The son of a pharmacist and a teacher, Ben Bernanke was the smartest kid in Dillon, South Carolina, a small farming town near the North Carolina border. By age 11, he had won the state spelling bee, placing 26th in the national contest, after failing to spell edelweiss.

(He obviously was not watching enough The Sound of Music as a child.)

The young Bernanke played alto sax in his high school marching band. He was also a member of a four-man band called Fancy Pants; all of its members wore plaid trousers.

After Harvard, Bernanke went on to pursue a Ph.D. at MIT, where he met — on a blind date — Anna, a student at Wellesley, who would become his wife.

Congratulations on being TIME’s 2009 Person of the Year, and here’s to greater transparency of the Fed!