Ralph and Muriel Hidy Manuscript About Great Northern Railway Company History, circa 1968-1970

Ralph Willard Hidy was born on April 21, 1905 in Portland, Indiana, to Urban and Helen Hidy. He graduated in 1926 from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and received graduated degrees in history from Clark University in Worchester, Massachusetts in 1928 and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1935. From 1941-1946 he served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Following his discharge from 1947-1950, he worked as the senior research associate with the Business History Foundation, an organization chartered to research and publish the corporate history of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. After teaching at Norwich University, Wheaton College, and New York University, Ralph joined the Harvard Business School faculty as the Isidor Straus professor of business history in 1957.

Muriel Emmie Wagenhauser was born on February 19, 1906 in Johannesburg, South Africa. She immigrated with her family to Canada and graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1927. Muriel then earned a fellowship at Clark University, where she met Ralph Hidy. The couple married on June 2, 1928. Muriel went on to get her PhD in economic history from Ratcliff College in 1939. Along with her husband, she joined the staff of the Business History Foundation, where the two co-wrote the four-volume Pioneering in Big Business, 1882-1911: A History of the Standard Oil Company.

From the mid-1950s and until the late 1960s, Ralph and Muriel continued to their work with the Business History Foundation, next researching the history of the Great Northern Railway for a planned monograph, with publication set to coincide with the company’s 1962 centennial. For reasons unknown, the book was not published until 1988, after the Hidys’ deaths, by the Harvard Business School Press. Significant editing was completed by Roy V. Scott and Don. L Hofsommer.

Ralph Hidy died on December 5, 1977 in Boston, Massachusetts. Muriel Hidy died on October 15, 1985 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.