1 10 67 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Celebration Description An account of the resource Speeches from the Celebration of Roy's Life, December 9, 2007, George Mason University, Arlington campus, Arlington, VA. Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. I am Betsy Blackmar, and I am one of the many people in this room who arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the early 1970s very uncertain as to what exactly we were doing. Roy helped us figure that out. What do you do when you don’t know what you are doing? You organize a reading group; you form a collective to produce a journal, you make sure that all of your friends know each other—whether in person or as legends. You give other people drafts of your work to read and read theirs and talk to them. Roy helped us all collectively to gain the confidence to do our creative work, and he helped many of us find jobs, housing, roommates, and life-long friends. Given Roy’s faith in mutuality and reciprocity, it matters to me to think that I may have given him back one thing: he met Deborah at a party at my Cambridge apartment. (of course, given the principles of six degrees of separation on which he operated, they were destined to meet one way or another). And Deborah gave Roy back to us all a hundred fold by sharing his hospitality and wit, and, over the years,—I think it took a long time-- helping him see that he could do even more if he didn’t stay up all night or live on chocolate donuts and Tab or drive himself to exhaustion; she even taught Roy to take vacations, which just seems like a miracle. Roy recruited me to help write a short screen play for a short documentary by Richard Broadman on Boston’s parks. Then, he suggested that we write a short book on Central Park. The thing is, the story was more complicated, there were more layers, we really needed to bring it up to the present, so more than six years and 600 pages later, we finished the Park and the People. But we would not have been able to do this had Roy not figured out the magic key to grant writing: all of our proposals started with a Johnny Carson joke from the mid-1960s—“It was so quiet last night in Central Park, that you could have heard a knife drop.” It was followed somewhere in the proposal by another one, “Did you hear the Soviet ambassador was mugged in Central Park last night? The park commissioner said it was an exceptional case: ‘it’s the first time they got a Russian’.” I never knew where Roy found these Johnny Carson jokes, but who else but Roy would recognize that someone sitting reading fifty pleas for money would be desperate for some comic relief? Of course, being Roy, he also compiled and analyzed all the crime statistics of the 1960s to prove that it was safer to be in the park than on the streets of New York. It was not always easy to collaborate with Roy. It was not just the damn to-do lists and the feeling that you could never keep up with him. It was Roy’s honesty: you just couldn’t tell Roy white lies about why you hadn’t done something you said you would do. I don’t think Roy hated a lot of things, but I do think he really really disliked cowardly self-serving white lies and excuses. He also didn’t have much use for pomposity, grandiosity, arrogance, or abuses of power. There is only one time when I think Roy was actually relieved that I didn’t follow through on something: for his 40th birthday, just after we finished the park book, I gave him a trowel and the promise of 100 daffodil bulbs. I had arranged to have the bulbs shipped to my house in Carmel, but, as it turned out, I didn’t travel to Washington that Fall, so I ended up planting them in my yard: he never asked me what happed to his opportunity to become a gardener. When I think of Roy now, I think of that little crinkle and light in his eyes when he was telling or hearing a good story. I think of the pleasure of sharing Roy’s and Deborah’s stories of the Human Comedy. It is probably because he recognized and so readily forgave the foibles of his friends, his colleagues, his students, that Roy was able to help so many of us muddle through and collectively hold each other up through so many bad things, political and personal, of which surely one of the hardest is losing Roy himself. Okay: no tears, no hugging, but here’s a lesson Roy would have allowed: start your grant proposals with a joke. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 155 Language A language of the resource eng Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Betsy Blackmar Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Betsy Blackmar Type The nature or genre of the resource Document central park friends roy think time Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Celebration Description An account of the resource Speeches from the Celebration of Roy's Life, December 9, 2007, George Mason University, Arlington campus, Arlington, VA. Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. For the past two years I worked closely with Roy as the administrative assistant for the Center. In spite of the fact that most of my work was on the clerical and mundane side- budgets to update, forms to have signed- I now recognize that my job entailed more than just merging cells on a spreadsheet. Working at the Center and with Roy, day to day, couldn’t fit a classical job description of an administrative assistant and I should have been more mindful of the response I got when I asked during my interview what a typical day was like- no day is typical. No matter what came up during the day or the night before at 10pm, I always tried to brew a pot of coffee before Roy arrived. There are many fond memories that I have of Roy. Whenever, I think about my time at the Center, there are two things that come to mind first, black jeans and Roy’s walk. I know that there’s been a lot of talk about Roy’s red shirts but I always remember the black jeans. His apparel choice was about as consistent as a cup of coffee in his hands. There was one occasion when Roy came in wearing blue jeans. I was stunned. Absolutely baffled. I couldn’t process Roy in blue jeans- it totally blew my mind! After a couple of minutes, I recovered and we proceeded to launch into one of the many hundreds of conversations we had about budgets. I’d have to say about eighty percent of our conversations dealt with Center finances, but i don’t want to bore you with that! Roy had a very unique gait. He shuffled a bit; had a slight roundness in his shoulders (I’m sure from years of walking around reading or responding to emails on his Treo). I always knew when he was approaching, - which leads the first item I want to share about working with Roy. Walking… Roy had a habit of starting a conversation at my desk and towards the end of his thoughts (while I clearly wasn’t aware of) he would begin walking away, his back towards me, still speaking– I couldn’t enhance my hearing ability so after a couple