The remarks that follow are personal. I have had the privilege of knowing Claude for 30 years, and as fellow Texans and fellow liberals (not exactly an oxymoron—nor, in fact, much of a crowd), we talked a lot. He would phone or I would phone, and we would consider the verities. We talked about evolutions in technical surgery, about surgical education in South Africa (after a visit to Johannesburg, he sent Dilip Parekh to our laboratory), about operating on celebrities, about investing (he told me to buy Berkshire when it was at 17, but I waited until it had doubled 2½ times), about church schools (he had a Jesuitical education), about how hard it is to achieve relevance and fairness in board examinations (we were both admirers of George Cruft), about friends in far places (I told him that I’d seen his photo on the wall of surgeons’ offices in Sydney, in Capetown and Jo’burg, in LA and New York), about the validity of the Bushs’ Texan credentials, about fads in surgery (from tonsillectomy to adrenalectomy for hypertension to gastric freezing to mandatory drains in abdominal and thyroid surgery), and about Betty (his lifelong compass) and his 7 children (overachievers all—Claude, Jr, a bank executive; Brian, a general surgeon; Gregory, a pediatric surgeon; Paul, a psychiatrist; David, a professor of geography; Rita, a museum curator; and Sandra, a stunning ballerina who used to dance for the Houston Ballet and now has her own company).