Yesterday the SEC announced that former SEC Chairman Roderick M. Hills passed away on October 29, 2014, at the age of 83. The SEC stated that Chairman Hills

had a brilliant legal career and was a man of great character.  He served as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1975 to 1977, with distinction.  Chairman Hills was a true champion for America’s investors.  The SEC has lost a strong leader and friend.  Our deepest sympathy goes out to his loved ones.

To learn more about Chairman Hills, I turned to an invaluable resource that does not seem to be as well-known as it should be: the Oral Histories section of the SEC Historical Society's "Virtual Museum and Archive." Among these Oral Histories is a fascinating interview with Chairman Hills that was conducted on December 20, 2002, by Ralph Ferrara (listen to the audio MP3 version here; or read the written transcript here).

In the interview, Chairman Hills talks about his two years as Chairman, and his SEC colleagues during that time who included enforcement legends such as Stanley Sporkin, Harvey Pitt, Irv Pollack and Ferrara himself. In the interview, Ferrara marvels at how much Chairman Hill accomplished in just two years, observing that while the agency has had chairmen with much longer tenures, "in your two-year tenure, I don't think that there's anybody who's yet equaled the number of initiatives that have endured as those that you initiated while you were there." Chairman Hills responded, modestly, that "[i]t's like riding the surf. If the surf is up, you ride the board."

As the interview winded down, Ferrara offered his thanks to Chairman Hill for everything he had done for the Commission, stating that

Clearly, you are the dean emeritus of the former Chairmen of the SEC, certainly one of the most distinguished Chairmen in the Commission's history. Be it far from me to try to summarize what we've done this past hour, but clearly you presided over the Commission at a time of transition, where the Commission regained the agenda of the agency. You were really the founder of the Commission's efforts to reform corporate governance, an effort that goes on today. And you were instrumental in creating the Commission's voluntary disclosure program to root out corporate corruption and give that more transparency, and thereby raise the normative standards of conduct for corporations across the world. You brought computerized record keeping to the SEC, which is really the forerunner of our EDGAR system today. Affirmative action was something that was on your agenda, brought to the SEC, and hopefully the SEC has learned and lived within the policy judgments you made at the time. Regulatory reform, you began your tenure with at the White House and continued with distinction through the SEC.