How I Became a Biostatistician and Joined the MSU Faculty

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Mary and I drove across Bozeman Pass through a September blizzard to reach our destination – Bozeman and Montana State University. We were 31 years old and had lived briefly in Europe and various places across the U.S. from coast to coast. We were born, raised, and educated in Wyoming, and now were returning to the Rocky Mountain West to settle down and raise a family. We chose Bozeman as the place to be our home.

My new position as an Assistant Professor at MSU was the first non-temporary job that I had ever taken. My former colleagues were incredulous that a biostatistician experienced in biomedical research would move to such a remote location. However, it made sense to Mary and me. In retrospect, my journey to biostatistics and MSU was facilitated by childhood aspirations, marvelous support from family and mentors, and lots of good luck. This narrative describes the main waypoints along My Bozeman Trail.

I was born in Wyoming in 1939 during the Great Depression. I was raised and educated in Torrington, an agriculture community on the North Platte River, 7 miles from the Nebraska border. Torrington lies along a historic road – the Oregon Trail & Pony Express route. Old Fort Laramie is 20 miles west. During my youth, I knew nothing about Bozeman. However, on family visits to the Fort Laramie National Historic Site, the rangers told stories about battles between Indian tribes and the soldiers who were stationed along the “Bozeman Trail.” I didn’t realize then that “Bozeman” was a person and a town as well as a trail.

During WWII my father worked for the USDA Farmers Home Administration (FHA) and my mother was an elementary school teacher. In 1942, my parents bought a newly-constructed small house on the east edge of Torrington where they lived for the next 40+ years. My sister Carolyn (“Lyn”) was born in 1946, putting her in the Baby Boomer generation.

Mom and Dad were successful athletes in their youth. Dad played football for Worland High School in the 1920s. His teams won the Wyoming state championship all four of his high school years. He and his brothers were strong farm boys and key players on the team. Mom played basketball and participated in track for Cheyenne High School. My folks were sports enthusiasts. Throughout my childhood, they encouraged my friends to join me in our backyard for athletic games.

Both sides of my family placed high value on education. Dad’s parents graduated from Colorado State University at the turn of the 20th century. Mom’s mother was one of the first to earn a teacher’s certificate from the University of Wyoming. Mom and Dad each had attended the University of Wyoming for two (non-overlapping) years, enough for Mom to receive a teaching certificate. Mom was a teacher when she and Dad married, but she had to stop teaching for a few years because married women were prohibited from teaching during the Great Depression. With the onset of WWII, married women teachers were allowed back in the classroom and Mom began a long, esteemed career as a 2nd grade teacher in Torrington. Mom especially enjoyed mentoring student teachers from the University of Wyoming.

Because of my parents emphasis on education, I knew they expected me to attend college some day. Based on stories about financial challenges during my parents’ depression-era college years, I felt the need to fund my own college education somehow. A way to do that struck me when I was 8 or 9 years old while watching the movie The Spirit of West Point. The movie was about two of Army’s most famous football stars, Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis. (I’m disappointed that modern-day movie critics give it mediocre reviews.) The movie taught me that good football players can get a college education at West Point – for free! All a guy had to do was become both a good student and a good football player. There was no reason for me to believe that I had an aptitude in either area. Nevertheless, I immediately dedicated myself to winning an appointment to West Point. In retrospect, it is amazing that my childhood dream did come true, although not at West Point.

I learned something important about myself during the winter of my 6th grade year at age 12.  I acquired a food-borne viral disease, Hepatitis A, also called infectious hepatitis. I was put under quarantine at home for a few weeks. My teacher loaned me textbooks and a classmate brought daily assignments and returned my homework to the teacher. I discovered that I enjoyed learning by myself. It was exciting to figure out what was important and do the homework. Being quarantined forced me to master independent study and the joy of discovery, skills that became important in my eventual academic career. That period of quarantine was an important experience – from then on, instead of working just to get good grades, my motivation came mainly from a passion for learning.

When the U.S. Department of Agriculture was reorganized in 1953, the year I entered high school, my Dad’s FHA job was eliminated. He and Mom decided to purchase a local trucking business, which they renamed “Hamilton Transfer, Storage, and Feed.”  For the next few years, I worked for Hamilton Transfer, full-time in the summer, and part-time during the school year. That job provided the same muscle-building exercise that modern athletes get in a weight room.

My Childhood Plan Succeeds – College on a Football Scholarship

During my Junior High and High School years, I was serious about studying and playing sports, especially team sports. My high school football teams made it to the Class A state championship game each year, but we lost every time – to Worland, my Dad’s high school. For the 1956 season, I was selected to the All-Classes, All-State team for Wyoming high school football. I enjoyed my high school course work and was co-valedictorian of the class of ‘57. My 9-year-old self assumed West Point was the only college with football scholarships. But by the time I left high school, I had football scholarship offers from a few universities. I chose to forego applying to West Point. Instead I would attend college in Laramie and play football for the University of Wyoming.

