angeles in 1944 and began working with L.A.'s gang members.

Later that year, he continued his work with troubled adolescents at a summer camp near San Bernardino. By that time, Price was "hooked" into helping at-risk youth.

"I fell into similar opportunities," he said.

Price graduated from Millikin University in Illinois with a psychology degree and began graduate work at Columbia University with emotionally-disturbed youth.

"That was my real test by fire," he said.

Price also traveled overseas to investigate other cultures and their friendships. He visited Korea for more than four years and stayed in Bali, Indonesia for two years.

Price said that many Korean children became his life-long friends.

"There are many eye-openers I learned from that," he said. "Their experience of a best friend is eternal."