My Years with Ludwig von Mises.pdf - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

Percy Greaves first came to the seminar in 1950 and attended
almost all the meetings until Lu stopped teaching. Lu thought very
highly of Percy's knowledge and understanding of economic
theory. "It is a great pity," Lu often told me, "that he did not make
his Ph.D." Lu's work was like scripture to Percy. He Was the chairman
of the dinner meetings whichthe students arranged from time
to time. He and his future wife, Bettina Bien, became very dear
friends of ours; they even spent their honeymoon .with us in
Vermont.
Ronald S. Hertz, now a prominent certified accountant with a
large firm on Park Avenue, attended Lu's seminar for many years
beginning in 1949. "No matter how verbose, inane, inept or belligerent
the question or the questioner," Ronald Hertz wrote me once,
"he was heard through and then received a patient, meticulous
response. It must have been the respect which Professor Mises
showed to students which kept even those who began with great
antagonism coming back."
There was a whole group of high school students that Lu allowed
to visit his seminar. They were bright young boys, eager to
learn and deeply interested in today's problems. They had discovered
that L u was their "man of the future" and not a "reactionary"
as "friendly" economists would call him before they shelved his
uncomfortable words of truth.
One of.the youngest members of this group was George Reisman.
One evening in the autumn of 1953 he rang the doorbell at
our apartment. I opened the door and saw a young, blonde, shy
boy of about fifteen years, who asked to see Dr. von Mises. I asked
why, and he told me that he was in high school, had read all of
Lu's books he could get hold of, and was wondering whether the
professor would allow him to attend his course and the seminar.
Lu talked to him, and helpful as always, admitted him. From then
on, George Reisman came regularly for years. He wrote his doctoral
dissertation with Lu and often came to the house to converse
with him.
Reisman was hard working, thorough, and inquisitive. In later
years he translated one of Lu's books from the German. It was
published in 1960 by Van Nostrand under the title Epistemological
Problems ofEconomics. Today George is professor of economics
at St. John's University in Brooklyn.
Ralph Raico was another one of the high school students that Lu
watched with "great expectations." Raico later went to Chicago to
continue his studies, and he is now teaching history at the State
University of New York at Buffalo. He recently wrote (in The Alternative,
February, 1975): "To know the great Mises tends to create
in one's mind life-long standards of what an ideal intellectual
should be. These are standards to which other scholars whom one
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