WHEN you have lived all of your 28 years in Holland, January is the best month to arrive in Florida. In 1966 transatlantic traffic or post-dots was gaining momentum and inspired many a contemporary Cassandra to toll the alarm bell against the brain-drain from Europe to the U.S. Having obtained my Ph.D on a now extinct atomic emission source known as the direct current carbon arc I was only too happy to let my brains drain, but where to go? It was Marvin Margoshes from the National Bureau of Standards (now renamed NINT) who with apologies for not being allowed to hire foreigners drew my attention to an obscure young professor by the name of JIM WINEFORDNER. It was one of the best pieces of advice I have received in my life. Jim had just embarked on his astounding publishing career with one or two papers on a phenomenon called flame atomic fluorescence spectrometry in a time when Alan Walsh’s atomic absorption had barely reached Europe and flame emission with noisy, total consumption burners was still very much en vogue. Soon after I arrived in Gainesville, I discovered that science was not the only area where Jim was far ahead of his times. Already then he put to practice what many years later became a fashionable scientific theory and a more dubious management tool: thriving on chaos. He had surrounded himself with a handful of graduate students from all over the U.S. with accents that gave an entirely new meaning to the concept of a common language. My boast that I was able to understand half of the lunch conversation added to my already substantial prestige as the first post-dot, and from a continent as remote as Europe. Those were happy days! We were all in our twenties except for Jim who had already passed the magical border of 30, where most people start to worry about their career. Not Jim. He joined in our lunch debates, commented on the next football game, organized beach parties, and shared our excitement over scientific innovations that would shatter the ancien regime of arcs and sparks. Out of his and similar groups elsewhere would grow a new generation of atomic spectroscopists who started their own series of conferences on atomic absorption spectrometry that would challenge and ultimately in the eighties take over the traditional Colloquium Spectroscopicurn Internationale (the Latin was Greek to us). There was one other weakness Jim shared with us. It is a delicate subject that I would prefer to overlook, but I must respect the stern policy of this learned journal to give an honest account of all relevant data. It was the interest in the opposite sex, and the privileged readers of Jim’s quarterly newsletter know that he has never really recovered from the affliction. In his defence I must remind you that the Florida climate does not call for heavy clothing and that the fashion in 1966 offered little solace. What else did we study? Atomic fluorescence, of course, and atomic absorption with continuum sources in long light pipes. Two miserable graduates worked long hours to tame microwave or electrodeless discharge lamps as they were then known, the fate of which has been amusingly described by HERB KAHN [l]. And TOM O’HAVER