12. The People

Let me introduce Em Weiler, Purdue department head, then Dean, School of Industrial Management. He hired the first wave, 1954–1956, managed it with finesse, integrity, and turned quality standards over to his faculty. Meet John Hughes, economic historian, the brother I never had; Stan Reiter, best economist I ever knew; mathematical economist par excellence, entirely self-taught in mathematics. He and John created the field of quantitative economic history; Stan named it cliometrics after Clio, the muse of history in Greek mythology. Meet Ed Ames, Russian economic specialist, generalist, who learned to program out first “supercomputer” in machine language, and discovered Charles Plott because Ed had this ability to sense a future innovator. Finally, there were our students: John Ledyard, Hugo Sonnenschein, Nancy Schwartz, Morty Kamien, Norm Weldon, Don Rice, et al.