The address of remembrance given today at Roger's Funeral Service OBO all of Roger's students by Hal Sosabowski.
I am Hal Sosabowski, I was Roger's student from 1984.
Michael, John and Anne gave me a carte blanche to tell anecdotes of Roger as they happened, so I am going to push the envelope hopefully without tearing it. They might create some mirth, and I am sure that Roger would like nothing more than to know that his friends, colleagues and family would be laughing fondly in remembrance and in line with Rev. Hirst's earlier commentary.
I knew him for thirty years, from age 19 to age 49, he acted as a mentor for those 30 years, long after his duty of care to me had passed.
He had a truly startling memory. These days we have PowerPoint and laser pointers. In 1983 lecturers were armed with chalk and notes. Roger eschewed notes. He could give a full hour lecture from memory with structures and FULL references including volume and issue numbers and even pages. I can clearly remember one when he was wearing his powder-blue suit and tie (he was always turned out nicely for lectures, dapper and elegant, treating the pageant of The Lecture with the importance and attention to detail it deserved) when he told us about J F Bunnet and The Base-Catalyzed Halogen Dance, Angewandte Chemie, 1971. The only reason that I can recite that abbreviated reference from memory even now was because I was stunned at the time that he could. Happily for me it came up in the exam.
He knew melting points and boiling points of some of the most obscure compounds, and you could chat anecdotally about almost anything chemical and he would add a fascinating or germane factoid, always in a self-effacing manner, to amuse, educate and entertain of course and never to show off his encyclopaedic knowledge. I remember telling him once about one of my children who had trodden doggy-doos all over the house which had recently been recarpeted. I was grimly recounting the story and his brow immediately furrowed into frown of empathy which, I wonder, may have cloaked just a touch of schoolboy delight. I told him my recollection of the appalling smell, and the first thing he said was ‘ahhh yes, FAECES” not without some perceived relish, the one word guaranteed to universally curl toes. Not for him was any child like euphemism, apparently even with his 14 year old son, Michael, the universally accepted expression was ‘FAECES’ or even worse, ‘Faecal matter’. Anyway as I recounted the story he nodded gravely and helpfully made the observation that the compound responsible for my olfactory distress would have been skatole aka 3-methylindole.
When the same son disastrously threw up on me when I was wearing a silk and ermine gown and minutes before I was due to collect a Teaching Award at a graduation, upon hearing the story he seemed to visibly brighten up and say with an air of satisfaction: ‘ahhh yes, they’ll never get the smell of butyric acid out of that – its detectable at parts per million’.
In fact nothing would surprise me less than to predict that when Roger is waiting at the queue for the pearly gates he will absent mindedly run his finger over the pearly balustrades and upon reaching the front of the queue will make an observation to a bemused St Peter along the lines of:
‘pearls – nothing more than concentric layers of calcium carbonate – in the form of aragonite of course – accounts for the iridescence you know’
...before casually strolling on with a raffish wave of his hand as a bemused St Peter scrambles to check the fact on Wikipedia on his iPad.
The above to one side. On behalf of all Roger’s students, all the industrialists, researchers, professors, lecturers, technicians, and maybe even accountants. I would like to say two symbolic words which will never capture the true meaning behind them. Thank you Dr Bolton. A true educator, a raconteur, a scholar, an academic and a steward of society’s knowledge whose mission it was to redistribute said knowledge. Your legacy is beyond measure and we all loved you.
A kind, funny modest and self-effacing man, with an impish sense of humour, who always gave far more than he ever took. His legacy is in all the people he educated and now are equipped to educate others and carry out research for society’s good. He was a true gentleman as well as being a true gentle-man……