of conversations where this would happen- I started to stand while speaking with him- that way I could follow him and thus ensure that I wouldn’t miss any detail. Details were very important- being uber-prepared was de rigueur. When I had my first event to plan on my own, I was incredibly nervous. I wanted to do everything right and make sure that the event went off without a hitch. I booked the room, sent out emails, provided directions, and ordered food. I did everything that I needed to and assured Roy that everything was prepared, snafu-proof... Fast forward to the event, the catering was to arrive at 5:45. By 5:46, Roy discreetly made his way to the back of the room and asked me about the food. My worst fear materialized when I called the restaurant and they were surprised to hear from me- isn’t the event tomorrow? I almost choked. I did not want to tell Roy. I, at the point, didn’t know how he would react. Thankfully, he remained composed when I told him the situation but he was clearly flustered- he paced about, kept going in and out of the building, and had me call the restaurant about every five minutes. After the longest thirty minutes of my newly professional life the food arrived- we had leftovers for a week in the office and I self-imposed a double-check policy on all future events. Also, my personal moratorium on Moroccan food stands. Checking-in was a regular aspect of communication between Roy and I… every week, sometimes every day, a new problem presented itself or issue arose- Roy would explain the situation, his desired outcome and then I would figure out the rest. He definitely had a lot of faith in my ability to find a solution- but I had to think on my toes… I didn’t havemuch time before Roy would come back for an update sometimes within a half hour of presenting the issue! If I couldn’t get in touch with anyone or the situation got more complicated- Roy’s response was usually the same- “oi!” followed by, “let me know if I can do anything.” I quickly made best friends with my phone and memorized the most relevant numbers- it was clear that I couldn’t wait for the rest of the world or Mason to catch up, and as in most academic settings there is a lot of bureaucracy to wade through, but that didn’t stop Roy and subsequently didn’t stop me from, I wouldn’t use the word “harassing” but persistently contacting someone until I got an answer! I’m sure that I tested a few people’s nerves but I realized that was beside the point- we had a purpose, we didn’t want to waste any time, and no one was hurt in the process! And, to clarify, no decisions were ever made in haste- everything was well thought out it’s just that Roy worked about ten times faster than everyone else. Roy knew how to quell most potential roadblocks or issues. It wasn’t working the system, per se; we didn’t break any rules, perhaps we bent the rules a little… but I’d characterize it as resourcefulness and determination to remain committed to the Center’s mission. He never pushed his agenda to a point of overstepping bounds or treaded on any toes- we just made a lot of phone calls! Roy was very patient, especially since I had little experience in accounting and a lot of trouble sitting still. He was lenient with deadlines, in my case- a few extra days to finish updating budgets, and always considerate when I made mistakes. I knew Roy was busy, but he never failed to take the time to talk with me- he invariably had an answer for any question that I asked. The only things that were predictable about Roy were his attire, his lunch order of a ham sandwich and apple, and his never-ending battle with the projector. Everything else... Thanks! Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 128 Title A name given to the resource As Roy's assistant... Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource You must be 13 years of age or older to submit material to us. Your submission of material constitutes your permission for, and consent to, its dissemination and use in connection with Thanks, Roy in all media in perpetuity. If you have so indicated on the form, your material will be published on Thanks, Roy (with or without your name, depending on what you have indicated). Otherwise, your response will only be available to approved researchers using Thanks, Roy. The material you submit must have been created by you, wholly original, and shall not be copied from or based, in whole or in part, upon any other photographic, literary, or other material, except to the extent that such material is in the public domain. Further, submitted material must not violate any confidentiality, privacy, security or other laws. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Heather Velez Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Heather Velez Type The nature or genre of the resource Document redshirt hamsandwich Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Celebration Description An account of the resource Speeches from the Celebration of Roy's Life, December 9, 2007, George Mason University, Arlington campus, Arlington, VA. Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. For many years Roy and I used to entertain each other with ideas for get-rich-quick books. We were sure that the popularity of <em>When Bad things Happen to Good People </em> would be easily topped by our sequel, “When Good Things Happen to Bad People,” and we were equally confident that our lavishly illustrated coffee table book on the history of dentistry would be a bestseller. But our favorite idea—one to which we would refer over and over in the years that followed-- occurred to Roy in the early 1980s, when we were post-doctoral fellows at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities. Neither of us had taught before at an institution at which scholars and artists were objects of fascination not only for students but also for other faculty members. Almost everyone we met at Wesleyan had odd or funny stories to tell about famous academics, especially those who had spent time at the Center for the Humanities in what were obviously its more illustrious days. We didn’t know if they were accurate in every or even any detail. But we became interested in the widespread habit of telling them, and as the stories accumulated, Roy proposed that we assemble a “Humanist Joke Book.” It was to be organized in two parts, corresponding to the two categories into one or the other of which, we believed, all jokes about humanists fit. Jokes in the first category made the implicit point that “famous humanists are just like you and me.” A story about political theorist Hannah Arendt and avant-garde composer John Cage playing tag after hours in the Center for the Humanities was one example. The other category conveyed the opposite point, of course—that “famous humanists are not like you and me”. The anecdote we heard about Norbert Weiner, mathematician and developer of cybernetics, is an example of this second