A Profile of Leslie Kish

(The following remarks were made by Reynolds Farley when he accepted, for Leslie Kish, the Mindel C. Sheps Award on April 3 at the 1998 PAA Meeting.)

I am exceptionally pleased to accept the Mendel C. Sheps Award for my friend and my colleague, Leslie Kish. For fifty-seven years, Leslie has encouraged demographers and social scientists to use equal probability sampling and to compute design effects whenever they select a sample. When he began his work, there was no consensus about the legitimacy or feasibility of using sampling in censuses or survey. There was little knowledge of design effects. Now sampling is so widely accepted that we do not think about its development.

As Noreen Goldman [Chair of the 1998 Mendel C. Sheps Award Committee] told us, Leslie Kish cannot be here in Chicago this afternoon. The reasons are good ones related to immigration and surprising changes in world history. Leslie is a Hungarian born in one of those Hungarian enclaves formerly located within Romania. His family came to New York City at the end of the wave of European immigration. Leslie graduated from night high school in New York and then earned a degree in math and physics from the City College of New York. However, he spent almost two full years fighting against Generalissimo Franco in the Spanish Civil War.

In 1941, Leslie needed a job and Rensis Likert asked him to be the first sampler in the Department of Agriculture. Leslie says he asked what that job was and Ren Likert told him to come to Washington to find out. Leslie took the job, a decision that changed our discipline. After three years of service -- this time in the United States Army as a meteorologist -- Leslie moved to Michigan in 1946 to help found the Survey Research Center.

Many of you have used or know about Leslie's definitive book, Survey Sampling, published in 1965. Others of you have participated in the Sampling Program for Foreign Statisticians that Leslie began in 1961 -- a program that has trained hundreds of demographers and social scientists from 97 countries. Any many of you know that Leslie has visited most of those countries to consult about sampling, to see his friends and to thoroughly sample their food and wine.

March 3 is a singularly important date for Leslie Kish. On March 3, 1926 Leslie and his family sailed through the Verazano Straits and spent the night on Ellis Island. Twenty one years late, on March 3, 1947, Leslie married Rhea -- and they are still married and cohabiting. And then on March 3 of this year, Noreen Goldman told Leslie that he won the Population Association's 1998 Mendel C. Sheps Award for his contributions to demography.

Leslie has good reason for his absence today. The Hungarian government simply trumped the Population Association. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences elected Leslie to their ranks and the Hungarian government awarded him their Order of Merit medal. Leslie is in Budapest this afternoon to receive those honors.