In Memory

David Hildebrand

                                                     

            

     He was our Class Valedictorian   

David K. Hildebrand was our class valedictorian.  He had a dry sense of humor, never put you down, but was so smart you couldn't help feeling inferior or at least wondering what he was really thinking.  David died on August 13, 1999 at age 59, but he's still making people smile as demonstrated in the following edited article by Robert Franklin for the Star Tribune written in 2003:

"He composed limericks for tests he gave his students at the University of Pennsylvania.  He said he was a fan of Major League Baseball and the Philadelphia Phillies.  He joked that if students seeking master's degrees in business wanted to fit in, they should write papers that were illegible, disorganized and 'obscurely wrong.'"

When he learned he was dying of pancreatic cancer, David K. Hildebrand decided to create a slush fund for his alma mater, Carleton College, in Northfield, MN.  That's a slush fund, literally, and it has been at work cleaning up snow and slush at the college ever since.

By all accounts, Hildebrand was a very funny guy -- intelligent and well-liked, too.  He was born in Minneapolis, was a National Merit Scholar at St. Louis Park High School, graduated magna cum laude from Carleton in 1962 and taught statistics for 34 years at Penn's Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia.  He wrote several books (Basic Statistical Ideas for Managers was one), was chairman of the faculty senate for a year and served on a search committee for replacing his university's president.

When he passed away, he left a wife and two children - and gifts to his undergraduate college from family and friends that became Carleton's "David K. Hildebrand Endowed Fund for Ice and Snow Removal."  Basically, it's to honor his indominable sense of humor.

It wasn't just the slush fund that was unusual about Hildebrand, who liked fishing, crossword puzzles and baseball, according to his obituary.  "Dave was so effective in the classroom as to be almost unnerving," a statistics colleague, Thomas Love of Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University, said after Hildebrand's death.  "Even with a big group, he could always read the room, and keep things fresh.  When you think of your memories of David in high school, doesn't that same "freshness" come alive in your memory?

Hildebrand created new teaching notes for his classes each year, Love said.  He hated pretense, once lampooning the use of the word "shoppes" for a new university shopping center ("I assume that among the shoppes will be a floriste, a computer shackcke and a drugge store," he wrote).  David always found a clever way to make his point!

And he found that he could ease test tensions with his statistical limericks, like this one:

                                     O, sing to the glory of stat!

                                     Of sigma, x-bar and y-hat

                                     The joy and elation

                                     Of squared correlation -

                                     Does anyone here believe that?

It is not that David talked rationally with campus statues, but this picture does make one wonder if he was able to extract intelligence from even the most "bronze-like" creatures in his campus environment!

                                          

In high school David was most able to engage anyone in a conversation about anything.  We hope that your memory of him included some opportunities for an interaction that you fondly recall.  He was that kind of person - one who knew how he affected anyone with whom he made contact.  His students, too, must have truly loved him as we did.  For a man like David crosses our path perhaps only once in our lives.  Two such Davids would indeed be a miracle.  He made everyone better in every venue in which he appeared.

As the picture below may demonstrate, even the campus ravens were in awe of Professor David Hildebrand, and may have engaged him often regarding his views of the Universe and the statistical inferences which may be drawn from it.  Ask any raven at Wharton whether or not another like David may appear on the faculty.

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore!"