1 10 3 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. 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. 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 44 Title A name given to the resource A Matter of Trust 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 <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. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tom Scheinfeldt Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Tom Scheinfeldt Type The nature or genre of the resource Document collaboration roy teacher trust 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. What follows is a speech I wrote for the special AHA session in Roy’s memory on January 5, abridged to avoid duplicating my other post on this site. I worked with Roy at the Center for History and New Media for ten years, from 1995 to 2005, and he also was my thesis adviser form 1998 until I graduated in 2004. I will talk about what it was like to work with him at the Center and to have him as a mentor. And because my relationship with Roy was mediated by technology I’ll talk about Roy’s relationship with technology as well. Several times in conversations with Roy I heard him speculate why there are not more hit TV series and movies about historians. TV shows and films about doctors and cops are popular, he used to say, because they are always urgently needed to save lives somewhere. If only we could come up with an emergency that would urgently require an intervention by a historian, played perhaps by Nicholas Cage or Angelina Jolie, who could rush to the scene and save the day, the discipline would have much better representation in American popular culture. I think Roy was skeptical about this possibility. However, in some ways, working with Roy was like this imaginary action movie. It was exciting and it was full of emergencies. I began working at the Center as its only employee. The center was Roy, Mike O’Malley, and me, with a standard Mac desktop for a server, located in a closet in a former student dormitory, with only six web pages on it. Of course, now there are dozens of historical websites and tools produced at the Center, but for the first few years we only had two or three. Eventually, we could afford top-of-the-line equipment and put it in a secure facility with multiple backups, but for the first few years that wasn’t an option. Web servers crash. Roy however, refused to acknowledge that fact. Once on an anniversary of 9/11 Jim Sparrow and I accidentally unplugged the machine that was serving millions of connections to our September 11 Digital Archive, and could not restart it for several minutes because the database got corrupted. For Roy, who was pacing back and forth watching us trying to repair the damage, every second our historical data stayed offline was agony. There were times when Roy would drive in to GMU’s Fairfax campus himself on a snow day—a real emergency in Virginia—to restart a crashed server as soon as possible. Roy never asked me outright to drop everything and spend 5 to 10 hours trying to work out the problem but he had a way of pausing on the phone, or nervously walking around in person that conveyed the message very well. I can’t say I didn’t resent the havoc Roy’s work ethic did to my social life. If I had a dinner engagement, I cancelled it. If I was on vacation in San Francisco, I had to go into a closest café with wireless to solve problems remotely. Immediately after arriving to any city, I looked for Starbucks coffee shops (that were guaranteed to have wireless access), to be ready in case an emergency would occur. Once I was on the metro right before Ballston station on my way to work when I got a call from Roy. It turned out that Pennee Bender from the American Social History project was presenting on our History Matters site at a conference. Her presentation was to start in 5 minutes and she just discovered that the search page didn’t work. I had to get off the train, out of the Ballston station, into the Starbucks, and fix the search in 5 minutes—as always for Roy, failure wasn’t an option. At first I was surprised at how seriously Roy took every glitch, but then I realized that he did this because he had a strong sense of purpose and a clear idea of how to accomplish it. For him, history only made sense as a democratic project. He believed that digital media could democratize history, and to this end he produced historical websites, spoke at innumerable meetings, wrote grant proposals, and promoted collaborative and open source scholarship. Keeping the server always on was just a minor manifestation of his larger vision and his determination to accomplish it. Working with Roy as a student resembled an action film in a different way—the emergencies where all mine and he was the one who saved the day. Quite simply, I would not be a historian today if it wasn’t for Roy. I’m Russian, and it would have been impossible for me to finish school if I didn’t have a job at CHNM at the same time. He had to fill out mounds of extra paperwork to hire me, and when my American visa got delayed for two months, Roy didn’t give up and kept the job open for me when he didn’t have to. Many students claim being close to their advisers—Roy was generous in ways that this common phrase doesn’t really describe. He would be always happy to meet with me, and always enthusiastic about my work, but when a conversation would approach a conclusion, he would just say “Ok” with a certain inflection, and I would know that I had to get out of the office so he could move on to other work. We communicated as much over email and instant messaging as in person. Roy once told me how he and Deborah, working on two separate floors of their house, simultaneously got emails with links to the YouTube video of Stephen Colbert mocking President Bush at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Only later did they realize that they were watching the video on different computers at the same time. One could imagine that Roy and Deborah sometimes communicated by email in the house as well. But in my case, the way Roy used email was much more valuable than any heart-to-heart conversations we didn’t have. It was remarkable enough that Roy could answer an email within seconds if it was about Center business, but what I appreciated even more was that when I asked him to help with my own work his responses were just as fast. During the celebration of Roy’s life in December, people were offering statistics on thousands of emails they got from Roy. Here are some statistics on how little time it took for Roy to get back to me over email about my research. Reading and commenting on my book prospectus: 17 hours Reading and commenting on reader reviews of my book manuscript: 9 hours Answering a question about my dissertation: 10 minutes Answering the last question I asked him, about a book we both had read, on September 26, 2007: 2 hours. How Roy found the time to reply this fast, I have no idea. He knew and communicated with so many people in the US and beyond—when I was about to move to Montreal to teach Roy sat down with me and gave names of a half a dozen digital humanities scholars he knew in Canada. In September 2005, over iChat, I asked Roy to read something of mine, and as always, he immediately agreed. Then he tried to figure out when he would actually do it. Here is what he wrote on IM: Roy Rosenzweig: maybe not this weekend Roy Rosenzweig: but monday Roy Rosenzweig: maybe Roy Rosenzweig: i have plane flight and hopefully could do then Roy Rosenzweig: i have picnic tomorrow and then antiwar march Roy Rosenzweig: and then various people are staying over Roy Rosenzweig: i have conferences all next week I know that what he had done for me he did for hundreds of other people. Thanksroy.org is full of testimonies of people he helped. I think he was such a perfect mentor precisely because one didn’t have to be his favorite student or colleague to count on his help and unwavering support. His commitment to social equality was not just academic, it encompassed everything he did—researching working-class culture, helping students, going to antiwar rallies, and lobbying for open source scholarship. Many brilliant historians exist but I haven’t met anyone as ethical and committed as Roy. He provided more than conventional history instruction; he taught by example. Roy was always there when one of his friends, colleagues, or students needed help yet anything more than a cursory expressions of gratitude made him uncomfortable. I got so desperate about this that when Roy asked me to write a letter in support of a grant the Center was applying for, I used the letter to thank him for many things he had done for me, and then asked him to proofread it to make sure that he actually looked at the words. Among other things, I wrote, “It would not be an exaggeration to say that my years at CHNM”—and as Roy’s student—“transformed my understanding of the purpose and practice history. I will always be grateful for this experience.” Thanks, Roy. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 145 Title A name given to the resource Working with Roy 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 Elena Razlogova Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Elena Razlogova Type The nature or genre of the resource Document chnm computer technology generosity kindness mentor teacher