Vogel recalls his early life in Eastern Europe and organizational and scientific matters under the Soviet system; his work at the Bohr Institute in Copenhagen in the late 1960s with colleague Kai Neergaard under leadership of Aage Bohr and Ben Mottelson; his association with the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA); and his eventual move to the United States to work in nuclear physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He recalls Caltech colleagues Felix Boehm and Rudolf Ms̲sbauer, and other colleagues in the W. K. Kellogg Laboratory in the 1970s; interactions with Richard Feynman; Murray Gell-Mann's influence on the direction of his research on neutrinos; and his most recent work on double beta decay.