A Tribute to Roy Keller
By Fran Reynolds
There we were– in a MU classroom! Roy and I with our 2018 MU Asian Affairs Center
LEAD class. Undergrads from Korea and Japan were our “charges” for a semester. Our task was to teach them the principles of good leadership and good writing in English.

Roy was a marvelous teacher. He was a grammarian and taskmaster in the art of
writing clean, clear, proper English sentences. I marveled at his knowledge of grammar
(something I never mastered!) and his ability to convey this to the students understandably. For example, Roy loved baseball, so we invented some preposition games around baseball, e.g. “on the base, at bat, in the field,” etc. Every week the students turned in a journal writing about their thoughts, questions, and feelings about what they were experiencing and learning. He spent hours reading those papers, writing in the margins and on post-it notes. He always found the positive parts of the writings and gently critiqued the parts that needed work. The student’s writing improved dramatically. I was in awe!

Roy was a storyteller – a raconteur of growing up in Arkansas, of army life in Korea, of
baseball (his great love), of graduate school, teaching and of family and friends. Those stories fascinated all who read or heard them. He wrote many stories in our UU Life Writers’ group and we all looked forward to them.

We were teaching partners for four years. I think we were a good team and we were
good friends. I miss him - and his stories.