Sep/Oct 2011

I received this email from Steven Schneebaum in response to the short obituary notice I wrote for Bob Ferris: “Bob was my roommate, and my closest friend, during our first three years at Yale. He joined Army ROTC, not as a political statement for or against the war in Vietnam, but because that was what a healthy young man with talents and no obvious disability was supposed to do. Your report mentioned that he was a French major. But Bob came to Yale to major in engineering, again because that was what was expected: men were engineers. Men certainly did not major in French.

“Bob found out early in freshman year that he had neither talent for nor interest in engineering. What he was good at was languages. A year as an American Field Service exchange student in Austria had left him all but fluent in German, and he loved the complexity and the sounds of French, in which he excelled. Changing majors for him was agonizing, because it meant breaking molds that it was not in his nature to challenge. It meant contemplating a career very different from the one imagined for him by his family and teachers once they realized what an exceptionally bright student he was.

“I was going through the same process (changing from math to philosophy) at the same time; we agonized together. We were an odd couple: I was a city kid, small in stature, very young and very green. Bob was a year older than most of our classmates, and was well over six feet tall. But we shared a number of important values. And Yale formed both of us, albeit in very different ways.

“I visited Bob’s home in Middlesex several times, including the summer before he left Yale, when he was building a house for his mother with his own hands. He taught me to drive a car (I grew up in New York City! Who knew from cars?) and a motorcycle (even worse!). He visited my family and me in Queens. He dated one of my high school girlfriends for a while. When I agreed to cox the Trumbull College crew, Bob took up rowing.

“He was a voracious reader, with an amazing vocabulary and a depth of culture that always impressed those few who were allowed to know him. But he was the most unpretentious person I have ever known, to this day. Although Yale rapidly became a vital part of him, causing him to break the mold against which he had never rebelled before he came to New Haven, he was never entirely sure that he wanted to be part of Yale.

“After junior year, he joined VISTA, and asked to be sent to Alaska. To Bob, Alaska was a more extreme form of his rural Vermont roots, which he needed to explore further before he was willing to commit to full-time adulthood. Living there would involve physical hardships and service to others, both of which he relished. There he met Jean Bighead, an Inuit licensed practical nurse in Stebbins, the village where VISTA sent him. I still have the Polaroid photo Bob mailed me just after they met. She was barely five feet tall. They were standing out on the tundra, arms around each other. They married during Bob’s VISTA year. I sent him hops and yeast so he could make home-brewed beer for the wedding. They stayed married for the rest of his life.

“Bob went on to serve many terms as mayor of the impoverished and ignored village of Stebbins. He organized the village reindeer herd, arranged for the construction of public buildings, including schools, and founded the only general store in the town. He was a leader in every aspect of village life. Apparently, he and Jean adopted the (numerous) children of her siblings, who died young. Nine years ago, he and Jean were robbed by two local teenagers, reportedly high on glue. Both were shot, Bob in the head, but miraculously survived. He continued his career of community service.

“Lou Heifetz, who roomed with Bob and me during junior year, wrote to me the other day that Bob was ‘an oak … sturdy, upright, a reliable source of support and shade for family and lucky friends. … He was an unassuming exemplar of human decency. I can’t begin to explain this, but even though it’s been more than 30 years since my last contact with Bob, I feel a deep sense of loss.’ I do too. And I had had no contact with Bob for more than 40 years. I don’t know how those years passed so quickly and irrevocably. That is why I feel compelled to write to you, and to our classmates, and to anyone else who may remember Bob Ferris, to mourn his passing, and to celebrate his life and his role in ours. Somehow, the world in which I live has been diminished with his death. I am well aware that I would be a lesser person had I never known him.”

“What are the rewards, on this earth, of a well-lived life? John Adams pared the answer down to six words: ‘the esteem and admiration of others.’”—New York Times, September 15, 2010.