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My friendship with Roy goes back more than a quarter century. We met at the Radical History Review in the late 1970s, where we were both editors, hit it off pretty quickly because we were both interested in non-traditional ways to do history, and decided we’d work together on what would become the Public History issue of the RHR. That volume was our first collaboration and became Presenting the Past, the first book published (in 1986) in the Critical Perspectives on the Past series at Temple University Press that I had the good fortune to co-edit with Roy and the late Susan Porter Benson for twenty years.
When Herb Gutman and I launched the American Social History Project in 1981, Roy was on the first (and every subsequent) directors/advisory/editorial board we set up to help us run ASHP. Roy helped me get the first edition of the Who Built America? textbook finished in 1989 and 1991, in the years after Herb Gutman died. He advised ASHP on every one of our multimedia projects, including films and videos as well as teacher guides and teacher training projects.
We entered the wonderful world of computers together, buying matching Kaypro II computers (which ran the now defunct CPM operating system) in 1982, Roy to do his own academic work and my ASHP colleagues and me to write the WBA? textbook. Our early shared use of computers led us to start poking around the emerging field of computer controlled media in the late 1980s. I was down in Arlington visiting one time in 1989 and Roy and I took the Metro into DC near Union Station to visit a new exhibit of computer controlled training tools and programs that some company or museum was displaying (I remember that one of them focused on training fire fighters). Out of that exposure came the idea that we really wanted to explore the uses of multimedia to do history. We’d been doing films and videos but the computer opened up immense vistas for teaching and learning. Very soon after that (in 1990) I got a call from Bob Stein, who headed a company called Voyager, who said he wanted to turn WBA? into the first electronic textbook and we (meaning ASHP and Roy) were off on the wild Toad’s ride of creating what became the first history CD-ROM, which Voyager published in 1993. That’s the origins of Roy’s (and our) descent (or ascent, depending on your perspective) into the wonderful world of multimedia.
I spent a great deal of time down in Arlington with Roy at the Jackson house in those years writing and thinking about what the WBA? CD-ROM would look like. Sometime in that period (I can’t remember exactly when, but maybe 1992), Deborah, despairing that Roy was never going to do anything other than work all the time on his computer, announced one night at the dinner table that she thought they both needed hobbies, things that would get them to focus on something other than their academic work. She suggested that they both think about what those new hobbies might be and we’d discuss it at dinner in a few nights. I was then witness to the following exchange (this is not a verbatim transcript, but it’s pretty damned close!):
Deborah (brightly): “Well, I’ve thought a lot about what my hobby should be and I’ve decided I’m going to take up gourmet cooking.”
Roy (sitting in uneasy silence):
Deborah (imploringly): “Roy, have you given this some thought? Have you come up with a hobby?”
Roy (hopefully): “Can the computer be my hobby?”
I laugh every time I think about this story. It speaks to Roy’s singlemindedness of purpose and his ridiculous intensity and capacity for work, which everyone who knew him admired and was daunted by. I learned after many years of collaborating with Roy that the best thing to do was sit back and admire that dedication and tenacity (and greatly benefit from it) and never, ever (unless you were a masochist) try to match it or him.
He was and will always be one of a kind, a brilliant, loving, intense, supportive and totally unique human being. He will be missed by all of us for a very long time, in large measure, because there is no one quite like him and never will be. We miss you and we love you, Roy. And, as Mike O’Malley said to me a few days after Roy died, “How are we supposed to get through things without Roy drawing up our To Do lists?”
Steve Brier
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Roy's Hobby""
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In various venues, friends and colleagues have remembered Roy for the myriad of qualities he possessed. Let me reiterate what I wrote for the History News Network and add a few more points:
Roy's untimely death will leave an incredible void personally and professionally. Roy was instrumental in creating so many programs in the History Department and the university, from crafting courses leading to doctoral programs in cultural studies, in community college education, and in our PhD program in History and the New Media, one of the most innovative in the country. He directed our MA program for many years and hundreds of students admired, respected, indeed, loved Roy for caring so much about their intellectual development and treating them as colleagues. Roy rarely turned down any request to colleagues or students, however burdensome. We always wondered when (and if) Roy slept--in his abbreviated life, cut short at its prime, Roy accomplished more than most of us can or will if we had ten lives.
