WILLIAM D. SAMSON
(1947 – 2005)
Readers will be sad to learn of the sudden death of William D. Samson on 15th September 2005. William D. Samson (Bill) was the Roddy-Garner Professor of Accounting, Culverhouse School of Accountancy, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He was a former President of the Academy of Accounting Historians and Editor of the Accounting Historians Journal.
Bill’s death occurred shortly before the December issue of AHJ was due to be sent to press. However, time has permitted the inclusion of a moving memorial from two of his closest friends and colleagues, Dale L. Flesher and Gary John Previts. A full tribute to Bill Samson’s contribution to accounting history and the Academy of Accounting Historians will appear in the June 2006 number of AHJ. To that end Richard K. Fleischman, the incoming Editor, invites vignettes of Bill’s life and work. Contributions should be sent by email attachment to fleischman@j cu.edu.
William Donald Samson
Memorial to an Accounting Historian,
Scholar and Friend
DALE L. FLESHER AND GARY JOHN PREVITS
Uniqueness is an attribute of greatness. Bill Samson was unique. No other accounting historian has had his likeness and his story told on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Bill was the subject of such attention on July 16, 1997. But he would be the first to point out that being a ‘poster child’ for accounting history was not what pleased him the most. Rather, his life with Joan, their collection of pets, and perhaps the Harley which he drove with all the abandon of a ‘rebel with a cause’, were the center of the spirited person we grew to know so well. Indeed living was something Bill well did, beyond his writings and classroom teaching.
A 1969 graduate of Virginia Military Institute, Bill served as a platoon leader and infantry officer in Vietnam, 1970-71 with the 25th (Tropic Lightning) Division. In many ways the thought of a lightning bolt depicts Bill’s furious energy about accountabilities for our profession’s reputation and ethics, as well as the disposition he invested in writing about a topic about which he was interested. Bill’s fury occasionally lent to outrage, which almost always, as a former colleague put it, was “brief and without malice”. Nevertheless it was a memorable experience for those in its path.
It was our mutual respect for Paul Garner which brought the three of us closer together. The occasion was an Academy of Accounting Historians conference dedicated to Paul’s memory. This event provided the impetus for us to explore early railroad annual reports. We also had many opportunities to work with Bill through the Academy. He held several offices in the Academy including terms as Editor of the Accounting Historians Journal (1990-1994), Secretary, and, of course, as President in 2002. Prior to that, Bill also spent many years in the service of the Academy and in recent years he has been the administrative guru of operations in Tuscaloosa, working closely with the Academy’s administrator, Kathy Rice.
Bill’s research and writing is, of course, where we had the greatest opportunity to work with him and to get to know him. Bill was a private person, but not secretively so. He enjoyed a good laugh and a practical joke, and could be ‘counted on’ to carry his own weight on a project and then some. He tended, as most hard working professors, to feel the strain of conflicting commitments, and to let his coauthors know if he felt too much of an immediate task had landed on his plate, when in fact it could be more equitably divided.
He had a joy of writing, which exceeded almost any bounds, and a major challenge in dealing with his prolific style was to edit it. He was not one who would tell you “OK cut away, no pride of authorship”. Bill was very proud of his writing. He was, in short, an excellent story teller and case writer, and contributed greatly to our joint efforts on the accounting history of railroads such as the Baltimore and Ohio, the Mobile and Ohio and the Illinois Central. The ‘grunt work’ – data dredging and analysis – was left to us. Our role included mining the materials, panning for a discovery and, following long meetings or brief telephone chats, integrating these raw materials with Bill’s drafting. Bill would weave golden phrases into the pages of drafts. He read great quantities of materials to supplement the primary sources that had been unearthed and used these to support or frame the contributions of our common work. But the full details and the stories of all of this are for another, longer, exposition.
Our contribution to your legacy, Bill, will be to continue the work that we began together and that remains unfinished so as to contribute to our colleagueship in the future as in the past. Yet, however much we try we will never be as colorful as Bill -wearing one of the ersatz neckties he discovered in some out of the way haberdashery, or donning his blue and white striped engineers cap at the start of a session reporting on one of our railroad papers. Neither will we ever be quite as interesting to our overseas colleagues. On completing a presentation in France, Bill was asked politely by one of our French colleagues, “What English dialect are you speaking?” Bill could talk “Southern” with the best!
Bill Samson – scholar, colleague, Academy leader and friend – Farewell. We will not only miss you, but we will struggle to find a way to fill the void, which in the final analysis, cannot be filled. For as we have noted, your uniqueness extended beyond the feature mentioned in The Wall Street Journal and reached into the minds and hearts of your family, colleagues and friends.
