A Tribute to RDK

This post is exceptionally long, I apologize. When I was an undergraduate student at the greatest institution of higher learning in the world. I had a really awesome adviser. Even though I was a biology major, and he was a chemistry professor--I knew from the classes that I had with him that I wanted him to advise me on life/professional decisions. It just reminds you of the huge impact that teachers have on our lives. What follows is an old excerpt from a xanga post I wrote during undergrad, and subsequently, an article I wrote about him for the college newspaper (please excuse the horrendous prose--oh and by way of explaining the title of the article, Calvin's mascot is the Knight).

"Tonight was the best lab ever. I actually understood everything and RDK was on top of his game. He was joking around the entire night, which definitely made it fun. He was like, 'Well if only one student understood the lab tonight then I can be happy... I'm not going to say who that is (points at me).' And I said, 'Oh stop it!' in the most obnoxious voice I could do. To which he laughed, good times."

Arabian Knight shares experiences

By XXX XXX
Guest Writer

Shells whistle overhead. A stray rocket crashes into the balcony of a high rise apartment building. A professor is gunned down in a parking lot by a crazed student. While this may sound like the script from the latest Scorsese film, these were just some of the experiences of one Calvin professor during the Lebanese civil war.

“I got my bachelor’s degree from Calvin in 1965, and then I went to Wisconsin for my graduate work,” said Roger DeKock, professor of chemistry. “But [in the early 1970s] there was a downturn in the chemical industry.”

Forced to work in consecutive post-doctorate programs that took him first to Florida and then to England, professor DeKock was more than ready for a teaching position. “While I was [in England] I got this job offer to go to the American University of Beirut. It was my first job offer, so [my family and I] decided that even though it was further from home, we’d better take this job.”

The first couple of years that DeKock and his family spent in Beirut were relatively calm, but the political climate in Lebanon was about to take a turn for the worse.

“People had been muttering things to me at the university, like, ‘Boy this place (Beirut) is getting to be a powder keg — and it really was a powder keg. From the Palestinians in refugee camps to the way the government was set up, there were so many pressures because of the [tensions between] the Christians, Shiites and Sunnis.

“April 13th, 1975. I still remember the day very well. It was a Sunday; the weather was beautiful; it was spring. I remember hearing late in the day that some fighting had broken out in Beirut.”

News reports would later say that a Palestinian gunman had opened fire on several people leaving a church in a Christian suburb of Beirut. In retaliation, a Christian group detained and then killed 26 Palestinian civilians. The fighting would only intensify.

“From certain parts of the campus you could see [two] high-rise hotels; one was the Holiday Inn and the other one was the Beirut Hilton. Opposing factions took over the hotels, and they started shooting at each other from the tenth story up. I distinctly remember trying to sleep that night and hearing shelling in the distance, and that created a very uneasy feeling — to hear fighting going on when one was trying to sleep.”

As the fighting intensified, DeKock’s need to evacuate his family became increasingly evident. “The airport would close periodically and then we couldn’t possibly leave, but one evening my wife and I were going out to get some food, and we saw an airplane landing. I said to her, ‘we’re going to get you and the two children a ticket and get you out of here.’ They got out of [Beirut] before the worst came.”

The sectarian violence between warring factions almost always resulted in collateral damage. “I heard bullets flying on campus — there would just be stray bullets,” said DeKock.

The apartment complex where DeKock stayed was not any safer. “There was a Lebanese army post right on the Mediterranean about a block from our apartment complex called “Bain Militaire.” The part of town that I lived in was the Muslim side of the city — the Christian side was the East side, and periodically the people running the rockets on the East side would try to take out that officer’s club.

“But they weren’t that good at aiming. If you heard the rockets go over you were safe, because they had overshot and they would probably go into the Mediterranean, but sometimes they would undershoot. We had one that landed on our street. It was at night.

“It was a huge explosion, and I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, what happened?’ But after everything calmed down, there was no shouting or screaming, so we guessed that nobody got killed or injured. We went out in the morning and looked, [and saw] that the rocket had hit on the sixth story balcony across the street and brought down the balcony on some parked cars down below — those cars were totally pancaked under concrete.

“Another thing that I noticed was that people who were normally unstable would really go off the deep end during times of war. That must have happened to one student, because he came onto campus with a gun — this was the spring of ’76. He came and killed two deans; one was the Dean of Student Affairs and the other was the Dean of Engineering.

“We heard on campus that there was some shooting, so we were told to shut our office door and turn our light off because we didn’t know who this person was shooting at. A few hours later we got the all clear and were told it was safe to leave. I went to walk home, and as I was walking by the School of Engineering, I walked by the pool of blood where the Dean of Engineering had been killed in the parking lot. He had tried to outrun the student.”

The atmosphere in the classrooms took on a different type of tension. “[Students] didn’t start talking politics to each other on campus — they knew not to do that. It’s like here at Calvin, if you know that somebody is a Bush supporter and you’re not, you just decide between each other to keep quiet. I think that there was a lot of disagreement among students but they didn’t start getting into shouting matches.”

The effects of the civil war stretched into other areas of civilian life. “I spent a lot of time just trying to get groceries. Something that would’ve taken me 30 minutes a day here, now could take two hours, waiting in lines to get bread, milk or meat.”

As many expatriates fled war-torn Beirut, anything that could not be taken on a plane was left behind. “Several of the people that we knew had pets, and they all left them behind with me. I didn’t want to just turn them loose, because when people started to leave, they just let their pets run loose in the city, and that was a horrible life [for the animals].

“I ended up with all kinds of propane gas cylinders that you would use for cooking. When people left, [all of their unused cylinders] ended up with me. I had 10 propane gas cylinders, and when I left I passed them on to someone else.”

The roughness of war contrasted the beauty of Beirut at peacetime. “When we lived there [before the civil war] people called Beirut the Paris of the Middle East. Arabs from the gulf countries would all come to Lebanon in the summer because the climate was so moderate.”

Because of the proximity to both the mountains and the Mediterranean, Beirut was once a popular tourist destination. “The mountains were about a 30 minute drive [from the Mediterranean]. People used to say that you could go swimming in the morning and skiing in the afternoon,” said DeKock.

In the summer of ’76, DeKock decided enough was enough. “The university would close periodically, the hotels were burning, the downtown — which was about three miles from where I lived — was destroyed while I was there. I left because it was dangerous, I thought, ‘why not get out while I can?’ I didn’t like being away from my family.”

From the mid-‘70s to the ‘90s the civil war in Lebanon continued in one form or another, and although formal warring has ceased, the area remains a hotbed of political strife, as evidenced by the violence between Hezbollah and Israel this past summer.

Professor DeKock had to send his family back to the United States for safety reasons while he spent time in Beirut alone.

Besides seeing war and violence first-hand, the DeKock family had experiences unlike many other young families.

DeKock, a professor of chemistry, lived and taught in a war-torn Beirut, Lebanon, in the 1970s.