Why I Chose to Major in Statistics

When I arrived on the Wyoming campus, I didn’t have a firm idea about a field of study. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were competing for technological superiority in the 1950’s. I knew that engineering was a popular field likely to provide good job opportunities. I enrolled in the General Engineering program although I knew very little about engineering as a profession. I enjoyed my college courses and built a good academic record. But I was unsuccessful in identifying a branch of engineering suited to my interests and aptitudes. I switched my major at the end of every semester, from General Engineering to Chemical Engineering to Mechanical Engineering to Civil Engineering. The summer before my Junior year, I visited my folks in Torrington and explained my dilemma – how to make a final career decision. Mom had a suggestion. Her brother Arnold King currently was visiting their older brother’s ranch near Cheyenne and she thought he could provide some guidance. I agreed that we should invite Uncle Arnold to visit us in Torrington.

I didn’t know much about Arnold King, other than the fact that Mom trusted his judgment. Now I know why. He was the President of National Analysts (presently called NAXION), a company located in Philadelphia. It was the "first commercial research company" ever formed, according to Wikipedia. It specialized in marketing research and its clients were major corporations such as Ford Motor and Anheuser-Busch. Arnold was educated at the University of Wyoming. He became well-known among statisticians in the 1930s for devising efficient, reliable agricultural sampling techniques while he was employed by the USDA facility at Iowa State University (See Era 3 - Statistical Calculation Facilities: 1920-1950s). At National Analysts he adapted his sampling expertise to marketing research.

G. Snedecor, P.C. Mahalanobis, Arnold King
Iowa State University 1933

Arnold kindly interrupted his Cheyenne vacation and drove to Torrington. I told him about my studies thus far and my difficulty in choosing a profession. He recognized that the course work I already had completed could easily be merged into a statistics degree program. He explained what statisticians did and the many opportunities available to statisticians. He said his son Don King was completing his studies for an MS degree in Statistics at the University of Wyoming. Arnold recommended that I seriously consider choosing statistics as my field. He said I should visit with Dr. Ed Bryant, Head of the Statistics Department, who was my cousin Don’s adviser.

Soon after Arnold’s visit, I met with Prof. Bryant. He mapped out a degree plan for me. I left his office motivated to become a statistician and entered the statistics program in the Fall Semester of 1959. I was amazingly lucky to have received the counsel of Arnold King and Ed Bryant at that point in my life. My first statistics course was taught by the Teaching Assistant Jim Daley. The text was Ed Bryant’s book Statistical Analysis. I received a B.S. degree in Statistics in June, 1961. At that time Statistics was a department in the College of Commerce and Industry so classroom examples of statistical applications typically were from the business world.

I had never considered graduate school, but Dr. Bryant suggested that I take a heavy load of classes during my senior year so I could apply the extra upper-division credits toward an MS in Statistics. At his suggestion, I applied to the graduate school and began MS studies during the Summer Session, 1961. I received financial support via the Department’s IBM/WDPC assistantship for teaching & research. This was a couple years after Dick Lund received support from that same assistantship. The assigned duties were to expand my computer skills, take a Fortran programming course during the summer at UCLA, and teach the department’s Data Processing course during the summer and academic year. Because of the extra credits taken my senior year, I was able to complete the MS requirements and receive the degree at the end of summer session, 1962.

Discovering Biostatistics in Scotland

In this narrative I will focus on Statistics and not say much about all the family members and friends that have enriched my life. However, my discovery of biostatistics was due to my wife of 50+ years, Mary (Talovich) Hamilton. Mary, a farm girl from Thermopolis WY, majored in pharmacy, which in those days was an intensive four-year program. She and I graduated in June, 1961. We began dating in our junior year and became close during our senior year, but neither of us was ready for marriage. We were determined, however, to keep in touch.

Mary was an outstanding student and she received a Fulbright Scholarship to conduct pharmacological research during 1961-62 at the University of Oslo, Norway. She left soon after graduation to spend the summer in Norway learning Norwegian. We regularly corresponded by mail. Her letters described many wonderful experiences in Norway and Europe.

Because of her compelling letters, I applied for a Fulbright for the next year, and fortunately was successful. Although I proposed to study in England, the Fulbright Commission suggested that I attend the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Being of Scottish ancestry, that assignment suited me. The Fulbright award supported surface transportation so I traveled from Wyoming to New York City by train, then from NYC to England by steamship. I was on the SS United States, sailing for Southampton, when Mary was sailing back to NYC from Oslo. Our ships passed somewhere in the Atlantic. During the next year, Mary took a hospital pharmacist position in Denver, first as an intern, then as a licensed pharmacist. I became enthusiastically engaged in academic endeavors and travel adventures in the UK and Europe.

