Tuesday, January 16, 2024
Dr. Roy Horst was a distinguished, imaginative scientist, an effective and entertaining lecturer, a beloved colleague at SUNY Potsdam, and the best storyteller I have ever known, and as a folklorist I should know. His stories were not fictive, but laid out strategically and lined out to release the most fully realized humor, the hallmark of the skilled narrater. They were usually first person narratives, and eventually you realized that Roy had lived a rich life full of colleagues and friends who came to enjoy and love him. The bat research stories, especially the ones where the research didn't work out as planned were especially evocative, and then there were the ones when he was transporting live mongooses and the necessary health permits across national boundaries to bring them home for study with his students in his lab back in Potsdam. Customs agents are by nature suspicious, and he, personally delighted I am sure, put them to the test on numerous occasions. Not too many years ago, when The Greenery college cafe' still existed, many of us at lunch would vie for the pleasure of sitting next to him at whatever table he was at to hear the latest yarn. We will really miss him. Even in his SOAR courses he teased some of his elderly lady friends by recounting the national statistics of bird and small mammal kill rates caused by their sweet domestic kitties out on evening prowls. Even when telling hard truths he could entertain.
Especially amongst us, the R.O.M.E.O lunch club of which he was a founding member we hardly ever heard the same stories twice, and even if we sometimes did we'd enjoy it the more. He lives on, beloved, in all of us who knew him.
Richard Lunt
