Recently I was reminiscing with my partner, Karen, about our college days, and I was sharing with her about my various roommates at the University of Rochester. The most important of those roommates was Dick Tropp. We roomed together for the second semester of our freshman year. We became friends during the first semester, and then, because neither of us had anything in common with our existing assigned roommates, I exchanged places with his roommate. We were very close during that semester. We shared a lot of humor. I showed Karen one of the photos of Dick on this site, and she asked me if that’s how I remember him. I told her, “Yes, except he had a full head of hair then, and I always picture him smiling or laughing.”
My father had given me a copy of Mark Twain’s bawdy Fireside Conversations in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (or “1601”), and Dick and I took turns reading passages, changing our voices and using British accents. There was a time when people on our dormitory hall called us “fags who go to concerts” (we were not gay, but we did go to concerts). Because our first two names were both Richard David, we put name tags in the receptacles on the outside of the door to our room that said, “Richard David I, fag who goes to concerts” and “Richard David II, fag who goes to concerts.” We both were studying German, and we would make up German words as we walked around the campus.
Dick’s photos and writings on this site really don’t convey his strong sense of humor. Sometimes that sense of humor could be really dry. For example, the motto for the University of Rochester is “Meliora,” which is Latin for “better.” In a moment of cynicism about the university, Dick said the motto should really be “Meliora, ma non Troppo.” That’s a riff on the musical tempo marking, “Allegro ma non Troppo” (fast and lively, but not too much so). So the new motto for the U of R would have meant “better, but not too much better.”
During the semester we roomed together, we both joined a newly-forming fraternity that was more of a social club. By the end of the semester, Dick dropped out, as he was deep down what students called a “GDI” (or G-d-damned independent). One semester later I dropped out, too. Seems that Dick was always a couple of steps ahead of me.
The following year, Dick elected to move to a wing in another dormitory that was a kind of intentional community for intellectuals/beatniks. I didn’t quite fit in with that group at that time, and I moved to another dorm. I only saw Dick a few times after that, but I did visit him at least once in his room.
The next time I saw him after we had graduated from the U of R was in Berkeley in the summer of 1966, while I was in graduate school in St. Louis and on a fellowship. I had chosen to spend the summer in Berkeley rather than St. Louis, and my excuse for doing so was taking a mathematics course at U.C. (Cal) which I was barely interested in. Dick and I went to Yosemite for a weekend with a couple of other people. I think that was the last time I saw him.
After finishing graduate school and teaching mathematics for four years in an inner-city college in the nation’s capital, I dropped out of academia in 1973 and moved to Berkeley. I learned some practical skills and then moved to a rural area of Northern California. Not unlike Dick Tropp – as I learned later – I wanted to be part of a community, and I had visions of a just, egalitarian society. By 1978, I was living on a ranch in the hills above Ukiah, and Peoples Temple and Jonestown were frequently the talk of the town. In fact, many of the people of mainstream Mendocino County were hostile to any kind of communitarian lifestyle. One member of the County Board of Supervisors explained his personal hostility to me, simply responding to my question by saying, “Sun Moon and Jim Jones,” both of whom had had communes in the county. I tried to assure him that there were no cults on the ranch where I was living, and that virtually all of the “counterculture” crowd wanted to have nothing to do with authoritarian cult-like communities. He eventually came to understand that.
In November 1978, my parents contacted me to tell me they had read that Dick and his sister, Harriet, were among the dead in Jonestown. They also told me that Dick had been the head of the Jonestown school. I was shocked to hear all that. My next reaction was that Dick must have been enticed by the interracial nature of Peoples Temple and the social-justice aspect of it. But I was never able to understand how Dick would have been drawn in either to Christianity (or any religion, for that matter) or to an authoritarian community where the leader claimed to be God-like. After all, I knew Dick to be fiercely independent, intellectually and otherwise.
During the past 47 years, I have frequently wondered how Dick got so caught up with Jim Jones. But, as I see now, Dick, like his sister, were in positions of power and thus had at least the illusion that they could help steer the community in a way that aligned with their values. In addition, they must have been attracted by the many good things that Jones did in the earlier years of Peoples Temple. I’m guessing that they were like the proverbial frog in a pot of slowly boiling water.
My reminiscences of Dick led me to search for him online, which is how I came upon this site. I cannot count the many hours that I have spent since then reading letters from Dick and Harriet, and from other people about them and about Peoples Temple more generally. The experience has shed a lot of light for me about the allure of Peoples Temple and Jonestown, although it has also deepened my repulsion of autocratic cult leaders. And I always regret that Dick Tropp didn’t get out of that pot before it boiled over.
(Rich Weiner is a mostly retired public interest lawyer living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is also one of the main organizers of a local non-profit dedicated to helping people age in place in their homes.)