In terms of whether I saw myself going on to academia or not, what I saw when I concluded, or was near concluding my studies on the variation in these lizards that was the basis of my thesis, the documenting the divisions of this species on the islands basically corresponded to the place, to seein’ larger islands that united the, say the creatures on the great banks and the northern part and so forth. Any rate, and considering academic positions, there was one here at Northwestern, there was one at Brown University, and one elsewhere in terms of my background and I’d had, by that time, considerable teaching fellowship experience. So I’d been teaching in grad school. Again with very trusting professors (George chuckling) who left the class to me. And this included advanced anatomy, comparative anatomy, and so on. So I did consider academic positions, but frankly, I was also a bit tired of that and looking for other adventures, shall we say, intellectual and otherwise. And there were two gentleman who came over to Ann Arbor in the last year or so of my time there who made a difference in terms of an opportunity, a different opportunity. There were no museum positions in the country at the time, but the two gentlemen from Chicagoland, one was K.P. Schmidt who was a chief curator of zoology at the Field Museum and who’d himself studied and collected salamanders in Guatemala in particular.
