IN MEMORIAM: CELEBRATING THE LIFE OF BILL SAMSON

WILLIAM DONALD SAMSON (1947-2005)

Bill was a big man. Yet, even in Alabama’s football sta-dium, you would know of his presence, hearing him without seeing him. He was an asset to every gathering. Richard Vanger-meersch recollects how Bill and Joni were the lives of the party, from Australia to the U.K., and all points between.

Bill was a man of fierce loyalties – to Joni, of course, to Alabama, to accounting history and the Academy he once headed, to the multitude of his friends. Who else would have been able to make accounting history a front page story of the Wall Street Journal? Who else could have shamed his more conservative coauthors on the U.S. railroading project into wearing engineering caps at their presentations? Perhaps Bill’s reverence for his mentor, Paul Garner, exemplifies his loyalty and his respect for the past.

Bill was one of the biggest hearted men I have ever had the privilege to know. Just ask the stray cats and dogs he and Joni rescued and welcomed into their home. Whenever I had occa-sion to visit Tuscaloosa, they took grand care of me.

The two articles that follow are offered as a tribute to Bill’s remarkable contributions to accounting history. The first is the latest of a lengthy stream of archival research undertaken by Bill, Dale Flesher, and Gary Previts to extend to accounting history Alfred Chandler’s belief that the U.S. transcontinental railroads were in many ways the first corporations of the mod-ern type. The second paper, of a totally different genre, is the product of one of Bill’s most heartfelt projects – to convince accounting educators of the possibilities for using Theresa Hammond’s A White-Collar Profession for the dual purposes of generating awareness of accountancy’s diversity issues while, at the same time, creating an interest in the profession’s past. Bill, we will miss thee.