My contribution to the celebration of Gordon Bower’s 75th birthday by means of this volume is this memoir on his research career and its context. I plan not to dwell on reminiscences (although, see Box), but, rather, to look forward, seeking to detect trends dating from the mid-1900s that will lead to the events of the 2000s. Because of the incredible scope of Gordon Bower’s contributions to psychology, the task calls for what is now popularly known as a team approach, and I concentrate on two issues that motivated much of the theoretically oriented research on learning, broadly defined, during the 1900s-

and the role of Gordon Bower in progressing toward their resolution. I conclude with a characterization of his influence on a large, and still growing, network of investigators.