Remembering Rose Friedman!

PBS via Bloomberg News

Milton Friedman, left, poses with his wife Rose in this file photo taken in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

I’m very sad to hear that Rose Friedman passed away (December 25, 1910 – August 18, 2009) the world has lost one more freedom lover!

According to Friedman Foundation:

• “Rose Director Friedman passed away Tuesday, August 18, 2009, in her home inDavis, California, of heart failure. While the exact date of her birth is uncertain, she is believed to have been 98 years old.
• She will also be remembered as both the professional partner and beloved wife and friend of her late husband of 68 years, Milton Friedman.
• She was born in a small village that was then located in Russia and is now part of Ukraine. Her birth records are lost, but she believed she had been born during December 1910. When she was an infant, her mother took her and her siblings and left for America, where her father had already moved to escape threats against his life arising from anti-Semitism. They left just before that part of the countryside was devastated during World War I.”

Unfortunately her birth date is not know as per the above information. But I heard that she studied with Milton in Chicago University!

Infact, Milton Friedman wrote a great tribute to late Prof George Joseph Stigler (January 17, 1911 — December 1, 1991) in which he said:

• I overlapped George at Chicago for one year, 1934-35, during which he, W. Allen Wallis, and I formed what proved to be a lifelong friendship. As it happened, all three of our future spouses were also students at Chicago. George was to marry Margaret Mack, always known as Chick, who was majoring in social science. Allen would marry Anne Armstrong, an art history major, and I married Rose Director, whose major was economics. We soon formed a sextuple whose lives were intertwined from then on.
• In 1936 George accepted an appointment as an assistant professor at Iowa State College (now University), and shortly thereafter was married to Margaret "Chick" Mack. George and Chick had three sons: Stephen, a professor of statistics at the University of Chicago; David, a corporate lawyer; and Joseph, a businessman. The family suffered a tragic loss in 1970, when Chick died unexpectedly, without any advance warning. George never remarried.

Also read Rose Friedman:

“Here's how she and Milton summed up what they thought they were doing, toward the end of their memoir, Two Lucky People:

• Our central theme in public advocacy has been the promotion of human freedom....it underlies our opposition to rent control and general wage and price controls, our support for educational choice, privatizing radio and television channels, an all-volunteer army, limitation of government spending, legalization of drugs, privatizing Social Security, free trade, and the deregulation of industry and private life to the fullest extent possible.

Also read "Noted economist Rose Friedman, wife of Milton Friedman, and former Portlander, dies"

Remembering Milton Friedman!