I graduated from Ray Lyman Wilbur Junior High School in
Palo Alto, California in 1957--as I recall, nobody ever
mentioned who Ray Lyman Wilbur actually was.  I made it to
UC Berkeley (as a junior transfer) in 1963, just before
the student revolution got rolling.  I chose to major in
sociology because it seemed a good mid-way point between
the sciences & humanities.  But my real love was history/
philosophy of science.  Kuhn's *Structure of Scientific
Revolutions* had just been published & he was still at
Berkeley back then.  I remember the sheer joy of reading
that book--as well as related works by Koestler (esp.),
Butterfield, Joseph Agassi, Popper, etc.  I took the late
P.K.  Feyerabend's spell-binding philosophy of science
class, & wrote a term paper defending Kuhn's sociological
theory of scientific change against Feyerabend's & Pop-
per's philosophically oriented perspective.  (I think I'd
write it the other way 'round today!) I more or less fell
into alcohol studies--my 1st wife's good friend's hus-
band's (i.e., Robin Room's) research group had an opening
for an RA--at what would one day become Berkeley's Alcohol
Research Group (or "ARG"; but it was still called the
"Calif.  Drinking Practices Study" when I started there).
Years passed & I kept wondering how I was ever going to
get back to the history/sociology of science.  Then, in
1990, circumstances created a serious career pinch--speci-
fically, my element in ARG's center grant proposal was
declined.  One consequence was that I finally *really had
to* finish a dissertation.  I took up an old problem I'd
puzzled over for years:  if the "alcoholism paradigm" was
as poor *from a scientific per- spective* as it seemed to
be, why had alcohol scientists embraced it in the post-
Repeal era?  (Read:  "Hello history/sociology of science
at last!") There wasn't really any specific scientific
discovery that launched the scientific side of the modern
alcoholism movement.  I started out by trying to find out
as much as possible about the origins of the Research
Council on Problems of Alcohol (RCPA)--which launched the
new science movement in the late 1930s.  I knew Mark
Keller's account of the RCPA's origins, but I was dubious
of it.  E.g., I knew that there were Nobel Prize winners
on the RCPA's original roster & wondered what on earth
important folk like that were doing on a committee assem-
bled merely to advance Norman Jolliffe's alcoholism
research proposal (Mark's thesis).  (Jolliffe was at the
start of his career back then & still a pretty minor
scientific figure.) I wrote letters to libraries &
archives all over the place & waited for the return mail,
but these generated mere crumbs of information--though I
later could make use of nearly all of them in my narra-
tive.  Finally, I decided to see what I could find out
about the RCPA in the papers of its only major west coast
member--Who else but Stanford president, Ray Lyman Wilbur!
At least I could drive down to Stanford & do my own dig-
ging.  With a little luck & help from a librarian, Wil-
bur's paper's brought forth a fairly complete history of
the RCPA--& told a story quite new & different from
Keller's.  I wrote it all up in my dissertation, "The
American Discovery of Alcoholism, 1933-1939" (1991).  It
was wonderful to be working in a fully historical/socio-
logical idiom re alcohol science.  I'm now at work on a
project re-estimating U.S. alcohol consumption, 1790-1950
(with Greg Austin at SWRL)--which has been slow going but
a very rich pursuit as well.  I also am trying to bring
the history/sociology of alcohol science forward to 1970.
All of which is to say how delighted I am to be in this
e-forum with all of you!  & Thanks again Ray Lyman Wilbur!