Ben Shalom Bernanke was born in 1953 and grew up in Dillon, South Carolina, a small town permeated by the stench of tobacco warehouses. As an eleven-year-old, he traveled to Washington to compete in the national spelling championship in 1965, falling in the second round when he misspelled “Edelweiss.” From that day forward he would wonder what might have been had the movie The Sound of Music, which featured a well-known song with that word for a title, only made its way to tiny Dillon.
