A Momentary Meeting of the Minds Becomes A Lifelong Conversation
As a young man, William Robinson III thought he wanted to be a Catholic priest. He enrolled at the University of Louvain in Belgium, a university that is internationally known for graduating noted Catholic theologians as well as presidents, prime ministers, authors and other notables. Lectures were given in Latin and French and, over time, he fell hard for languages and literature instead. He became a schoolteacher.
But he felt he was drifting. A visiting professor who taught a course in French Romantic Poetry at the University of Rhode Island suggested he get his Ph.D. He had always been a good student, spending much of his free time in libraries reading novels, history -- and, in particular, poetry. Once at UConn, he eventually became the assistant director of UConn’s program in France, accompanying almost three dozen students to Paris one year, and traveling throughout Europe.
A year after one of his trips to Europe, he was standing on a grocery line in Storrs. A woman in front of him turned and asked, “Didn’t I meet you in Madrid last year?” She invited him to a party that she was hosting at her home that evening. He arrived at 10, sat down on her sofa, and minutes later watched as a pretty brunette sat next to him.
They talked for a long time. She was Marlene Zieky from Bloomfield, an undergraduate in the French department. Her first impression of him? “I could tell he was an academic,” she says. “But he also had a warm and interesting personality.”
For him, that evening became an intersection of poetry and reality. They fell in love and married in 1974, three years after he had completed his Ph.D. and two years after she had graduated from UConn. He was then in his second year at Boston College Law School. All that education, in literature and poetry and languages and law, combined to make him a sought-after Providence attorney who subsequently was named to a seat on the Rhode Island Supreme Court. She succeeded in real estate. They had a family, and despite the demands of careers and children, to this day they profess to keeping their poetry alive.
“Becoming parents certainly made us more aware of what responsibility means,” she says. “But as to our relationship with each other, I can simply say that we care about each other more with each passing year.” He agrees. “If anything, we’ve become closer over time – and that’s something to be thankful for,” he says. “For Father’s Day, I received a beautiful card from my wife. I realize that it was Father’s Day and not Husband’s Day, but she said beautiful things in that card regardless of what the day was meant to celebrate.”
He is still in close touch with the UConn student group he accompanied to France in 1969, attending a reunion in September 2009 that drew alumni from locations as far flung as Italy. “I’m grateful to UConn for many things,” he says. “I pulled my life together while I was there. I loved every moment. UConn is a serious scholarly institution, and, frankly, there is so much more than basketball going on there.” She is grateful that UConn is “increasingly respected as a fine academic institution.”
To further that end, and because libraries are so important to the couple, they have written a planned gift into their will to benefit the Homer Babbidge Library at UConn. Justice Robinson still spends much of his free time in libraries, just as he did when he attended UConn. “That’s what I care about,” he says. “I had a tremendous amount of reading to do, and the library was the obvious place to do it. Now, I often on Sunday afternoons go over to the University of Rhode Island library. I’d rather do that than hang around on the porch.”
Except when fate – or chance – brings him to his favored spot, on a sofa next to his beloved Marlene.
