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

the bust; but I asked her to change the hair, which she did. When
the bust was finished, my husband looked at it approvingly,
smiled, and said slowly, "Yes ... Yes." He obviously was pleased.
Nelly took the bust and worked at home on the details. Then she
cast it in plaster in her studio and took it to the foundry, where it
was cast into bronze by the lost-wax process, the same process the
old Greeks used centuries ago, the only true and. good reproduction
for portraits.
At a dinner party George Koether presented the bust to my husband.
It has its place of honor in our living room, a fresh rose or a
carnation always next to it.
Lu took great interest in Dr. J. B. Matthews, the well-known
anti-Communist. During the 1950s and early 1960s, Matthews and
his wife, Ruth, often included us in their parties, which were gatherings
for many conservatives. For a brief period in the 1930s Dr.
Matthews had been a "fellow traveler':" a term he popularized
when he became a staff member of the House Committee on Un­
American Activities. At a turning point in his life, J. B. wrote in a
moving letter of gratitude to Lu how much he was influenced by
Lu's writing. He fought the socialist trends in the United States
until his death in 1966. Over the years, Ruth became one of my
best and most loyal personal friends.
Among the many friends we had and kept for a lifetime was
Sylvester Petro, for years professor of labor law at NYU, now director
of Wake Forest Institute for Labor Policy Analysis in Winston­
Salem, North Carolina. We saw Syl and his wife, Helen, frequently,
and I remember well that, wherever Syl lived, he was
always working-trying to make the walls of his studio
soundproof!
I asked Syl one day when and how he met Lu for the first time.
This was his reply:
Lu and I firstinet, I believe, in 1951 or 1952. The occasion of the
meeting was a letter of appreciation which I had written to him about
Human Action. I told him in that letter that I had never encountered
such a work and thought it should easily rank among the greatest
writings of mankind.... The main things that attracted me to Lu
were the virtually superhuman qualities of intellect, of judgment,
and of wisdom that he possessed in such extraordinary abundance. I
have done my fair share of reading in the classics, in logic, in philosophy,
in epistemology, in law, in economics, in social theory, in
politics and all the rest. In spite of this rather wide reading, Lu:>s
work seemed to stand out sharply and brilliantly. It was on a different
level from anything I had ever read before. Even Adam Smith:>s
great work, The Wealth of Nations, compared with Lu's book, Human
Action, seemed primitive and elementary. After reading Human
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