The recent publication of the fifth, and final, volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) marks the culmination of nearly five decades of work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. DARE is a landmark of American scholarship, recording the words, phrases, pronunciations, and pieces of grammar and syntax that vary from one part of the country to another. And the attendant hoopla and coverage from media and DARE admirers around the world is fitting and deserved.

I just wish Fred Cassidy, the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who was the force behind DARE, were here to enjoy it. He worked on the dictionary until his death in 2000. Even after his passing, Cassidy continued to push it forward: His epitaph reads “On to Z!”

I’ll leave it to others to affirm the merits of DARE, its more than 60,000 terms, and the colorful history of the project itself that includes a treasure trove of 1,800 audio recordings made by DARE field workers who collected 2.3 million responses between 1965 and 1970 as they did their research. But what I do want to capture before DARE leaves the media spotlight is my own memory of Fred Cassidy and my brief encounters with him in the late 1970s.

Madison, Wis., retains the feel and appeal of a small town, and the city was even smaller and friendlier when I arrived in the mid 1970s. After several years of community work, I wrangled a job with the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters in 1979, an independent, nonprofit organization, that as far as I could tell was a sort of club for UW faculty types, most of them guys. They were a garrulous and jocular bunch and treated me with kindness and courtesy, even though I wasn’t in their league.

See: Huffington Post