It was my honor and privilege to serve the SUR as President in 2008-09. It was a year of working with a great Board of Directors and dynamic membership, which in collaboration with our SGR counterparts, culminated in a very successful meeting in Maui, HI. My association with the society and its membership has been a highlight of my professional career.

I am a Southern boy. I trained at the University of Virginia where renal angiography and intervention fanned my early interest in the kidney and its disease processes. I had the opportunity to join the faculty at Wake Forest University School of Medicine with responsibility for Genitourinary Imaging in 1983. For those of you who may not know, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is the buckle of the Appalachian kidney stone belt. The huge stone population was the source of several of my early literature contributions that allowed me to become a member of the SUR in 1989.

Over the past 20 years I have made many great friends through the Society. I have even forgiven Dr. Robert Hattery (and all of the other Mayo GU stars) for inviting me to visit Rochester in the “spring”. I don’t care what people in Minnesota say (including you Dr. Wasserman), a temperature of 12 degrees is winter where I come from!

The best part of an extended career (and I state emphatically that I am much grayer in this picture than I am in my own mind) is watching the younger members prosper. I allow myself the single arrogant thought that in some small way I’ve had the opportunity to encourage the careers of a few of our current membership. From my perspective as an ex-president, the prospect of our future as abdominal imagers is bright!