I'm guessing this is referring to the fact that early versions of Fortran stored return addresses in specific memory locations (at the end of the function definition IIRC) instead of on a call stack. This is why those versions of Fortran couldn't do recursion, because the new return address would overwrite the old one.
It seems weird now, but natural at time. Point a register at the data following the call, rely on the caller advancing over the argument and jumping back to the (presumed) code after the data. The stack isn't involved at all...
