How vividly I recall the feeling of eager anticipation looking forward to the well-organized and informative lectures Professor Carleton Hodge presented in his 'Structure of Ancient Egyptian' course at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Linguistic Institute of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor during the summer of 1965. I was a graduate student in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley at the time, taking his and three other courses. Little did I imagine then that he and I would maintain a lively correspondence from that summer on for the next thirty-three years, nor did I expect that we would come to spend so much time together at the joint annual meetings of the American Oriental Society and the North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics, which we would regularly attend for a quarter of a century. We also lectured on each other's campuses, and I took great delight that many of my fellow Californians personally came to appreciate not only his scholarship (Hodge 1991a and 1991c), but also his charming and celebrated wit and sense of humor.