Last month, my friend Tom Humphrey died. This collection of remembrances is written equally for two audiences—those who knew Tom, and those who didn’t. Once in a while, a true original passes by. This a chance to say hello and bid farewell to one of them.
Tom was both Renaissance Man and Tennessee Mountain Rustic, straight out of central casting. He was an economist within whose mind swirled centuries of history—the impossibly detailed intricacies of money, banking, and scientific doctrine. In the years I worked with Tom at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, ours was a formal workplace in a formal town, where one wore conservative suits, even on the torrid, sweltering days of summer, when the short walk from office to automobile left you and your business attire drenched in sweat. The building itself was sleek and modern, as were the furnishings. The one exception to all this was Tom Humphrey’s office, where this wanderer through the centuries sat most of the day in a beat-up wood-and-wicker rocking chair, scribbling intensely on pads of paper, rocking all the while. The blue-suited denizens who came to call found a proud Scotsman from Eastern Tennessee, clad in rumpled pants, a checkered work shirt, fearsome eyebrows, and a tangled gray beard and mustache. In outward appearance and outsized personality, he reminded me of Sean Connery’s Daniel Dravot in The Man Who Would Be King (1975).
[Robert offers a series of great stories in this lengthy essay. The best may be Humphrey’s worst lecture. One gets the sense that Humphrey would enthusiastically endorse and embrace this eulogy. — Ed]
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