SLONIM, Morris J(ames) 1909-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born January 9, 1909, in Molczadz, Poland; died of complications following a stroke June 2, 2004, in Falls Church, VA. Statistician and author. Slonim was a mathematical statistician who spent many years with the U.S. Air Force and was the author of textbooks about statistics. Educated at Harvard University, where he earned an M.B.A. in 1932, the first jobs he found during the Depression were in a candy factory and as a longshoreman in Boston. His first job as a statistician came in 1938, when he worked for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. When World War II started, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces and was assigned to meteorological research. After the war, he found employment again as a statistician in Washington, D.C., for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and then in Omaha, where he worked for the Strategic Air Command. When the Korean conflict began, he was called back to military duty, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel before he left in 1954. But Slonim remained in the Air Force Reserve and returned to Washington, D.C., to work for the Air Force until 1962. For the next three years, he was with the U.S. Post Office. Then, in 1965, he became senior statistical training advisor for the U.S. Agency for International Development and was stationed in Turkey and Afghanistan before finally retiring in 1969. His later years were spent as a consultant in Florida. During the 1960s he authored two textbooks: Sampling in a Nutshell (1960) and Sampling (1966); and in the 1970s he took up running. Slonim competed in the Golden Age Olympics and, when he was seventy-five, set the American record for the five-kilometer race in his age group.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Washington Post, June 14, 2004, p. B4.

ONLINE

Falls Church News Press,http://www.fcnp.com/ (June 17, 2004).