In 1981 it was my great good fortune to join the research group of Andreas Acrivos at Stanford, and further to be given the opportunity to investigate the many curious phenomena identified by Francis Gadala-Maria in his seminal 1979 PhD thesis on suspension rheology. In this talk I will reflect on the many false starts we went through in trying to understand the mechanisms underlying these observations. Ultimately, however, we got it (mostly) right and the conclusions have had a significant impact on the field. I will conclude the talk with a brief discussion of some of the related problems which are currently under investigation.
