Best Of

I remember when I was a graduate student at Virginia Tech, I became good friends with James Buchanan--a Nobel Prize economist that lived in the Blacksburg area and had an emeritus appointment at Tech with an office right next to mine.

He was always sponsoring economic seminars and would fly economists in from all over the world for them. He lived in one of the oldest houses in the area outside of which was a fleet of Town Cars (I think 5 of them if I remember)--he loved his Town Cars. He always paid me to go to Roanoke airport and pick up these people in one of these cars. I remember one time picking up a famous German economist, him getting in the back seat of the car and then not shutting up about how big the car was for the 35 minute drive back to Blacksburg. To him, that thing was huge, the largest car he had ever been in. I remember him telling me that (and I'm paraphrasing) 'I've never been in a car before where you could stretch your legs out'.