evidence in any one line is not in itself conclusive. He was convinced that support for an idea from several such lines could be as compelling, cumulatively, as support from a single, beautifully contrived and controlled experiment.

He was a “consummate collaborator” and published more often than not as coauthor with colleagues “on an extremely wide variety of topics and on numerous cultures, always drawing upon and drawing out the expertise of his coworkers.”³ His colleagues valued him highly for his intriguingly different ways of looking at things that so often provided productive veins for them to mine in their own research.

Roberts was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the only child of John M. Roberts, senior, and Ruth Kohler, his father's second wife. He had a much older half brother and half sister. His father, a highway engineer, moved the family to Lincoln, when Roberts was a year old, and it was there that he grew up and went to school, taking his A.B. degree at the University of Nebraska with distinction in 1937. He did not find the study of law at the University of Chicago congenial and left it after one quarter in the fall of 1937. He switched to anthropology, which he continued at the University of Chicago for two more quarters in 1938 and 1939, when he transferred to Yale. While there he studied with G. P. Murdock, B. Malinowski, C. S. Ford, and John Dollard, among others, and worked under Murdock as research assistant on the Cross-Cultural Survey (which became the Human Relations Area Files, Inc., after World War II).

His studies were interrupted in February 1942, when he was called up as a captain in the U.S. Army Reserve, less than a year after his marriage to Marie Louise Kotouc of Lincoln, Nebraska. In World War II, he commanded a company of infantry in northern France and was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in action and the Bronze Star for meritorious service. He returned to Yale in November 1945,