Glenn Loury
speaker
197 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Glenn Loury’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Oh, man, it was just fun solving those problems. I get it. I got a feeling of mastery in solving the problems. And they're tricks in calculus. How do I reduce this expression to a form that I can actually integrate it and apply what I know? I liked it. And I had a great teacher. Mr. Andres was his name. He was an engineer. He had retired recently.
He was a Northwestern alum, which is how I ended up at Northwestern. He referred me to their admissions committee. And I'd go to his office hours and he'd show me problems and tricks and, you know, we were having a good time.
But in any case, I'm saying I wanted to study for the exam, and the librarian had barricaded herself in because she was afraid that the rampaging students who were all up in arms about the strike were going to somehow come in and deface the library and so on. So she had barricaded herself, and I had to persuade her.
It took me 15 minutes to persuade her to open the door and let me in so that I could sit down and study because I had to get to that 4 o'clock shift, the second shift that day, to my job, and I needed to use what hours I had to study.
Yeah, I was working second and sometimes third shift, but mostly second shift, yeah, 4 to midnight, right. How old were your kids? Lisa and Tammy were born in 1967 and 1968, respectively. So this was 1970. They were two and three. Did your wife work? She did. She worked at the post office.
We had our hands full, to be sure. We were very young parents, and we were determined to improve ourselves, and we were doing the best we could.
Well, first of all, I thought the war sucked.
You know, I was against the war. Fair. And I thought the protests were justified. I mean, Kent State, you know, these kids got shot and all that. But I thought also that a lot of the participation in the protest was kind of indulgent and saddish and, you know, it was a fun thing to be doing. It was a part of a kind of manufactured thing. alienation that I didn't share.
You know, I wasn't about to burn my draft card. The guys that I was working with, most of them were ethnic at the printing plant. Most of them were, you know, Italian or Irish or Jewish or Polish. or Greek second-generation immigrants to the United States, and they were pretty conservative.
But there was the Black Power stuff that was going on as well in those years, and I was enmeshed in that on the South Side of Chicago and had family members who were pretty radical. So, you know, I was, if you had to give me a label, I would have been left of center. I would have been a liberal, but I was mainly a nerd.
They were proud of me. Well, I graduated with a very strong academic record from the high school. I got a scholarship to study at the Illinois Institute of Technology. My girlfriend, who became my wife and the mother of my first two children, had dropped out of high school to give birth, and they were worried that I was going to lose my way.
So when I and my father, my mother and father broke up when I was quite young, five years old, but my dad was an important part of my life, and I very much... wanted his respect and approval. And he, you know, when I told him that Charlene was pregnant, he said, he rolled his eyes and, you know, he said, you have to do the right thing and take care of that kid and stuff.
But this is not the way that you, you know, I had imagined you living your life. And when I told him I was dropping out of the Illinois Institute of Technology and going to work, he said, well, let's, you better have a plan.
So when I finally kind of put myself together and did well at the community college and then got the scholarship at Northwestern and then made the dean's list in my first semester, he was like, okay, this is better. Yeah. They were proud of me. And when I graduated with awards and stuff, I was the prize-winning mathematics major in my class of 1972 at Northwestern.
And I got admitted to MIT as a graduate student that very same year. They were over the moon. They loved the idea that I was overcoming the odds.
My dad is no longer living. He was a lawyer and accountant. He worked for the Internal Revenue Service. Sorry, Tuck. Spent his life as a federal employee, as a bureaucrat. He worked his way up to being the director of the Kansas City Service Center, which is a huge company. income tax return processing operation in Kansas City. And it suited him. He was a revenuer.
I'm telling you, man, this guy would drive around. He lived in Overland Park, Kansas, which is a tony suburb of Kansas City. And he'd drive around and he'd see a boat sitting in somebody's driveway. And he'd ask himself, I wonder how that guy paid for that boat. And I'm not going to put it past him to go and look up the thing and maybe direct an audit in that direction.
Yeah. He believed in it very religiously. Yeah. What were his politics? He was a moderate Democrat, but not especially political. He was mainly a bureaucrat. I mean, he loved the internal politics of who's getting promoted, what budget is going on, who's the regional director, and how much power has so-and-so got, and what about this or that. You know, he loved calling people on the carpet.
He was a patent lawyer. George C. Scott. Yeah. That was his favorite movie. The scene where Patton slaps the recruit, that was his favorite scene.
Yeah, something like that. So did you go to MIT? I did go to MIT. I did a PhD in economics at MIT in the 70s.
Showing 21–40 of 197 · page 2 of 10
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