1 10 2 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 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 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 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 21 Title A name given to the resource Roy's Hobby"" 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. By submitting material to Thanks, Roy you release, discharge, and agree to hold harmless Thanks, Roy 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 Thanks, Roy\'s use of the material, including, without limitation, claims for violation of privacy, defamation, or misrepresentation. Thanks, Roy has no obligation to use your material. You will be sent via email a copy of your contribution to Thanks, Roy. We cannot return any material you submit to us so be sure to keep a copy. Thanks, Roy will not share your email address or any other information with commercial vendors. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Steve Brier Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Steve Brier Type The nature or genre of the resource Document computers friendship roy work