With astronauts blasting off from my extended backyard next to Cape Canaveral, I remember scrawling “1963” on the dust jacket (middle) of the book that I read in second grade, my 328-page copy of The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin (left). A second inspiration encouraging me to become a naturalist was my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Ruby Gammage, who was ranked as one of the nation’s top 100 “Elementary Science and Mathematics” educators. However, on November 22, 1963, a tearful Mrs. Gammage asked the class to suspend calculating cylindrical volumes in order to hear the radio broadcasting news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (right). I resolved on that day, my eighth birthday, to become a physician. Twenty-four years later, at the Wood Library-Museum Board Meeting, the last anesthesiologist who had attended that mortally wounded president, Dr. Marion T. “Pepper” Jenkins, would welcome my start as acting curator for the Wood Library-Museum. (Copyright © the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology.)