Cindy Hardy

I’ll always remember Roy as I first met him, knife thin, intense, ambitious—a new assistant professor in the UAF English department and a marathon runner.   I would see him running, training for the Equinox marathon, as I drove in to school to teach—I was finishing my MFA and teaching adjunct classes at the time.  Those were wild times—the whole department gathered regularly for parties at Dave Stark’s or John Morgan’s or Peggy Shumaker’s or Jerry Cable’s or Madge Clark’s house and we’d dance or talk through the long winter nights or lingering summer twilight.

My friendship with Roy really developed later, after his divorce, when he was selling some furniture and I needed some for a new cabin I was moving into.  I went to his house to buy the furniture and we sat and talked for hours—our kids, our divorces, my plans for graduate school, UAF politics, literature.  I found that Roy was someone whose world view I could trust—someone who would tell the truth as he saw it.  He was among the faculty who encouraged me to think beyond the MFA to the Ph.D.  When I returned, knowing that Fairbanks was the place I wanted to raise my son, he welcomed me and offered me the use of his office while he was on sabbatical in Romania.  With Roy, I never felt anything other than a peer.  He met everyone on equal terms.

Over the years, we worked together on union matters  and on university committees.  While he was chair of the English Department, he helped me negotiate my position from a half-time term position into a full-time tenure track position, and thus helped establish a Department of Developmental Education.  He was willing to try new things—I could run ideas for classes or projects by him and get a fair hearing and encouragement.    And when the politics of the University drove me crazy, I could make the walk to Copper Lane house and sit in his office, close the door, and talk freely and trust that he would do the same.

When Roy retired, I told him we should get together for lunch and talk about old times.  It never happened, though we made plans that kept changing.  The last real conversation I remember having with him was this past spring.  He was walking from the Gruening Building to Wood Center and had to stop half-way and rest, sitting on the concrete circular flower planter there.  He was breathing heavily, and I stopped to talk to him.    As we talked we both pretended that he had only stopped to admire the flowers and the loveliness of the day.  We agreed again to try to have lunch sometime. 

In my view, Roy never stopped running the marathon—only the nature of the race changed: teaching students, running the Honors House, fighting for  the rights of fellow faculty, holding the University to its mission, holding others to their best selves.  He may not have realized it—a marathon is a long race, after all—but he was winning, and the prize was that he left the University, his students, his colleagues, his community, and his friends better off for having had him in our midst.