Dexter M. Roberts

Dexter Merritt Roberts, 84, of Missoula, died Saturday, June 13, 2015, at St. Patrick Hospital. Farewell to a great mountain man, beloved teacher, Buddhist scholar, world traveler, human rights advocate, warrior for wilderness, jazz lover and prolific poet.

Dexter was born March 31, 1931, in Syracuse, New York, to Adelaide Laura Dexter (Newport, New York) and David Lewis Roberts (North Wales). He was the youngest of three sons.

He grew up in suburban New York where his father sold life insurance and his mother was a homemaker. He often spoke fondly of his mother as a lover of birds, home life, and family. As a boy Dexter looked up to his father and brothers, all athletes, who coached him in the popular sports of the day, football, baseball and basketball. He recalled spending many happy days in the "brotherhood of guys," riding his bike across town to play sports in makeshift baseball diamonds and vacant lots.

When he was a small boy, Dexter's great-grandmother lived with his family. He remembered her as a quiet meditative presence, who spoke mostly Welsh, and called him "great-grandmother's darling little boy," when she read to him and they played checkers together.

The family spent summer vacations in a rented cottage on Lake Champlain, where he recalled beautiful beaches and learning to swim. His father taught Dexter to fly fish while visiting relatives in upstate New York. This became a revered activity and gave him a lifetime appreciation for the natural world.

Dexter attended high school in Rochester, New York. He was a good student and became a star basketball player. He attended Colgate University on a sports scholarship, and recalled the excitement of competing in a basketball tournament at Madison Square Garden. At Colgate, Dexter studied English and served as the president of his fraternity.

Following his graduation from college, he served two years in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War, aboard the USS Berry, where he spent his time swabbing decks, making friends and travelling the world. After the Navy, Dexter worked as a newspaper reporter and then moved to Palo Alto, California, to attend Stanford University where he earned a PhD in American Literature. At Stanford he met and married Susan Geary. They moved to Missoula, where he worked as a professor at the University of Montana and taught American literature from 1962-1992. Dexter and Susan raised three children, and divorced in 1975.

Starting in the late 1960s, the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam war movement came to Missoula. Inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dexter began to work with Methodist and Lutheran student organizers and the small group of African American students who had come to Montana to study at the university. Together, they started an "action seminar," which organized black and white students to test Missoula rental practices, and observed that landlords regularly discriminated based on race. The group also successfully got the mayor of Missoula to sign a civil rights proclamation.

Moved by King's death in 1968, Dexter took a one-year sabbatical to focus full-time on civil rights. He moved his young family to Buffalo, New York, where he worked as the director of education at a jobs placement program helping inner-city African Americans graduate from high school and find employment. After returning to Missoula in 1970, he became active in the anti-Vietnam war movement, helping organize demonstrations and counseling young men who wished to become conscientious objectors and avoid the draft.

During this time Dexter's activism began to shift towards environmentalism. The family moved into a house up Pattee Canyon, where Dexter spent hours hiking in the woods and learning to identify songbirds. In 1971, the Round River Experiment at the University of Montana was created for outdoor education, and Dexter signed on as a teacher. In 1975, Dexter became a founding faculty member of the Wilderness and Civilization Program at the University of Montana. Students and professors took 12-day backpack trips into the wilderness, while studying liberal arts course work. Dexter focused his teaching on the American environmental writers, including Henry David Thoreau, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Edward Abby, and Annie Dillard. The program inspired countless students to take on the work of environmental preservation and Dexter spent much of the rest of his life fighting to protect wild lands, waterways and wildlife.

During the 1970s Dexter also became interested in Zen Buddhism. He and his wife, Susan, created a zendo meditation center, in their home and hosted weekly sitting meditation sessions. He also spent time studying at the San Francisco and Green Gulch Zen Center. Later, his focus shifted to Tibetan Buddhism and the teachings of the Dalai Lama. After working with refugee Tibetans resettling in Missoula, Dexter traveled to Dharamsala, India, home of the Tibetan government in exile, where he spent time working at the Tibetan Library of Works and Archives, and edited a book on the Dalai Lama's teachings "Generous Wisdom," published in 1992.

During these years and later, Dexter traveled throughout Asia, often accompanied by his son, visiting ethnic minority regions in Thailand, Japan's northern island of Hokkaido, the subtropical forests of Taiwan, and the Buddhist mountains of China. After retirement he also worked as a volunteer naturalist at a lodge in Silver City, New Mexico.

Dexter was a prolific writer, with hundreds of poems and thoughts collected in spiral notebooks and on scraps of paper over many years. In 2012 Dexter's book of poetry "Imagine a World" was published. Much of his writing was about the natural world.

For much of the last 30 years of his life, Dexter lived in a cabin outside Missoula at the top of Grant Creek Canyon, just below the Rattlesnake Wilderness line. From his house he heard the sound of the creek and the spring call of the varied thrush, chickadees and nuthatches. He shared the company of deer, bears, and an occasional mountain lion.

His last years were spent reading, meditating, conversing with friends and family, and playing checkers with his grandchildren when they visited.

He is survived by his children, Martha Roberts (Jon Read) of St. Paul, Minnesota, Sylvia Roberts (Peter Coe) of San Francisco, California, Dexter Tiff Roberts (Sun Min) of Beijing, China; his grandchildren, Ariana Roberts of Beijing, and Theo Roberts-Coe of San Francisco; his nephews, nieces, and their families, and a lifetime of friends, colleagues, and students that shared his love for good books, poetry, Buddhism, backpacking and wilderness preservation.

A memorial service to celebrate Dexter's life will be held outdoors at his residence in Grant Creek on Friday, July 17, from 4 to 5 p.m., with light refreshments and time to gather following the service. For further information, contact Caroline Kurz (email: caroline@gardencityballet.org; phone: (406) 549-0514) or Sylvia Roberts (email: sylvvia@earthlink.net; phone: (415) 203-1538).

In lieu of flowers, consider making a donation honoring Dexter to any of the following organizations: National Resources Defense Council; The Clark Fork Coalition; Sierra Club; Earth Justice; Cornell Ornithology Lab; Alliance for the Wild Rockies; Amnesty International; Tibetan Children's Village (through Tibet House California), Southern Poverty Law Center; United Negro College Fund; Jeannette Rankin Peace Center.
Read Dexter Roberts's Obituary and Guestbook on www.missoulafuneralhomes.com.