The history of SPE is perhaps best told by the men and women who have guided it through the past 5 decades, from a primarily US offshoot of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers (AIME) to the worldwide technical and professional society it is today. JPT asked each of SPE's living past presidents to reflect on their terms—the highlights, the challenges, and the milestones. Wayne E. Glenn, 1960 This year was an important one in the history of SPE. At a time when other professional societies were cutting back on services or increasing prices, SPE was adding services and holding dues the same and giving members more for their money. SPE established many important programs at this time. The Distinguished Lecturer Program was created in 1960 as was the new quarterly journal, SPE Journal, the society's first technical journal. Both were historic milestones for SPE. SPE Executive Secretary Joe Alford and I began discussing the possibility of expanding SPE worldwide and starting up sections overseas. I had the Conoco plane at the time, and we traveled all over the world—to Europe, to Russia—to try to set up sections. We tried to find good people on the ground who were interested in SPE, and we met with government officials and left behind SPE literature. The funny thing was, often the person we left in charge of setting up the section, after the government saw how efficient and capable he was, would hire him away and put him on the government payroll and we would have to start again from scratch. John C. Calhoun Jr., 1964 In February 1964, during the AIME Annual Meeting, I officially became SPE President, succeeding L.P. Wharton. Although SPE had become an autonomous unit of AIME in 1957, a period of transition still existed, which accounts for the February date for assuming the office of SPE President. This transition period, along with several other elements of change of concern to SPE, drove the society's agenda. In my 1964 Presidential message, I took note of the fact that President Wharton had asked the question, "What are SPE's aims and obligations?" The very phrasing of this question reflected the relative youth of petroleum engineering and of SPE as a professional association, a situation that few in today's SPE world are aware of. I gave a threefold response to that question: our need to be a learning profession, to seek out and nurture new members of the profession, and to enlarge our awareness of a role for SPE with respect to the broader issues of our general society. When, in the fall of 1963, as President-elect, I had outlined these views, the Oil & Gas Journal reported it as a three-point education program—the education of SPE members, the education of those who will become petroleum engineers, and the education of the public at large. These were the challenges that SPE faced in becoming a truly separate and higher-quality professional association that represented a fully recognized branch of engineering.