Robert Grant Crist was known to many different people in many different ways: he was a husband, father, friend, colleague, and professor. Everyone, however, no matter how they knew him, knew him as Bob Crist, historian—an appellation with which I feel sure he would have been fully satisfied, and the one most familiar to the readers of this publication.
Perhaps many others could have done better justice to Bob Crist than I. Although he was a friend of my parents, I came to know him best when I was a history graduate student in his class at Penn State Capitol Campus. Of all people who ever majored in history in college or graduate school I must be the one who was least interested in writing for publication. Professor Crist, however, encouraged me to do research that resulted in a paper about the late Pennsylvania State Senator George N. Wade, which was eventually published in this journal. He was anxious to have this project proceed while many of the Senator's friends and colleagues were still available for consultation—that is, before the primary sources were gone.
Dr. Crist had an ongoing concern for the preservation of local history, and for recruiting people to do historical research for purpose of publication (notwithstanding their reluctance). He was always conscious of the uncertain availability of human source material, which stemmed from his first local historical research project: a paper about Robert Whitehill, colonial statesman. Whitehill was one of the prominent but little known political figures in the early years of this nation's history. This lack of recognition was in part due to the fact that Whitehill's activity occurred in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, which was at that time (and is still to some Philadelphians) perceived as a remote, unknown, and therefore unimportant, region. The difficulty in obtaining source material for that project would have a lasting effect on Crist's views about historical research in the future.
Bob Crist had not always been headed for a career as a historian. When a student at Dickinson College during World War II, he was drafted into the United States Army, assigned to the intelligence corps, and sent to the University of Pennsylvania to study German language. By some quirk of army reasoning he was subsequently sent to the Pacific to serve on the staff of General Douglas MacArthur. After the war he returned to Dickinson, where he completed his college course work not in history but, in light of his army training, in German. His interest in history, was, however, not diminished, and he continued his research, writing and publishing material on local history for the remainder of his life.
When, in middle age, after a career in public relations he applied for admission as a graduate student in history at Penn State, there was some reluctance to admit this fellow with an undergraduate degree in German. When he submitted evidence of all the research he had done (by this time he had written and published about a dozen local history monographs) he was accepted into the history department on a probationary status. He proved to be more than worthy as a student, and eventually earned his Ph.D. in 1981 and later a place on the Penn State Capitol Campus faculty, where I became acquainted with him.
It was a time for great rejoicing that first week of Fall 1776. In the capital on the Delaware the good people of Philadelphia, still exhilarated from the wine of national independence first sipped only two months before were sampling another heavy draught—life under a new and radically democratic State government which had just replaced an oft times unpopular proprietorship. One in congruous event diluted the pure air of celebration.