The Rev. Robert T. “Bob” Dick

The Rev. Robert T. “Bob” Dick, gentle parish minister, lifelong pacifist, advocate for racial justice, and active volunteer for community service in retirement, died peacefully and in comfort at age 97 on May 31, 2014, at the Doolittle Home in Foxboro, Mass, where he had resided since 1994.

Although he was a student at Tufts’ Crane School of Religion in the early 1940s, Mr. Dick waived his wartime theological exemption and served as a conscientious objector in Civilian Public Service units for four years in New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York, working in forestry, on ward duty in mental hospitals, and as a subject in experiments in nutrition, high altitude, heat, and dehydration at the University of Rochester Medical School in New York. In later years he edited a booklet, Guinea Pigs for Peace: The Story of C.P.S. 115-R (1943–1946), about those experiments.

Robert Tyrrell Dick was born in Stockton, Illinois, on 17 December 1916, one of six children of Joseph R. Dick and Alma Tyrrell Dick. After his mother’s death when he was seven, Bob was raised primarily by an older sister. He attended the local Universalist church as a child and later told his son Jeff that “if it were not for the encouragement and support of the ‘ladies of the Universalist church’ he would not have gone to college nor into the ministry.” He was graduated from Stockton High School in 1935, where his fellow students elected him senior class president and foresaw his future career, in the school yearbook, as “President of the United States.” After thirteen months in the Civilian Conservation Corps in Idaho and Oregon, Mr. Dick attended the University of Dubuque (Iowa) for a time before going on to earn an AB degree from Tufts University in 1942. While on the summer work crew at Ferry Beach in the late 1930s, he met fellow crew member Helen Hersey, also a Crane student at Tufts and the daughter of Universalist minister Harry Adams Hersey. In 1943 they were married in Helen’s home town of Danbury, Conn. After finishing his wartime service, Bob returned to ministerial study, receiving his BD degree from Colgate-Rochester Divinity School in 1948.

Over the next thirty-six years, Mr. Dick went on to serve Universalist and UU parishes in the East and Midwest, first at the Universalist Church (now United Church–UCC) of Bristol, New York (1948-51), where he was ordained, as he recalls, “to the Christian ministry” on September 19, 1948. After three years there, he moved to the First Universalist Church of Lyons, Ohio (1951-57) and then back east as associate minister to the Universalist Church of West Hartford, Conn. (1957-59). He returned to Ohio to serve a circuit of Universalist churches in Belpre, Frost, and Little Hocking (1959-64), and then headed east once again to the ministry of the Universalist Church of South Acton (now the First Parish Church of Stow and Acton), Massachusetts (1964-67). A yoked ministry to the Universalist churches of Springfield (now UU) and Chester Depot in Vermont (1967-76) was followed by a call to the UU Fellowship of Elkhart, Indiana, where he served until retirement in 1984 and was designated minister emeritus.

In support to ministerial colleagues and the wider UU movement, Mr. Dick served on the board of the UU Service Committee, as a Good Officer in the NH/VT chapter of the UUMA, and as advisor to the Erie Shore Federation of Religious Youth.

In 1986, Bob and Helen moved back to Springfield, Vermont, and joined the UU congregation there where he had earlier served as minister. Two years later, in 1988, on the 40th anniversary of his ordination, the Springfield congregation also named him their own Minister Emeritus. In retirement, Bob became active as a hospice volunteer and in the local work of the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP), was a member of Springfield’s Senior Center Advisory Board, and had a leading role in the formation of a Vermont Chapter of the United Nations Association of the USA, serving on its board.

In his steady and faithful concern for peace, racial justice, and many other progressive social causes, the Rev. Mr. Dick was a fifty-year member of the interfaith peace organization, Fellowship of Reconciliation, a life member of the NAACP, and a charter member of Common Cause. In 1981 he was honored with the Adin Ballou Peace Award of the Unitarian Universalist Peace Fellowship. His and Helen’s work for peace lighted a path for others. Sandy and John Zinn, for example, recalled that they “got to know Bob & Helen in Elkhart from their involvement in local peace efforts. We were not members of [the UU Fellowship of Elkhart] at the time, but it was partly from their witness that we later joined. They lived their beliefs.”

In 1994 Bob and Helen moved to the Doolittle Home in Foxboro, Mass, and joined the Foxboro Universalist Church (UU). Helen died in 2008 after 65 years of marriage, but Bob continued to enjoy visits at the Doolittle Home from groups of local children.

Bob is survived by sons Nathan Dick of Estes Park Colorado, and Jeffrey Taft-Dick of Springfield, Vermont, a daughter Noreen Redd of San Diego, and grandchildren Jonathan, Joya and Philip Taft-Dick.

In lieu of a formal memorial service, Robert Dick’s life was remembered and honored as part of the Elkhart Fellowship’s annual Founders Day service on October 5, 2014, conducted by their minster, the Rev. Amy Kulesza DeBeck.

Mr. Dick’s ashes are buried alongside those of his late wife Helen in the Ladies Union Cemetery, Stockton, Illinois. Memorial gifts are encouraged either to the Doolittle Home, 16 Bird St., Foxboro, Mass. 02035, or to the UURMaPA Endowment Fund, c/o Paul L’Herrou, treasurer, UU Retired Ministers and Partners Association, 38 Kimball Avenue, #12, Ipswich, Mass. 01938.