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

Today, one of these children, Mark Peterson, whom Iremember
so well through this amusing incident and through later meetings,
is working for his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia and is an
enthusiastic defender of the free market and of freedom for the
individual.
I wrote about our friend George Koether in my acknowledgments
at the beginning of this book. He and his wife, 110, were
very close to us. He was a journalist and economist who started
attending Lu's seminar in 1949. Active, enthusiastic, always full of
new ideas, he had one feeling, one conviction, that never changed
after he started studying Lu's ideas. Lu was to him, and "ought to
be to all the world," he said, "the light burning in the darkness."
Then there was Bettina Bien, now Bettina Bien-Greaves. She
first came to the seminar in 1951 and attended it to the last session,
not missing a single meeting. She is one of those rare individuals
who combine intelligence and mental curiosity with warmth and
understanding of human nature. With the passing of the years, she
became a household word with Lu and me. If there was any information
Lu needed, any refreshing of his memory, he would say,
"Call Bettina," and surely enough she had the answer.
After four or five years in the seminar, Bettina took her seat next
to Lu, taking notes in shorthand-and no one would have dared to
contest for that seat. I spoke first to Bettina in 1952 during a seminar
in California. At that time she was still rather quiet, hardly
asking any questions. But later, working with tremendous zeal,
studying Lu's books from beginning to end, reading them again
and again, her inner security grew in relation to her knowledge.
She wrote an excellent bibliography of Lu's work, and for his
ninetieth birthday she catalogued-with my permission and without
Lu's knowledge-his whole library of about 6000 volumes, to
Lu's greatest surprise and delight.
The location of the seminar changed three times in twenty-one
years. Lu and I loved the second location best. It was Gallatin
House, the former British embassy on Washington Square, a beautiful
brownstone building. Two stone lions at the entrance of the
tiny garden bore witness of the past. Looking out of the windows
of his office overlooking Washington Square, Lu often said that
this might have been the view that inspired Henry James for his
great novels. We all loved this place, in spite of the parking problems
we all had! -
When the seminar was held in the old NYU building where it
had started, so many students attended that the room was often
overcrowded and not a single chair could be added. Some of the
students may have come out of curiosity to hear the famous professor.
But most of them had a goal and were studying hard. In later
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