In Memoriam
Roger Kerley
Virginia Kerley, Roger's widow, sent the following information.
"Roger passed away on October 14, 2011. He is survived by his wife Virginia of Washington DC and Parkton, Maryland, his daughter Dana Jimenez of Warner Robins, Georgia, and three grandchildren. His daughter Catherine Zech preceded him in death (2005)."
Below is a remembrance of Roger by Larry Speidell ’64, Yale classmate and lifelong friend. Larry wrote the piece at the time of Roger’s death, and sent it to us in March 2022.
Roger Kerley
Freshman at Yale, 1960
Larry Speidell
Freshman at Yale, 1960
Roger Kerley — My Friend
For Isabela, David, and Isaac
By Larry Speidell ’64
August 2012
Larry & Roger, Central Park, August 1943Roger was a dear lifelong friend. I probably knew him for more years than anyone else on earth. Friends like Roger are hard to come by. He was a rock… solid, insightful, reliable, and creative. He was also tons of fun to hang out with and to make mischief with! Here are a few vignettes from my days with Roger.
Harriet & Roger, Central Park, June 1944
We met practically at birth, babbling in our baby carriages on trips to Central Park from our neighborhood (New York’s Madison Avenue around 88th and 89th Streets).
Those earliest days are a bit of a blur. But it was wartime, and some of the dads were away. Moms would take us to the park when weather permitted, and we were soon crawling around and then toddling. Our hangout was the vicinity of the Alexander Hamilton statue near the reservoir, but sometimes we’d venture south toward the Metropolitan Museum (in the background of the photo with Harriet). Cleopatra’s Needle was another favorite hangout.
There is a small treasure trove of old coins we buried in the dirt by the roots of an old tree, roughly 50 feet northwest of Ham’s statue.
Birthday parties were a big deal to us kids, and Roger was always among the friends who came to our apartment and sat on the living room floor for movies (television didn’t exist!). My dad ran a small company that made commercial and advertising motion pictures, so he had access to a lot of old films such as the early classic “The Great Train Robbery.” For my 4th or 5th birthday party, however, there were several cartoons plus a short scenic film of farm life that included a herd of cows. Even in black and white, it seemed so real that Roger rose to his feet, ran to the screen… and patted a cow.
We grew older and went off to grade school, Trinity for Roger and Allen Stevenson for me. Still, we found time after school for handball against building walls and racing our bikes around the block (terrorizing shoppers coming out of Gristede’s market and Liggett’s drugs). Our neighborhood in the Upper East Side in the 1950s was solid middle class, much more modest than it is today (now called “Carnegie Hill” after the Carnegie mansion on Fifth Avenue at 91th Street). The old comic-book and bubble-gum shops have closed. Now Starbucks and upscale boutiques have taken their place.
In those days, kids had a lot of freedom to go around on their own. We had our own city-bus passes, so we’d ride the Madison Avenue bus or simply walk the ten blocks to school — all by ourselves. The picture below shows the corner of 88th and Madison taken from the window of my apartment 7A at 19 East 88th Street (a block south of Roger’s place on 89th). This was a brisk spring afternoon in 1955, when we were twelve. A red 1955 Ford station wagon is making a u-turn (Madison hadn’t changed to one-way uptown traffic yet). Further down the block, a 1953 Ford coupe is parked in front of Luria’s Wines and Spirits, which was a mysterious place to me, filled with strange potions my parents seemed to enjoy. At the near corner, a 1955 Cadillac is parked in front of Schraffts restaurant, one of a chain of medium-priced restaurants that featured delicious chicken pot pies and fabulous chocolate sundaes. Old ladies enjoying their afternoon tea at Schraffts were surprised to discover that some of the packaged sugar cubes in the dish on their table were merely empty wrappers, or even that the sugar had been replaced by a small blocks of wood… who could have done that?
Roger and I went our separate ways in the late fifties for high school, but miraculously we were both accepted to Yale, class of 1964. A bizarre ritual of registration day at Ivy League schools in the fall of 1960 included a trip to the Payne Whitney Gymnasium to stand in line, stark naked, for “posture pictures.” When called forward, each freshman stood on a rotating platform for snapshots, front, rear, and side. The theory was that body types reflected personality types, with the three main species being endomorphs, ectomorphs, and mesomorphs. Years later this line of research was thoroughly discredited, and authorities decided that it wouldn’t be a good idea to keep nude pictures of Yale graduates like George W. Bush… or Roger and me. They were all destroyed — so it is said…
New York Times, January 15, 1995
Cars were prohibited for freshmen, but after that we were eager for wheels. I got a 1961 Corvair which broke down frequently. Roger, however, bought a real sports car, a light yellow 1959 Triumph TR 3A (the first of several he owned). Riding in that car was heaven, although with side curtains instead of roll-up windows it was a bit drafty and damp… and it broke down almost as much as my Corvair. We joined the Yale Sports Car Club and participated in time-speed rallies in the countryside around New Haven. The idea was to follow instructions along a preset route at a planned modest speed. What typically happened, however, was that you couldn’t figure out the directions, got lost, and then drove at breakneck speed to make up for lost time. It is a miracle we didn’t get arrested… or worse. At a turn on West Rock, our friend Art Dodge drove into a pile of rocks with his maroon 1961 Corvette (a high-school graduation present!). At our 25th reunion, Arthur waxed philosophical: “Do you know how come we survived so long?” he posed…”Because we learned how to drive drunk!”
