Robin Campbell

At Robin’s memorial service, my Uncle Jim, who had lost his wife decades before, told me to remember the good times. That is so easy to do, because there were so many good times with Robin. Robin died two years ago this evening. I am remembering the good times, and I am so thankful to have known and been married to such a remarkable, wonderful man.

I remember, when I first met Robin, wishing that I could bottle him up and sell him, somehow. I never stopped feeling that way. I still feel that way now, more than ever. I remember the first time I saw Robin, being mesmerized by him, and I never stopped being mesmerized by him. There were times when I really, seriously suspected that Robin was really, seriously an angel from heaven, and looking back, there are times when I still suspect that.

There is no way to really be able to describe another person, but I can try, and I will. Describing isn’t the same thing as understanding. I never understood Robin, and I still don’t. That is a compliment. Robin was The most psychologically and intellectually independent person I have ever known, or known of. I don’t understand how it is possible for any human being to be as independent as Robin was. He really was like someone from another planet. At first, I thought maybe it was because he came from Scotland, but going to Scotland and learning about Scotland, and meeting other people from Scotland didn’t answer any of my questions about who this Robin Campbell guy was and where he came from. All of my experiences with other Scottish people just left me scratching my head even more, wondering even more what planet Robin came from. It seemed to me that he came from Heaven.

I was raised in a very political family. Most if not all of my values were instilled in me by my very political parents. Robin was blessed with wonderful parents and a very loving family. Robin’s parents were not political at all, and they were more than a little bit hippy dippy when it came to raising the kids. They sent Robin to the best school in the country where discipline was strictly and often and often unfairly enforced, but they never told their children what to believe, about politics or religion or anything. Kids raised that way often just end up following the crowd. To say that Robin did not just follow the crowd would be the understatement of all time. Robin’s parents stood back and allowed Robin to come to his own conclusions. Remarkably, miraculously, Robin virtually always if not always came to the correct conclusions, with no one and nothing but his own brilliant mind to guide him. There are people in America who were raised in liberal or non political families who end up becoming conservatives, but Scotland isn’t America. There isn’t a conservative movement in Scotland. There aren’t even any conservatives in Scotland, that I know of. Scotland is a country filled to the brim with people who really, seriously believe that socialism works. Robin knew by the time he was 20 that it didn’t. Nobody told him, nobody explained it to him, and no one had to. He just looked at the world around him, he knew what the score was, and he was willing to speak out against socialism even if everyone around him was a socialist. I find that remarkable, and I don’t understand how it is possible. I actually feel like I understand Scottish socialists better than I understand Robin. Their parents were socialists, their teachers were socialists, they live in a country where at least 95% of people are socialists, so of course they are socialists too. I totally get that. I don’t get Robin. I worship the ground he walks on, but I don’t understand him. He was a genius, and that is all there is to it.

What makes Robin all the more remarkable, considering that he was a genius, is that he didn’t have a snobbish bone in his body. Robin’s parents didn’t have much money, but somehow their son attended the top boy’s school in Scotland. This may have been at least partly due to the fact that Robin was very bright. I suspect that there may have been more to it than that, because Robin’s father and uncle also attended that school, and I am pretty sure that his grandfather did as well. I don’t know this for certain, but I suspect that Robin’s family is or was what is known as “shabby genteel.” Which means, in Europe, upper class poor. People who have social connections, but no money. This is just speculation on my part. I don’t know for certain, and I never will in this lifetime. But regardless of whether I am right or wrong about the social status of Robin’s family, Robin had a million and one opportunities to be a snob, but he never was one. He never used his intellect or his education or his money-there was a time in his life when he had money, (before I met him, Lol 🙂 as a club to beat other people with. He never used his intellect or knowledge to intimidate those who weren’t as smart as he was, and he never attempted to surround himself with other well educated people. He actually scoffed at most well educated people. He thought most of them were incompetent fools, and he had no time for them.

Robin attended college for about 3 weeks, and then dropped out and joined the workforce. By the time he was 28, he owned his own business, employed about 50 people and was driving around in a Porsche. At one point early on, he became so fed up with what he considered the incompetence and bad attitudes of recent college grads that he started saying, “College graduates need not apply” in his postings at the job center. The people at the job center threw a fit over this, but they couldn’t stop him. After experimenting with hiring various types of people, Robin settled into a routine of always giving first dibs on any job to those who had a military background. This was only partly because Robin was patriotic. According to Robin, those with a military background were the best people to hire and the ones most likely to succeed at the job. But, there was a limited supply of military guys looking for civilian jobs, so Robin also got involved in a program where he mentored street kids, basically, and gave them training and jobs in his company. He loved those kids, he loved that program, and he was thrilled with how it all turned out. Most of those kids ended up being great employees-far better than any of the college graduates, Robin would assure you. Robin used his gifts to lift other people up.

He was brilliant, he was kind, but if you didn’t know him well, before anything, you would have noticed that he was happy-joyful, actually, is a better word for it. Robin was always smiling, always laughing, always with a quick joke-well, ok, not always, lol, but often. He told me once that his goal in life was to make sure that every person who encountered him went away feeling better afterwards. It occurs to me now, and Robin would totally admit, that isn’t entirely true. If he encountered someone who was a snob, it definitely was not his goal to help snobs feel better. He had no qualms about taking snobs down several notches, as he did at the New York Times and in real life, on occasion, but as long as you weren’t a snob, Robin was absolutely wonderful, and he went to extreme lengths to make sure that there were as few snobs in his life as possible.

The people who knew Robin-the ones who weren’t snobs, anyway-would tell you that they did feel better each time they encountered him, and they were so much better for having known him. If that isn’t success, what is?