Robert Redfern-West
Feb. 10, 1944-Sept. 10, 2024
Palo Alto, California
Robert’s life began in Los Angeles and ended some 400 miles to the north, in Palo Alto. The intervening years would find him at home in the world, everywhere seeking adventure and plumbing scholarly resources in his voracious quest for knowledge. Robert’s mind was a source of wonder to all who came to know him. He possessed the rare gift of absorbing and remembering an encyclopedic amount of material from a range of disciplines, synthesizing it, and presenting it in a whole new light.
He was the son of refugees, Austrian Katerina (Kitty) Meyer and Czech John Vislojil, who in 1938 fled the advancing Nazi invasion of central Europe with their toddler, Richard, to seek safety and opportunity in the USA. As the family drove westward toward Los Angeles, Kitty would decide in exasperation to change their surname to West when Vislojil proved to be unpronounceable by their new countrymen.
Robert attended both public and parochial schools in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, earned a BA and an MA in History at UCSB, and was invited by his History mentor to join him for post-grad work at Trinity College, Dublin. The three years he spent in Ireland were seminal, primarily due to the contacts he made. As with the friendships he formed throughout his life, he courted and treasured those connections.
When his studies ended, Robert left Ireland without his then wife, Diane, and young daughter, Gabriella, and headed back home. As he considered the future, he felt that a career in publishing was appealing and took an entry level job with Prentice Hall in Denver, where he stayed for two years, then accepted an editorial position with Houghton Mifflin in Boston. In the late 1980s, having found that he was temperamentally unsuited to the confines of the corporate publishing arena, he took a more daring path and founded his own scholarly publishing company, Academica Press, whose primary function was the publication of scholarly monographs. Piloting his own ship offered him several advantages: a fairly steady income, stimulating opportunities for discourse with intellectual stars, and the freedom to enjoy any number of shore excursions when they beckoned. His growing reputation at Academica coupled with his Roman Catholic background would eventually open the door to the crowning achievement of his career: the publication of the personal papers of Pope John Paul II, for which he received a papal order.
The aforementioned shore excursions could fill a book. Back on American soil, once more a bachelor, Robert was free to move about the country. He was well-suited to the task. Not only was he tall, broad-shouldered, and handsome, he was an elegant dresser. His roguish wit--delivered in a rich baritone--sealed the deal, and Robert was soon much in demand in local social circles. In due course he married Jennifer Dowley, a union that would not only gift him with two children, Addison and Marion, but would also chart his peripatetic course for the next two decades as Jennifer’s blossoming career in arts management took them from one post to another. In each new setting Robert quickly felt at ease--making friends, settling in at local book stores and libraries, and trying on various occupational hats, such as playing innkeeper at his own Sacramento bed and breakfast, the Bear Flag Inn, where his larger-than-life persona was likely the biggest draw. When his partnership with Jennifer eventually ended after 23 years, he found himself alone in Bethesda, still steering Academica while lovingly caring for Addison, now an autistic teenager.
In the summer of 2001, Robert dropped Addison at camp, then stopped to visit a friend near Cooperstown, NY, where the Glimmerglass Opera festival was staging an outdoor performance of Cav/Pag. As fate would have it, there was an extra ticket. During the intermission Robert was introduced to a fellow native Californian, ranch owner Suzanne (Suzy) Redfern, and the rest is, well, history. A year-long telephone courtship, made tolerable by escapes to Paris and Buenos Aires, led to wedding talk. Because a one-man publishing company was infinitely more relocatable than a Central Valley farming enterprise, Robert moved west, to the heart of Silicon Valley, where he and Suzy spent the last twenty-two years of their life together. That final chapter proved to be, as one old friend put it, a “soft landing.” They settled in a leafy neighborhood 5 minutes from Stanford and 20 minutes from SFO and the world, which they never tired of exploring. When planning their return from faraway places they would inevitably find an excuse to detour to romantic off-season Venice and a reunion with the literary salon of locals and expats they’d fallen in with. Robert was never so taken with travel that he was unavailable to friends old and new when they asked for help through a rough patch.
As the focus of Robert’s life continued to shift, he felt it was time to pass on the torch of Academica Press, the lovechild of his youth. He felt fortunate to have as a friend the perfect person in whom to entrust that challenge, a young intellectual and bon vivant he'd known since Bethesda days. When his health began to decline, Robert maintained his sunny disposition as well as his life-long driving forces: an appetite for fun and adventure, a need for deep and lasting friendships, and a thirst for scholarly discourse. Just days before he died, his voice could be heard from his second-floor home office in long, vigorous debate over historical minutiae with one old sparring partner or another.
Robert is survived by his wife, Suzanne Redfern-West, his children, Gabriella, Addison, and Marion West, and his brother, Richard West.
