Owen says the house belonged to Professor Harvey Cox, who lived at the time on Frost Street.
“We were supposed to sit there and work on the book all summer,” says Crist. Instead, “George and I sat at the kitchen table all night with stacks of books trying to figure out the secret of dog racing.”
But Crist sees no inconsistency between Meyer’s abstracted, mathematical philosophy of betting and his chaotic, loony sense of humor.
“There’s an element among people who spend a lot of time at the racetrack of an anti-authoritarian, unconventional—if not entirely anarchic—frame of mind,” Crist says, and this applies to even the most intellectual and rational of gamblers. “It’s a little bit like running away and joining the circus. That characterizes George’s worldview and what he’s gone on to do.”
—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.
