Robert Hulbert Randall and Mildred Pitner
A niece remembers:
“Robert Hulbert Randall first. He was born in Grand Rapids, Mich., on July 1, 1902, three and a half years younger than my father. He was inevitably somewhat in the shade of his brother, but there was no gross favoritism, and he seems to have sturdily held his own. My father (who was always referred to in the family as “Jack,”) was tickled to relate that when the family first went to England, in 1910, he meticulously copied the British flag in colors on a sheet of drawing paper, and labeled it (correctly) the Union Jack. His then almost eight year old brother, always referred to in the family as “Bob,” took a sheet of my father’s paper, colored his own flag, and labeled it the “Union Bob,” not in ignorance, but self-assertively.
My Uncle Bob followed his older brother through Mount Morris High School in the Bronx, then a high school with a fine reputation in the New York City system, and easily reached by subway from the Randall family home on 127th St. in Manhattan. My grandfather was brought up to be handy with tools and mechanical things, and turn trained both his sons - who, both of them, trained my brother John - but not me. But of all the four, Uncle Bob’s mechanical bent and ability were outstanding. He could construct a telegraph system, as my brother could later, and also radios, including short wave sets, that equaled professional ones, from the First World War through the Second. (On Bob’s radios, which he built for his father, in Belgrade Lakes, I heard not only Charlie McCarthy, but Roosevelt’s fireside chats, some of Churchill’s speeches of defiance and one of Hitler’s static-interrupted but not ranting speeches.) Uncle Bob could also repair much that went wrong in the automobiles of the age, and with his father’s Gar Wood motorboats, presently his own, on Belgrade Lake. His shops, in his various homes and in the garage at Belgrade Lakes, were impressive.
Therefore it was not surprising that Uncle Bob majored in physics at Columbia, and went on to an M.A. and a Ph.D. in its graduate school. His bent was practical and mechanical, but his chosen specialty was acoustics, in which he mastered and contributed to theory as well as constructing complicated devices. One complicated device for his Ph.D. project was accidentally sat on and crushed by a fellow-student. (How could that happen?) His father was very upset, but Uncle Bob, apparently, just equably (philosophically?) spent a few months building it anew.
He joined the faculty of the College of the City of New York (CCNY) in its great decades, standing apart from its then rousing radical political life. He rose to be an associate professor, for CCNY rarely granted its faculty members the rank of full professor, in some mistaken hope that it would be thought thereby to have higher standards than Harvard or Columbia. In World War II he was a consultant to the armed forces on acoustical subjects he couldn’t and therefore didn’t discuss with us. He was very amused to be one of a number of scholars who wrote papers that were then classified with a higher degree of security than he himself possessed, so that he theoretically couldn’t read them again. He lived with his parents (and with my parents) in their brownstone house through the 1920s, and was very kind to my older brother John, who was born in 1923, and ever after when both were at Belgrade Lakes, and presently to me. He didn’t discuss his professional work with us, and rarely took part in a political or any other kind of argument - and was in general a relatively quiet person in a highly talkative family. But he was always ready (within reason) to supervise our swimming when we were children, to take us on auto excursions in Belgrade or more often on motorboat trips. He was glad to explain any mechanical work he was doing, and he encouraged us, chiefly my brother, to help out insofar as we could. When I was very young, he several times looked at my constructions with wooden blocks or matchboxes, when they ran into problems, and made helpful mechanical suggestions.
Uncle Bob was, in sum, a most equable, pleasant, helpful and outstandingly decent man. When returning from Europe with his parents at the end of the summer of 1926, he met a young woman from Washington, Georgia, Mildred Pitner, on shipboard. She said later that she elicited very soon the fact that Bob was slightly older than she was (a week?), so that she could therefore (according to then current Southern mores) permit a serious friendship to develop. It did develop, uncommon between the sections in those pre-airplane days, but rather slowly. But in the steamy summer of 1929, three generations of New York Randalls sailed to Charleston, S.C., trained to Washington, Ga., and celebrated a sweltering wedding.
Washington proved to be a beautiful town with many old, white-painted houses. Her father, James Pitner, was an attorney. In the 1930s, he served for two terms (I believe) in Georgia’s state legislature, as an ally of the liberal Democrat and ally of Roosevelt, Ellis Arnall, who served some non-consecutive terms as governor.
Aunt Mildred had gone to Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, and always stressed its high academic standards, especially in Latin and in English, her major. (I later heard her and Uncle Bob reading chapters from noted English novels to each other in Belgrade.) She was a lively and vivacious belle when young, and never lost her liveliness or vivacity until extreme old age. But unlike Scarlett O’Hara, America’s idea of a Southern belle in most of the 1930s, Mildred had a mind and an upright character. When she moved North to New York in 1929, she was keenly aware that Northerners looked down on the South, as a region somewhere between (soon to be published) “Gone With the Wind” and “Tobacco Road.” She could deal with this, indeed, she loved to deal with it, volubly.
Like her father, she was a liberal Southerner on the race and class “questions,” but she didn’t think equality could be legislated at once, and she certainly didn’t think Northern pressure, much less contempt, helped a minim. She counter attacked, relevantly, against the hypocrisy of Northerners, whose cities were more residentially segregated than any Southern town ever had been, and who practiced thorough job discrimination and other ways to keep Negroes (the proper term then) down, without recourse to the South’s laws, and often without much or any awareness of what they had done and were benefitting by.
But life with Aunt Mildred, at her homes in Riverdale and then in Tenafly, N.J., and in Belgrade, was anything but a continuing sectional quarrel. She was generous hostess, a bubbling raconteur, much engaged in her neighborhoods, including, I believe, their schools and churches, and a generally and rightly popular person. I think she liked to tease and even bug my father, who didn’t rise to the bait, but seemed to get along well with my mother - though both, I believe, dwelt on each other’s foibles when not together. She was certainly kind to my brother and me."
Bob and Mildred inherited the lodge, land and motorboat at Belgrade Lakes, and I think that he, at least, was happiest there under the great pines by the blue lake. Bob suffered periodically from depressions. Mildred had many health problems. They grew old. Uncle Bob retired, and died of cancer in 198 . Aunt Mildred retreated to Washington, Ga. and lived into the blindness of old age, dying in 1997.