Thanks, Roy

I remember meeting Roy and Deborah, Betsy, Jean Christophe, Warren, Gary, Gary, Liz, John, Carol thirty five years ago. We were searching for something Harvard didn't seem to think important. In those days right after the tumultuous strikes,demonstrations, picket lines, we were odd, sometimes frustrated by what seemed like a faculty out of touch. We were all reading Thompson, Gutman, (early)Genovese; we were arguing about the value -- or lack thereof -- of quantitative history; time on the cross; we were reading voraciously, literature that was ignored by our professors. We all gravitated to those few faculty we thought would put up with us. We were consumed by history "from the bottom up."

We gravitated to each other, forming readings groups, putting out New England's the early mimeographed issues of MARHO, finding people like Jim O'Brien, Barbara Melosh, Susan Reverby and others from outside the cloistered world of Cambridge. We tried organizing a TA's union; Jean-Christophe illustrated the famous RHR t-shirts, with the image of a Marx that had an eerie resemblance to J-C himself; his image ended up gracing the matchbooks we irresponsibly produced -- "Earn Big Money, Become a Historian." We sat around a lot, gabbed, crabbed and talked, talked, talked.

I may be wrong but I remember Roy and J- C organizing the basketball games on Saturday afternoons and then Roy and J-C organizing a gathering in parks every year after the semester ended. For many of us, this "Memorial Day Picnic" as it was called (despite the fact that it rarely occurred on that day) became one of the more important days of the year-- it came after all our papers had been handed in. We all gathered somewhere -- a park, and later a parent's summer or suburban house and finally our place in Craryville, -- Originally, we all just let down and played endless basketball games and occasional softball and volleyball games. As the years went on, and as we aged, the basketball games became shorter, more dominated by our various children and, in the last few years, actually stopped completely.

This past year was perhaps the first time that no one even made a move to the court, not to mention the basket. We heard occasional apocryphal stories of J-C's various injuries from his on-going Saturday games, but for most of us, the days had become filled with talk and warm feelings. Roy was, of course, the center of all of this. Even as our lives changed, as our kids got older or as we moved from place to place, the "picnic" continued to be an annual event with Roy sending out the requests for food and maintaining a growing guest list of closer and closer -- and older and older -- friends, and J-C writing his famous "directions" to the house -- "look for the giant statue of Gertrude Himmelfarb," "register early at the Bates Motel at the end of the road," .... look for motels that had long-since disappeared. We all came to expect the invitation to come in April and worried when it came a bit late. Always by post, only recently with an email follow-up from Roy. Like the birthday and anniversary cards that Roy sent out without fail -- to us, to our kids, to friends -- paper was the preferred means of communicating. This from Roy, the king of computer technology. reminders: Bring a main dish, no more bread.... invitations filled with information and mis-information but all with a warmth that was stoked by Roy, a dedication to his friends, and a loyalty that began nearly one third of a century ago. It was Roy that was the glue. We love you Roy. Deborah, you know what's in our hearts.

David