Backstory: Banking on Bernanke

From the beginning, Bernanke not only excelled - going to Washington as an 11-year-old spelling champ - but also tried to plumb difficult issues. When he got to high school, racial segregation was just ending. From his vantage point as a saxophone player in the marching band, he wrote a novel about an integrated football team.

"He was very proud of it," says Kenneth Manning, a friend from Dillon who had attended the town's other, all-black, high school.

When he wasn't in school, Bernanke worked construction and waited tables at South of the Border, a kitschy tourist stop that uses countless billboards to reel in Florida-bound vacationers. In his free time, he would shoot baskets with his younger siblings, Seth and Sharon.

But he also began thinking of opportunities beyond Dillon. Dr. Manning provided a crucial nudge. The two shared a common bond, "a burning desire to expand intellectually," says Manning, now a historian of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Manning was already at Harvard. In visits to the Bernanke home, he helped persuade Ben's reluctant parents that their son should go, too. Manning also offered brotherly counsel to his friend. Bernanke didn't merely listen, Manning says. "He clearly digested what you said and thought about it."

Even in the Ivy League crowd, Bernanke stood out, graduating Harvard with top honors in 1975. He discovered his passion for economics, and for a Wellesley College student, Anna Friedmann, whom he married while in graduate school at MIT. "They are very down-to-earth," says Mark Gertler, a New York University economist. "His wife is a wonderful person. She'll keep him on an even keel."

He describes the Bernankes as people who value their private lives after the workday is over (Anna is a Spanish teacher) and are unlikely to spend as much time on the Washington social circuit as Greenspan did. They have two grown children, Joel and Alyssa.

Although friends say Bernanke now follows the Washington Nationals, he rooted for the Red Sox while in Boston. These were years of rising hopes and epic letdowns. Fellow economist Jeremy Bulow recalls that Bernanke made it to Fenway Park for one of the darkest days in New England sports history: the one-game playoff in 1978 when the Sox lost to the New York Yankees on shortstop Bucky Dent's improbable home run.

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Even as he witnessed dismal moments at Fenway, Bernanke was exploring the dismal side of his science - researching the Great Depression. After earning his PhD in 1979, he taught at Stanford, then settled in at Princeton for nearly two decades. He cowrote a popular textbook, but also seemed interested in leaving a mark in the real world.

Around the time he was named a Fed governor in 2002, he explained the career move to his dad this way: He wanted to do something for his country. In an earlier era, others in his generation had fought in a war. What he could give now was his talent as an economist.

Though Philip Bernanke knew his oldest son had high ideals, the comment surprised him. "I didn't realize he was really that patriotic," he says.

Wednesday, in the wake of his Tuesday confirmation by the Senate, Bernanke will begin a tour of monetary duty that promises to test his many talents. Those who have worked with him have few qualms. "He's good at figuring out the best solution" to a given problem, says Dr. Gertler. "He's open to any solution that works.... But I'll say this: He's very tough."

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