On September 1, Wanger, 68, will put himself out to pasture, retiring as lead portfolio manager of the $6.8 billion fund. Taking over will be Chuck McQuaid, who has worked with Wanger for 25 years, the past seven as co-manager of Acorn. "I wish Chuck the best, but I hope he doesn't do too much better than I did, because that would be embarrassing," jokes Wanger, who will remain an adviser to his firm, Liberty Wanger Asset Management. Acorn, a small-cap growth fund, lost 13.3 percent in 2002 but trounced the Russell 2000 index, which fell by 20.5 percent. Over the past five years, Acorn is up 7.4 percent, compared with a 1.4 percent decline for the index. Wanger got his start in 1960 as an analyst for Harris Associates, which a decade later chose him to manage its $7 million Acorn Fund. In 1992 he left Harris, taking the fund's assets with him, to form Wanger Asset Management. Liberty Financial bought him out in 2000 for $450 million, only to sell the following year to FleetBoston Financial, which runs $10 billion-in-assets Liberty Wanger as a wholly owned subsidiary. One thing Wanger says he won't miss is the fund industry's collective obsession with benchmarks and tracking error. "Money managers have become too beholden to style boxes," he laments. "One of the best-known phrases to describe an innovative, creative thinker is to refer to someone as 'thinking outside the box,' and yet here we are as an industry, trying to stay in our little boxes."