Wilks, son of Chance C. and Bertha May Gammon Wilks, was raised with his younger brothers, Syrrel and William, on a 250-acre farm, small by Lone Star standards near Little Elm, Texas. Though hunting and fishing were childhood pastimes, they say he built a radio at the age of 12, not such an easy task in 1918. Those must have been warm and happy years, for “Sam” always spoke glowingly of Texas, of his family ties there, and, too, he took every opportunity to revisit his home state.
As an undergraduate, Wilks studied industrial arts at North Texas State Teachers College in Denton, Texas, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1926. He was especially interested in architecture, and he and a friend designed a large drinking fountain that was erected on the campus. While teaching mathematics and manual arts in secondary school in Austin, Texas, he studied mathematics at the University of Texas, where he received his master’s degree in 1928. At the University of Texas, Professor Edward L. Dodd introduced him to probability and statistics and encouraged him to study with Professor Henry L. Rietz at the University of Iowa, then the center for statistical study in the United States of America. When Sam discussed the Iowa days, he emphasized his good fortune in being thrown together with an outstanding group of young graduate students, including, for example, John H. Curtiss and Allen T. Craig.
His doctoral dissertation (see Metron, Vol. 9, pp. 87-126, 1932) dealt with the sampling distribution of statistics of a variable when a “matching sample” has been drawn so as to match an initial sample on a correlated variable_for example, we may match the heights of men in a “matching sample” with those in an initial random sample. Now what is the distribution of weights in the matching sample?
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