Rob Woutat died in January 2019 at the age of 80. I was a student of Rob’s over a period of five years at St Paul Academy in St Paul, from the first year he taught English at the school. In addition to English classes with him I was in six plays he directed over my last three years in high school.
Rob wrote me a college recommendation that I have no doubt was responsible for my admission to Dartmouth and thereby changed my life entirely for the better. Fortunately for me, Dartmouth required only one teacher recommendation at the time. I owed him. When I returned to the school to teach for the year before I went to law school, Rob was a warm and supportive colleague.
Rob had a dry sense of humor and wonderful clarity in his style. He was a student of American humor and a master of understatement. A humble teacher of large enthusiasms — Mark Twain among them — Rob put One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on the reading list to cap off our year studying American literature, before anyone knew who Ken Kesey was. At my graduation Rob handed me a gift-wrapped paperback copy of A Treasury of American Political Humor, edited by Leonard Lewin. I still have it in my library. At $1.25, it is one of the most thoughtful gifts anyone has ever given me.
For several years Rob wrote a humor column for the St. Paul neighborhood weekly Highland Villager. He gave a reading of his favorites at an evening event the year I taught with him. I wish he had collected a best-of, but he did write two books that remain available: the memoir Dakota Boy: A Childhood In Memory (2003) and the true crime account Rosalina’s Story: A Trail of Mayhem (2014).
Rob left the Twin Cities and moved to Bremerton, Washington. There he wrote a weekly column for the Kitsap Sun, where David Nelson was his editor. Nelson remembered Rob in the column “Saying an unexpected goodbye to Rob Woutat,” with links to several of Rob’s columns. Rob wrote his own obituary in the 2011 Kitsap Sun column “Better early than never…my obituary.”
I had looked forward to seeing Rob turn up at my 50th high school class reunion in 2019, as he did to our 40th in 2009, but I waited too long to reconnect with him. There is a lesson I should have learned long ago in there somewhere.
