Norton Moore Bedford
Boston Room
Marriott World Center Hotel Orlando, Florida
CITATION
by
Thomas J. Burns The Ohio State University
Throughout his lifetime, he has been concerned with providing information perhaps because he was raised in St. Joseph, Missouri, the town where the pony express started and where he started his career at 18 by working for the local newspaper.
His family has not always succeeded. The Bedford family settled originally in New England, but took the Royalist side in the Revolutionary War and had to flee to Canada. The family got back into the country a century later when his grandfather bought a Montana ranch. His mother’s family took the losing side in a war, too: they supported the Confederacy in the Civil War.
After trying farming, his father supported his five children as a chemist and a wool grader with a meat packer. Early on an achiever, as a boy, he became an eagle scout. However, he was motivated to attend the local junior college, after meeting a girl on a tennis court who was to become his wife. Nevertheless, as a tennis player of tournament calibre, he invited her to play tennis only when a competing boy friend, also a good player, was about to ask her to play.
After earning a degree from Tulane University, he went into business until he was drafted in World War II. In the artillery, he progressed from private to major while receiving the bronze star. With Paton’s Seventh Army at the Battle of the Bulge, he experienced the most difficult time of his life; later with the victorious First Army, he fought in the breakthrough at Remagen Bridge.
After receiving an MBA at Tulane, he earned a Ph.D. at The Ohio State University, in the first year the University granted such a degree in accounting, 1950. 1950 was also the year the Accounting Hall of Fame was started and he is the first Ohio State Ph.D. to be elected to the Hall. Briefly at Washington University, he switched to the University of Illinios, where he has been ever since, 34 years. He is the fifth professor from the University of Illinois to be elected to the Hall following A.C. Littleton, Robert Mautz, Lloyd Morey, and Hiram Scovill.
As a scholar, he has been a major contributor to income measurement theory and other theory areas in particular as a pioneer of behavioral accounting. The editor of 26 books and the author of five books and two monographs, he has written over one hundred widely cited and translated articles of which over a dozen appeared in The Accounting Review. A lecturer at 100 universities in 17 countries, he has given over 200 lectures in this country alone. Always a leading teacher of graduate studies, he has chaired the dissertation committees of 51 students, many of whom have gone to achieve eminence themselves including Nicholas Dopuch, Rashad AbdelKhalik, Robert Libby, and many others.
Only a sometime hero to his family, they became disillusioned with his linguistic abilities when after ordering lunch in a Munich restaurant, he received a heaping platter of radishes, the one ingredient in salads that he does not eat. Father of two, his daughter, a former CPA, is now the mother of his two granddaughters. Long a smoker, his son helped him quit after a period during which he carried out the garbage to conceal his smoking.
Noted for his concentration while working to the extent that he becomes unaware of food, weather, people, and other events, he had a discussion in California recently where he was giving a complex explanation. When he finished, his son said, “Dad, you have just talked your way through a pretty hard earthquake.”
As an administrator, this Arthur Young Professor is noted both at his University (where he served as Head of the Accountancy Department and where he started the executive development center) and elsewhere for his ongoing leadership. On the board of directors, for the American Institute of CPAs, the National Association of Accountants, the Financial Accounting Foundation, and three business companies, he has been a consultant to almost two dozen organizations including the Securities Exchange Commission and the Internal Revenue Service. A past president of the American Accounting Association (and the Federation of Schools of Accountancy), he recently chaired the former organization’s committee whose report on accounting education was widely acclaimed.
For all of his accomplishments, but in particular, for significantly extending the scope and the quality of accounting education and accounting information everywhere he is named the 48th member of the Accounting Hall of Fame — Norton Moore Bedford.
