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EARLY WILLIAMS YEARS
“Intellectual Man of Mystery”

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He bought a new [Volkswagen] Bug then we went on another hiking trip that summer. We went all the way to Georgia, the Ozarks, and came all the way to Mansfield, Vermont. We were in the White Mountains in New Hampshire where we fought the mosquitoes like crazy. It’s classic Bob. We were climbing, we […]
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There’s an island offshore and at low tide you can walk out to it. This was a really, foggy, dark day. You couldn’t see very well and we didn’t know Popham Beach [Maine]. This was before it was a state park. We’d been there but we didn’t know the lay of the land. So we […]
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We were on a trip somewhere, me, my wife and the two younger kids and we were coming back to the Albany airport and Bob was going to pick us up. So he picks us up, yeah, but it was heavy snow. And eight-tenths of the way home, he said, “We have bald tires.” He […]
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You know, to see him he would’ve been a fabulous family man, but it never was to be. I don’t know whether he had any women friends or not.
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Well there’s some possibility I gather from my wife, who knew Bob’s Dutch friend, that there may have been a girlfriend in Bob’s graduate school days, who never seriously entered the picture here at Williams. But it was possibly an unfulfilled romance.
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I visited Bob several times while he was at Williams College. He had a little apartment with a wood burning stove to keep the whole place warm and also he cooked on it. It was just pleasant to be with him.
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There was this French woman. What’s her name? Collette. I don’t think he was serious about her but at the same time I know that she was, and he, somehow or other, I think it’s that whole thing about distance and intimacy, I think he flew from it and yet he wanted it. It was […]
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A difficult person to understand. Not lonely because he had so many friends and so many admirers but he lived alone and I’m surprised about what John said about his thinking of getting married because I never had that sense that he was thinking of, you know, getting married. In the basic sense a loner, […]
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Fred Schuman – he would go swimming every day. That was very important to him. He explained to me one time that he would – he must have been 70, 72, maybe 68, 70, whatever. Looking back on it now I’m 78 and I sort of smile, but he said, “You know, John, I’ve got […]
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There’s a footnote that I think needs to get in here. At the time, virtually all of the faculty were male and the married ones had spouses, somebody who tended not to work and stayed home with children, or if they did work they were a secretary, they had a non-professional job. So there was […]
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