I was enjoying my first visit to the United States and my first full-time stint as a teacher in the School of Architecture at theUniversity of Kansas when one morning in early February 1966, I got the long distance phone call. It was Jimmy Munce calling from the Belfast office of James Munce Partnership. His husky military-style accent with its slight English overtones sounded a trifie more excited than usual. ‘We're going to be interviewed for a planning job in Londonderry,’ he said. ‘Can you fiy back for a few days?’ I feltmyself suddenly caught up in Jimmy's excitement as I had been so many times previously in the seven or eight years I had known him. ‘I'll arrange it,’ I replied. ‘When do I need to be there?’

Ten days later I foundmyself onmy way back to Belfast thinking of the busy few days that lay ahead and wondering if Jimmy's optimismabout getting the commission was justified.There had been some disappointments in the past and before my departure to the United States the firm's application to prepare a plan for Belfast had been rejected, even though the Munce Partnership (then Munce and Kennedy) had entered into association with the prominent Scottish planners Sir Robert Matthew and Percy Johnson-Marshall. James Frederick Munce was not a man to be deterred by a few temporary setbacks.He had returned fromthe SecondWorldWar a major and a toughened veteran of the Burma campaign, to inherit his father's small but successful civil engineering practice. Jimmy, at this time in his late forties, was an architect by training but an entrepreneur by nature. He had expanded the practice to include architecture, quantity surveying, and recently city planning as major components to form what was fashionably called at that time a multi-disciplinary practice. With a staff of some seventy or eighty in the Belfast office and branch offices in London and Glasgow, Jimmy had already some major industrial projects and a number of rural housing projects occupying his attention.

He had also been busy overseas and had followed up his success of completing a sports complex for the Pan-Arabic games in Amman, Jordan, with his similar current multi-million dollar project in Tripoli, Libya. Much to his chagrin none of this success bore much fruit in his native province.