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

Over more than thirty years, every Sunday morning when we
were in town the telephone rang: Larry, asking for Lu. They would
talk for almost an hour. This was the weekly review. Everything
that happened in economics and politics, all the burning questions
of the day, would be discussed, and Lu gave his forewarnings for
the future. Larry was more optimistic than Lu-though Lu at that
time did not see the situation of the U.S. as hopeless. He had
confidence in the strength of·America, confidence that she would
pull out of the difficult situation inflation had brought about. But
whatever he said and wrote contained a warning about the growing
deficit in productivity in comparison to America's supply of
goods and services.
Almost immediately after Lu put down the receiver, the telephone
would ring again. This time it would be Henry Hazlitt,
"Harry" to his friends. This conversation would last another hour,
with different questions and answers. But Lu's warnings were always
the same. Afterward, I often asked Lu: "Is your seminar over
for today?" He would answer with a laugh.
These were the only two people with whom Lu really talked on
the telephone. Mostly I answered. Appointments and arrangements
were made through me. For Lu the telephone was a necessary
but disturbing means of communication. He tried to avoid it
as much as possible.
The third of our very close friends was Philip Cortney, who had
lived in Paris. Cortney was head of an important steel export firm
in Paris and director of the executive committee of the Banque
Transatlantique of Paris. He was married to a former singer of the
Opera Comique in Paris, and when the Germans occupied France,
theCortneys came to the United States and made their home in
New York, where he joined the American branch-factory of Coty,
the renowned' perfume manufacturer, becoming the firm's president.
Strangely enough, he hated the smell of perfume-he was not
even able to recognize a difference between scents-but he loved
economics and reading, and he very soon became an enthusiastic
admirer of Lu's and a great friend of mine. He was, if I remember
rightly, the first one to suggest, in a French newspaper, that Lu
deserved the Nobel Prize for Human Action. Cortney was opposed
to a government-fixed gold price, and he fought like a lion for his
ideas. If the government did or said anything that displeased him,
a letter went off, or an editorial appeared in a newspaper, or a news
pamphlet was published. Hardly everwere his letters disregarded;
even Richard Nixon, then vice president, took the time to write a
rather lengthy answer to one of his letters.
Philip was the most hospitable and generous friend imaginable.
F or many years he invited "the family," as our little group was
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