Strong Decays: Past, Present and Future

In this talk I review the history of models of strong decays, from the original model through applications to charmonium, light and charmed mesons, glueballs and hybrids. Our current rather limited understanding of the QCD mechanism of strong decays is stressed. Regarding current and future applications of strong decay models, we note that in certain channels the very strong coupling predicted between |qqbar> basis states and the two-meson continuum may lead to strongly mixed states and perhaps molecular two-meson bound states. The relevance to the D_{sJ}*(2317) is discussed.