I was born in New York City in 1935 and grew up in suburban New York, Connecticut, and western Pennsylvania, moving there in 1950. I attended the College of William and Mary from 1954-1956 and graduated from Stanford University in 1958 with a degree in Biological Sciences. In 1962 while studying at Tulane University, I became interested in Mexican fishes during an internship and focused my dissertation on the evolutionary problem of species of Chirostoma being restricted to one river system in Mexico. In 1963 I spent the summer in central Mexico collecting fishes with Salvador Contreras to fill gaps in previous collections and visited a limnological station to make collections from a lake.

1. I was born on October 30, 1935 in New York City (Manhattan) and grew up mostly in
suburban New York, Connecticut (where I went to boarding school) and in the mountains
of western Pennsylvania, where my family moved in 1950.
I attended the College of William and Mary in Virginia from 1954-1956 and graduated
from Stanford University in 1958 with a BA in Biological Sciences. I became interested in
Mexican fishes during the summer of 1962 when I had an internship in the Fish Division of
the U.S. National Museum. At that time I was a beginning graduate student at Tulane
University and looking for a dissertation topic. During the course of my reading, I came
across Jordan and Hubbs's 1919 monograph on the Atherinidae and noted that almost all
of the species of Chirostoma were restricted to the Lerma-Santiago river system. As this
appeared to be an interesting evolutionary problem, I studied it for my dissertation.
Salvador Contreras and I spent most of the summer of 1963 in central Mexico collecting
fishes and filling in gaps in the collections made by Meek and Miller.
Salvador and I visited the limnological station at Patzcuaro to see if there were any
specimens available that had been collected by De Buen (we couldn't find any) and to
make our own collections from the lake.