Maurece Schiller (1901-1994) left Dartmouth and landed on Wall Street in 1922 on the bottom run as a "runner," delivering orders from the brokerage firm's customer in the office to the exchange floor, and returning with a confirmation. His experience of seeing shady practices and heedless risk end in the crash and Great Depression led him to choose his life's work: practice and study of special situations, designed to avoid risk for clients. Beginning in the 1930s, he invented new and refined existing special situations so the investor could experience almost riskless gains and avoid the devastation of the Great Depression again. He rose to the position of Director of Research at Newburger & Loeb in the 1940s. After publishing his first books on special situations in 1955 (the first ever on the subject), 1959 and 1961, he moved from New York to Santa Barbara, where he worked with individual clients of his own registered investment advisory. He published two more books on special situations investing in 1964 and 1966 and contributed articles on the subject through the early 1970s. His works were the only comprehensive treatments of the field until 1997.