George W. Hilton

George Woodman Hilton was born January 18, 1925, in Chicago and raised on the city's South Side. His father was a hospital administrator and his mother was a homemaker. During his childhood he became transfixed by trains and ships.

A summa cum laude Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Dartmouth College, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1946 and a master's degree in 1950, Hilton attended the London School of Economics from 1953 to 1955 and earned his doctorate in 1956 from the University of Chicago. After starting his teaching career at the University of Maryland, College Park, he went on to Stanford University and, in 1962, he joined UCLA's faculty, where he taught economics and transportation regulation until his retirement in 1992.

After he earned a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, his first academic appointment was at the University of Maryland, where "one of the pleasures of the position" was the proximity of a 77-mile railroad that he had always wanted to visit. In 1963 it became the subject of what he said afterward was the best of his books: The Ma & Pa: A History of the Maryland & Pennsylvania Railroad.

In 1962, Hilton joined the faculty of UCLA, where he taught economics and transportation regulation until retiring in 1992. He was the author of 15 books. Among his books were "The Ma & Pa: A History of the Maryland & Pennsylvania Railroad" (1963), "Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic" (1995) and a book on baseball, "The Annotated Baseball Stories of Ring Lardner" (1995).