I cannot imagine having gone through my career in the geosciences and the academy without involvement in AGU meetings on a regular basis. My first AGU meeting was over 42 years ago, at a time when Spring Meeting at the Sheraton Hotel in Washington, D.C., was the “big” event of the year. I was fortunate, as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, to be among many friends as peers, most of whom would participate in the Spring Meeting. Thus, it was simple for us to pile into a departmental van and head to D.C., camp out in one, or at most two, hotel rooms, and then return. That said, things have changed, a lot, and for many students in many settings, travel to AGU meetings is far more complicated. At that 1977 Spring Meeting, I remember listening, with some of my paleomagnetist student colleagues, to Walter Alvarez talking with my dissertation advisor, Rob Van der Voo, about how the now very famous Alvarez’s and others’ hypothesis for the end-Cretaceous extinction event had been sorely misinterpreted by members of the press who were attending the meeting. This was during a time when sessions in the then Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism section were a bit livelier than today. I remember a certain individual, on the faculty at a university in Montreal, Que., routinely showing demagnetization data that were completely uninterpretable, claiming that his rocks had very complicated magnetizations associated with them. I also remember another individual, on the faculty at a university in Columbus, Ohio, who routinely showed completely unintelligible magnetic polarity stratigraphy results, and certain members of the audience stating, unabashedly, “Darn it, no one can read any of that junk!” These were truly unforgettable learning experiences for a student, experiences one would never get from reading a scientific paper! The 1978 Fall Meeting in San Francisco was a truly enjoyable one. I gave talks in both GP and VGP sessions, with the subject of one of those talks becoming my first sole-authored paper. That was the year I discovered that AGU Fall Meeting also included a most “special” evening session, at the Edinburgh Castle Pub on Geary Street! The 1979 Spring Meeting in Miami was a very special one for me, as I was presenting what I thought was an impressive set of data from my dissertation work in western Nevada—a set of data that demonstrated beyond any doubt that listric normal faults could penetrate to midcrustal levels and result in the wholescale tilting of crust by over 90°. I presented those results in a GP session, but later in the meeting I sought out one of the giants of extensional tectonics and, in a quite shy fashion, introduced myself and asked whether I could show him some new data. After about 5 minutes, I realized that my years of hard work in the field and the laboratory really had been worth it. He made me feel important! That was an experience far, far better than a positive review of a manuscript. At this time in graduate school, I was uncertain about what I really wanted to do for the rest of my life. That uncertainty went away a day later at the Miami meeting when David Strangway from the University of Toronto asked me whether I wanted a postdoc at Toronto for a couple of years, if not longer. He said that he heard my talk earlier in the meeting and knew that I was perfect for the position. I basically said yes, and when I told Rob Van der Voo, he simply said, “I am very, very proud of you!”