Robert 'Bob' Piron

Robert 'Bob' Piron died in his sleep at Welcome Nursing Home in Oberlin on Tuesday, August 16, 2022. At the time, he was recuperating from a fall and undergoing treatment for cancer. Bob was born to Fruma and Elie Piron in TianJin, China on July 18, 1935. His maternal grandfather ran the Belgium-owned Tientsin Tramway and Lighting Company that supplied both transportation and electricity to northern China from 1914 until it was taken over by the invading Japanese Army in 1943. His parents bribed their way out of China in 1941 and eventually settled in Brooklyn, New York. As a boy, Bob was a bat boy for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team he rooted for all his life, despite their move to Los Angeles in 1957. In his teens, he became good enough at tennis to teach it on the public tennis courts in Brooklyn. During this time, he also learned to play piano with a renowned piano teacher (who may have been a secret lover of Arthur Rubinstein) and attended the elite Erasmus Hall High School. Once he realized that he was not good enough to be a concert pianist, he decided to become an economist instead. He obtained a B.A. from New York University and then a Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University. In 1961, he joined the economics faculty at Oberlin College, which was his only employer until he retired in 2008. Bob began his academic career studying the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomics. But he was eclectic and in his later years he both did research in and taught courses in experimental economics, well before it became an accepted sub-field. Bob came to Oberlin because they offered him a job, but he stayed because of the piano department of the Oberlin Conservatory and because he was allowed to coach the College tennis team. In the 1970's, he formed the Oberlin Tennis Camp under the aegis of Billy Jean King, which later became the Oberlin Nike Tennis Camp. Hundreds of high school students attended the Camp over its 30-odd year life and many enrolled in the College. In 2005, Bob co-founded CleanAlert to commercialize a filter clog detector. He was chairman of the Board until shortly before his death. He has no surviving close relatives, but lots of adoring former students, whom he considered his 'kids.'