The Fulbright Commission and the University of Aberdeen staff provided great assistance to me. I found that the statistics faculty at the University of Aberdeen was world-class. It included Prof. Michael Sampford, who was then the editor of Biometrics, and other well-known statisticians, some being authors of textbooks I had read. The University was founded in 1495 and has been an academic force in Europe ever since. The students, staff, and faculty at the University were wonderful. Aberdeen was the perfect place for this Wyoming lad.

The Aberdeen statisticians were engaged in collaborations in biomedical, environmental, agricultural, and fisheries research. Through the statisticians at the University of Aberdeen, I discovered the field of biostatistics. I was attracted to the applications, and took all the biostatistics courses that time allowed. I realized that I needed more training and a degree certifying that I was a biostatistician. As the second term began, I decided to apply for admittance into a PhD program in the U.S. In one of the Aberdeen courses, the instructor asked us to read biostatistical papers by Prof. Lincoln Moses at Stanford University. The theory and applications were interesting to me and I thought it would be great to work with Moses. I mailed an application to Stanford. Before a reply arrived, I left Aberdeen to travel during the long Scottish Spring Break. 

After the break, I picked up my Aberdeen mail. It included a letter from Stanford University. Stanford offered me an NIH Fellowship, but instructed me to accept by a date that expired 10 days before I opened the letter. My heart sank. That night I went with friends to a movie. When it was 9am in California, I went to a pay phone in the theater lobby and phoned Stanford to see if I could still accept. Fortunately, the answer was yes. My classes would begin there in September, 1963.

Biostatistical Training: Stanford University and the National Institutes of Health

Lincoln Moses was the Department Head but agreed to be my advisor for the time being. He gave me a quick oral exam before he recommended a course schedule. The program he suggested would take a year longer than I planned. I clearly needed more training in mathematics because the Stanford program required working knowledge of mathematical statistics. As for biostatistical training, Profs. Lincoln Moses and Rupert Miller conducted a biostatistics seminar course that met for two hours every Wednesday afternoon in the Stanford Medical School/Hospital. Profs. Bill Brown and Brad Efron later joined as additional mentors. I eagerly attended that biostatistics seminar throughout my time at Stanford. It not only was enjoyable but also introduced me to research strategies in biomedicine and to the associated biostatistical literature.

When it came time to start a dissertation project, I asked Prof. Rupert Miller if he would be my dissertation supervisor. I had taken courses from him and he had employed me for a few months on a research project that produced a co-authored paper. He accepted and after we discussed alternative research ideas, I chose to study sequential designs for dose-response experiments. While I worked on the dissertation, Prof. Miller  arranged for me to serve as a statistical consultant in the medical school and to co-teach a graduate-level social science course.

Mary Talovich and I kept in touch through the years. In 1966, she moved from Denver to a pharmacist job in San Francisco where we could spend more time together and see whether our loving feelings had survived the past 5 years. Yes they did! In December, 1967, Mary and I were married at a family ceremony in Thermopolis. I received my PhD diploma at the end of the Winter Quarter, 1968, and we headed for the East Coast.

Instead of going directly into a permanent job, I volunteered to serve in the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service as Staff Scientist, Mathematical Statistics and Applied Mathematics Section, Biometry Branch, National Cancer Institute which was located on the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, MD. The head of the Section was Dr. John Gart. He was a widely-respected biostatistician and also an excellent mentor who broadened my perspective about biostatistics. The NIH had assembled an exceptional staff of biostatisticians and epidemiologists. Their accomplishments were praised around the statistical world. My decision to volunteer two-years of service to the country turned out to benefit me by providing excellent post-doc training.

While I was studying at Stanford, three statisticians from Wyoming (my first statistics advisor Ed Bryant, my first statistics instructor Jim Daley, and my cousin Don King) founded a statistical consulting company called Westat that was headquartered in Rockville. In case you don’t know, Westat became a huge success and now is an employee-owned, international corporation with a staff of about 2000. Cousin Don invited Mary and me to Westat social functions and we renewed friendships with Ed, Jim, and other Wyoming folks. Don showed me by example the excitement of discovering what story lay within a scientifically-gathered data set. Ever since then, I have emulated his passion for discovery via statistical data analysis.