type. This is how it goes, or at least how one version of it goes: Norbert Weiner was coming home from work, but couldn’t remember where his home was. He and his family had recently moved though within the same neighborhood, and he had forgotten not only his new address but what the house looked like. He saw a bunch of children outside, playing, and went up to one of them. “Little girl,” he asked, “do you know the house where the Weiners’ live?” Pointing to one across the street, she replied, “Yes, Daddy, it’s right over there.” Of the two kinds of stories, Roy enjoyed retelling those that suggested that famous humanists are not like you and me, because the joke usually turned on humanists’ blindness to basic knowledge that we have of one another and to the bonds that define and enrich our lives. Roy found that obliviousness funny, I think, because it was so unlike the way he was and what he valued. In early 1999, Roy read Malcolm Gladwell’s “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg” in the New Yorker, an article that describes people who are what Gladwell came to call connectors in his book The Tipping Point, published the following year. Like Lois Weisberg, they know everyone. “In a very down-to-earth, day-to-day way,” according to Gladwell, “they make the world work. They spread ideas and information.” They connect people up with friends, spouses, jobs and other opportunities. And they do this not as a deliberate, self-serving strategy but because they have what Gladwell calls “an innate and spontaneous and entirely involuntary affinity for people. They know everyone because—in some deep and less than conscious way—they can’t help it.” Half-way through reading the New Yorker piece, Roy looked up and said, “this is my sister.” He had always admired Robin’s ability to stay in close touch with all their relatives, the number of her friends and acquaintances, and the ways she managed to intertwine them. But by the time he finished reading the article, he had realized that he was a connector too. It may have dawned on him at the moment when he read that Roger Horchow, another of Gladwell’s examples, “sends people cards on their birthdays” and that “he has a computerized Rolodex with sixteen hundred names on it.” (Roy’s electronic address book only has 1,542 cards—I checked.) He saw that he and Robin had similar propensities; they just operated in different communities. He served as social glue for those whom he met in the schools that he went to, starting with first grade but, much more so over the years, in his profession. Many of you have alluded to this quality on the website thanksroy.org. He was, Dina Copelman wrote, “a one man employment service. . . . always thinking about who would be good for a job, who needed a job, who might want to talk to someone who might know of a job.” Another friend and colleague Ellen Noonan remembers that he was always “passing along information about a project or person I should know about.” His “special gift for bringing the world together,” as Gladwell puts it, was wonderfully compatible with his politics and his desire to be part of a solidarity for causes in which he believed. A walk through downtown Washington, camera in hand, surrounded by friends demonstrating in support of a woman’s right to choose, in commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington, or in protest against the Iraq War-- was a day well spent. His preference for collaborative rather than solitary work is well-known—he saw early in his career ways to blend friendship and scholarship. The telephone was an apt metonym for Roy until the computer took its place. The appeals of email and then the internet for Roy were obvious. As his friend Tom Thurston said on thanksroy, “From the start he saw that this new medium must be a collaborative enterprise, that the inter-networks were about social networks. Roy understood the web long before there was a web.” So now “famous humanist” stories are beginning to circulate about Roy--like the time he tried to keep the front seat of his car from sliding forward, unbeknownst to the examiner, while Chris Clark took his driving test or the time early this fall when he advised a younger colleague about his book manuscript while lying on the floor of his office, the only way to minimize his physical pain. And like the stories that amused him most, many of those about Roy also make the point that he was “unlike you and me.” But he was different not, as is typical of this type of story, because he ignored or forgot his social world but rather because he was able to do more than most of us to create and sustain it. In the last week of Roy’s life he mustered what energy he had to tell friends and family members that he was grateful to them. He thanked his doctors, he thanked the nurses who cared for him at the Virginia Hospital Center. He dictated emails of affection and appreciation that I sent for him to colleagues. A few people he was able to thank in person, and he asked me to call others and put him on the phone briefly. Had he been in perfect health that effort, given all his friends and colleagues, would have been herculean. But without much stamina he had to stop the phone calls and email long before he had intended. So I want to say on his behalf: thank you all for your friendship at whatever point in Roy’s life you knew him and for the support you gave him in his last 17 months. He was determined to carry on as he always had, doing the work he enjoyed with the people that he loved. You accepted his determination and carried on with him. I also want to thank our families, friends, and colleagues at George Mason who have been helping me through this impossible loss. Finally, I am very grateful to those of you—too many to name—who have arranged this Celebration of Roy. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 132 Title A name given to the resource About Roy Language A language of the resource eng Description An account of the resource Speech written by Deborah Kaplan, Roy's wife, for the Celebration of Roy's Life, December 9, 2007. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Deborah Kaplan Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007-12-09 Type The nature or genre of the resource Document Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Celebration Description An account of the resource Speeches from the Celebration of Roy's Life, December 9, 2007, George Mason University, Arlington campus, Arlington, VA. Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. Good afternoon. I’m Kathi Brown, a former student of Roy’s...as well as former neighbor...and also a friend. I met Roy more than 20 years ago when I first entered the evening Masters program in History at GMU. I also had the privilege of being one of Roy’s research assistants on the opus that he and Betsy Blackmar crafted on the history of Central Park. When Roy’s wife Deborah e-mailed me a month ago to invite me to say a few words today, it took me approximately a nanosecond to reply with an enthusiastic “Yes!....Please!....Thank you!” No sooner did I hit SEND to respond to Deborah’s invitation than I burst out laughing. I pictured Roy, wide-eyed and astonished over the speed with which I had accepted an invitation to speak in public. He knew first-hand how much I loathe standing up in front of an audience. In fact, it was an ongoing joke between us. After I graduated with my Masters degree and started my historical consulting business back in the late 1980s, Roy used to ask me once a year to come back to campus to talk to graduate students about my career. Each year, like clockwork, I would listen to his invitation...hoot with delighted laughter...look him straight in the eye and reply: “Love you...would do almost anything in the world for you...EXCEPT this...NO!” After a few of these comically predictable annual exchanges, Roy conceded defeat and presumably found others who were less stubborn and more willing to say yes. Today, of course, is the exception that proves the rule. I could not in my wildest dreams imagine turning down Deborah’s invitation. Which brings to mind what I think is probably my all-time favorite quality in Roy. Roy, as we all well know, was brilliant...funny....eloquent... inspiring...and blessed with the kind of giant mind, gentle spirit and generous heart that are rarely found cobbled together in one human being. But the trait I probably cherished most in Roy was something in which he was abysmally, magnificently lacking: Roy possessed a complete and utter inability to say NO. Need to borrow a book? Sure! No problem! Come on over to the Kaplan-Rosenzweig Lending Library anytime! Conveniently open from dawn to midnight. No lines, no limits, no late fines or fees............I loved it! And benefited from it, in part because I lived only four blocks away from Roy and Deborah for ten years...Believe me, I wore a trough in the sidewalk between their house and mine. Looking for a level-headed analysis of an existential crisis? Roy was my go-to guy. I could always count on him for a no-nonsense, if somewhat bemused interpretation of life’s quandaries. Mostly because I gave the poor man absolutely no choice, Roy shepherded me gently from my mid-20s “What should I do with my life?” to my current late-40s, middle-aged “OKayyyyyyyy, that was great! NOW what?” If he had stayed with us for another couple of decades, I have no doubt that he would have had wise words and entertaining advice to offer me on everything from menopause to choosing a retirement community. Yet another area in which Roy could never manage to say NO was in the realm of computers. I can’t think of anyone who had more technology per square inch stuffed into a home office than Roy. Whenever I walked in the door at his Jackson Street house, I felt like I was boarding the Starship Enterprise. Roy’s affinity for the latest in high-tech toys proved his undoing. At least where I was concerned. Knowing that I had an expert living mere blocks away prompted me more than once to throw myself on Roy’s mercy when contemplating a computer purchase. Even now, a full 20 years later, I’m still half-ashamed of myself for the time I successfully pestered Roy into driving around Arlington with me one afternoon to three or four computer stores to protect me from fast-talking, geek-speaking salesmen. He did all the talking, while I more or less hid behind him, checkbook in hand, ready to close the deal whenever he gave me the signal! The next time around I was just as bad. When the time arrived to upgrade again, I actually made Roy call J&R Music and Computer World, a big electronics discounter in New York, pick out a computer and negotiate a mail order sale for me. Later that day I got a call from him. “Kathi? Roy. OK, here’s what you do. Get out your wallet. Call 1-800-806-1115. Ask for extension 352. A very nice, non-threatening guy named Ed is standing by to take your credit card number....” I kid you not! Perhaps even worse than begging for help with my computer purchases were the COUNTLESS times I dragged Roy away from the comfort of his home office to rescue me from some computer-related snafu of my own clumsy-fingered making. Just one example. I will never forget the time I managed to wipe out an entire book manuscript with just a few keystrokes. How I accomplished this incredible feat, to this day, I have no idea. All I know is that I sat dumbstruck at my computer for a few seconds and then did the ONLY logical thing.... “Roy?” I cried tearfully into the phone. “My computer just ate my book!!!! Help!!!!”...There was a moment of silence...Then the voice on the other end replied calmly: “OK, put down the phone, raise your hands and slowly baccccckkkk awaaaaay from the desk. Don’t touch anything!! I’ll be right over!” Sure enough, Roy popped up on my doorstep five minutes later and spent at least THREE hours picking through my hard drive, scooping up shards of prose and reassembling as much of my opus as he could find. All the while, trying to comfort me. All I could do was sit next to him, doing a fine impression of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” staring helplessly at the screen, and humbly thanking him every five minutes for rescuing my baby from oblivion. And, naturally, Roy being Roy, as he was leaving, he extracted from me a solemn promise to learn to BACK UP MY COMPUTER, LOL! How can you not love a friend like that???? I’m sure there were times when Roy might have preferred to Control-Alt-Delete me AND my computer problems right out of his life, but fortunately for me, he was too loyal and too kindhearted to say NO, no matter how ludicrous or ill-conceived my request......My comfort lies in the hope that along the way I provided him with sufficient entertainment—and friendship—to make it worth his while to keep me around! I’m just about out of time, but before I turn things over to the next speaker, I have just a little more to add, on a more serious note. Roy was my hero. Plain and simple. When I first walked into Roy’s classroom on a September evening more than twenty years ago, I had no inkling that the mustached man with the shy smile and twinkling eyes at the head of the room was about to forever change the way I see the world. Not by hammering me over the head with the kind of ear-splitting, in-your-face, see-it-my-way-or-hit-the-highway blustering that dominates our public discourse today. Instead, he did it quietly. By putting the right books in my hands... By taking me on as a research assistant so I could learn the incomparable pleasures of historical detective work... He did it by listening...REALLY listening...never once in more than 20 years giving me the feeling that any question, any opinion, any idea I had was not worthy of serious consideration and a serious response. Above all, Roy did it by teaching me to ask the right questions. Not just in the classroom... Not just in my consulting work... And not merely questions about the past... Instead, he taught me to ask questions on a bigger, broader scale...about the way the world really works...or, often, doesn’t work. Questions I’ll be asking today...tomorrow...and for the rest of my life. The ability to shape someone’s mind for the better is a gift...the value of which is not to be underestimated. Fortunately, for those of us who were his students, Roy possessed that gift, in spades. So, whenever it was, 30 or more years ago, that Roy was presented with the opportunity to choose teaching as a career, rather than find something else to do with that magnificent mind of his.... I, for one, will always be grateful..........that he didn’t say NO. Thank you. