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After attending Carleton College for two years, Bob Larson received a Bachelors degree from the University of Wisconsin, and a Masters degree from the University of California-Berkeley, and taught at Augustana College from 1940 to 1942. Having decided to become an actuary, he worked at Aetna (1942 to 1945) and Bankers Life of Iowa (1945 to 1948), achieving Fellowship in the Actuarial Society of America in 1947. Bob returned to the University of Wisconsin in 1948 and started the actuarial science program. He received a PhD in Commerce from Wisconsin in 1951 and continued teaching there until 1954, when he went to work as an actuary at the Benefit Association of Railway Employees.
He became the first Occupant of the Chair of Actuarial Science at Nebraska in 1957. While at Nebraska, Bob worked on a two-year study of state pension plans led by a committee of the Legislative Research Council of the Nebraska Unicameral. That assignment led to significant changes in the University of Nebraska retirement plan. In 1966, Professor Larson left Nebraska and subsequently served as an actuary for various life and health insurance companies. His last position prior to retirement in 1980 was as Chief Actuary for the Railroad Retirement Board.
Bob had a wide range of interests and accomplishments throughout his life. He was athletic, a very good swimmer capable of going long distances, and a competent distance runner, good enough to run track at both Carleton College and the University of Wisconsin. His description of himself as "an undistinguished member of the track team, scoring an occasional point when someone fell down" was typical of his sense of humor. Bob was a lifelong sports fan, faithfully attending home football games at Nebraska even in the pre-Devaney era when the teams were very bad. He was also an avid duplicate bridge player, earning the Life Master designation in 1964, and continued playing even after he was classified later in life as legally blind, having lost the sight in one eye due to an accident during his college years and in the other eye due to corneal dystrophy.
Bob was most successful in attracting students and meeting the Actuarial Science Program's initial goal of providing well-trained, highly-motivated actuarial science professionals for Nebraska insurance companies. Bob's legacy is far-reaching both personally and professionally. Despite having a somewhat offbeat personality that some might even characterize as "crotchety", Bob was much loved by his students. They especially appreciated his ability to explain complex subjects in simple, and usually humorous, terms, as illustrated by his "apple and orange market in the Kingdom of Zed" example, which was used in testimony before the Senate Finance committee in 1983 to explain antiselection. Bob cared about his students and kept in touch with many long after he retired, not only through his infamous Christmas letters, which often used the backs of sample actuarial exam questions as paper, but also through personal contact.
Bob Larson passed away April 15, 2005 at the age of 88.
