ABSTRACT

Fall in New York City never looked so beautiful to me as it did on that second day of

September 1976 the day that I had to leave it for Kennedy Airport’s last flight to San

Diego. That evening, I left for graduate study in Theoretical Linguistics at the University

of California San Diego and to meet the woman who was to be my graduate advisor and

research director, Ursula Bellugi. She had a lab down the road at The Salk Institute for

Biological Studies. But earlier that day, I did not want to go. Nim Chimpsky did not want

me to go either, and he showed me so by subjecting me to the single most ferocious

attack that I had experienced in my many years of living and working with him.