Culmination of My Path to MSU

One afternoon, while sitting through three stoplight changes waiting to inch forward and pass through an intersection, I noticed that the sky was cloudless but gray with automobile and industrial fumes. The atrocious traffic and pollution haze forced me to realize how much I longed for the Rocky Mountain West. That night I asked Mary whether she would consider moving nearer to Wyoming. She readily agreed. I was nearing the end of my two-year hitch in the Commissioned Corps. John Gart had given me an attractive offer to stay at NCI. Moving was not an easy professional decision for me. Mary preferred hospital pharmacy work so she had no misgivings about leaving her retail pharmacy job in Maryland. We both missed the West and we decided to move.

I applied to universities in Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. Eventually, I scheduled an interview trip to Missoula and Bozeman. On the way to Missoula in mid-January, 1970, my plane was forced by a heavy snow storm to land in Sheridan, WY in order to de-ice the wings. Eventually we made it to Montana, but only to Helena, not Missoula. I finally reached the University of Montana by bus at noon the next day, so I had just a half day interview.

Because weather conditions prohibited flying out of Missoula, I had to catch the 4am train to Bozeman. I was sleep-deprived and cannot remember much about the MSU interview day. I recall Ken Tiahrt driving me in his old International Scout down Main Street where the snow was piled so high in the middle that I could see only the buildings on our side of the street. I was surprised that Dick Lund and David Jacobson were at MSU, both of whom I knew from graduate school days in Laramie. I met the statistics faculty and students. Ken and Department Head Louis Barrett took me around campus to visit various administrators including Richard McBee, Dean of the College of Letters and Science; Kenneth Goering, Dean of the Graduate School; and Irving Dayton, Vice President of Academic Affairs. At 4pm, I gave a seminar talk. The statistics group took me out to dinner, then to the motel, where I enjoyed a full night of sleep for the first time in three days. The airport opened the next morning and I flew back to Washington National Airport where Mary met me.

I meshed well with the statisticians and other faculty members on each Montana campus. Both schools offered me a position. Mary and I decided on Bozeman. MSU was the science and engineering school, located closer to our families and friends in Wyoming, and more likely to have a hospital pharmacist position for Mary. MSU’s starting AY salary was $13,100.

We drove from Rockville to Bozeman in late September, planning to arrive on the Friday before classes started. As I struggled to drive safely over Bozeman Pass through a blizzard, I began to have second thoughts about Bozeman … am I taking Mary to a forlorn frozen outpost? Upon entering Bozeman, we went directly to the Math Department. It seemed completely deserted, but fortunately, there was one graduate student working that afternoon, Wayne Park. I asked him to recommend a motel. He said the town was full of new students and their parents. There were no vacancies. He invited us to follow him to a log cabin in Bear Canyon where he, his spouse Sally, and their son Daryl lived. Sally was wonderful, amazingly unperturbed by these spontaneous house guests. We spent our first night in Bozeman in a snow-covered cabin with new-found friends. That weekend, we joined the Parks and some Bear Canyon neighbors on a ski tour. After that weekend, Mary and I knew we had fallen out of a smoggy city into our vision of heaven. We soon found a place to rent on W. Grant Street near the University and I began my career at MSU.

There were four statisticians in the 1970-71 Math Department faculty – Frank McFeely, Ken Tiahrt, Dick Lund, and me. The Department offered B.S., MS, and PhD degrees in Mathematics–with Statistics emphasis. All graduate students in Statistics were supported by teaching assistantships. The university was still on the quarter system. My classes were attended by bright, dedicated students. The academic quality of its students was the underlying strength of MSU throughout all my years on the faculty.

By Spring Break in 1971, Mary and I had settled into Bozeman life. We purchased an old home on S. 6th and began remodeling. Soon we had 3 babies join us, Wade (1971), Katrina (1972), and Cord (1974). Mary was the second pharmacist hired by Bozeman Deaconess Hospital. She worked part-time evenings and weekends to relieve the nursing supervisor who previously had to take on pharmacy duties when the only full-time pharmacist was not there. I was at MSU 9 to 5 during the week. Mary and I often had to communicate via notes. Because of our commitments to the kids, our jobs, and remodeling, Mary and I remember almost nothing about the usual things – music, movies, social events, etc. – during the 1970s. We do remember the joy we felt each day. We were, and remain, terminally content.

Epilogue

Years later, I was walking home from the University well after dark on a cold winter evening. Snow flakes were floating down. The street was soundless. Light shown from windows of houses and from streetlights on the corners, creating a warm, cozy mood for my solitary tromp through the snow. The day had been filled with creative energy generated by classes and research seminars. Houses along the street held MSU students and faculty whose accomplishments were keenly on my mind. I suddenly realized that I was in the midst of a marvelous human reservoir of knowledge, imagination, and desire to create new knowledge, an intellectual environment that until then I hadn’t fully appreciated. The discovery revealed my unconscious joy for living and working in this community, an epiphany that still holds me in its grip.

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Last revised: 2021-08-31