The passing of a retired instructor and researcher leaves a huge hole in Red Deer’s history community, say friends and colleagues.
John Tobias, who taught history at Red Deer College for more than 30 years, died on Dec. 23, two and a half years after his retirement.
Tobias made a remarkable contribution to the field both in his research and in his ability to pass his passion onto his students, said former colleague Jim Martens, who recently moved to Victoria.
“He introduced the unsuspecting to the potential power of historical investigation,” said Martens.
“He was a riot to golf with, too,” he said.
Tobias was already a well-established researcher when he came to Red Deer College, working primarily in the history of Western Canada’s First Nations and focused on land claims, said city archivist Michael Dawe, who was recently seconded to work on a centennial project for the City of Red Deer.
Over the span of his career, Tobias hunted through tens of thousands of documents, tracking the minute details that would be essential in establishing the validity of land claims and disputes, said Dawe.
Tobias’s wife, Bea, said her husband of 45 years had done his PhD work in European history, planning to take a teaching job. With few opportunities available, he found a job with the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations, amassing since then a volume of work that remains unequalled.
Bob Lampard, a longtime member and former president of the Central Alberta Historical Society, said Tobias’s knowledge of early Western Canadian history was valued and will be badly missed.
Tobias didn’t just teach history. He lived it, said former college president Ron Woodward, who retired in August.
“Any students that you ever talked to or his faculty colleagues were always just amazed at his understanding of history, as opposed to just teaching the facts,” said Woodward.
Even though he taught his last class in the spring of 2007, Tobias continued to visit the library to conduct research, Woodward said.
Dawe was the student member on the college committee that first hired Tobias in 1975.
“He did connect really well with students. Sometimes in university, you have profs that were pretty disengaged. They’d finish the lecture and then race the students for the door. John wasn’t that way,” he said.
Shortly after joining the college faculty, Tobias took a seat on the city’s archives committee, where he pushed strongly for enhancement of its collections along with having the archives permanently staffed.
Ironically, Dawe found himself being interviewed for the job by the same man he had helped interview a few years earlier.
John Luke Tobias was born in Pennsylvania on Feb. 27, 1942. He moved to Edmonton in 1964 to study history at the University of Alberta.
Tobias died at Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre from complications of kidney malfunction and diabetes.
An informal memorial will be held at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday at the Harvest Centre at Westerner Park.
bkossowan@www.reddeeradvocate.com