Stanley Robe

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This profile is part of the Brownsville, Oregon One Place Study.

Biography

Stanley was born in 1915 in Tangent, Oregon, during the time his father was teaching school there. He had poor health as a boy. His mother, however, took special pains not to baby him, due to her bad experience with the way her parents raised her kid brother. As a result, he could not remember his mother ever kissing him or showing physical affection.

As he was growing up in Brownsville in the 1920s and 1930s, Stanley was sent by his parents to live with Papa and Grandpa Kirk in the summers. He was so much younger than his brothers that his parents seemed not to know what to do with him. The Kirk place had no indoor plumbing. He found reading material in the outhouse and the attic, newspapers from the World War I era. In these newspapers he read articles by war correspondents and learned about the world beyond Oregon. These newspapers were his first inspiration for foreign travel.

Stanley attended the University of Oregon where in 1940 he met Alice Mueller. At the U of O he met professor Leavitt Q Wright, an instructor in Spanish, whose inspiration caused him to change his major from journalism to Spanish. Stanley was ambitious to continue his academic career and did not plan to marry right away.

Wartime Espionage with the OSS

He was a graduate teaching assistant in Spanish at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1941 when the United States entered World War II. Stanley was drafted and sent to Camp Lewis in Washington State, then down to Fort Hood, Texas. He waited for weeks at Fort Hood while all the other draftees were sent out. Finally he got an order to report to a certain address in Washington, D.C. Here he was told that he was to join the Office of Strategic Services and report for duty in the Panama Canal Zone. He was issued an ID card, a revolver and a cyanide pill.

He despised having to tail people in Panama and snoop into their business. Once he was assigned to two Russians. He followed them to the market in Panama City, saw them buy a watermelon and strike up a conversation with a pretty girl. He followed them to their hotel and then took the room next to theirs so he could report on them. In the morning he duly reported that the watermelon rinds were in the garbage.

He also took dugout canoes up rivers into rural Panama where he interviewed local police chiefs and inmates in local jails. His notes on their dialects became the material for his first monograph, "The Spanish of Rural Panama." He collected some San Blas molas (reverse applique folk art) and a necklace of monkey teeth.

In Panama he was in the same unit with Charles Berlitz, who later dreamed up the "Bermuda Triangle." The difficulty in communicating to his recent bride, after having married in 1943 while on leave, made him depressed. He would begin letters he would never finish, knowing he could not include any detail due to the top secret nature of his service. He put on weight, however, and came home sporting a gold rim on his front tooth, gold being what a Panamanian dentist had to work with. At the war's end he was invited to become a charter member of the Latin American division of the CIA, and never regretted turning it down.

Graduate School in North Carolina

The G. I. Bill allowed Stanley to continue his graduate work. Stanley and Alice moved into graduate student housing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. It was wartime surplus and they shared their living space with other couples who would walk through their living room to the bathroom.

In 1947 Stanley made his first research trip to Mexico. He and Alice lived in Yahualica, Jalisco. Although Alice spoke no Spanish, she adapted and continued making art on Mexican themes. She even baked a Thanksgiving turkey in a brick oven. In Mexico, Stanley was the first folklore researcher to use a mechanical recording device. The old Soundscriber machine used green acetate discs and was enormous and heavy. While gathering folktales in Jalisco, Stanley would visit villages where there was no electricity, sometimes at the bottom of steep barrancas. Power was provided by two six-volt car batteries that were carried into town in burlap sacks by a burro. The sacks also contained an inverter that converted the DC batteries into 115-volt AC current, as well as the Soundscriber machine. Periodically Stanley must have taken these car batteries to a gas station for recharging. A photo from the period shows an informant speaking into a hand-held microphone while his audience looks bemusedly on. This research became part of his dissertation and later was turned into Folktales from the Los Altos Highlands, Jalisco.

Having finished his Ph.D., Stanley attended the Modern Language Association convention in search of a tenure-track university position. It came down to a choice between the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana) and the University of California, Los Angeles. UCLA was chosen because it was on the west coast, closer to family,

35 Years at UCLA

The Robe family was to make Los Angeles their permanent home. In 1949 Stanley and Alice moved into more war surplus housing, on Gayley avenue on the west side of campus. Stanley L. Robe is found as an Instructor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in the UCLA Catalog for 1949-1950.^[1] Later they moved to an apartment nearby on Landfair Avenue, where they were living when their first child, Robert, was born in 1951. In about 1953 they bought a house at 980 Amherst Avenue in Brentwood.

In 1961 Stanley had the opportunity to teach for six months at the Instituto Caro y Cuervo in Bogota, Colombia. By now the Robes had two children. It was decided that the whole family should make the move for the six-month stay. The children attended one semester at the Colegio Nueva Granada in Bogota. This decision to have the children live in Latin America was a great benefit to them.

Returned home, the Robe family moved in March 1963 a short distance to a home at 979 South Bundy Drive in Brentwood. Quiet streets no more. Bundy Drive is a busy artery in West Los Angeles. The family attended Brentwood Presbyterian Church at the corner of Bundy and San Vicente Boulevard and the children enrolled in Brentwood Elementary School.

In 1965 the whole family once again came to Mexico for the entire summer while Stanley did field research in the state of Veracruz. The city of Jalapa was to be their home base for excursions into the coastal jungle, the highlands near Perote, and the mountains near Orizaba. Stanley went into small towns to collect folk tales, making contact first with the local priest or barber, and then collecting a crowd who waited for a chance to tell stories or "see and say" words prompted by a book of pictures. By this time Stanley was using a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder. He transcribed the tales and then classified them using Stith Thompson & Aanti Arne's "The Types of the Folktale." This work became the basis of "Hispanic Folktales from Veracruz." 1966 was the last year the whole family came down to Mexico. That year Stanley taught summer school at the University of Guadalajara.

