Imagine if you can an Allan Sillitoe novel set on a Norwegian fjord and you might have some idea about my childhood years. I was raised in a company mill town on the west coast of Canada where, until the late 1950s, marine transportation was the sole means of reaching the outside world. In many ways, though, this isolated community was a socialist utopia—workers earned the same wages, families paid the same rents, crime did not exist, and social capital was very high. All this radically changed when both a railway and a highway were completed to Vancouver. Soon thereafter the community experienced a lot of turnover and the town site was eventually closed down—then all families moved elsewhere and workers had to commute. This disruption was much more drastic than what William Garrison and Brian Berry had recently chronicled in nearby Marysville, Washington, where that community’s social and business fabric was severely strained by the new Interstate highway system. I started classes at the University of British Columbia in the mid-1960s and I enjoyed the student lifestyle so much that I remained at UBC for a decade. This was the most carefree period of my life—my studies were well supported by the government, I lived in vibrant neighborhoods like bohemian Kitsilano Beach, I often cycled to school, I read a lot of Dostoevsky and Pynchon, I became very interested in film noir, and I made numerous friendships that have lasted a lifetime. My undergraduate studies were mostly devoted to mathematics where I was exposed to most aspects of the discipline. Later, in graduate school, I specialized in human geography and economics but dabbled in several other disciplines. During graduate school I also spent many evenings imbibing at the Cecil hotel, a pub whose regulars included left-leaning university faculty, union leaders, and the founders of Greenpeace. My first university course in geography focused on Europe’s regions and I can recall writing a historical account of the continent’s shifting iron and steel industry. While researching for this paper I encountered Weber’s least-cost analysis and also came to appreciate how transportation improvements can significantly change land uses and entire patterns of industry. The following year, my first in graduate school, I took a series of informative courses on regional analysis, urban geography, and economic development. It was all very exciting and, for the first time, I was carefully reading journals instead of getting original ideas filtered through textbooks. My MA thesis, which combined some analysis with a lengthy literature review, addressed city-size distributions—separate chapters were devoted to central place theory, stochastic processes, historical studies, and issues related to primacy. I find it interesting that this has become such a hot topic in regional science during the past fifteen years or so. While studying for my PhD I was given a lot of freedom and, as a consequence, I made a number of false starts on a dissertation. In fact, I still have notes from this experimental period and have revisited some of the half-baked ideas I formulated about location theory at that time. Eventually, though, I focused again on central place theory and wrote a somewhat unremarkable treatise on structure and process in Christaller’s system. Martin Beckmann was my external examiner and he was very generous in his evaluation. Throughout this period Ken Denike served as my advisor and much of my thinking was influenced by what Ken had already learned from people like Walter Isard and William Alonso at the University of Pennsylvania. Curt Eaton also served on my committee and his perspectives on agent behavior continue to influence how I view decision-making problems that involve space or location. Clearly one of the highlights of this period was meeting John Parr and he, Ken, and I wrote a paper that was published in the mid-1970s addressing the relationship between a city’s population size and the formation of its economic base. After leaving UBC, where I had been far too long, I was very fortunate to get visiting positions, first at the University of Washington and then at Queen’s University. I had many lunches with Dick Morrill in Seattle and he managed to dispel much of my skepticism about the value of government policy, at least with regard to locating public facilities. Maurice Yeates in Kingston made me think a lot more about rent theory, and perhaps I should have accepted his advice (and data) to study how new transportation investments were reshaping the land value surface of Toronto. Later in my career I accepted other visiting positions, in North America and Australia, and always found these very productive times given the reduction in paperwork and committee assignments. Having lunch in Squamish with past WRSA president Warren Gill (2010). By the late-1970s I was looking for a more permanent residence. I had been talking a lot with Michael Dacey in Geography a