Rose Matousek challenged the Dewey Decimal System and won.
A handwriting analyst from Hinsdale, Mrs. Matousek believed her profession was useful for authenticating documents, investigating crime, and providing personnel departments with insight on job-seekers’ aptitudes. She wrote to Dewey in 1980, urging the library classification system to remove books on the study of handwriting from its “occult” category.
It worked. She soon received a letter from Dewey editor John P. Comaromi, who told her the works would be moved to the psychology grouping.
“It’s a major accomplishment that affects all graphologists,” said Valerie Weil of the California-based American Handwriting Analysis Foundation.
“It gives a little more credibility to handwriting analysis,” said Dave Grayson, an Oak Park graphologist. “She’s revered. She is held in high esteem with all handwriting analysts.”
“Everybody in the field credits Rose with that,” said Sheila Lowe, president of the AHAF and a court-qualified handwriting examiner.
Mrs. Matousek, who consulted on a west suburban murder case and sought to organize and professionalize the study of handwriting, died last Thursday at the Tabor Hills senior living community in Naperville. She was 95.
A graduate of High School District 201 in Cicero and Morton Community College, the young Rose Kasalovsky met her future husband, James Matousek, on Chicago’s L. Her interest in graphology led to studies with an expert from Germany, said their daughter, Cherie Matousek.
A founding member of the American Association of Handwriting Analysts, she wrote several guidebooks for practitioners with sections on subjects like “Pressure,” “Slant,” “Direction,” “Size,” “Spacing” and “Connectedness.”
“They were well-known,” Lowe said. “I read them and found them helpful.”
The field has been around since at least the 1600s, when Camillo Baldi, an Italian doctor, said “Handwriting, being a manifestation of the one who writes, somehow reproduces something of its writer’s temperament, personality or character,” Lowe reported in her book, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Handwriting Analysis.”
In the 1930s, graphology was used to scrutinize ransom notes in the investigation of Bruno Hauptmann, later electrocuted for the kidnapping and murder of the baby son of aviator Charles A. Lindbergh. More recently, in 1995, handwriting analysis was used in a criminal case against boxing manager Don King, accused of faking a contract to cheat Lloyd’s of London.
“It’s absolutely solid and scientific,” said Linda Erpelding of the AAHA, a group with a large Midwest chapter. “It touches so many areas, from graffiti on the walls, to signatures, which, of course, is document examination.”
Still, the profession has taken hits. Critics deride it as a pseudoscience on a par with phrenology, a discredited Victorian-era study of the shape and size of the human skull to determine behavior. And in recent years, law enforcement officials don’t seem to call on private graphologists quite as readily as before the 9/11 attacks, presumably because federal investigators have beefed up their own ranks of handwriting analysts, according to Grayson.
Computers have also cursed cursive. “Penmanship today pretty much stops at the printing level,” Mrs. Matousek told Newsweek in 1996. She worked on the Campaign for Cursive, an effort organized by graphologists, pen companies, educators and others to re-emphasize penmanship in the schools in the belief that it improves brain development, motor skills and even test scores.
Mrs. Matousek once worked on a murder investigation in the western suburbs. The assailant had left a note scrawled in lipstick or crayon on a public restroom mirror, her daughter said. She also consulted on document authentication, lectured on handwriting analysis and taught at the College of DuPage.
She favored elegant suits. Erpelding said she once caught a glimpse of Mrs. Matousek’s closet. “She probably had 70” suits, she said.
“She would put on her best dress to go out and dump the garbage,” Grayson said.
When her husband retired, “she put pots of plants all over the stove, meaning, she retired with him,” Erpelding said. “She never cooked again.”
Proud of her Czech heritage, she enjoyed Bohemian Crystal restaurant in Westmont.
Mrs. Matousek remained feisty. Even in her final months, when people asked her “How do you feel?” she replied, “With my fingers.”
Her husband died before her. Mrs. Matousek is survived by another daughter, Lana Kosina, three grandchildren and one great-grandchild. A memorial service is planned at 1 p.m. April 18 at the Unitarian Church of Hinsdale.