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 129 Title A name given to the resource Tribute to Roy: Kathi Brown's Remarks from December 9, 2007 Celebration in Arlington, Virginia Language A language of the resource eng Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource You must be 13 years of age or older to submit material to us. Your submission of material constitutes your permission for, and consent to, its dissemination and use in connection with Thanks, Roy in all media in perpetuity. If you have so indicated on the form, your material will be published on Thanks, Roy (with or without your name, depending on what you have indicated). Otherwise, your response will only be available to approved researchers using Thanks, Roy. The material you submit must have been created by you, wholly original, and shall not be copied from or based, in whole or in part, upon any other photographic, literary, or other material, except to the extent that such material is in the public domain. Further, submitted material must not violate any confidentiality, privacy, security or other laws. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kathi Brown Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kathi Brown Type The nature or genre of the resource Document computers hero mentor neighbor student teacher Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Celebration Description An account of the resource Speeches from the Celebration of Roy's Life, December 9, 2007, George Mason University, Arlington campus, Arlington, VA. Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. Roy Memorial Speech, December 9, 2007 I’m Steve Brier, founding director of the American Social History Project at The City University of New York, and a friend and comrade of Roy’s for almost 30 years. The second hardest thing I did in preparing for today was finding a red shirt to buy. Let me note that Roy’s favorite color for his shirts is not a widely shared preference of either America’s shirt makers or apparently the rest of the shirt-buying public. That aside, the hardest thing about speaking today, besides the utter injustice of having to face the fact that Roy is gone, was the challenge to encapsulate in five minutes my feelings and thoughts about my dear friend. I met Roy, as did many of us here today, while serving on the editorial board of the Radical History Review in the 1970s. Roy was the quintessential radical historian throughout his long and illustrious career: profoundly committed to broadening the subject of historical inquiry, to realizing the democratic possibilities of doing history, to minimizing the theoretical obfuscations that marred so much scholarly writing, and to finding new ways and presentational forms to convey historical ideas to a broad public audience. Most of all, Roy’s radicalism was expressed in his passionate commitment to collaboration, an approach to doing history that defied the profession’s blind faith in the requirement that scholars work alone. Roy loved to collaborate with a variety of colleagues whose skills and experiences complemented his own remarkable conceptual and creative abilities, whether he was writing books and scholarly articles, helping conceive and produce documentary films, CD-ROMS, and websites, or developing cutting edge software to help his fellow scholars be as productive and accurate in their scholarship as he always was. There are at least twenty people here today who are proud to have their name associated with Roy’s as co-authors, co-creators, and/or co-producers. Every one of us can attest to Roy’s tenacity, his tireless capacity for work, and, most importantly, his extraordinary generosity and kindness as a colleague and friend. I guess my fondest memories of working with Roy center on the Who Built America? CD-ROMs, much of the writing for which happened at Roy and Deborah’s Jackson St. house beginning in the early 1990s. I’d move in for a week or two at a time to work closely with Roy: you got three square meals at Chez Rosenzweig-Kaplan, a chance to read the paper in the morning and discuss the news of the world, and go to a movie and eat dinner out on the weekends. Otherwise, we were chained to our computers all day and well into every evening, working with the kind of intensity and focus that defined everything that Roy did. Collaborating with Roy in those years on the WBA CDs, especially in the years before the Internet changed the way we did research, was a bit like being cloistered in a historical monastery, where you had access to a fabulous collection of history books, journals and reference sources and where the head history monk (Roy) pushed himself and his fellow monks relentlessly. Despite this pace, my only gripe from all those years of working with Roy in his Jackson St. study was that I ended up having to sit in an incredibly uncomfortable red straight chair while we pored through enormous mounds of historical materials. I finally had to convince Roy to buy himself a new desk chair just so that I could sit in his old one. I never kept up with Roy’s output or his brilliant historical insights, though I tried damned hard to do so. I learned pretty quickly that the best thing you could do was work hard and admire (and ultimately benefit from) Roy’s incredible capacity for hard work and intellectual productivity. Working with Roy in those years reconnected me with the sheer joy of being a historian, seeking to master ideas and material far a field from my formal training, while actively engaged in a bigger collaborative project that helped transform the way we all thought about and presented history. Much like my other dear friend and close collaborator, Herb Gutman (who, like Roy, was also 57 when he died), Roy’s influence will be felt for years to come in the profession and beyond. There will be (and there already have been) numerous books, journals, conference sessions, fellowships and prizes named in Roy’s memory. But I am confident that as much as Roy is remembered for his brilliant insights and output as a historian he will also be remembered for the endearing friendship and support that he offered to so many people, inside the profession and far beyond it. Roy