Once, Roger and I set out a rally course for the Sports Car Club and proceeded to officiate the event. The problem was that I had borrowed our “official” stopwatch from my parents, but forgot to wind and test it. It turned out to be way off in keeping time, and we ignominiously accepted the winner’s claim that his watch was correct and ours was wrong!
I remember one moment in 1963 as though it were yesterday. Roger had borrowed his mom’s lovely new 1963 Buick Skylark coupe. It was cordovan metallic with a cream vinyl top and an aluminum V-8. One day after a spring rain outside the gate of Saybrook College, we “washed it” by simply wiping off the raindrops with a chamois. It glistened in the afternoon sun. I still use that trick to clean my own cars without soap or a hose. And when I do, I always think of Roger.
Arete
Roger and I had learned to sail, so we joined the Yale Yacht Club to use their 14-foot dinghies. Alongside the Club sat an old 22’ centerboard sloop that had been damaged in a fall hurricane, and we decided to salvage it. For a mere $300 (more like $3,000 in 2012 dollars), we were on the way to being yachtsmen….
Over the winter, we repaired fiberglass on the wooden hull, laminated new ribs, and bleached the mast with oxalic acid. We also caulked and caulked and caulked. I don’t think we ever did fix the leaky centerboard trunk. Over Christmas break, I repaired seams in the big dacron mainsail in my parents’ living room back in New York.
In February 1963 we decided that we needed a dinghy, and I knew of just the craft — at the summer camp where I’d taught sailing, halfway up the coast of Maine. For the trip, Roger produced his mom’s old but beautiful black 1957 Chevrolet Bel-Air sedan with roof racks.
Larry wishing he was in Florida instead of Maine…
Needless to say, it can get pretty cold in February in Maine. Never, however, can I recall so cold a night as the one we spent inside that ’57 Chevy, parked in the snow by the side of the road in Sargentville, Maine, huddled shivering in wafer-thin sleeping bags …
Somehow we survived the night, loaded the rowboat, and fled back down the coast. The skies cleared to reveal a crisp, bright, sparkling winter’s day. I remember driving down Route 1 on the west side of Penobscot Bay, with “Where Have All The Flowers Gone” by Peter, Paul and Mary on the radio.
In spring, we launched our craft named Arete (“excellence” — from Plato, Philosophy 101), and we planned a June cruise with our classmate Peter Cook down Long Island Sound to Mystic, across the Race to Shelter Island, then back along the Long Island shore to Roger’s homeport of Glen Cove.
The Artful Dodger ... dodging a tanker in the Race
Every day of that trip was an adventure, At dusk on the first day we nearly sank after a mere ten miles passing through Duck Island Roads, a channel near Clinton, Connecticut, when short steep waves poured water down the hole in the stern deck which we’d cut to mount our Evenrude 7.5 hp outboard (later we built a little sealed well back there so water couldn’t flood the hull).
The next day, we sailed to Mystic and enjoyed a night at Mystic Seaport. Then we narrowly avoided collisions in the Race while heading across toward Long Island. And we survived an uncomfortable night on a bug-infested beach on the forbidden eastern shore of Gardiner’s Island (privately owned). Another day, we sat out a storm in Smithtown. Finally, we made it to a good mooring for the summer in Glen Cove Harbor.
Roger and Peter at breakfast on the bug-infested beach at Gardiner’s Island
Arete was a good boat, and we sailed her through the summer. She never let us down — or sank under us — but one day at her mooring the rudder suddenly dropped off! My dad came to the rescue by asking the workshop crew at his motion-picture company to make a new wooden rudder. We beached Arete at low tide in Glen Cove Harbor and bolted it on with two long threaded rods. After another year we sold her to a classmate, breaking even financially but making a huge profit in the memories. Later on, Roger bought an old P-class racing sloop that we enjoyed sailing until she crumbled under the burden of age and wood rot.
Meanwhile, we continued our active interest in cars, acquiring three 1954 Ford station wagons for a total of $125. We rented them to the Yale Outing Club and may actually have made a small profit. To repair one of them, Roger and I rolled up our sleeves and did a valve job in his garage in Glen Cove. The set of socket wrenches I bought with Roger in an auto parts store in West Haven one night is the set I use to this day.
At last, we graduated from Yale and moved on. With the Vietnam War, we faced the draft. Roger joined the Coast and Geodetic Survey. I got into Business School and then joined the Navy. But coincidentally, we bought nearly identical cars in the fall of 1966 (great minds think alike!) Both were General Motors “A-body” post coupes… both were maroon. With great pride we took pictures in his mom’s driveway: Roger’s Buick Grand Sport and my Pontiac GTO. I sold mine in 1973, but found it again in 2009 and bought it back. Roger didn’t like his as much, so it was sold to make room for a yellow Porsche 912 that he kept for years.
These vignettes don’t begin to capture the meaning of Roger to me. Old friends that we grow up with know us in a complete and irreplaceable way that not even spouses or children can understand. Old friends were present at the creation of the adults that we became. They fit in our lives in the way old slippers fit on our feet. Roger was a precious friend — he still is.
Thank you, Roger!