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To present you with a brief biographical sketch of this enormously achieving, complex, vulnerable and proud man in the space allotted to me is a difficult task. I said proud, for he has much to be proud about. There are many others, students, colleagues and associates, who can enlarge upon his war years, his meaning and place in the scientific world, his prodigious talent as a teacher and talent scout, his administrative skills, etc. What I can do is relate some vignettes that may in themselves give one a flavor of Roy Grinker, some influences in his life, some of his early struggles to overcome a sense of deprivation of a father figure who was at hand yet distant.
The year is 1916 and Roy R. Grinker, age 16, steps off a train at Ann Arbor, where he is to matriculate at the University of Michigan. By his own admission he was shy, but knowledgeable in the world of books, which he voraciously read, despite his grandfather's repeated and still-remembered admonition not to do so, for the way people became insane was that they read too much. He was totally unsophisticated in the ways of the world. No one met him, no one told him where to go, what to do. In his boyish knickers he walked from the station to the campus and then chose a place to live at the edge of the campus on a street named Merry Court. Little did he realize at that time, that the