was simply a lovely human being, a mensch, who had a deeply open curiosity about everything and everyone he met all over the world. In what turned out to be the last few months of his life, Roy was very encouraging and inquisitive when I had the chance to describe to him a new family memoir project that I had just started to think about. He managed in the midst of his various medical treatments, as only Roy could, to find the time and the energy to send me a book from Amazon about doing family history that he thought I should read. And during one of our last times together in Arlington he invited me to come down to spend a week or two with him and Deb in their Lincoln St. home when I started my sabbatical, so that I could once again use the incomparable Rosenzweig history library and, far more importantly, from my perspective (and I think maybe his as well) to have the chance to talk with him about the project. Sadly, I missed the opportunity to take Roy up on his wonderfully generous offer; he died a few weeks before my sabbatical began. Thanks, Roy, for your generosity of spirit and for your kind heart. You are and will be profoundly missed. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 130 Title A name given to the resource Roy Memorial Speech Language A language of the resource eng Description An account of the resource Speech given by Dr. Stephen Brier at the Celebration of Roy's life, Sunday, December 9, 2007. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen Brier Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007-12-09 Type The nature or genre of the resource Document Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Celebration Description An account of the resource Speeches from the Celebration of Roy's Life, December 9, 2007, George Mason University, Arlington campus, Arlington, VA. Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. Welcome friends, family, colleagues. Thanks to all of you for being here today, and a very special thanks to the many people who worked so hard to put this event together, especially Amy Noecker of the College of Humanities and Social Science Dean's office, who really did most of the heavy lifting. I'd also like to thank George Mason University President Alan Merten, who has done so much to support Roy's work at the Center for History and New Media over the years and to Provost Peter Stearns and Dean Jack Censer, who provided the financial means for today's events. My name is Tom Scheinfeldt, and I worked with Roy at the Center for History and New Media for just over five years. We are gathered here today to honor, remember, but especially to celebrate Roy's life. I can't begin to put into words what the loss of Roy means to his friends and family, to the historical profession, to digital scholarship, to George Mason University, and to me personally, so I'm not even going to try. I don't think Roy would have wanted me to try. I think he would have wanted us to concentrate on moving forward, on what still is to be gained rather than on what has been lost. Mostly I think Roy would have wanted us to enjoy ourselves today, to take this opportunity of being together to forge new collaborations and renew old friendships. Roy was a deeply emotional and extraordinarily caring person, but he wasn't overly sentimental. In that spirit, those of us on stage today are going to do our best to keep things honest but upbeat, heartfelt but light. For such a distinguished scholar, one of Roy's abiding charms was his gleeful love of TV sitcoms. He was particularly fond of Seinfeld and its writers' maxim that the show contain no hugging, no crying, no lessons learned. We should do our best today to take Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David's advice ourselves. That means you should feel free to enjoy yourself. You should feel free to laugh. You should feel to speak unselfconsciously during the open mic portion of the program. You should feel free to get up and go to the bathroom. For my part I'm going to do what Roy always did when we bade farewell to a staff member at CHNM who was leaving for graduate school or some other opportunity. Roy always started with history, by reading the first email he received from the person. The date of Roy's first email to me is May 10, 2002, during my first week at CHNM. Roy was finishing his sabbatical at Harvard, and aside from a brief meeting during my interview at OAH a few weeks earlier, I hadn't spent any time at all with Roy. Nevertheless, Roy was about to become my most frequent and voluminous correspondent. It's a lengthy email, stuffed with attachments. It begins: Tom -- This is probably more than you want to read. Over the next five years, I received nearly 10,000 emails from Roy, an average of more than five per day. Sometimes there were more than I wanted to read. That first email ends: Many thanks for coming into things with so much energy; it sounds like you have already made a terrific start. Take care, Roy. I was a brand new hire, still ABD, and Roy hardly knew me. But no matter how many emails he sent, no matter how long, and no matter to whom they were addressed, Roy always ended with a word of encouragement or praise. I had a mostly working relationship with Roy, but all work with Roy was close work. That made me a very lucky guy. You will hear a lot more today about the work Roy did while he was still alive. In many ways, however, the work Roy left undone is as important as the work he did himself. Roy left not only a legacy, but also a to-do list (Roy was very fond of to-do's). Just this week we were provided with two examples of how we will continue to benefit from Roy's hard work and generosity long into the future, and of just how much of that work remains to be done. Today, I am very pleased to announce that CHNM has been awarded two major grants from NEH, both of them written largely by Roy just this summer. The first is for a major study of current digital research practices in the profession and to further push the bounds of digital historical research. The second grant targets CHNM as a center of excellence and will endow it with an Infrastructure and Innovation Sustaining Fund through a challenge grant of $750,000. What this incredible opportunity means is that donations made to CHNM in Roy's name will help us meet the full NEH challenge of $2.25 million, part of which will endow a prize in Roy's name. Styled The Roy Rosenzweig Prize in History and New Media this award will be presented annually by CHNM and the American Historical Association for an innovative and freely available new media project that reflects thoughtful, critical, and rigorous engagement with technology and the practice of history. We have already raised $30,000 towards this prize and we hope to raise enough funds this year to begin awarding it in 2009. Some of you have already made donations to CHNM in Roy's name. Thank you. Those donations may be applied to the