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http://blog.historians.org/news/348/roy-rosenzweig-1950-2007
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75
Title
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Roy Rosenzweig, 1950—2007
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eng
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Roy Rosenzweig, the Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History & New Media at George Mason University, and a friend and councilor of the AHA, passed away yesterday, October 11, 2007, due to complications resulting from advanced cancer of the lungs.
Roy Rosenzweig
Rosenzweig was that rare academic: consummately knowledgeable, self-reliant, productive, intuitively creative, and above all, a humanist who helpfully bridged the often intimidating gap between the seeming elitism of academia and his students. At George Mason University, Rosenzweig also headed the Center for History and New Media (which he cofounded), and developed it with a pioneering enthusiasm, making it one of the leading centers for digital history.
Indeed, embracing emerging technologies with ardor, but always with a cautious sense of the possible and the real, Rosenzweig fused history and technology with a seemingly effortless ease that inspired many other historians to take off on their own exploratory voyages into new media.
Not surprisingly, Roy Rosenzweig and his colleagues at the Center for History and New Media and received many accolades, including the AHA’s James Harvey Robinson Prize for 2004 and 2006 (for History Matters and World History Matters, respectively, for creating web sites to help students navigate the complexities of U.S and global history). And just a few weeks ago, the Center for History and New Media received a $7.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education for creating a clearinghouse for information about history education.
Rosenzweig, who received his PhD from Harvard University in 1978, wrote or edited numerous books and articles including Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 1983); The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Cornell University Press, 1992), co-authored with Elizabeth Blackmar, which won the 1993 Historic Preservation Book Award and the 1993 Urban History Association Prize for Best Book on North American Urban History; and, most recently, with Daniel Cohen, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
Roy Rosenzweig received numerous awards for his scholarship and professional contributions, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, which he held in 1989–90. In 2003, he received the Richard W. Lyman Award for his work with digital history. In March 2007 he was conferred the Distinguished Service Award by the Organization of American Historians, for his “outstanding contributions to labor and public history, and his dedication to reaching new and diverse audiences as expressed in his pioneering efforts in the uses of digital technology and new media.”
Dedicated as he was to his teaching, Roy Rosenzweig perhaps treasured more than anything else the admiration and affection of his students, three of whom, remarkably, now work at the AHA building. Roy Rosenzweig was the MA thesis adviser for Lee White, the executive director of the National Coalition for History, and for Chris Hale, publications production manager at the AHA. Rosenzweig was the PhD dissertation adviser for Robert Townsend, the AHA’s assistant director for research and publications. “I have lost both a mentor and a friend with the passing of Roy,” said Lee White. “Few people truly affect the direction that your life takes. Of all of the teachers I have had throughout my education, he is the one whom I will always cherish the most,” he added. Chris Hale particularly appreciated the fact that Rosenzweig was readily accessible to his students, and declared, “that’s rare in academia and, for me, was the best aspect about my whole graduate school experience.”
A long-standing and loyal member of the AHA, Rosenzweig served as the Association’s Vice President for Research from 2004 to 2006. Inventive as always, he used his tenure to bestir the AHA to break out of the inhibiting confines of the traditional annual meeting formats and introduced several new modes of presentation, and worked to open up access to scholarship not only at the meeting but from the pages of the American Historical Review. During his vice presidency, Rosenzweig also successfully led the search for a new editor for the AHR. Rosenzweig was also an enthusiastic founding member of the National History Center, an initiative of the AHA, and served on its planning committee.
In recognition of his invaluable contributions to the Association, to the profession, and to the discipline, the AHA chose Rosenzweig to be the next recipient of the Troyer Steele Anderson Prize to be conferred at the AHA’s 122nd annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Sadly, the prize must now be conferred posthumously. Roy Rosenzweig, a true academic visionary and superlative historian with a social conscience, will be missed by friends, colleagues, and students alike.
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American Historical Association Blog
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Chris Hale and Pillarisetti Sudhir
Type
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Hyperlink
AHA
blog formal notices
roy
-
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A static visual representation. 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.
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122
Title
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Roy at Pohick
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eng
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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.
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This is a second picture from that evening at the Pohick Module on October 3, 2001. Roy is talking to Dee Holisky. In the background are Bob Hawkes and Paula Petrik.
Creator
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Mills Kelly
Contributor
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Mills Kelly
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chnm
Pohick
red shirt
roy
shirt
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121
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Roy in Pohick
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eng
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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.
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This is a picture I took in the second incarnation of the Center for History and New Media (the Pohick Module) on October 3, 2001. Note the shirt--what a surprise!
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Mills Kelly
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Mills Kelly
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chnm
Pohick
red shirt
roy
shirt
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99
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Robin, Roy and our dog Mutsey
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eng
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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.
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Take notice of the dark shirt. It was most probably RED.
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Robin Rosenzweig Schkrutz
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Robin Rosenzweig Schkrutz
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Still Image
Dog
red shirt
Robin
roy
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https://thanksroy.org/files/original/80113ffb270018220b3a3f8394c6b09f.jpg
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46
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The kind of tribute he would have liked
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eng
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http://www.accoutrements.com
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Mike O'Malley
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comic
mustache
roy
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20
Title
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fashion sense
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eng
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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 <em>Thanks, Roy</em> in all media in perpetuity. If you have so indicated on the form, your material will be published on <em>Thanks, Roy</em> (with or without your name, depending on what you have indicated). Otherwise, your response will only be available to approved researchers using <em>Thanks, Roy</em>. 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.
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Roy liked not to have to think about clothes, and he was a man of habits. Left alone, he'd of worn nothing but jeans and red shirts
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Mike O'Malley
Contributor
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Mike O'Malley
Type
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fashion
redshirt
roy
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https://thanksroy.org/files/original/cb125756ad49f41cad4f33bfcee92e61.mp3
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36
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alt.blues.roy
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eng
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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 <em>Thanks, Roy</em> in all media in perpetuity. If you have so indicated on the form, your material will be published on <em>Thanks, Roy</em> (with or without your name, depending on what you have indicated). Otherwise, your response will only be available to approved researchers using <em>Thanks, Roy</em>. 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.
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A very rough first take--I'll probably polish it up when I get time. Although to be honest, writing a piece of music for Roy is sort of like painting a landscape for Ray Charles. Roy would appreciate the gesture, I'm sure.
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Mike O'Malley
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Mike O'Malley
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Sound
blues
music
roy
-
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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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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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Identifier
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149
Title
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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.
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Tony Rosenzweig
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Tony Rosenzweig
Type
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Document
cambridge
family
husband
loss
roy
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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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Text
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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.
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Identifier
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142
Title
A name given to the resource
Roy
Language
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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
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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.
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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