From Tom Ward

 See the lovely video recorded by Tom Ward for Joe's 90th:  https://www.dropbox.com/s/cmqp9v7u1ppifpp/WIN_20200902_09_20_20_Pro.mp4?dl=0

Transcript below:

Dear Joe – a very happy 90th birthday to you! 

I arrived at Washington National Airport (as it was then known – I won’t speculate on such a happy day on the wisdom and appropriateness of naming airports after Republican presidents) late in August 1989. A letter home a few weeks later read “Stepping out of Washington National Airport, I was met with stunning heat and humidity, rather like Manzini at its most oppressive. Fortunately, I had been met by two people from the Department, Ken Berg and Joe Auslander. We walked across a grill pan of a car park to Joe’s little car, and then proceeded through the hair-raising roads of Washington to Hyattsville. After locating the house where I was to stay and leaving my luggage there, we three went to collect Joe’s wife and go to a restaurant.”

The great kindness Joe (and Ken Berg and Nelson Markley, and others from the group that Delores, one of the administrative staff in the mathematics department, referred to as “the guys” – Mike Boyle, Dan Rudolph, Misha Brin) showed to a nervous new post-doc who hadn’t yet defended his thesis made a huge impact. My family background involved multiple countries, but one of us working in the United States was a real departure, and my mother announced that for the first time it felt like one of her children had gone somewhere truly foreign. She also gave me the best advice to anyone taking the first wobbly steps as an academic: “don’t try to be clever, everyone here is clever. Try to be kind.”
That was reinforced by how Joe treated everyone. Practically of course, but Joe would also find opportunities to boost younger mathematicians and students in seminars. Celebrating the success of others.

My next vivid memory of Joe and Barbara was a flying visit Tania and I made to Washington just a few weeks after our marriage in 1990, an enjoyable dinner with them and a lovely Joe incident – he decided he should have given us a wedding present, so rushed into his own kitchen and assembled a set of beautiful hand-made mugs for us, which stayed with us for many years – a reminder of his instinctive generosity.
Mathematics, life, the minutiae of the distinction between “ergodic theory” and “topological dynamics” meant that over the next thirty years we only met at certain broad conferences. Always a pleasure to catch up with Joe, to share pain or joy about political developments, a random collage of lunches in Bonn and teas in Warwick and so on.

So – a very happy birthday Joe from both of us, very best wishes for the future, and thank you for your many kindnesses all those years ago.