challenge, and we will be back in touch shortly with information on how to do that. Those of you who have not already made a donation—or those who have but would like to make another gift towards the prize fund—will find a card in your program with additional details. You should also feel free to contact me or Dean Censer directly if you would like to discuss your donation. I know Roy was very grateful for your support of his work and his Center through the years, and on behalf of everyone at CHNM, I would like to thank you very much for your continued friendship. Roy was a business-first kind of guy, so now that we have the business out of the way, we can turn to something more personal. For the next 50 minutes or so, we will hear from a wide assortment of Roy's family, friends, and colleagues. After that, around four, we will turn it over to all of you for your stories and reflections. About five we will adjourn to the Law School atrium across the parking lot for drinks and Chinese appetizers. After that, we will venture out to enjoy ourselves in smaller groups at some of Roy's favorite neighborhood restaurants, which you will find at the back of your program. Thank you all again. Let’s get started. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 131 Title A name given to the resource Welcome to Celebration of Roy's Life Language A language of the resource eng Description An account of the resource Tom Scheinfeldt's speech welcoming everyone to the Celebration of Roy's Life, December 9, 2007. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tom Scheinfeldt Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007-12-09 Type The nature or genre of the resource Document Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Celebration Description An account of the resource Speeches from the Celebration of Roy's Life, December 9, 2007, George Mason University, Arlington campus, Arlington, VA. Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. My name is Jean-Christophe Agnew, and I knew Roy for some thirty five years. If that sounds a bit like the introduction for someone in recovery from something, that’s pretty much how I feel at the moment. And you too, I’m sure. All of us poised at one step or another of recovery from our loss. And because of the way Roy lived his life and took care of his friends, it is very much our loss. Sad as I am to be here – sad beyond words really -- I am relieved and comforted to be here with all of you. Roy was many, many things, but he was, above all, his friends. There are others here today whose friendship with Roy goes back to high school, even junior high. But feeling trumps fact here, because one of the marvelous things about Roy was his gift for making you feel as if you had hung out with him in junior high. Thanks to Roy’s abiding allegiance and affection for us all – his remembrance of our birthdays, for example, his care to update us on our friends – we all belonged to the imagined community of Roy Rosenzweig: Let’s call it Royville. So it is a comfort to me to see Royville assembled here this afternoon. No longer imagined, no longer virtual, but here, present. Once again, our friend and comrade, our confidant and collaborator has managed to bring us together. Though if were he here himself, you know that he would have a list of better things we might be doing with our time. Frankly, what we’re saying and doing today would have been unendurable for Roy, like a collective hug that went on and on, beyond reason. But what we’re feeling today -- certainly what I’m feeling -- is beyond reason. The love we felt for him, the love we took from him. The last time I remember such a gathering was more than 25 years ago, at Roy’s and Deborah’s August wedding in Middletown, Connecticut, where I distinctly remember thinking to myself: A wedding. What a wonderful pretext, what a great excuse for all of us to call to order the first official meeting -- the charter meeting -- of the Roy-and-Deborah fan club. For that is what that gathering was at that moment of happiness there on that sunlit lawn on that summer afternoon, and that is what it still is, here in this room, at this moment of our grief and loss. But was it not always been thus? From the legendary stickball games in Bayside to pick-up hoops in Cambridge, from dinners at 82 Kirkland Street to picnics in Craryville, from those godawful chocolate donuts and cans of Tab at the Urban Center at Harvard to the gallons of coffee at the History and New Media Center at George Mason, Roy drew us together in one way or another, turning the various pretexts for gathering into real texts: textbooks, monographs, anthologies, slide tapes, cd roms and finally the on-line loop of digital knowledge which so perfectly replicates (at least for me) the circles of friendship and knowledge that Roy himself generated over the years. Six degrees of Roy. Early on, there was MARHO, the Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization, the small nucleus of editorial collectives that started the Radical History Review more than three decades ago. Roy and I would often joke about the now long forgotten MARHO regional associates, a loose network of corresponding members –many of them isolated (by their own account) at various Midwestern and Southern colleges and universities. Wanting desperately to talk to someone, anyone, about, say, the impact of Daniel De Leon or the significance of the British General Strike of 1926. Had it not been for Roy’s empathy and his efforts over many years – all those letters and phone calls -- this committee of correspondence among left historians would have disappeared. No one else in MARHO was willing to take that job. And so it fell to Roy, or rather Roy rose to it. Which is why the Thanks, Roy website seems so right, so apt an appreciation. All the Regional Associates of Roy’s life returning the favor, reminding us of the impact, the significance of this man in our lives. The impressions. The anecdotes. The remembered dialogue. Reading over these recollections, I see my best friend re-emerge, coalesce before my eyes like some pointilliste portrait. No, wait. Pointilliste portrait? No, no, no….what I really see is that signature green or red ink underline scrawled beneath the word “pointilliste” with a polite question mark to the right. What is Roy telling me? Have I got the wrong technology? Should I substitute “dot matrix,” or maybe “pixelated”? Or is he suggesting that my figure of speech is itself a distraction, a way of aestheticizing and avoiding my own sorrow at writing about Roy -- without Roy? I’d ask him but I suspect that by this point in these remarks, Roy would have left this room looking for the coffee machine. Or better yet, fallen asleep. Roy and I spent more than 25 years of our lives writing one thing or another together, from introductions to obituaries. But the longest assignment of all was the column we cobbled together three-times-a-year on history and historians: the Abusable Past. It wasn’t exactly Morrison and Commager, more like Click and Clack, the Tappet brothers of history. Looking under the hood of the profession was not so difficult given how many historians Roy knew and how much time he logged at conventions. So many conventions. Once, just for fun, we did a back-of-the envelope calculation of the time Roy had spent at conventions. It added up to a year. A full year out of his life. Now how he felt about that I don’t really know. And perhaps he didn’t either. But how many of us here in Royville would give a year out of our lives just to see him at the next AHA – in his red shirt and jeans – waiting at the registration desk to go out for coffee? Thank you, Roy, for everything. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 142 Title A name given to the resource Roy Language A language of the resource eng Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Jean-Christophe Agnew Type The nature or genre of the resource Document Historians history roy years Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Celebration Description An account of the resource Speeches from the Celebration of Roy's Life, December 9, 2007, George Mason University, Arlington campus, Arlington, VA. Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. I’m Tony Rosenzweig, Roy’s first cousin and I’m here representing family and on behalf of family I’d like to thank all the colleagues and friends who came to share their thoughts and memories. It’s wonderful – though not surprising – to see how many were touched by Roy. Although I grew up near Roy, I got to know him well first when I moved to Cambridge as an undergraduate and Roy was a graduate student at Harvard. He hosted me when I visited the campus, showed me around Cambridge and would somehow find time to get together regularly for lunch or just a chat on a nice day in Harvard yard. During these conversations, Roy -- with gentle but incisive questioning -- would help me understand and clarify my own thoughts. It has been particularly heart-warming to see that – 30 years later – when our daughter came to DC for college, Roy – now together with Deborah – reprised this role, making her feel welcome, making it clear she had a home away from home. Roy was generous with more than just his time. He gave my wife and me our first car, which was stolen several times from Cambridge. Whether because it was somehow blessed – or because it was a 1967 Dodge – it always came back. My sister, who recently lost her own husband to a brain tumor and couldn’t be here today, sent this message: “What a year this has been. A cruel year, unlike any other experienced or imagined in my worst nightmare. So true for all of us. Losses across a spectrum: my uncle, my husband, a cousin’s husband and my dear cousin Roy, honored here today. At times it seems unbelievable that all this has happened in a few short months. I wish I had known Roy better, that our paths had crossed more often [but] I admired Roy from afar—proud of all he had done….[and] proud to count him as a relative. When in the DC area I reached out to Roy & Deborah and they always welcomed us for a visit. Last year, on our last trip to the NIH, where my husband was in a clinical trial…, we shared a quiet dinner together at a Chinese restaurant in Bethesda. It was a blustery cold February night and the winds were especially cruel. Together we commiserated, sharing the trials and tribulations of living with serious illness and frustrations with modern medicine -- two cancer patients and two caregivers. Roy was as sharp as ever and aside from hair loss seemed to be doing well. Richard on the other hand was not. I am sorry that I cannot be there physically today to share a warm hug and shed a tear. Please know that I am with you nonetheless because of what I carry in my heart--the feeling of kinship, of heritage, of friendship, of family. Loss is loss, never welcome, never wanted but an inevitable part of life. For me I try to cherish what I have learned from the experience, the good that has come from the bottom of the abyss—the strength, the lessons learned, the people.” [She ends by quoting her 16 year old son Ross’s eulogy for his father]: “… it is different for everyone. Who could honestly say how exactly they feel, and then feel the same as the person next to them. It is different for everyone. And they can’t. It is different; nothing is the same and nothing is as simple. The loss of a Lover is not the same as the loss of a brother. The loss of a brother is not the same as the loss of an Uncle. The loss of an Uncle is not the same as the loss of a colleague. The loss of a colleague is not the same as a teacher. A teacher is not the same as a close friend. Nothing is Worse. Nothing is Easy. Nothing is as simple. Everything is different.” Represented here today are people who had each of these relationships with Roy and though each is different, we all each of share a common sense of loss but also will carry with us a common legacy, the gift that – like that 1967 Dodge – will keep coming back since it comes from having known and been touched by Roy. [Message from Roy's sister, Robin Schkrutz:] Since it is Chanukah, this story that my father liked to tell comes to mind. It was one of my son David's early experiences at Sunday School. Our rabbi was trying to explain the miracle of Chanukah. He wanted to make sure that the class of 5 year olds all knew what a miracle was. He asked the class what do you think a miracle is? Five year old David raised his hand and answered a miracle is when people are nice to each other. My brother Roy was someone who practiced miracles every day of his life. He was always nice to other people. The Roy that I knew was the Roy that everyone in this room knew. He wasn't different to different people. He was good and kind to everyone. Although his academic achievements and awards are amazing, he never made a big deal of them. It was always you who was the important focus of any conversation. I cherish the time we spent as children spending endless hours playing games together. As we got older, the distance grew, but I am grateful that we kept a tradition of thanksgiving and Christmas vacation get-togethers. Roy's kindness was one of his most wonderful attributes. When I read all the wonderful ways you treated others, it makes me even more proud than ever to have been your sister. And that is what I will remember you for. I hope all of us will think of honoring Roy by showing kindness to others. Because that would be the way to spread what he gave to all of us. 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Examples of still images are: paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type "text" to images of textual materials. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 162 Title A name given to the resource Roy's Celebration Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Still Image