Despite his many accomplishmemts: superb researcher and scholar with highly acclaimed and prize-winning books; a pioneer in digital history, a terrific teacher, again receiving the highest award from the state of Virginia for his efforts, he was uncommonly modest and unassuming. He shunned the limelight, giving othrs far more credit for what he actually created, conceived, or wrote. His work for the AHA, the OAH and countless othr professional organizations attest to the wide respect he garnered from colleagues in the US, and indeed, throughout the world.
We had been close friends from the start of his career at George Mason and it will be terribly difficult to conceive of the department without his incredible presence. I recall, when he gave me a tour of the Center for History and New Media after moving to its new, shiny location in Research Building I, that he was obviously proud of the offices, the computers and the latest technology. However, he was equally proud of the newest office coffee machine and took positive delight in demonstrating its many attributes. So, to dear Roy--let me raise my cup and know that your good name, many accomplishments and creative ideas will, indeed, MUST live on.
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Roy Rosenzweig was my colleague across town at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason. We saw each other at meetings and conferences four or five times a year; I had gotten to know him more personally when my partner worked at the Center for a while. He was warm and generous, obviously the kind of colleague and mentor we all want to have.
Roy had an impressive career filled with distinguished accomplishments. In 2003 he was the second of only five recipients of the prestigious Lyman Award, for outstanding achievement in the field of digital humanities. Others can (and already have) spoken to what Roy did as a teacher, a historian, and as a friend. I want to talk about something he built, because even though I never spent much time at CHNM I do have some experience with running a center.
Running a successful center is hard enough, but building one from the ground up is Herculean. And sometimes, it must seem, Sisyphean. Roy told me about CHNM’s history once, how it began in his office in the history department. And then moved to more palatial digs in a leaky trailer on the George Mason campus. Last year, however, the Center for History and New Media was given pride of place in the University’s new Research I building, a state of the art space that finally offered CHNM the facility it so richly deserved. The amount of invisible labor that goes in to something like that is vast, and not the kind of work that is rewarded (or usually even noticed) in the academy. There’s purchasing. For everything, from paper clips to computers to furniture. There’s hiring and personnel. There’s countless meetings with administrators and other stake-holders. There’s budget work. There’s payroll. There are fortuitous but mission-critical conversations with people in hallways. There’s strategic planning. And that’s before we even get to the Center’s research mission, but in order to pursue that mission there first must be funding. That’s where grant writing comes in. Roy wrote lots of grants and was remarkably successful; but grant writing is not glamorous work. Long, detailed narratives are the backbone of any proposal, and these must strike a pitch-perfect balance between precision and rigor and intellectual energy. Budgets have to be meticulous, laid out in advance literally to the last dollar. There’s all sorts of other documentation that must be prepared, collated, and formatted, all just so.
I’m dwelling on these details because I imagine this was a large part of Roy’s days and nights: invisible, often painstaking but essential work whose rewards are apparent only years later, if at all. But here’s the thing: today CHNM has a staff of over forty populating that state of the art research space. Roy has had lots of help along the way, and the Center’s future leadership could not be in better hands, but if I had to say what Roy did in a sentence it would be this: he created a place where forty people now come to do things that are so exciting that I bet every single one of them has nights they can’t sleep because what they really want is to be back at the Center. This is the pay-off of all the budgets and forms, all the paperwork, all of the long, tedious hours of administrivia: you get to do things so exciting you can’t sleep. Roy created a space where those forty people, and many more in the years to come, will meet, talk, and build things together. Amazing and wonderful and important things.
Thanks Roy, I’m only one of many who will miss you greatly.
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By submitting material to <em>Thanks, Roy</em> you release, discharge, and agree to hold harmless <em>Thanks, Roy</em> and persons acting under its permission or authority, including a public library or archive to which the collection might be donated for purposes of long-term preservation, from any claims or liability arising out the <em>Thanks, Roy</em>\'s use of the material, including, without limitation, claims for violation of privacy, defamation, or misrepresentation.
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Of all the amazing qualities Roy possessed -- intelligence, generosity, creativity, industry, wit, and so many more -- the one that always stood out for me was trust. Roy trusted in history. He trusted in hard work. He trusted in fairness. Most of all, he trusted in people.
Roy was a collaborator. He was brilliant on his own, but I think he was happiest and at his best when he was working with other people. And people flocked to him.
I think Roy was able to gather so many friends and colleagues around him because he trusted them, often without prior cause and always without prejudice, and so people trusted him back. Roy showed us that the way to gain trust is to give trust, which is the same thing as saying that the way to be loved is to love. It's the best work lesson and the best life lesson I have ever learned, and Roy was the best teacher.
