Early Years and Service As An Educator
Robert Tobin was the second of seven children born to Nat Tobin and his wife, Jane Patterson (1894–1982), in Louisiana's Bienville Parish village of Lucky. The family moved to Arcadia, the parish seat, so that the Tobin children could obtain a better education. Young Robert graduated from a black school in Arcadia, where he met his future wife, Thelma McCoy. At the time of his death, the couple had been married for seventy-six years and had outlived their daughter.
A World War II veteran of the 78th United States Army Signal Corps, Tobin was honorably discharged with the rank of technical sergeant and remained a life member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Studying at Louisiana's Southern University in Baton Rouge, a historically black institution of higher learning, and graduating with a major in science and a minor in mathematics, he subsequently attended California's Stanford University in Palo Alto, from which he obtained a master of science degree in science and secondary school supervision. He then entered the teaching profession at Castor Elementary School in the Bienville Parish village of Castor, later becoming principal of the school and subsequently transferring, at the invitation of his friend and mentor, Wilbur Leon Hayes, to the then-all-black Webster High School in Minden, where he served as a classroom teacher, assistant principal and principal. Five years after his retirement in 1970 from the field of education, the school was consolidated with the previously white Minden High School.
Read more about this topic: Robert T. Tobin
Famous quotes containing the words early, years and/or service:
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“The masochist: “I send my tormentor hurrying hither and thither in the service of my suffering and desire.””
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)