I grew up in Pittsburgh, during its “Smoky City era”, before the Pittsburgh of today, a hub of technology and R&D. As a child, my favorite pastime was attending Pirates games at Forbes Field. My dream was to be a professional baseball player. I could characterize my career in two words: Who knew? Like many Pittsburghers of my day, I started working in “the mill” a few years after high school. After working several years at the United States Steel’s Homestead Works, I realized that I did not want to do this for the rest of my life. As the poet Jack Gilbert, who grew up in Pittsburgh, said, “You can’t work in a steel mill and think small.” So in spite of my lack of academic prerequisites, I decided to quit the mill and go to college. I started at Allegheny County Community College and eventually transferred to the University of Pittsburgh, where I majored in philosophy and economics. In 1972 I entered Pitt’s graduate program in economics. Many prominent regional economists passed through the department, such as Ed Hoover, Ben Chinitz, and Charlie Leven. Urban and regional economics was “in the air” at Pitt. Harry Richardson spent a few years at Pitt while I was a graduate student, and his research and mentoring led me to write my Ph.D. thesis on urban agglomeration economies. Unfortunately, Harry left Pitt before my dissertation was completed, but fortunately one of the best economists I have ever known, Jack Ochs, became my thesis advisor. I was privileged to have the guidance of Harry and Jack and I am deeply indebted to them. After completing my thesis, I took a job at Florida International University, and after one year I joined the University of Missouri. I spent one year at the Kansas City campus and several years at the St. Louis campus. A paper looking at agglomeration economies in manufacturing activity from my thesis was published in the Journal of Regional Science in 1979, and a book followed. Soon after arriving in St. Louis, I paid a visit to Charlie Leven, who was chairing the Economics Department at Washington University. Charlie had just published a book examining the “turnaround phenomenon” in U.S. population dynamics. In the 1970s, a dramatic reversal of the long-standing tendency for people to concentrate in metropolitan places was observed — rural places gained migrants largely as the result of increased outmigration from metropolitan places. This reversal engendered the “clean break” hypothesis — namely, that the U.S. population trend had undergone a major break with the past. This new trend led to a flurry of academic papers during the 1970s and 1980s. I was surprised that no one had looked at whether the employment profile between rural and metro places paralleled that of the population profile. I seized the opportunity, and my research uncovered a turnaround in employment growth that had preceded the reversal in the rates of population growth and was published in the Journal of Urban Economics. We now know that reversals in population growth during the 1970s proved to be temporary and the trend toward greater population concentration reasserted itself. Charlie was an inspiration for my research, and we formed a fast and lasting friendship. That’s why I was delighted when Marcus Berliant asked me to present a paper at a conference honoring Charlie, who passed in 2011. It was special to spend time with mutual friends and to meet Charlie’s family. My association with the Regional Science Association began in 1980, when I attended the North American Meeting held in Milwaukee. I presented a paper showing that current estimates of urban agglomeration economies were too large and appeared to be declining over time. The paper was published in Papers, Regional Science Association. What attracted me most about the association was, as David Plane has noted, the “simple style of regional science – it’s all about the scholarship and collegiality without the extraneous trappings of other disciplines and groups.” I was fortunate enough to meet Don Mullineaux, who was the chair of the research group at the Philadelphia Fed. In 1980, I was trying to model inflation expectations for a project I was working on, and Don had just published a paper using a new series on inflation expectations. I called Don to see if he would share the data with me, which he most graciously did. We got to talking, and when Don found out that I was a regional economist, he told me that the Bank was looking to hire an economist for its regional section and asked if I would be interested. One thing led to another, and in January 1981, I began my 35-year (and counting) career at the Philly Fed. That same year, Ted Crone joined our group, and Dick Voith joined us a few years later. This marked the beginning of a productive and stable period of urban and regional research at the Philly Fed. I am fortunate to have had Ted and Dick as colleagues and friends. Dick and I worked on a number of projects. Our first paper considered t