His parents had come from Michigan because his father, an electrical engineer with a degree from the University of Michigan, had taken a position with Brooklyn Edison. Several of his father’s Michigan classmates had done the same, so from the outset “there were close associations with some other families.” The Frosts wanted their kids to have a private school education and they had heard about Brooklyn Friends from the Fairman family. “Jim Fairman, who was a year younger than I, went through Brooklyn Friends, too. We were also in the choir together at St. Paul’s Church. His father, Jim, Sr., Dick’s godfather, was the one who had recommended Brooklyn Friends.

Recalling his days as a BFS lifer, he feels the most important moments were “at either end,” as he put it. First there was Kindergarten. “From the very outset, I tell you, I had a crush on my Kindergarten teacher. She was Marian Gove. I used to get my folks to invite her over for dinner when I could.” Young Dick’s courtship plans were coming along nicely until his father launched a plan of his own. “Dad had a young engineering friend by the name of Walter Fisk from Alabama. Walter was a new arrival in New York and he was looking.” Mr. Frost introduced Walter to Marian and they were soon engaged. “Dad was their best man and I was their ring bearer at the age of 6.” Was Dick jealous? “I think I was too young to know about romantic jealousy,” he said said. “Walter and I were friends and he taught me how to play ping-pong. We maintained relations with the Fisks for decades. They had three girls in time. It was a grand family."

Then there was senior year and a more formative kind of attraction that would impact the rest of his life. “Benjamin Burdsall, who was head of the high school and our English teacher in 11th and 12th grade, had a profound influence on my intellectual career. He knew that my strong subjects were English and science. I won a science prize when I was a junior, in physics,” he said, adding humbly, “I’d gotten the best grade.”

Benjamin, a practicing Quaker, was a graduate of Swarthmore College. “As a loyal Swarthmorian he was always interested in steering good students to Swarthmore. He was disappointed again and again by an admissions office at Swarthmore that ignored his recommendations,” as Dick tells it. “It was in ‘46 or ‘47 that he read the riot act to them, that they weren’t paying attention, that there were strong students at Brooklyn Friends that they should be noticing.” Swarthmore apparently heeded the call at last and admitted no less than four BFS students that year.

Benjamin believed history to be a solid middle ground between English and science and encouraged Dick to major in it. “Burdsall saw an opportunity to draw on both of my inclinations or talents, and he was right. History is much more of an objective direction than literature, but less objective than science.”

That’s not to say there weren’t crucial moments in his middle years at BFS, too. “A physician had decided that I had rheumatic fever (later proven wrong). He said I needed to stop competitive athletics so starting in 7th and 8th grade I began reading more books.” Dick already loved to read but the loss of sports was a blow to him. “I had played football in sixth grade. I was a quarterback. That came to an end. I did play baseball later on in high school and I got my varsity letter. I was not a great player but I was good enough to make the team.”

Quakerism had an impact on him as well. “There was no evangelical effort whatsoever to convert staff,” he said. “It’s not part of the Quaker way, which is to try to influence people by example, peace in particular. “ He remembers the time during a Meeting for Worship at Schermerhorn that Head of School Warren Cochran stood and made the reflection that students, and indeed the entire community, needed to keep their priorities straight, that we should put first things first. “A very simple idea, but one needs to be reminded of the significance of that. First things first.” Dick still cherishes the Quaker value of respect for personhood. “Individuality and community need to go hand in hand,” he explained, “and for Quakers they do. While cliques existed they were not nasty. They were not willfully exclusive or prideful. That simply did not exist at Brooklyn Friends.”

