With this third number of the sixteenth volume of The Social Contract, Bob Kyser closes out his fifteen-plus years as managing editor of our quarterly journal. He turns over the reins with our hearty thanks for a job well and cheerfully done.
I first met Bob as the Reverend Robert Kyser when he came to Petoskey in 1974 to take up his duties as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, to which our family belonged. It soon was apparent that our new pastor's middle name was "community involvement." Over the fifteen years of his tenure he organized interdenominational Bible study for the city's pastors, chaired the commission to rewrite the city charter, served on the boards of Planned Parenthood, the choral society, the community theater, and the building of a retirement village. If truth be known, his favorite hat was that of chaplain to the city fire department.
Bob and I worked on many social issues together and helped form several discussion and book study groups which are still active after more than a quarter century. His undergraduate degree in philosophy with a minor in history has shown through in these endeavors.
I am a firm believer in cronyism picking people with whom one has a long history and resultant good assurances as to how the association will turn out. When Bob decided to retire from the ministry at age 62, he left the Petoskey pastorate for a few short-term assignments in Ohio that would carry him to that goal.
That was just the time that I decided to have a go at a quarterly journal as a "house organ" for the immigration reform movement. I asked Bob to become managing editor and he agreed. In 1990 we bought him the necessary computer equipment and software. He taught himself how to use it and the rest is history. In addition to typesetting and composing 63 issues of the journal he has typeset several books for the Social Contract Press. He tells us he will very much miss working with the stellar scholars and activists who have gravitated to the pages of The Social Contract.
Bob and his wife, Audrey, will now have more time to spend with children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and to travel. The community study/discussion groups will continue under his leadership and occasionally he will carry through projects for this office, one of which will be to look forward to a volume to be entitled The Best of the First Twenty Years of The Social Contract.
Again, our thanks to Bob Kyser for his service to The Social Contract Press a colleague whom we plan to help "wear out rather than rust out."