Harry Jaffe: Barefoot kid comes from salt mines to fix District schools

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - In the predawn darkness of the fall morning when Robert Bobb’s father drove him through the sugar cane fields of rural Louisiana to the bus that would take him to Grambling State University, his father said: “If you don’t like it, come home.”

That was a sweet notion from a father who drove a tractor in the sugar cane fields all summer and worked in the sugar factories all winter, a man whose education ended in third grade. His eldest son was the first in the family to graduate from high school. Though he was proud to send his son to college, the kid could always come home.

No way, young Robert Bobb thought. Coming home would mean returning to the salt mines — literally.

Morton Salt ran a sulfur mine down the road, and in the summers, when he wasn’t working in the sugar cane fields, Bobb would descend into the hot zone of the salt mines. Grambling State would have to be hellish for him to return.

Bobb came to The Examiner offices this week to talk about his campaign for school board president, with the Nov. 7 election racing toward us. He was turned out in a dark pinstripe suit, crisp white shirt, black and white tie, black and white suspenders, lizard-skin cowboy boots. All this on a man who grew up barefoot.

It’s a cliche, especially in politics, to say that a candidate’s past prepared him for whatever office he seeks. In Bobb’s case, his past in that small southern town propelled him to this moment.

“The only way out was education,” he says.

With his father working in the fields and his mother as a domestic, Bobb and his siblings spent much of their time with their grandmother. She couldn’t read, so she made Bobb bring home the Times-Picayune and read it to her.

“I would crawl into bed with my grandmother and read the Bible, or church stuff or the newspaper,” he says.

After driving tractor all day, his father would come home, place his eldest son and his daughter in the middle of the room and make them explain their homework.

“The work ethic in my household was incredible,” he says.

Bobb never did take his father up on the offer to come home. He graduated from Grambling, got a masters degree in business and tried the private sector before he went into municipal government, where he has spent the past 25 years managing cities like San Francisco and Washington.

Bobb’s bio will tell you he paved a path for African-American city managers; it won’t say he paved a path for his family. Once he set off to Grambling, his sister and three brothers followed along to graduate from college.

When you take the measure of Robert Bobb these days in his suits and boots, it’s hard to see the teenager working at the salt mines. But he can feel the heat of the mines on the soles of his shoes.

When he says “education was the only way out,” he lived it.

Harry Jaffe has been covering the Washington area since 1985. E-mail him at hjaffe@washingtonian.com.

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