Margit von Mises, R I P.

Margit Herzfeld, a successful actress and play translator, had not heard of Ludwig von Mises when they met at a dinner party by Felix Kaufmann, the science historian. "What impressed me," she later wrote in My Years with Ludwig von Mises, "were his beautiful, clear blue eyes, always concentrated on the person to whom he talked, never shifting away. . . . The next day, when my hosts told me he was considered . . . [the] greatest living mind in Austria, it gave me quite a shock. He seemed so unpretentious and simple, so easy to talk to." Mises, a confirmed bachelor, was impressed as well: he sent her red roses and a dinner invitation.

"If you want a rich man, don't marry me. I am writing about money, but will never have much of my own," Mises warned her when he proposed. Indeed, he was a poorer man by the time of the wedding, which took place in Geneva: the Nazis had entered Vienna, ransacked his library, and destroyed his papers. Ludwig and Margit fled across France just ahead of Hitler's armies. They finally reached New York in August 1940, with no income, no books, no home, and few employment prospects. Mises had to learn to write in a new language; they moved five times in their first year. "If it were not for you," he told her, "I would not want to live any more."

Henry Hazlitt and Lawrence Fertig eventually arranged a privately funded appointment at New York University; the Miseses settled in and six years later became American citizens. The stories from their American years - dinners, seminars, mountain-climbing - are now legendary. And in America Ludwig wrote - and Margit typed, proofed, and otherwise midwived - the thousands of manuscript pages of Human Action, the most important defense of market economics ever written.

After Ludwig's death, Margit became what Murray Rothbard called a "one-woman Mises industry." On the hundredth anniversary of his birth, I approached her with the idea of an institute dedicated to her husband and his ideas. Calling it a "dream come true," she agreed to chair the institute, and gave me wise counsel, as she did to many others.

Now her work is ended; Margit von Mises died in New York City on June 25 at the ago of 102. The ideas of freedom, which she worked so hard to advance, live on.