Until 1989, the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) could have been viewed as an interest group of the Linguistics Society of America (LSA); AAAL met in two designated meeting rooms as a subsection of the LSA conference. In 1991, I was asked to organize the first independent meeting of AAAL in New York City, with the help of Nathalie Bailey as local chair. With the planning committee, we made several important changes that would take effect in the first independent AAAL conference: we would have many more sessions than could be accommodated in two rooms, we would invite colloquia as well as individual papers, and we would go out of our way to recruit international presenters, even though our name was the "American" Association for Applied Linguistics. I remember that first independent AAAL conference as a resounding success, with 400 enthusiastic participants.