The trip to St. Louis was terrific. The time in St. Louis, the drive out there was a long way and en route my daughter, who had been accepted at Amherst College and who was encouraging me and Ruth to take the job in St. Louis, because it's exciting and you need to do something different. On the drive out, she said – as we were passing corn fields in Idaho – she said this is so far from any place I'd ever want to be. She was so keen to get into college and break free, which she did do. But, despite that, we got out there and we had lunch with the then-chairman of biochemistry. It was about a 100 degrees and moist, but we got through that and bought a lovely home which backed onto the university campus, across a beautiful park which I had to traverse to get to the medical school every day. This was in a small town called Clayton. Forest Park was the name of the park. It had beautiful museums and sports fields and a number of other things, so it was fun to walk across the park or ride my bike across the park.

The community felt like I was back in high school in the '50s. It was not a bustling New York or Boston community, but it was wonderful. Our kids, our sons loved it. They went to high school there, played sports, and have friends even today, now that they're in their 50s, have friends from that era.

St. Louis' suburbs are beautiful. And Washington University, to the effort of Bill Danforth, who was then president. He was an MD. He raised tremendous amounts of money and interests in the university, and I got involved with that. We created a neuroscience center. I was the chairman of the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology. Subsequently, it changed to the Department of Neuroscience after I left.

I tried to do both; I took part in teaching gross anatomy. Until one day, I was in the lab and one of the students who happened to be the son of a high school friend of mine, came up to me and said, 'Dr Fischbach, the rumor in the class is you don't know what you're talking about.' I said, 'Bob, anatomy is straightforward,' but he wouldn't believe it. But I helped organize that, make it a vital course. More and more my time and my interests diverged from laboratory science to university-wide affairs, both at the medical school and the college.

Our neighbor [Bob McDowell] in Clayton was Chairman of the Math Department. He and his wife [Attie] became very close friends, and his kids. So, I enjoyed St. Louis enormously and recommended... I'd get very annoyed when the snooty, arrogant kids from New England say, 'How could you ever go to St. Louis if you had a job in Boston?' They just don't know what the world is like. We loved St. Louis and were there for about 10 years, when I was recruited to come back to Harvard as chairman of neurobiology.