I was born on October 30, 1935 in New York City (Manhattan) and grew up mostly in suburban New York, Connecticut (where I went to boarding school) and in the mountains of western Pennsylvania, where my family moved in 1950. I attended the College of William and Mary in Virginia from 1954-1956 and graduated from Stanford University in 1958 with a BA in Biological Sciences. I became interested in Mexican fishes during the summer of 1962 when I had an internship in the Fish Division of the U.S. National Museum. At that time I was a beginning graduate student at Tulane University and looking for a dissertation topic. During the course of my reading, I came across Jordan and Hubbs's 1919 monograph on the Atherinidae and noted that almost all of the species of Chirostoma were restricted to the Lerma-Santiago river system. As this appeared to be an interesting evolutionary problem, I studied it for my dissertation. Salvador Contreras and I spent most of the summer of 1963 in central Mexico collecting fishes and filling in gaps in the collections made by Meek and Miller. Salvador and I visited the limnological station at Patzcuaro to see if there were any specimens available that had been collected by De Buen (we couldn't find any) and to make our own collections from the lake.