His obituary is here.
I knew him best as the director of Bethel’s library, in which capacity he employed me as his student assistant. I also took a course from him, on Russian history.
He was very kind to students, as the following examples will show.
(i) He got back in touch with me in 2018 and urged me to finish writing my long-overdue dissertation. He was hardly the first person to urge this. But
his intervention did the trick. He asked to read what I’d written so far, and he commented on a number of sections.
After this jump-start, I wrote regularly. I completed the Ph.D. the next summer.
(ii) A college acquaintance told me, long after the fact, that he and other young bucks once rashly denounced the quality of Bethel’s library holdings, in a letter posted on the “Wittenburg Door.”
(The “Wittenburg Door” was a cafeteria bulletin board. It was the college’s most picturesque – and cringeworthy – public forum.)
Dr. Root invited the young bucks to his office. He treated their concerns seriously and graciously, solicited advice, and ordered books they asked for. Little did they know, the library’s resources were severely constrained. Dr. Root didn’t complain of this to students; even I, his assistant, learned it from other sources.
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In his dress and in his politics, Dr. Root was a 1970s conservative. He hung a large portrait of Nixon over his student workers’ desk. Bold! But he didn’t do it to taunt the libs; that wasn’t his way. He genuinely admired Nixon’s statesmanship.
He grieved – privately, to me, at least – that the Republican Party, which he staunchly supported, had turned Trumpist.
He venerated missionaries. One of his pet projects was the indexing of Jim Elliot’s journals. I worked on this, occasionally, when there was nothing else to do; it was a relief when Jim and Betty finally tied the knot and Jim got courtship off his mind.
Dr. Root spent his life in midwestern towns and cities and shared his midwestern pleasures with his student workers. The end-of-term banquets were especially generous: I still savor the memory of one of them, an Amish dinner in the countryside. The summer workers were treated to daily donuts and the occasional lakeside outing; we’d observe a surprisingly lively Dr. Root playing volleyball and croquet. I was amused, too, when he’d return with stories of his holidays. Sometimes, he’d go abroad; usually, he’d stay in a friend’s Manhattan penthouse. For a few days each year, he’d change into a wild baseball- and theatre-goer, sushi eater, and book buyer. Book buying was his job, of course, but he relished the hunt.
It occurs to me that my time helping him to buy books for the library was what made me the habitual bargain hunter I am today.
Then again, he may have chosen me as his student worker because he already perceived that tendency. One day, he invited me into a back office to take what I wanted from the surplus of donated books. He must have liked the gusto with which I went about choosing, because that was when he offered me my job – much of which would consist of filling out forms from bargain book catalogs.
There’s a scene in Evelyn Waugh’s
Decline and Fall in which the ne’er-do-well Captain Grimes is offered his dream job of traveling from pub to pub to sample and rate the beer. (He has to turn it down for personal reasons, of course.) Something comparable, involving low-budget book buying, might have been
my ideal job – the realization of my “true self.” Dr. Root did that job. Lucky man! I’m glad I was able to do it with him for a time.
