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Acknowledgments

The people who have helped me along the long path of my involvement with tropical fish are too numerous to mention, but I must call out one by name, my wonderful wife, Janet Rogalski. Known to my fishy friends as Saint Janet, she has put up with floods, middle-of-the-night trips to my retail stores after a break-in—and after a car drove through the side of the building—dashes to the airport to pick up fish, and more.

We met when I had a large wholesale fish operation in Boston and she was the unlucky customs broker assigned to help me clear a shipment of live marine fish from the Philippines. The airline let me take the shipment the night it arrived, with a promise to complete the necessary customs clearance—at that time U.S. Customs required a special import license to bring live fish into Boston. The next day, the lady customs broker called to ask for that import license number. I told her we had applied for one (a little white lie) but didn’t have it yet. She said she would talk to U.S. Customs. That conversation did not go so well: she called back to tell me not to sell any of the fish. I suggested that she inform Customs that the fish had all died. She said she couldn’t do that and would get back to me. Her next phone call was to tell me that Customs wanted the common and scientific names of all the fish, which were at that point listed only as product numbers on the invoice. Dutifully, I wrote out all of the names and delivered the list to her office. She then called to complain that she couldn’t read my handwriting. I told her that I didn’t have a typewriter and was sorry that my handwriting was so bad. She said, “Listen, you moron, you don’t seem to understand that Customs can close you down.” To which I responded, “Let’s see if we can work this out—what are you doing for dinner tonight?” We met for dinner, and it was love at first sight. We have been happily together ever since. (And I not only found my soul mate; they also let us keep the fish.)

So it is to my dear wife, Janet, that the only specific thank-you goes. To the many others to whom I am grateful, I quote from William T. Innes’s 1926 preface to the ninth edition of his book Goldfish Varieties and Tropical Aquarium Fishes, the precursor to his classic Exotic Aquarium Fishes: “Anyway, we have to accept most of our blessings in life as a matter of course, without credit to the source, satisfied if we may pay the debt to our anonymous benefactors by passing on our own contribution to others.” The great man has said everything I would, so I leave it at that.