I trust and love and miss him very much.
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This is my October 21, 1007 column for The Examiner newspaper.
Being a teacher is as schizophrenic as being a student. There’s class, and there’s life, and “never the twain shall meet.” Students pretend to focus on schoolwork between the hours of 7:20 a.m. and 2:05 p.m., but who are they kidding? Certainly not their teachers, who remember what it was like to be constrained emotionally and intellectually by schoolroom rules.
As a teacher, I expect of myself more focus and less distraction, yet sometimes life insinuates itself into my lessons. While my students have been distracted by homecoming, I have been thinking about a distinguished George Mason University colleague who recently died of cancer at the age of 57.
Hundreds of Mason students and teachers are mourning his untimely death, but my high school students know nothing of Roy Rosenzweig’s digital histories or of his many contributions to GMU and his Center for History and New Media, and so I keep my sense of loss private.
While talking about literature in the classroom, I have been composing in my mind an email to his wife, whom I have known for over 30 years. How can I show her compassion when I have not suffered the loss of a husband? What comfort can I offer when I don’t really understand the devastating effect of that loss?
Oddly, I found the answer to that question grading papers. School and life merged the moment I read my classes’ essays on “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” which focused on the heroine, Janie’s, response to Teacake’s untimely death. What comfort did Janie find for the loss of her companion and the love of her life?
Student after student wrote that to Janie, Teacake still “lived” since his effect on her remained. She mentally projects her memories—“pictures of love and light”—against the wall of her home. She gathers up those memories and lifelong dreams and calls in her soul “to come and see.” Teacake “could never be dead until she herself finished feeling and thinking.”
Zora Neale Hurston’s words are Janie’s comfort, and were precisely the words I needed for Roy’s wife, Deborah. Roy’s books, teachings, and digital texts remain, and the memories of those who knew him are the “pictures of love and light.”
What also remain are the ways Roy changed others. Like Teacake, Roy treated people respectfully and graciously. His friends and colleagues have created a website (http://thanksroy.org) that reflects myriad instances when his personality and intellectual strengths made others wiser and stronger--“pictures” preserved.
Of course no website, no matter how moving or comprehensive, can begin to compensate for the loss of a husband or friend, a death that came decades too soon. But reading my students’ commentaries helped me see that books are often relevant to life outside the classroom, and that Hurston’s words have a function beyond my English curriculum.
Perhaps at a distant point in the future, some of my students will remember that a person’s “love and light” cannot die as long as they themselves have “feeling and thinking.” At that moment, they might realize that sometimes what we learn in the classroom can teach us about life. Sometimes “the twain” does meet.
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When Life and the Classroom Meet
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Erica Jacobs
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<p><strong>For a Historian, Dying Young</strong></p>
<p>in memory of Roy Rosenzweig, 1950-2007</p>
<pre>
By a pond, by a hospital, a bird,
feathers as starched and white
as nurses' uniforms used to be,
stalks a muddy bank in red high heels.
Down into the muck of Florida
go eight scarlet inches of decurved beak
as if, tired of the clay that passes for food
in the afterlife, an ibis has stepped from a frieze
in some young pharaoh's tomb to feed.
Past a pool of ketchup where a French fry fell,
beak and claw leave their marks in mud.
Herodotus, father of history, father of lies,
if you're the thin shade under a palm tree
across the water, tell me a story that doesn't end
with my reading in the Times today
that emptiness sits at a desk in Virginia
where Roy should be. No longer
does his computer glow and thrum:
let the tree frogs of Arlington take note.
Let a crow call us to preen our black feathers.
Down leaf-littered sidewalks, down streets that sag
under the names of long-dead presidents--
is that Death the worker making his way in sober suit?
A crumpled page, a fallen leaf--gone too soon,
the labor historian, late of Lincoln Street.
</pre>
<p>--Debora Greger</p>
<p>I shared an office with Deborah in her first and my only year at Mason. By the spring of that year, there was mention on her part of someone she was seeing, someone who sometimes came to town. We all know who that turned out to be! And how we all miss him.</p>
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Elegy for Roy
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“Roy as New Media Historian”
OAH, March 29, 2008
Yesterday was my birthday and something didn’t happen that I had come to rely on for the past quarter century: I didn’t receive a wonderfully witty and politically astute card from Roy wishing me a happy birthday. That kindness and attention to personal detail were the essence of our dear friend and colleague and one of the things I will sorely miss in the years to come.
