Robert A. Georges died January 31, 2022, at the age of 88. Deeply committed to folklore studies, he had a tremendous impact on students, the development of the discipline of folkloristics, and the administration of a graduate program in folklore and mythology at UCLA.Bob, as he liked to be called, was born May 1, 1933, in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. He earned a BS degree in French and English in 1954 at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, a former state teachers’ college. He taught English classes at Bound Brook High School in Summerset County, New Jersey, from 1954 to 1956; one of his courses concerned mythology, especially Greek, which befitted his ethnic heritage. At the high school, he met his future wife, Mary, who was teaching in an adjacent classroom; they wed August 11, 1956. Bob then spent 2 years in the army, beginning in 1956, after which he taught English in Manahawkin, New Jersey, from 1958 to 1960.He attended the University of Pennsylvania where he earned an MA in English and American Literature in 1961. At Penn, he was inspired by ballad scholar MacEdward Leach, who furthered his interest in folklore. He also was intrigued by the approach of behaviorist B. F. Skinner, from whom he took a course; Bob later realized and wrote about (1991) the ways in which some of Skinner's concepts were implicit in folkloristics, helping to account for folklore's existence among all groups of people and persistence through time.“One of the things that brought me into this field and continues to keep me in this field is the fact that everything we study is done in every society in the world . . . the processes, the forms, the structures, the behaviors . . . they're all universal. And they're all expressive, and that has the potential to tell us something about what makes the species unique.” Hence, he referred to himself as a “universalist” as a folklorist, not preoccupied with culturally specific rules of performance or what makes people differ from one another but what renders them similar in their behaviors. He viewed folkloristics as a behavioral science concerned with how folklore originates in the human mind, why it continues through human interactions, and what meanings individuals attribute to these expressive manifestations of physical, cognitive, and psychological processes that are learned, reinforced, and rule-governed.Before completing his MA exams at Penn, he went to Indiana University (IU); he majored in folklore and minored in linguistics and English Romantic literature, filing his PhD dissertation in 1964 on Greek American folk beliefs and narratives in a sponge fishing community in Tarpon Springs, Florida. At IU, he took folklore courses taught by Richard M. Dorson and Warren E. Roberts, as well as a class on proverbs offered one summer by Archer Taylor, a visiting professor. “I certainly had a very good rapport with Warren Roberts; I had a high respect for him,” said Bob. “His [two-semester] course in the folktale . . . was largely responsible for getting me interested in the field of narratives” on which Bob focused much of his research.1In 1963, he was hired by the English Department at the University of Kansas. As a senior that year, I enrolled in his introductory folklore class. Bob's lecturing was so enthusiastic and his interpretations so insightful that before the first class period ended, I knew that the study of folklore was what I wanted to devote my life's work to. Others, too, found him an inspiring mentor. He had a great passion for folklore studies, held high standards and expectations, and gave unstintingly of his time in assisting students and wrote helpful, detailed comments on their research papers and exams. He took immense pride in his identity as a folklorist, instilling in his students a commitment to advancing the field with the greatest intellectual rigor.Bob joined the English Department and the Folklore and Mythology Program at UCLA in 1966, a year after its MA degree was established. I became his colleague in the Program in 1968. For 28 years until his retirement in 1994, he taught mostly graduate-level courses on folklore theories and research methods, the folktale, folk speech, Native American folklore and mythology studies, immigrant and ethnic folklore, and folklore archiving.He served as vice chair of the Program and later its chair (1982–1986). He was the principal architect of the PhD degree that was approved in 1978. As an administrator and pedagogue sensitive to students’ needs, he insisted on the preparation of an extensive handbook containing procedures, the structure of MA and PhD exams, and reading lists that guided students in their courses and in the Program.Bob was on several editorial boards and presided over the AFS Folklore Fellows and the California Folklore Society. His publications advanced folkloristics significantly. He is credited with six books, beginning with Studies on Mythology (1968) consisting of essays by nine major scholars including Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Clyde Kluckhohn, Edmund Leach, and Claude Lévi-Strauss; the volume was well-received for its insightful prologue, epilogue, and explanatory notes and is widely used as a text. He also translated a work on modern Greek folklore by Stilpon P. Kyriakides (1968). Bob's PhD dissertation on Greek American folk beliefs and narratives saw print in 1980. In 1982 he compiled, with Stephen Stern, an annotated bibliography on American and Canadian immigrant and ethnic folklore. I had the good fortune of being invited by Bob to collaborate on two books with him. People Studying People: The Human Element in Fieldwork (1981) explores this unique mode of inquiry with its recurrent human problems that arise and must be solved in individuals’ interactions. The second work, Folkloristics: An Introduction (1995), sets forth fundamental concepts and methods that have long informed the discipline.Bob's articles deal with several forms of folklore, concepts, and approaches. They include the structural analysis of riddles (with Alan Dundes, 1963), play activities (1969), and folktales (1970, 1989). In a number of essays, he assesses and develops more fully essential concepts in the discipline, such as legend (1971), motif and tale type (1983, 1997), the historic-geographic method (1986), the folklorist as comparatist (1986), and repertoire (1994). His behavioral approach to understanding folklore's manifestation in people's interactions informs his landmark essay in JAF “Toward an Understanding of Storytelling Events” (1969) on narrating as a social experience and communicative event; it also is evident in his innovative articles about feedback and response in narrating (1979), apparent digressions and asides in stories that people tell (1981), and the impact of timeliness and appropriateness in personal experience narrating (1987).2In his publications as well as his teaching, Bob was driven to find new answers to three central questions in folkloristics: How and why does folklore come into existence? Why does it persist? Why does it remain stable and change? He approached the issues behaviorally and thereby contributed to understanding what human beings have in common as a species. His was a worthy goal and resulted in notable accomplishments that made him a luminary in the discipline.As a former student, then a colleague and co-author, and a friend for more than a half century, I miss Bob greatly, as do many others who knew him. His wife Mary of more than 60 years pre-deceased him in 2018; he is survived by his son, Jonathan, and three brothers, Jim, Raymond, and Tim.