Les [Thurow] thought he wanted to be a doctor and Les took an economics course, I guess his sophomore year, and it was like putting a duck into water. It was as if he already knew it. He became dean of the Sloan School of Business at MIT and wrote a series of books, “The Zero-Sum Society” and so on. Ara is really the only one who went back to his hometown, Plattsburgh, N.Y. He went to NYU law school and went back and became the district attorney for a very large county, Clinton County, but he has lead a very holistic life. He founded a symphony orchestra. He meets in the same coffee shop every morning with cronies to gossip about sports and politics. And you know the classical text began with immediate things, right? Socrates would go to the marketplace and it wasn’t abstract, it was concrete.

Richard Herzog,
’60