Murray Kornfeld was a successful New York businessman. His encounter with tuberculosis led him to the internationally famous Saranac Lake Sanatorium run by Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau. At America's "magic mountain," Kornfeld decided to create an institution that would serve as the center of higher learning and research for diseases of the chest. Thus was born the American College of Chest Physicians and the famous journal that is now called CHEST. In this lecture, the story of Kornfeld's legacy is weaved with the growth of knowledge of sarcoidosis during the last 50 years.