In Waynesboro, on the surface.. . one summer was very like another: to the casual eye the children playing their games in the big yards behind the iron fences were eternally the same as the girls and boys of the year before and the year before that. But the games of one season were played by another generation than those who had played them three or four years earlier, so quickly does childhood pass into adolescence, adolescence into adulthood. Helen Hooven Santmyer And Ladies of the Club INTRODUCTION We should say at the outset that probably neither one of us is officially qualified to write this article. The editor specified that the authors for this issue must have been scientifically conscious when the first issue of Vision Research was published in 1961. At that time, D.T.‘s only contact with visual science had been a remarkable undergraduate seminar in perception from Hans Wallach at Swarthmore. She had just started graduate school in Berkeley, and had been assigned by chance to the young Tom Cornsweet as an advisee. He was having an *Preparation of this manuscript was partly supported by a Senior International Fellowship from the Fogarty International Center of NIH and a Guest Research Fellowship from the Royal Society, both to J.A.M. and NE1 grants 02920 and 07031 to D.Y.T. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are personal communications sent to us in response to a request for contributions to this article. We are grateful to those of our colleagues who shared their reminiscences with us. ton leave from: Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, U.S.A. uphill battle getting her out of the library, where she imagined science was to be found. T.M., on the other hand, was still in the fifth grade; his only interest in visual science was to establish why it was that he had just started wearing glasses, and how he could most finally lose them. Nonetheless, we shall reconstruct and reminisce.