In the late 1960s Stanley served as Chairman of the UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He spent part of 1968 on his own in Caceres, Spain.

Stanley had the ability to imitate many Spanish dialects, from the Castilian lisp, to the rapid fire of Cuba, to the shibboleth of Argentina.

One of his major publications was "Azuela and the Mexican Underdogs," in hardcover, published by the University of California Press with illustrations by his son, Bob. This was a critical work on "Los de Abajo," the novel of the Mexican Revolution by Mariano Azuela, first published in serialized form in a newspaper in El Paso, Texas. A graduate student discovered in a Mexico City archive a complete run of the novel, which was photocopied and transcribed and then the manuscript typed (on an IBM Selectric) and a jacket photo taken at home. In the process of researching the Mexican Revolution he acquired a collection of engravings by Jose Guadalupe Posada which he donated to the UCLA library. At this time he was an advisor for many graduate students in Spanish, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and other interdisciplinary programs. One of his graduate students eventually herself became Department Chairman. He and Alice began traveling again and attended conferences all over the world.

When his wife Alice died suddenly in 1984 it was a hard blow to Stanley. It was a colleague of his, Professor Frederick Crescitelli, who introduced him to his second wife, Maria Pia (David) Lubonia. He and Maria Pia were married in the late 1980s. This brought out the romantic side of Stanley that had been hidden for many years. He grew a pencil mustache, had his teeth capped (losing the gold) and moved to Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley. He also seemed to lose interest in keeping up with UCLA and the people who knew him, outside of a very small circle. The 1994 Northridge earthquake damaged their townhouse and for a time they resided in Laguna Beach, where Maria Pia died in 2000.

He passed away in 2010 at San Gabriel, California, in a care facility near the home of his son Bob. At that time he was suffering from dementia and his mind would function in Spanish. Once, when I addressed him in Spanish, it was as if a switch flipped and suddenly he was speaking English and he was able to recognize and respond to me.

Census Records

1940 Census, Eugene City, Eugene Precinct 31, Supervisor's District 4, Enumeration District 20-85B, sheet 1A, enumerated by Thelma C. Warlick on April 15, 1940. Line 1, 2343 Columbia Street, household 1, owns; value of home $4600; not a farm.

• Robe, Hermon L. Head M W 70 married, did not attend school within the year, completed 4th year of college, born in Oregon, resided April 1, 1935 in same house, works for pay 20 hrs./wk, assistant curator, university museum. Worked 26 weeks in 1939. Income in 1939 $480.
• Line 2, Robe, Estella K. Wife F W 64 married, did not attend school within the year, completed 2nd year of high school, born in Oregon, resided April 1, 1935 in same house, does not work for pay, engaged in home housework.
• Line 3, Robe, Carol V. Son M W 32 single, attended school within the year, completed 4th year of college, born in Oregon, resided April 1, 1935 in same house, does not work for pay. Worked 20 weeks in 1939.
• Line 4, Robe, Stanley L. Son M W 24 single, attended school within the year, completed 4th year of college, born in Oregon, resided April 1, 1935 in same house, works for pay 20 hrs./wk, Graduate Assistant, State University. Worked 26 weeks in 1939. Income in 1939 $500.^[2]

1950 Census: looked for Stanley and Alice Robe at first in ED 66-821 and did not find them. 8 May 2022: I found Stanley and Alice in ED 66-822 at 511 1/2 Landfair Ave., Los Angeles (image 17 of 111), household 86. Stanley was age 34, born in Oregon, married, a teacher at the university, working most of the week. Alice was age 36, born in Wisconsin, married, not working (whatever OT means).^[3]

I also found, a few lines above this entry, some of their future close friends.

At 505 Landfair were Wiley F. Barker, age 30, born New Mexico, occupation M. D. and his wife Nancy K. Barker, age 28, b. Ohio.

At 505 1/2 Landfair were Sherman J. Keely, age 35, b. Illinois, an auditor for a public accounting company. He was later with Prudential Insurance. His wife was Alice L. Keely, b Illinois, age 34, an office clerk for a designer co. We frequently visited the Keely family in later years and I played with their children, Jay (adopted) and Robin, growing up.

Sources

1. ↑ University of California Bulletin General Catalog 1949-1950, p 379 https://registrar.ucla.edu/file/42037179-96ee-4a25-b1c7-c15e2da61331
2. ↑ "United States Census, 1940," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:VRR1-Z7W : 14 March 2018), Herman L Robe, Ward 1, Eugene, Eugene Election Precinct 31, Lane, Oregon, United States; citing enumeration district (ED) 20-35B, sheet 1A, line 1, family 1, Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, NARA digital publication T627. Records of the Bureau of the Census, 1790 - 2007, RG 29. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2012, roll 3368.
3. ↑ "Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States Records," images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QHK-SQH7-191F-J : May 8, 2022), image 17 of 111; United States. Bureau of the Census.

• "Louisiana, New Orleans Passenger Lists, 1820-1945," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:KZQ2-FYJ : 12 March 2018), Stanley Robe, 1943; citing Ship Cuba, affiliate film #185, NARA microfilm publications M259 and T905 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.); FHL microfilm 2,311,535.

"United States Social Security Death Index," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:JBN3-34C : 20 May 2014), Stanley L Robe, 17 Aug 2010; citing U.S. Social Security Administration, Death Master File, database (Alexandria, Virginia: National Technical Information Service, ongoing).