Dr. Ross Roy, emeritus professor of literature

Dr. Ross Roy

Dr. G. Ross Roy was recently awarded the Order of the Palmetto by S.C. Governor Mark Sanford. The award was given at the closing banquet of an international conference commemorating the 250th anniversary of the birth of 18th- century Scottish poet Robert Burns.

After the governor's award, Roy and his wife Lucie went in early June to the University of Glasgow, Scotland, for Roy to receive an honorary doctor of laws degree.

Roy was born in Montreal, where his father worked with his grandfather in a huge national wholesale florist operation. Before that, Roy's father was a chemist with Ford in Michigan, where Ford discontinued wood in its car bodies, which in turn discontinued the need of a factory chemist.

Roy's mother was an Anglo- French volunteer in France during WWI.

Just about everyone in Montreal was fluent in both French and English, but there was also a strong population of Italian immigrants, almost as many as in New York City. Roy was practically trilingual.

A distance runner on the school track team, Roy finished Montreal's Westhill High School, and he immediately enrolled in Concordia College, still in Montreal. After only one year, though, he had to leave Concordia for the war effort. It was 1942, and Roy joined the Canadian Air Force.

He trained as a navigator on what the Canadians called the Anson bomber. Once in England, he trained more on the Dakota, which was what the American Army Air Corps called the C- 46, while civilians knew it as the DC- 3. The Dakota Roy flew was also a glider tug.

Roy navigated while his planes dropped paratroopers on some missions and tugged gliders on others.

At the end of WWII, Roy was the Canadian equivalent of a First Lieutenant. He came home in time to re- enroll in Concordia in the fall of 1946. Initially, he considered horticulture in order to join his father and his grandfather in the wholesale florist business. His grandfather, William Omiston Roy, was also a well- established landscape architect. He laid out Henry Ford's Michigan grounds and the Florida estate of Thomas Edison.

But it was his grandfather's love of the work of Robert Burns and Roy's first trip to Scotland at age 8 that made the most impression on Roy. His collection of Scottish literature, now on the stacks at USC's Cooper Library, began with his grandfather. Today, it is the world's largest outside Scotland.

Roy focused on literature. He went to the University of Montreal where he scored a fellowship to study at the University of Strasbourg, France, in Alsace. He taught English, and he met his wife Lucie, a student at Strasbourg.

The Roys moved to Canada so Roy could teach in the Royal Military College in Quebec.

Another scholarship, this time from the French government, encouraged Roy's pursuit of a doctorate at the University of Paris. This was during dissatisfaction with the French presence in Algeria, around 1955- 57, and there were occasional uprisings, to include machine gunners on the Champs Elysees.

By the time Paris calmed down with the rise of de Gaulle and the Fifth Republic, Roy had relocated to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where little resembled Paris or Alsace or Montreal. Unhappy with the movie offerings, Roy organized and scored the funding for a film club.

Roy was equipped with two doctorates, one in comparative literature from the University of Paris and another in English from the University of Montreal.

He and Lucie returned to the University of Montreal, and this time he became an associate professor of English for three years. Then there was an opportunity he took for two years at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. His department chairman, Jack Guides, left for the University of South Carolina, and Roy soon followed.

At Texas Tech Roy had already begun his journal,

Studies in Scottish L iterature, and Guides encouraged him to grow the journal at USC. Today, it is the world's foremost journal on Scottish literature.

One regret Roy shares is his efforts to establish a Scotland House in New York City, something suitable for a fit next to the Harvard Club or the Penn Club on W. 44th St. near the New York Public Library. Lady Hamilton of Scotland, now deceased, was a big help, but it just didn't come together.

What did come together was the G. Ross Roy Medal given with 1,000 pounds traveling money every year to the best student on a Scottish topic. Roy also put together the Roy Scholars program, which is a memorial fellowship that brings scholars here to access Roy's Burns Collection at USC's Thomas Cooper Library.