Roger Ebert receiving his honorary Doctorate in Humanities in 1994.
I didn鈥檛 realize what a truly special guy聽Roger Ebert聽(HonDocHum鈥�93) was until the first time I saw him type. His copy didn鈥檛 contain any typos.
Well, hardly any. Nobody鈥檚 perfect writing on a manual typewriter. But Roger came close.
It was August 1963, and we were at a college editors conference. Roger was editor of the聽Daily Illini. I was editor of the聽Colorado Daily.
Several of us were writing a charter and bylaws for the U.S. Student Press Association, which had been founded the year before. Roger was its first president.
And, being overly verbal and opinionated little dickens, we were driving ourselves nuts. At one point I was literally banging my head on the wall. (Roger would gleefully remind me of that whenever we met.)
Anyway, after listening to a couple hours of bickering, Roger said, 鈥淥K, I鈥檒l type up a summary of what we鈥檝e agreed to so far.鈥�
We hadn鈥檛 decided anything, but everyone was too tired to argue with him and needed a bathroom break. The room emptied, and Roger sat down at a typewriter that had materialized out of somewhere and started to bang away.
In about 10 minutes he produced a polished summation of all the stuff we had agreed on without realizing it. The prose had the same easy grace and Midwest directness with which he spoke and wrote for the next 50 years.
And the first draft had barely a typo, an x-out or a revision in it.
As one who always had an adversarial relationship with manual typewriters, I found this mind-boggling.
Here was a guy who could take people鈥檚 sloppy thinking and turn it into a polished draft at 60 words a minute. I knew there was something special going on here, and it wasn鈥檛 just his flying fingers. The special part was what was going on between his ears.
In 1970 I met Roger at Stapleton International Airport (of blessed memory) and drove him to 麻豆影院 for his first Conference on World Affairs. As we started up Davidson Mesa, the snow began to fall. The next day I measured 3 feet of snow in my yard. So I can honestly say I drove Roger Ebert to his first conference through a Colorado blizzard.
How did Roger feel about the conference he would attend 37 times?
鈥淢any felt, as I always did, that the conference was the time when you found out about what was new,鈥� he wrote in a memorial book about sociology professor聽Howard Higman聽(Art鈥�31, MSoc鈥�42), the conference founder.
Of Higman, he wrote, 鈥淗e was large. He contained multitudes. He would have filled Falstaff with envy,鈥� and 鈥渉e was a man who liked to be part of a good conversation.鈥�
That pretty well describes Roger, too, but I would substitute 鈥淒r. Johnson鈥� for Falstaff in Roger鈥檚 case. Roger was just as smart, just as witty and just as opinionated 鈥� and a lot better tempered.
