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.