In Memoriam: Robert G. L. Waite (1919-1999)

Robert George Leeson Waite, pioneering psychohistorian and Brown Professor of History, Emeritus, Williams College, suffered a massive stroke and died on October 4, 1999, at the age of 80. Born in Cartwright, Manitoba, where his father was a minister of the United Church of Canada, Waite grew up as a “P.K.,” a “Preacher’s Kid,” in the prairie towns of Manitoba and Minnesota. In telling stories of his boyhood, he could capture the flavor of life in these small towns, adopting the cadence, the expressions, and the lilting accents of the Scandinavian farmers and their families he knew so well. In the fall of 1937, Waite entered Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the midst of the Depression, when ministers of rural churches, like his father, were mostly paid “in kind.” To supplement his scholarship and to earn whatever spending money he could, Waite held a variety of jobs, from working in the open pit mines of the Mesabi range in northern Minnesota to guarding the purported corpse of John Wilkes Booth in a traveling carnival. Upon graduating from Macalester in 1941, he entered military service from which he was discharged three years later with the rank of corporal—a distinction he insisted that be included in his curriculum vitae. With weak eyes and a deaf ear, he was assigned to limited duties, one of which was guarding the Mendota Bridge across the Mississippi River in St. Paul. In later years, he told his grandson that he performed his task so well that no enemy plane had ever dared to bomb the Mendota Bridge while he was guarding it.