Dick also recalled his friend Frank Elliot, who was student body president both his junior and senior years and one of the four students admitted to Swarthmore at the same time as Dick. While a graduate student at UC Berkeley, Dick sought Frank’s advice on his then-unpublished manuscript. The Mooney Case, based on Dick’s doctoral thesis about an infamous 1916 terrorism case in California, eventually found a home at Stanford University Press in 1968. The Mooney Case, Dick explained, focused on the so-called preparedness movement, a primarily conservative capitalist effort that sought to pressure the US government to bolster its borders from foreign invaders. During a San Francisco Preparedness Day parade, a bomb killed 10 civilians, and radical labor activists were immediately blamed, among them anarchist Tom Mooney, an activist and fund-raiser for the radical Industrial Workers of the World. Mooney was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death despite a gaping lack of evidence against him,  false testimony and manufactured evidence. The Mooney case became a cause celebre for labor activists around the world as an example of repressive, anti-working class sentiment in the US courts and government and their pressure resulted in Mooney's sentence being commute to life imprisonment and, finally, a pardon in 1939, over 20 years later.

Dick’s interest in history extends far beyond labor. “When I put the Mooney case to bed in 1968, what I decided on realistic grounds was that first of all I didn’t particularly like labor history,” he confides. He’d begun teaching at Colgate in 1966, and was at a history convention in 1970 in Boston when he picked up an autobiography by a Native American, and began to consider the daunting task any white historian must have faced in documenting the Native American culture. White historians had all gone to this community with an agenda to convert them or make money from their resources.

“I thought about this,” he said, “and the methodology and problems fascinated me. I began to make inquiries about the Pueblo,” he explained, due to some time he’d spent teaching in New Mexico.

He began researching archives in Washington, DC, and over several years gathered much primary source material which he intended for articles or a book on the Pueblo people. That was truncated when in 1979 he was invited to serve as an expert witness for Pueblo communities that had natural resources claims against the US and the state of New Mexico, the famed Aamodt Case. “I became an historical witness which involved research and testimony. I participated in what has become a notorious natural resources rights dispute brought by four tribes who had lost their water in the early 20th century to Anglo and Hispanic settlers,” he said. “This case began in 1960 and it still has not been settled.” Dick was instrumental in developing both Colgate's Native American Studies program and its Native American Off-Campus Study Group in Santa Fe.

Dick’s interest in Native American culture also spilled over into one of his chief hobbies, photography. “I have enlargements hanging in my living room in Santa Fe of some Navajo ceremonies, which are now illicit, because the Navajo in recent years have prohibited photography in their ceremonies.” Ever-mindful of not encroaching anew on Native American confidentiality, Dick purposely did not conduct any interviews with Native Americans for his recent article in the Spring 2009 issue of the New Mexico Historical Review. Titled "Photography and the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, 1870-1930", his article explores cultural respect for Native Americans and their passive and active resistance against Anglo photographers.  

He also likes to sing, and is a member of the vocal group Tapestry. His passion led to his compiling the newly released book of 146 madrigal introductions, I Never Saw A Silver Swan: Poetic Introductions to Madrigals of the Renaissance, 1530 – 1630. “The composers are primarily English and Italian, with several French madrigalists,” he said. “Among the leading composers are Thomas Morley, Orlando di Lasso, Thomas Weelkes, John Wilbye, Orlando Gibbons, Claudio Monteverdi, William Byrd, and Clement Janequin.”

Dick and his wife Barbara have two daughters, Caitlyn and Heather. In thinking about BFS’ impact on his life he mentioned that Caitlyn had attended a public school at their home in Hamilton, New York and was “kind of a loner” who excelled academically, “but not until she enrolled at the George School [a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania,] did she truly thrive. In one year she blossomed and it was Quaker values that did it.” Caitlyn chose to go on to Earlham, a Quaker college in Indiana. “She is not a Quaker. Neither am I. But we have a high regard for Quaker values.”

Today Caitlyn lives in Santa Fe, and Heather lives in Erie, CO. The Frosts reside primarily in Hamilton but they still have a winter home in Santa Fe.

“Students need to appreciate their privilege,” he said of BFS today. “Their parents have provided it, the previous generations have provided it. They have outstanding teachers there now because we had them. There’s a continuity. And it would be well for kids at BFS to understand that they are beneficiaries, and their own efforts are an integral part of their education, but so have been the efforts of others to bring them to these opportunities.”