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ON SATURDAY, 22 April 2006, at 3:00 p.m., a host of friends, former students, and colleagues gathered at the Ann Arbor home of the late D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Shack to his friends) to celebrate his life and scholarly achievements. This gathering was arranged by his widow, Kristine Zvirbulis, and the site chosen was the house where Shack lived and worked for the years that spanned his retirement from Harvard (1988) and his death on 28 November 2005. Those seventeen years were truly golden as measured by his scholarly productivity. Scarcely a day went by when he did not spend eight hours at his desk, in his basement study. Indeed, he could be found at that desk right up until a few months before his death, his constant companion being his favorite cat, Poppaea, who was provided with food and fresh water close by her loving master's desk. On 22 April, Poppaea, an eighteen-pound, gray and white feline, was decked out with a handsome mauve bow to greet the guests, while the other nine feline members of the household were temporarily confined to quarters. The twenty-second was to be Poppaea's day in the sun out of respect for her late master. Shack stories were shared on that occasion, and some of the old chestnuts were brought out for the umpteenth time in the spirit of the gathering. A few of these tales will be included in this memoir. In the world of academia, which is no stranger to eccentrics, Shack towered above most. The stories about his many idiosyncrasies are legion and are bound to be told and retold for many years to come.
In writing this memoir, I am fortunate to be able to draw upon certain remembrances entitled "Uncle David," which were prepared and distributed at the gathering in April by Shack's niece, Gillian Shackleton Hawley. In addition to the "oral tradition" that circulated on that day in April, Shack stories abound in the obituaries written by E. J. Kenney of Cambridge (Independent, 4 January 2006), by Ruth Scodel of the University of Michigan (Times, 22 December 2005), and by Richard Thomas of Harvard (Harvard Gazette, 8 December 2005), and a few of the tales are well worth repeating here. Those writers...