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606 Importance of mentorstwice as tall as I was! The relevance of this to the field of statistics is that itcreated in me a deep respect for the principles of our legal system, to whichI find statistics deeply relevant, for example, concerning issues as diverse as thedeath penalty, affirmative action, tobacco litigation, ground water pollution,wire fraud, etc.But the uncle who was most influential on my eventual interest in statisticswas my mother’s brother, a dentist (then a bachelor), who loved to gamblesmall amounts, either in the bleachers at Wrigley Field, betting on the outcomeof the next pitch while we watched the Cubs lose, or at Arlington Race track,where I was taught as a wee lad how to read the Racing Form and estimatethe “true” odds from the various displayed betting pools while losing twodollar bets. Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, during the warm monthsthen, were times to learn statistics — even if at various bookie joints thatwere sometimes raided. As I recall, I was a decent student of his, but still lostsmall amounts — this taught me to never gamble with machines. Later, asa PhD student at Harvard, I learned never to “gamble” with “Pros.” Fromthose days I am reminded of the W.C. Fields line who, when playing pokerfor money on a public train car, was chastised by an older woman: “Youngman, don’t you know that gambling is a sin?” He replied, “The way I playit, it’s not gambling.” The Harvard Pro’s were not gambling when playingagainst me.There were two other important influences on my statistical interests fromthe late 1950s and early 1960s. First there was an old friend of my father’sfrom their government days together, a Professor Emeritus of Economics atthe University of California Berkeley, George Mehren, with whom I had manyentertaining and educational (to me) arguments, which generated a respectfor economics, which continues to grow to this day. And second, my wonderfulteacher of physics at Evanston Township High School — Robert Anspaugh —who tried to teach me to think like a scientist, and how to use mathematicsin pursuit of science. So by the time I left high school for college, I appreciatedsome probabilistic thinking from gambling, some scientific thinking fromphysics, and I had deep respect for disciplines other than formal mathematics.These, in hindsight, are exposures that were crucial to the kind of formalstatistics to which I gravitated as I matured.50.2 The years at Princeton UniversityWhen I entered Princeton in 1961, like many kids at the time, I had a pile ofadvanced placements, which lined me up for a BA in three years, but unknownto me before I entered, I was also lined up for a crazy plan to get a PhD inphysics in five years, in a program being proposed by John Wheeler, a wellknownprofessor of Physics there (and Richard Feynman’s PhD advisor years