I was selected to be the new Executive Officer of APS at the end of 1993 and started my position in the spring of 1994 just after APS headquarters had moved from New York to the DC area. It was a time for new beginnings and expansive thoughts. Charlie Duke at Xerox was chairing the Committee on Applications, and he suggested that APS should start a new Forum that would better serve the broader physics community. As a condensed matter physicist who learned solid state physics from John Bardeen, I knew that great physics was being done at places like Bell Labs (the AT&T research lab) and IBM, but Charlie’s idea went way beyond this. APS should be the American “Physicists” Society and most physicists were not doing basic research but were actively involved in creating and developing applications of physics. I liked this idea and Charlie and I sold it to the APS leadership and Council. Thus the Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics was created and quickly grew to be the largest APS unit.