“He was a great one for getting new people involved in the countryside and going on hikes and using the hike as the conversation. Pine Cobble, Northwest Hill, Mount Greylock. We’d just take one of the trails. One of the early hikes I remember was the loop where you go up Broad Brook and then out over on Green River Road. It was just about a 10-mile loop. He would gather groups. There would be five or six people. He loved those occasions, getting out, hiking or snowshoeing. We were snowshoeing my first couple of years there and then we got into cross-country skiing, must have been the winter of ’67. Everybody bought cross-country skis and we started skiing. That was great. He was well put together, you know? He was an indefatigable hiker. He could ski a long time. By that time [Pol. Sci. Prof.] Claud Sutcliffe had come to the college and Claud, he was an athlete. He was a swimmer. After a snow, you know, we were there in two-foot snow that’s powder and you just sank right down. Claud would always volunteer to go ahead, insist on going ahead, to break the trail. So Bob would tell us just to “Follow the elephant.” Always full of allusions to India.

–Craig Brown,
Former Political Science Professor