  Although largely unrecognized, Gerry Brown had played a seminal and prescient
role for the development of the currently heralded "first-principles approach"
to nuclear dynamics known as "nuclear effective field theory" ($n$EFT for
short). I give a brief account in what way he entered -- together with his
Korean colleagues -- at the earliest stage of its development and what he left
behind for the future in paving the road to go {\it way beyond} the standard
$n$EFT. I do this in the context of Gerry's original conceptual ideas conceived
after the "dilepton fiasco" that indicate a surprising new role of hidden local
and scale symmetries in nuclear physics.
