Librarian | Historian | Board Member | Newspaper Reporter/Editor
Actor | Teacher | Genealogist | College Alumni Coordinator
Bob has had several strong avocations as well as several careers. He is still active in them all, restrained only by time allowances.
LIBRARIAN
After earning a Masters in Library Science from Simmons College, Bob worked for 
ten years at the Hartford Public Library, where he was
originally hired as the Classical Music Librarian. After the new chief librarian replaced the departmental structure with a cross-training general structure, Bob served for several additional years as a general reference librarian. In the absence of a curator, Bob’s background in American and Connecticut history enabled him to effectively run the Hartford Collection,
a remarkable collection of Hartfordiana with materials dating back to the eighteenth century.
He also managed the U.S. Patent & Trademark Depository Library program at HPL, one of 84 such collections nationwide that receive and house copies of U.S. patents and patent and trademark materials, make them freely available to the public, and actively disseminate patent and trademark information. In 2003, Bob addressed the Connecticut Library Association annual meeting on patent and trademark searching.
Bob also developed one of Connecticut’s largest and most comprehensive public library collections of classical music books, scores, sound recordings, and videos, and maintained outstanding collections in American History, Music, Religion, Slavery, Racism, Politics, Law, and Philosophy. He also regularly produced a quarterly Companion to the Arts, which highlighted professional music, theater, and dance performances in the Hartford metropolitan area. He hired local musicians for various library programs, including the popular Dancing ‘til Dark, andwas Chairman of the New England Music Library Association’s 
Public Libraries Committee. He also wrote Musical Manuscripts and Scores in the Hartford Collection (1996) while earning his M.A. in American Studies at Trinity College.
While interning at the Yale Divinity School Library in 1993, Bob collaborated with Stephen Ray and Martha Lund Smalley in compiling a Guide to the Social Ethics Pamphlet Collection.
His article “Requiem for a Music Cataloguer” was published in the Spring 2000 issue of PDS Directions, a publication of the Patent Documentation Society.
Since moving to Raleigh, Bob has enjoyed using his librarian skills volunteering at the Olivia Rainey Local History Library, where his projects have included preserving and cataloguing historic tax records and plot maps.
HISTORIAN
In 2005, Bob earned an M.A. in American Studies from Trinity College, writing his thesis on Noah Webster’s Role in the Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Movement, a little known aspect of the great American polymath’s life.
While an undergraduate at Trinity College, Bob wrote a research paper on “Benjamin Britten and Wilfred Owen: The War Requiem” (1990).
ACTOR
Bob has appeared in several professional German-language stage productions includingShakespeare's Heinrich IV, Erste Teil (Henry IV, Part 1) and Calderon's Traum und Leben des Prinzen Sigismunds (La Vida est Sueno). He's played leading and supporting roles in a number of community theater productions,including Nichols' Abie's Irish Rose, the medieval morality play Everyman, Shaw's Androcles and the Lion, and Kesselring's Arsenic and Old Lace. He had a non-speaking role in the History Channel production of Teddy Roosevelt: American Lion (2004), starring Richard Dreyfuss.
WRITER/EDITOR
While living in Germany in the early 1970s, Bob was a writer and copy editor for The 
Overseas Weekly, an American newspaper marketed to U.S. forces stationed in that country.
For many years Bob wrote op-ed pieces for The Hartford Courant on a wide variety of topics. His first op-ed piece for the News & Observer in Raleigh, published February 7,2009, was on the financial difficulties being experienced by American opera companies (http://www.newsobserver.com/ opinion/columns/story/1396834.html).
Bob spent 14 years writing and editing technical publications at The Travelers Insurance Companies, in their Data Processing Department (now known as Information Technology).
BOARD MEMBER
Bob has served on the boards of several Hartford non-profit arts organizations, including Chamber Music Plus, the New World Chamber Ensemble, and the Hartford Conservatory, all headquartered in Hartford..
For several years, he reviewed grant applications for the Evelyn Preston Foundation, which provides free summertime concerts in the city, and for First Night Hartford.
Bob was also on the board of the South Park Inn, a non-profit agency that provides shelter and other services to homeless men, women and families in Hartford.
TEACHER
Bob is a substitute teacher at two of Raleigh’s finest schools: Raleigh Charter High School (which has been ranked by Newsweek magazine as one of the nation’s best), and the Ravenscroft School, a private college-preparatory school. Known as the “Singing Sub” or "Opera Dude", Bob has developed a reputation as an excellent class manager and the students' favorite sub. At Raleigh Charter, he is periodically called on to teach the kids about opera, fill in for music classes, and substitute for the regular lesson in History and Social Studies.
In Fall 2009, Bob will teach an opera class at Duke University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), part of its continuing education program.
GENEALOGIST
After acquiring his first Personal Computer in the 1980s, Bob developed an interest in genealogy. He purchased a Family Tree Maker package and began entering data 
on his own and his wife’s families. The Chaplock database now contains thoroughly researched information on over 10,000 of their relatives, both living and dead.
Bob has also contributed articles to Ballentine Branches and Lovelock Lines, newsletters devoted to both families. His humorous article “Noah’s Ark Encounters the Mayflower,” explains how the number of one’s direct ancestors is exponential, has been reproduced online dozens of times.
COLLEGE ALUMNI COORDINATOR
In 2002, he was president of his Trinity College class’s reunion committee, and for many years has been class secretary, compiling and submitting class notes to The Trinity Reporter.
Librarian | Historian | Board Member | Newspaper Reporter/Editor
Actor | Teacher | Genealogist | College Alumni Coordinator