Looking back, it was an incredible opportunity for a notyet PhD to put faces to some of the names he had seen in print. Among those names and faces, was a younger John Loehlin, even then wearing his trade-mark black shoes and white socks. The tone of John’s thought was known already from his note modestly but concisely correcting some conceptual errors in Raymond Cattell’s Multiple Abstract Variance Analysis (MAVA: Loehlin 1965). I was not smart enough to understand either but I knew their importance from my teachers and idols, the late John Jinks and David Fulker. I remember being a fly on the pub wall as John Loehlin, Louis Guttman and David Fulker pored over a notepad in the bar discussing earnestly whether putting heritability estimates down the diagonal of a correlation matrix would solve the “communality problem” in factor analysis. I didn’t have a clue what they were talking about.
