Abstract
I expect all PhD students are advised to publish early and often in their careers, ideally in top-tier journals. They’re told that’s the surest way to have a long and successful career in academe, and how the “game” should be played. Well – Dick Fleischman loved every part of the game, and he played it very well for a very long time. Dick enjoyed traveling to the archives, sifting through documents, finding gold nuggets, putting data into tables, telling the story, and getting the paper into print. Simply put, Dick loved being an accounting historian, and he loved every part of the process. I’ll leave it to others to talk about Dick’s service to the Academy of Accounting Historians and his many career achievements. I’ll talk instead about Dick as the colleague I knew and admired.
As I recall, I first met Dick at the 1991 Accounting History Research Methodology Conference in Oxford, Mississippi. I was a junior faculty who had published one history paper in the Accounting Historians Journal (AHJ). It was a one-company case study of a small, late nineteenth-century New York boat builder, but the paper must have made a good impression on Dick. By that time, Dick was well known among those of us who were drawn to archive-based accounting history research. He had published papers in accounting history journals, and along with Lee Parker had become one of the very few accounting historians to publish a history paper in The Accounting Review. Dick was the academic I wanted to emulate – a person who could have a successful scholarly career that focused on accounting history.
Dick approached me at that conference and asked if I would join him to complete a paper that compared British and US cost accounting history. He said that the Economic History Journal (EHJ) reviewers told him he needed to make the comparison because a paper focusing solely on British practices was too narrow. Unlike most US accounting academics, Dick’s PhD was in history, and until then his research focused on British accounting practices. He said he knew very little about US accounting history, and he needed a co-author for that side of the comparison. Dick really wanted to publish in the EHJ and if that took adding a co-author then that’s what he’d do. I was flattered by Dick’s ask and immediately said YES. In retrospect, joining him in that effort was the best decision I ever made in academia.
We worked together for the next 25 years and published 25 journal articles, quite a few book chapters, and presented around 30 papers at international and regional conferences. While we each had our own interests, we were often viewed as flag bearers of an archive-based, economic rationalist perspective on accounting history. I fondly recall the academic antler clashing at several conferences regarding the veracity of the economic rationalist, Foucauldian, or Marxist perspectives. I took the sparring as a personal challenge, but Dick was far more relaxed about these and other academic matters. He had a sharp mind, a great sense of humor, and never took himself too seriously. If it meant working with the “enemy,” from my perspective, to publish a paper, that was never a problem for Dick. He frequently initiated projects with colleagues from many different countries, backgrounds, and orientations. I’m certain many faculty would agree that Dick was particularly instrumental in their career success.
There are many personal anecdotes I could share about Dick. He was my mentor, career adviser, travel companion, and good friend. We visited archives in Hawaii, the West Indies, the United Kingdom, and throughout the United States, especially the National Archives in Washington, DC. Our most memorable trip occurred in the summer of 2000 or 2001 as best as I can recall. We embarked on a two-week excursion to three or four southern US university libraries to collect data on antebellum plantation accounting practices. The project emanated from a paper we had written about nineteenth-century Hawaiian sugar plantation workers. We felt that examining the role of accounting on US plantations seemed a logical extension. It led us down a golden path that kept us active in the game for many years.
We started the trip from Dick’s home in Cleveland and drove south in his convertible. He preferred to drive shirtless and hatless, kept the top down, and smoked his infamous cigars. As we headed south, Dick baked evenly while the sun scorched his bald dome. We usually shared rooms at Red Roof Inns and ate far too many meals at Cracker Barrel restaurants. Both were Dick’s favorites, and I wasn’t going to object, and I don’t recall being asked for input on the matter. Dick loved the trip and paid for everything. We probably drove around 2,500 miles, and I was happy to be along for the ride. Within an hour after returning to Cleveland, Dick presented me with an itemized list of my share of daily expenses including a mileage allowance – carried down to two digits. I don’t remember how much the trip cost, but Dick wanted me to cut him a check before I headed back to upstate New York. I was a bit taken aback, but prudently held my tongue and accepted the frugal side of Dick’s personality.
During our trips and conference presentations, especially until the #early 2000s, Dick lived large – he really enjoyed his burgers and fries, and we both had a few too many drinks on occasion. But after he married Sandra and aged a bit, Dick started to have several medical issues, and he wisely became far more attentive to his health and lifestyle.
I expect that many academics fondly recall their experiences working with Dick. He often chose younger faculty as co-authors, and Dick always carried his share of the workload. One of the things Dick did especially well was to target a specific journal at the front end of a project and gear the paper’s narrative and literature review to publication in that journal. I recall that he had tried for years to get a paper into Accounting Organizations and Society and was thrilled to do so near the tail end of his career. Dick was especially perceptive in deciphering and responding to reviewers’ comments, perhaps as a result of serving as the editor of AHJ for many years. While I was inclined to make a stand against a critical reviewer who I thought was “misinformed,” Dick was far more accommodative of requests for changes. For Dick, the purpose of the “game” was to get the paper published, and Dick wanted to win that game more than anyone I’ve ever met.
More recently, 10 of our 25 journal articles included David Oldroyd as a co-author. In all cases, we’ve never had disagreements about how to list ourselves as authors. Typically, the one who wrote the first draft was listed first. and that person moved it along to the other two for their bits. Once the paper was finished, Dick often volunteered to conform the paper to the journal’s style requirements. While I disliked that task, Dick patiently went through the narrative and references to ensure that every comma and parenthesis was absolutely correct.
Finally, and in all candor, Dick wasn’t a very good presenter. He typically looked down at his yellow-lined note pads, spoke in a low and increasingly raspy voice, and often exceeded time guidelines. He was unabashedly old school and openly disdained the use of power-point slides that would have helped many attendees follow along. But if you paid close attention and listened very carefully, you could hear that Dick’s presentations were carefully organized, logically precise, and beautifully articulated – just like his written narratives. Simply put, Dick was a master craftsman, and his craft was accounting history.
I lost my mentor, good friend and colleague when Dick Fleischman passed away. We all lost one of our era’s preeminent accounting history scholars.