Delattre and Freeman’s (1968) “A dialect study of American r’s by x-ray motion picture” is a groundbreaking phonetics study that documents variation in the articulation of American English “r”; now famously, the tongue can be either bunched or retroflexed. I asked Don about how this collaboration arose, and he shared these recollections. (Joe Pater).

Pierre Delattre was one of my many mentors, for all of whom I am very grateful. I arrived at my first job as the English-language person at UC Santa Barbara, only to realize that although I’d had a fair amount of graduate coursework in EL (Old English, Old Norse, Middle High German, History and Structure of English) in the course of my English (not linguistics; very few existed then [1965]) Ph.D., I really had had no systematic training in linguistics. Pierre ran a big phonetics lab at UCSB and I just went over there and worked with him. He was very kind and generous with his time and ideas, and without my asking put my name as joint author on the paper I had worked on that came out of that lab. He encouraged me to apply for (and recommended me for) one of the summer-study grants that the UC system had for young faculty, which sent me to UCLA for the 1966 summer Linguistic Institute where I encountered Noam. Noam, in turn, after the summer was over, encouraged me to apply for (and recommended me for) an NSF fellowship to go to MIT for a year. When I got it, everyone in English was much chuffed at the fact that the National *Science* Foundation had awarded a postdoc to an assistant professor of *English*, but I, even then being aware of the clout Noam had in the fellowship world, wasn’t. I knew it was more about Noam than about me. At MIT I worked mostly with Morris Halle, who in turn recommended me first for my UMass job in English, and then when they were thinking of letting me start a linguistics department (there was a moribund program in place), intervened in my behalf for that as well and gave me a ton of invaluable advice in the early going. So my early career was sort of a handoff-handoff-handoff. But it all started with Pierre, really. He had a very nice house in a fancy part of Santa Barbara (Hope Ranch, down by the ocean), and I played tennis with him on his court there. Not long after I left he dropped dead on that court at age 67 while playing with his family. Amazing guy.