The first annual Eastern Theoretical Physics Conference was held at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, on October 26 and 27, 1962. Such a conference was first proposed by M. E. Rose in the spring of 1961, and the decision to organize the first meeting was made at an informal gathering of physicists from Duke University and the University of North Carolina with Dr. Rose. It was thought that this conference should be arranged on a regional basis, somewhat along the lines of the Mid‐Western Theoretical Physics Conference which had been meeting for several years. Under the chairmanship of Dr. Rose, a committee was formed, consisting of E. Merzbacher of the University of North Carolina, J. Sucher of the University of Maryland, and C. N. Yang of the Institute for Advanced Study. In the fall of 1961, a formal proposal was submitted to the National Science Foundation, which agreed to support the first conference.