After college I lived in Washington DC for a few years. One of my jobs there was working for ICF Consulting (ICF=Its a Consulting Firm!). My boss at ICF also had an appointment at the conservative think-tank the American Enterprise Institute. AEI was then and still is a mixed bag...it has a significant quota of nutty right wingers, some ex Republican politicians, and it has some real scholars who lean slightly right of center. Norman Ornstein is the maybe best example of the last group.
I used to stop bye periodically to pick up my bosses mail and help coordinate meetings conferences etc... On the same floor as my bosses office was a large office in which there was a somewhat elderly looking man. Whenever I walked past he was busily writing or engrossed in reading academic papers. On a sofa on the opposing wall there usually was a man reading a popular magazine (People, Us, Sports Illustrated) who may have been a nurse? I rode the elevator a few times with the old guy and he always was always quite cordial. I thought of him just as "the Old Guy". "Boy" I thought to myself "he looks terrible. I hope when I'm 65 I don't look like that."
Then one day I picked up the AEI newsletter and on the back page was a picture of "The Old Guy" with a blurb something like "Paul Samuelson congratulates his former professor Gottfried Haberler on his 90th birthday." 90? That guy is 90? I hope that someday I am just like "The Old Guy". Gottfried Haberler.
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