Saturday, January 08, 2005
I owe my very existence to Louis Rukeyser
After a thirty year run, Louis Rukeyser is off the air. I watched him regularly, as did Fausta:
Certainly the clarion call "Lou's on" has shouted through American households, including mine, millions of times since those dark days of the early 1970s when Lou first brought his gospel of market capitalism to public television. He is the godfather of every personal finance and investing show on television today, and he is probably responsible in some material way for America's retreat from statism since its zenith during the Nixon administration.
Very few people, however, know that Rukeyser is also responsible -- in a "butterly flaps its wings" sort of way -- for the TigerHawk Life, which fact I learned only a couple of years ago from the man my mother married after my father died.
The story goes back more than 50 years, to the late winter of 1954. My stepfather (let's call him "Bosley") was a sophomore at Princeton, and my father, his best friend, was a freshman. They had met on the bus to the Trinity School on the first day of school in the first grade, but my stepfather had skipped a grade when his family moved from Manhattan to White Plains so they were a class apart by the time they got to Old Nassau.
Back then, all sophomores were invited to join one or more of Princeton's eating clubs in a process known as "the Bicker." My stepfather received bids from Colonial Club and Key & Seal Club, and might very well have joined Colonial Club had Key & Seal's silver-tongued "Bicker Chairman" not persuaded him to do otherwise. That Bicker Chairman was Louis Rukeyser, Princeton '54.
Since it was apparently something of a foregone conclusion that my father would join Bosley's eating club, my father accepted a bid from Key & Seal Club the next year. There he became fast friends with one "Whitey" Whitehouse, who also happened to be my mother's first cousin. Whitey introduced my father to my mother, and the rest is history.
So I owe my very existence to the personal intervention of Louis Rukeyser. How many people can say that?!
I have watched Lou nearly every Friday of my adult life, from back in the days when his George Washington hairdo was black and the program aired on PBS as Wall $treet Week With Louis Rukeyser. I even watched the program one Friday after giving birth, something (had I written to tell him, which I didn't) Lou might have mentioned in his annual "viewer's special", which featured things like video clips of a very memorable couple who sang a song with the ditty "I'm not a miser, I just wanna be another Louis Rukeyser". One of the baby's first sentences was "Lou's on!".
Certainly the clarion call "Lou's on" has shouted through American households, including mine, millions of times since those dark days of the early 1970s when Lou first brought his gospel of market capitalism to public television. He is the godfather of every personal finance and investing show on television today, and he is probably responsible in some material way for America's retreat from statism since its zenith during the Nixon administration.
Very few people, however, know that Rukeyser is also responsible -- in a "butterly flaps its wings" sort of way -- for the TigerHawk Life, which fact I learned only a couple of years ago from the man my mother married after my father died.
The story goes back more than 50 years, to the late winter of 1954. My stepfather (let's call him "Bosley") was a sophomore at Princeton, and my father, his best friend, was a freshman. They had met on the bus to the Trinity School on the first day of school in the first grade, but my stepfather had skipped a grade when his family moved from Manhattan to White Plains so they were a class apart by the time they got to Old Nassau.
Back then, all sophomores were invited to join one or more of Princeton's eating clubs in a process known as "the Bicker." My stepfather received bids from Colonial Club and Key & Seal Club, and might very well have joined Colonial Club had Key & Seal's silver-tongued "Bicker Chairman" not persuaded him to do otherwise. That Bicker Chairman was Louis Rukeyser, Princeton '54.
Since it was apparently something of a foregone conclusion that my father would join Bosley's eating club, my father accepted a bid from Key & Seal Club the next year. There he became fast friends with one "Whitey" Whitehouse, who also happened to be my mother's first cousin. Whitey introduced my father to my mother, and the rest is history.
So I owe my very existence to the personal intervention of Louis Rukeyser. How many people can say that?!
2 Comments:
By 
Fausta, at
Sat Jan 08, 01:14:00 PM:
Excellent! Does Lou know about this?
By 
, at
Wed Oct 05, 12:25:00 AM:
I still do not know "what happened to Lou," did he pass away and if so from - what?
