Rensselaer Adventures Comes to an End

Robert Schenk started the blog Rensselaer Adventures in September 2008, reposting from his CyberEconomics blog that he started in June 2008. This blog post serves as a form of eulogy for Robert (Bob) Schenk as he sadly and unexpectedly passed away on March 17th, 2025. Bob was the sole writer for Rensselaer Adventures however he received tremendous support from his wife Germaine in terms of copy editing and proofreading, and support from the community who often gave him feedback and tips for newsworthy items that should be included in the blog.

He posted nearly daily for the first couple of years, and reached his 1000th post on November 21, 2010, a date that was special to him.

In his Ten Year Anniversary blog post on June 18, 2018, Robert went into more of the history of his blogging…

“I started blogging ten years ago, on June 28, 2008. My first post was not even a real post--it was a link to a bit of humor I had on my website about how I raised gas prices. My first blog was not Rensselaer Adventures but rather Cybereconomics. I did not have a clear idea of what I wanted to do by blogging, but my daughter had started a blog and her decision prompted me to do the same.

I started the Rensselaer Adventures blog in September. I do not remember why I started it, but I suspect that I had found that I wanted to limit my posting on the Cybereconomics blog to items that were somehow connected to economics and have a different place for items that were only of local interest. The number of posts on the Cybereconomics blog peaked in 2009 and then faded away, with the most recent post there nearly two years ago. When I began the Rensselaer Adventures blog, I moved over several items from the Cybereconomics blog and they were my first posts.

At the beginning my readership was only friends and acquaintances but readership slowly grew as more people discovered the blog. Google was one way people could find the blog--if they googled for a local topic I had covered, they might find the blog. In 2010 I tried to get more people to visit the blog by creating a Facebook page called Rensselaer Adventures and began to post a link to each blog post. The graph below, which gives monthly page views, shows that the number of visits to the blog increased until 2017. (Even though the graph does not include the months prior to June, 2010, there were visitors during those months.) Facebook referrals are the number one source of visitor traffic, with Google searches far behind. The downturn after 2017 may be partially due to the new way Facebook prioritizes what users see.”

“In the early years I tried to limit each post to one topic. I no longer do that and posts often jump from one topic to something completely unrelated. Hence, you cannot really tell what is in the post from the title. Content has drifted as my interest has changed. One huge change occurred in 2013 when I began to attend public meetings. Now without posts on meetings I would have little to write.”

“Blogging has been a fun adventure that has taken me to a lot of events that I otherwise would never have attended and allowed me meet a lot of people who I otherwise would never have met. I do not know how much longer the blog will remain alive, but I am 99.73% certain that I will not be writing about a twentieth year anniversary of blogging.” - June 18, 2018, the blog continued for 17 years until now (March, 2025).

Robert especially enjoyed documenting business openings, Rensselaer murals and other art, local history, and natural events, like the Iroquois River flooding. He enjoyed speaking and listening to people that he otherwise would not have met through his social circles as a professor or at church.

After his retirement from St. Joseph’s College as an economics professor in 2010, the blog was a creative outlet and gave him a sense of purpose, identity, and social interaction.

Robert loved numbers and statistics, so here are some:

From 2008 to 2025, he wrote 3230 blog posts.

“Sometime around September 1 blogger says this blog passed the 2 million mark in page views.” From September 8, 2023 post. 

He also loved graphs. He went from posting shorter, more frequent posts to longer posts that covered more topics. 

He liked including photos in his blog and frequently used hand-me-down cameras and smartphones provided by family. When asked if he wanted a new camera for Christmas or birthdays he always said that it wasn’t needed, he was happy with what he had. This mirrored most of his personality through life, reusing items and finding ways to make supplies last as long as possible was in many ways a hobby, or passion, for Bob.

The Greater Rensselaer Chamber of Commerce presented the 2024 Citizen of the Year Award to Bob Schenk for his Rensselaer Adventures blog. We do not think that he was expecting any limelight from his hobby of writing about the local community and the various routine details of small town Indiana. The award was a surprise for him and greatly appreciated despite an outwardly stoic persona.

Bob will be missed by many, the family will monitor this blog for the next few months to make sure that any comments are passed through the spam filters and posted in the comment section of this blog post. For those wishing to pay their respects there will be a wake at Steinke Funeral Home from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. on April 1st, 2025 and a funeral at Saint Augustine Catholic Church at 10:00 a.m. on April 2nd, 2025. The obituary can be found at:  https://www.steinkefuneralhome.com/obituaries/Robert-Schenk?obId=39771349

Robert's obituary

Robert Schenk died on March 17, 2025 at IU Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis, IN. He was born on September 21, 1946 in Hutchinson, Minnesota, son of the late Richard M. Schenk and Frances A. (Smith) Schenk. His childhood was spent in Stewart, Morton, and Little Falls, Minnesota.

He graduated from Saint John's Prep School (1964) and Saint John's University (1968) in Collegeville, Minnesota and earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1977). He taught two years at Glenville State College in West Virginia and was an economics professor at Saint Joseph's College in Rensselaer, IN from 1974 until he retired in 2010. Beginning in the late 1980s, he created several hundred digital typefaces that are still for sale on the internet. In 2008 he began a blog called Rensselaer Adventures and for many years reported on whatever interested him about living in Rensselaer. After retirement he enjoyed creating maze books, exploring tessellations, researching family history, and creating typefaces. He was a member of the Board of Directors for CDC Resources from 2011 until 2020, serving three years as president.

He married Germaine Bole in Chicago on December 27, 1970. He is survived by his wife and five children, Gretchen (Craig) Baker of Baker, NV; Peter (Sarah) of Greenwood, IN; Edward (Corryn Smith) of Flagstaff, AZ; Matthew (Mary) of Berea, KY; and Andrew (Shae) of Bloomington, IL; two brothers, Richard of Washington state; and Thomas (Patricia) of St. Paul, MN; and thirteen grandchildren: Matthew and Emma Baker; Maria, Claire, Joseph, James, and Daniel; Gregory; Natalie, Bethany, and Emily; and George and Eleanor. He was preceded in death by his parents, his daughter Ingrid, and his sister Nancy.

Robert's visitation will be held at Steinke Funeral Home of Rensselaer on April 1, 2025, from 3 p.m. until 7 p.m. A funeral mass will be held at St. Augustine Catholic Church the following day, April 2, starting at 10 a.m. Burial at Mt. Calvary Cemetery will follow. Memorial contributions may be made to St. Augustine Catholic School and Shriners Hospital for Children.

Steinke Funeral Home is honored to be handling the arrangements. Memories, condolences and photos may be shared with the Schenk family at www.SteinkeFuneralHome.com.