Love at First Sight: Robbie Gibbons

“There will be a time when you are forced to follow your heart away from someone you love.”
—Ashly Lorenzana

When I was 15, before I had my own sailboat, I went as crew with a group of Lake Lotawana sailors to Lake Okoboji in northern Iowa. This trip would change my life.

We were a pretty motley group. This was the first time sailors from our lake had traveled to an out-of-town regatta and no one had a proper boat trailer. Instead, we had brought the boats north on a mix of farm trailers. I'm sure the Okoboji sailors wanted to laugh at our ragtag group, but they couldn't have been more hospitable. While this unloading was taking place, two of the most gorgeous girls I had ever seen drove up in a beautiful wood-sided Chrysler convertible. They were Robbie Gibbon and Tigar Beacons. I was instantly in love!

Robbie attended the yacht club parties that weekend and we hit it off as well as two fifteen-year-olds can. I was in love although I wasn’t sure about Robbie. I knew she had many suitors at the lake.

Like every young teenager I had my share of high school romances. I was crazy about Dolores Anderson for a few weeks and thought Ann Mackey was the one, however, they were both nothing serious.

Robbie and I exchanged letters, a few phone calls and a minor romance flourished. The next summer I had my driver’s license, and I convinced my folks that I should take a family car and a friend, Joe Birmingham, to Okoboji for a five-day visit to the Gibbons as house guests, an invitation I had finagled. Even though I was still well aware that Robbie had many other suitors at the lake, our romance continued.

That fall I left for my year of school in England, and I took a framed picture of Robbie to put on my nightstand. The British may have been miles ahead of us scholastically but were far behind socially and I think I was the only guy in my house that had a “girlfriend.”

During my year abroad we wrote to each other since it was virtually impossible to make international phone calls. I'm not even sure there was a telephone available to students at Haileybury College.

When I returned to school at Peddie, Robbie had enrolled at Abbott Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where I knew she had a series of boyfriends, but we still stayed in touch by mail and an occasional phone call. In my senior year, I was able to convince her to come with me to my Peddie Senior Prom where we spent more time necking in a professor’s car than we spent on the dance floor. I was seriously in love.

I had been accepted at Yale and Robbie chose Northwestern University. At this time, Yale was all-male so when Robbie selected Northwestern, I decided that seven years of all-male schools was enough and I also enrolled at Northwestern. Over the years I have pondered many times how my life would have been different had I chosen Yale. Would the distance have been too much to continue our romance? Would I have met a nice Vassar girl? We will never know. Robbie and I arrived at Northwestern in the fall of 1950. At that time fraternities and sororities were very strong on campus and Robbie joined Kappa Kappa Gamma and I pledged Sigma Alpha Epsilon. As is usual with romances at that age, we had our occasional ups and downs, and both dated other people, but by our sophomore year, we were going steady. In our junior year, things got serious, and we discovered that Robbie was pregnant.

The 480-mile drive from Evanston to Sioux City to inform her parents seemed like it was 10,000 miles.

With great trepidation, we announced the news, and the Gibbons were unbelievably supportive. Robbie's father, a doctor, told us that he could arrange the termination of the pregnancy if that is what we wanted. We rejected the idea immediately. Robbie dropped out of school, and we rented a one-bedroom apartment on the near north side of Chicago. It was on the third floor with no elevator and the bedroom window was only 40 feet from the elevated tracks. Every 20 minutes a train would go by, and the entire building would shake. We got used to it, but you can imagine the expressions on the faces of occasional dinner guests when a train went by, and it looked like the dishes were going to shake off the table. A good thing about being on the 3rd floor with no elevator—carrying groceries up three flights of stairs kept us in shape!

Being married changed my school life. I had to resign from ​being ​president of the fraternity and president of the ​Interfraternity Council as well as the NORTC program. No two years in the Navy upon graduation.

            Candy was born in December 1953, and we started a new life. We moved into a large house on Ridge Ave. in Evanston and rented rooms to some of my fraternity brothers to help with the rent. Tom Woodward, Chuck Hollinshead and Roger Dickinson were easy to have around, and in the spring of 1954, we had great sessions watching Cubs games on TV while Roger, the popcorn master, cooked up a hot batch and we guzzled Hamm's beer. Sometimes Candy joined in from her crib.

 We skipped my graduation and moved to a small rental home in Glenview, Illinois, where I started selling masonry saws for Clipper. We felt right at home. The noise from airplanes taking off from the nearby Naval Air Station reminded us of our Chicago apartment. We had a good life in Glenview. I worked hard and liked my job and we had pleasant weekends exploring the Chicago area.

In 1955, Kim was brought into the world with the help of the same doctor that had delivered Candy. The wonderful care Robbie and Kim received was worth the long drive from Glenview to the hospital on the south side of Chicago.

In 1957, I got the big promotion at Clipper—as the man says it is easier to climb the ladder of success if your daddy owns the ladder—and we moved to Kansas City. My father guaranteed the mortgage on a nice house on Cherokee Drive and our life in Kansas City began. And it was a good life. My job involved some travel but not too much and we had the use of my parents Lake Lotawana home for most weekends. Robbie was my regular crew for the sailboat races. We were frequent​ winners.

In 1958, Jeff was born, and the family was complete.

Robbie was great fun to be with, loved parties and was a wonderful wife and mother until we moved to Aspen in 1967, when she developed a serious drinking issue. I don't know what caused her alcohol problem. It may have been my fault for being so involved in my work or it may have been the party environment of Aspen. Either way, it was for real. Robbie went to three of the best alcohol rehabilitation facilities in the country, however, it would only be a week or two before I would find a bottle of vodka in the back of the toilet bowl, and she would spiral out of control. I finally decided that it had to end and filed for divorce. We were divorced in 1972 and Robbie moved back to Kansas City where she managed to recover and marry another reformed alcoholic, an old friend from Lake Lotawana. I found myself a single parent with three precious kids to raise.

Robbie was able to overcome her alcoholism and was successful selling real estate and working as a personal shopper for a high-end Kansas City department store. Unfortunately, Robbie's years of abusing her body caught up with her and she died of a heart attack in 1992 at far too early an age.