About Roy

For many years Roy and I used to entertain each other with ideas for get-rich-quick books. We were sure that the popularity of <em>When Bad things Happen to Good People </em> would be easily topped by our sequel, “When Good Things Happen to Bad People,” and we were equally confident that our lavishly illustrated coffee table book on the history of dentistry would be a bestseller. But our favorite idea—one to which we would refer over and over in the years that followed-- occurred to Roy in the early 1980s, when we were post-doctoral fellows at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities.

Neither of us had taught before at an institution at which scholars and artists were objects of fascination not only for students but also for other faculty members. Almost everyone we met at Wesleyan had odd or funny stories to tell about famous academics, especially those who had spent time at the Center for the Humanities in what were obviously its more illustrious days. We didn’t know if they were accurate in every or even any detail. But we became interested in the widespread habit of telling them, and as the stories accumulated, Roy proposed that we assemble a “Humanist Joke Book.” It was to be organized in two parts, corresponding to the two categories into one or the other of which, we believed, all jokes about humanists fit.
Jokes in the first category made the implicit point that “famous humanists are just like you and me.” A story about political theorist Hannah Arendt and avant-garde composer John Cage playing tag after hours in the Center for the Humanities was one example. The other category conveyed the opposite point, of course—that “famous humanists are not like you and me”. The anecdote we heard about Norbert Weiner, mathematician and developer of cybernetics, is an example of this second type.

This is how it goes, or at least how one version of it goes:
Norbert Weiner was coming home from work, but couldn’t remember where his home was. He and his family had recently moved though within the same neighborhood, and he had forgotten not only his new address but what the house looked like. He saw a bunch of children outside, playing, and went up to one of them. “Little girl,” he asked, “do you know the house where the Weiners’ live?” Pointing to one across the street, she replied, “Yes, Daddy, it’s right over there.”

Of the two kinds of stories, Roy enjoyed retelling those that suggested that famous humanists are not like you and me, because the joke usually turned on humanists’ blindness to basic knowledge that we have of one another and to the bonds that define and enrich our lives. Roy found that obliviousness funny, I think, because it was so unlike the way he was and what he valued.

In early 1999, Roy read Malcolm Gladwell’s “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg” in the New Yorker, an article that describes people who are what Gladwell came to call connectors in his book The Tipping Point, published the following year. Like Lois Weisberg, they know everyone. “In a very down-to-earth, day-to-day way,” according to Gladwell, “they make the world work. They spread ideas and information.” They connect people up with friends, spouses, jobs and other opportunities. And they do this not as a deliberate, self-serving strategy but because they have what Gladwell calls “an innate and spontaneous and entirely involuntary affinity for people. They know everyone because—in some deep and less than conscious way—they can’t help it.” Half-way through reading the New Yorker piece, Roy looked up and said, “this is my sister.” He had always admired Robin’s ability to stay in close touch with all their relatives, the number of her friends and acquaintances, and the ways she managed to intertwine them. But by the time he finished reading the article, he had realized that he was a connector too. It may have dawned on him at the moment when he read that Roger Horchow, another of Gladwell’s examples, “sends people cards on their birthdays” and that “he has a computerized Rolodex with sixteen hundred names on it.” (Roy’s electronic address book only has 1,542 cards—I checked.)

He saw that he and Robin had similar propensities; they just operated in different communities. He served as social glue for those whom he met in the schools that he went to, starting with first grade but, much more so over the years, in his profession. Many of you have alluded to this quality on the website thanksroy.org. He was, Dina Copelman wrote, “a one man employment service. . . . always thinking about who would be good for a job, who needed a job, who might want to talk to someone who might know of a job.” Another friend and colleague Ellen Noonan remembers that he was always “passing along information about a project or person I should know about.”

His “special gift for bringing the world together,” as Gladwell puts it, was wonderfully compatible with his politics and his desire to be part of a solidarity for causes in which he believed. A walk through downtown Washington, camera in hand, surrounded by friends demonstrating in support of a woman’s right to choose, in commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington, or in protest against the Iraq War-- was a day well spent. His preference for collaborative rather than solitary work is well-known—he saw early in his career ways to blend friendship and scholarship. The telephone was an apt metonym for Roy until the computer took its place. The appeals of email and then the internet for Roy were obvious. As his friend Tom Thurston said on thanksroy, “From the start he saw that this new medium must be a collaborative enterprise, that the inter-networks were about social networks. Roy understood the web long before there was a web.”

So now “famous humanist” stories are beginning to circulate about Roy--like the time he tried to keep the front seat of his car from sliding forward, unbeknownst to the examiner, while Chris Clark took his driving test or the time early this fall when he advised a younger colleague about his book manuscript while lying on the floor of his office, the only way to minimize his physical pain. And like the stories that amused him most, many of those about Roy also make the point that he was “unlike you and me.” But he was different not, as is typical of this type of story, because he ignored or forgot his social world but rather because he was able to do more than most of us to create and sustain it.

In the last week of Roy’s life he mustered what energy he had to tell friends and family members that he was grateful to them. He thanked his doctors, he thanked the nurses who cared for him at the Virginia Hospital Center. He dictated emails of affection and appreciation that I sent for him to colleagues. A few people he was able to thank in person, and he asked me to call others and put him on the phone briefly. Had he been in perfect health that effort, given all his friends and colleagues, would have been herculean. But without much stamina he had to stop the phone calls and email long before he had intended. So I want to say on his behalf: thank you all for your friendship at whatever point in Roy’s life you knew him and for the support you gave him in his last 17 months. He was determined to carry on as he always had, doing the work he enjoyed with the people that he loved. You accepted his determination and carried on with him. I also want to thank our families, friends, and colleagues at George Mason who have been helping me through this impossible loss. Finally, I am very grateful to those of you—too many to name—who have arranged this Celebration of Roy.