I don’t think you can separate Roy and his various identities as historian, as we are trying to do here today, from the quintessential fact that he was an unusually kind and generous human being. That generosity extended to all of Roy’s connections and relationships, whether he was reading and editing, multiple times, thick manuscripts; writing untold numbers of job references and letters of recommendation for students, colleagues, and friends; or engaging in serious gossip about the historical profession and the personal quirks and idiosyncrasies of its self-involved and self-regarding practitioners.
My job today is to talk about Roy as a new media historian. But to do that I need first to establish what I see as five essential truths and political commitments that defined Roy’s entire career:
• broadening the subject of historical inquiry;
• fighting for the democratic possibilities of doing and communicating history;
• overcoming the theoretical obfuscations that marred so much scholarly writing;
• finding new ways and presentational forms to convey historical ideas to a broad public audience; and, most of all,
• working collaboratively.
Roy loved to collaborate, which was especially evident in his early and vigorous embrace of new media as a form that could reshape the way we thought and learned about the past.
Roy and I entered the wonderful world of computers together, buying matching Kaypro II computers in 1982, Roy to do academic work and my ASHP colleagues and me to write the WBA? textbook. Our early shared use of computers led us to start poking around the emerging field of computer controlled media in the late 1980s. I was down in Arlington visiting some time around 1989 and Roy and I took the Metro into DC near Union Station to visit an exhibit of computer controlled training programs that some company or museum had on display. Out of that experience emerged the idea to use new media to do a new kind of history. We’d been doing films and videos at ASHP (Roy was a valued consultant on these productions) but the computer opened new and seemingly limitless vistas for teaching and learning and for working collaboratively. Roy immediately grasped that new media, because of its complexity and technical demands, necessitated collaboration. He was thrilled at that prospect.
I guess my fondest memories of working with Roy as a new media historian go back to the origins of our first new media venture, which centered on researching and writing the considerable amount of text that introduced and framed the rich multimedia content of the Who Built America? CD-ROMs that we (meaning the American Social History Project and Roy) conceived and developed together. Much of that writing took place in Roy’s book-lined and paper-strewn office in Roy and Deborah’s Jackson St. house in Arlington. I’d move in for a week or two at a time to work closely with Roy, which consisted of being chained (metaphorically speaking) to a computer all day and well into every evening, working with the kind of intensity, focus and sheer sense of discovery that defined everything that Roy did.
I could never manage to keep up with Roy’s output or his brilliant historical insights (I don’t think any of his collaborators did), though I tried damned hard to do so. I learned pretty quickly that the best thing you could do was push yourself, work hard and then sit back and appreciate Roy’s incredible ability to work harder and produce more. Even our hard working team of a dozen or more comrades at ASHP was not enough to keep up with Roy, leading him to create and head up his own new media history operation at GMU, the Center for History and New Media. And, as I think about it, even Roy’s CHNM colleagues, who numbered more than three dozen before he died, can no doubt attest that they couldn’t keep up with Roy, either. I know I speak for all ASHPers and CHNMers when I say that to have been able to collaborate with Roy on imagining and realizing history in new media was a privilege, allowing us all to engage in a common project that helped redefine the way history was thought about and presented.
Roy’s influence will be felt for years to come in the profession and beyond. I am certain that he will be remembered not only for his staggering intellectual output, but also for the endearing friendship and support that he offered to so many people, inside the profession and far beyond it. Thanks, Roy, not only for your brilliant intellect and tireless work ethic, but much more for your extraordinary generosity of spirit and for your kind heart.
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Coffee with Roy, Roy as New Media Historian""
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Speeches from the Celebration of Roy's Life, December 9, 2007, George Mason University, Arlington campus, Arlington, VA.
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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
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155
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eng
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Betsy Blackmar
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Betsy Blackmar
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central park
friends
roy
think
time
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Dublin Core
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Celebration
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Speeches from the Celebration of Roy's Life, December 9, 2007, George Mason University, Arlington campus, Arlington, VA.
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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
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142
Title
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Roy
Language
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eng
Creator
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Jean-Christophe Agnew
Type
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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
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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.
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
149
Title
A name given to the resource
Roy
Language
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eng
Description
An account of the resource
Speech written by Tony Rosenzweig, for the Celebration of Roy's Life, December 9, 2007.
Creator
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Tony Rosenzweig
Contributor
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Tony Rosenzweig
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Document
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family
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