One of the final privileges of a retiring President of the American Geophysical Union is the opportunity to address this group of members and their wives gathered to recognize the accomplishments of colleagues whose distinguished contributions to geophysics and to the Union set the standards of excellence which each one of us, in his own way, seeks to approach.A review of presidential addresses over past years is, I can assure you, a humbling experience. My predecessors have, on occasion, presented important lectures on their own scientific work, delivered masterful reviews of fields embraced by the AGU, transmitted State of the Union messages, or offered statesmanlike commentaries on geophysics. In the present instance, perhaps the term ‘ address’ is somewhat pretentious. My wife thought so. During the past few years she has become accustomed to the acronyms by which we refer to the International Council of Scientific Unions as ICSU, to the International Year of the Quiet Sun as IQSY, and so on through SCAR, SCOR, NASA, and others. When I told her that I proposed to entitle my address ‘A “Golden Age” for Geophysics,’ her face lit up with wifely perception. I detected a mischievous twinkle in her eyes, and she remarked: “Oh, of course, GAG!” When she asked how I intended to answer the question mark explicitly included in the title, I told her by Aggiornamento, which, as everyone who has been to Rome—or read accounts of the Vatican II in the New York Times—now knows, means renewal. She put the question and the answer together and came up with ‘GAGA.’ As you might well imagine, a recurring question in our household during the past week or so has been: “How is ‘GAGA’ coming along?”
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Feb 1, 1966
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