ERIK LANE MARCH 11, 1996 BLOCK B
BIOGRAPHY: BOB LANE (GRANDFATHER)
Bob Lane was born in Denver, Colorado on February 14, 1936. He was the fourth of five kids. He wasn’t born in a hospital because in 1936 there weren’t as many hospitals. Bob was born in the kitchen: actually he was home on the kitchen table.
Bob said, “one of the first known stories of me is when I was a baby; I was in my crib fussing and crying. The dog, Kayo, who was sleeping next to me got up, looked at me and left. He opened the front door and started to dig in the yard and returned with an old bone, he dropped it into the crib. the dog went to sleep and I gnawed on the bone and shut up.”
In 1943, when Bob was seven his parents divorced. Shortly after his mother married a wheat farmer and she and the five children [actually only two: Bob and Beth] moved to his farm outside of Wray, Colorado. When she changed her name Bob did too – so for a few years he went under the name “Foltmer”. Every day he rode his horse to school. For grades two through six he went to school in a one room school house. After grade six there were only four students left in his school so they got transferred to a larger school in the city of Wray [population 2,000]. Bob found that the transition from a one room school to a much bigger one was tough because he wasn’t the biggest kid anymore. In just the first few weeks he got into about sixteen fights, but he later found his place in the pecking order of his new school. It didn’t take him too long to settle in, and once he did he managed to get mostly straight A’s. That is until he discovered football, cars, and girls. “Those three things, even back then, could get you into trouble.”
In Bob’s Freshman year, 1949, he was one of two athletes to letter in both football and track. There should have been something to honor him, but instead the senior lettermen put him through the initiation. They hassled him, they paddled him, and worst of all they made him do the walnut race. The loser had to crack the walnut with his teeth.
In his senior year, 1952-53, Bob won the half mile at the conference championships setting a conference record of two minutes flat. After all this glory Bob got in trouble with girls and drinking and ran away from home. He made it to California where he was caught, returned, and kicked out of school. He changed his name back to Lane.
In March of 1953, during the Korean war, he joined the United States Marine Corps where, after boot camp, he was sent to Camp Pendleton, California for advanced combat training. Bob was sent on a train to Florida with a fellow marine who was ‘black’. He said, “As soon as we crossed into the Southern states I got my first taste of racial discrimination. My friend couldn’t even eat in the same restaurant. I didn’t understand how they could send black people off to Korea to die for them and then not even let them eat with us. I wanted to straighten a few things out by kicking some ass but my friend, who had been through this before, said that there was nothing that we could do.”
In 1955, in a Lutheran church, Bob met the young woman who was to become his wife of forty-one years [soon 57 yrs.]. After a whirlwind courtship they were married and by 1956 had their first son, my dad. Bob, Karen, and Steve moved to Dallas where Bob would study engineering at SMU. One day Bob’s English class was reading T.S. Eliot and it just happened that Mr. Eliot was on a tour. When he came to SMU Bob went to see him. His poems had such an effect on Bob that he changed from engineering to English. And from Texas to California.
By now Bob and Karen had two sons. They packed all their stuff into a trailer and set off for Santa Barbara, California. They brought just enough money to make the trip if there were no problems, but, forty miles out of Dallas, they had a problem. They 
pulled up to a stop sign and noticed sparks shooting from the back, .. the trailer hitch had bowed and was dragging on the road. The only thing valuable that they owned was also heavy, a washing machine to wash all the diapers. Since most of the money went towards fixing the trailer they couldn’t stay in hotels and since Karen couldn’t drive Bob drove day and night. To stay awake he took some pills that his med. school pals gave him. Little did he know that they were speed. He found out, though, when he started to see monsters and naked women on the highway. “The result was the strangest trip along highway 66.”
They got to Santa Barbara and Bob attended a Junior college where he graduated as valedictorian. That got him an entrance scholarship to UCSB. By the time he got his degree he had a little girl and was working five part-time jobs. When he got a job with Boeing he quit all the rest. After two years with Boeing they moved to Seattle. Then back to Santa Barbara for another two years of grad school. From there he landed his first teaching job at a college in Coos Bay, Oregon teaching Shakespeare and Freshman English.
In 1969 Bob got a call from a friend in Canada who said that there was a college opening in Nanaimo. Bob said, “where’s Nanaimo?” his friend told him that it was on Vancouver Island. Bob said “where’ s Vancouver Island?”
He looked on that map and it looked neat so he interviewed over the phone for a job at the, brand new, Malaspina College and was hired. He said, “my plan was to stay for two years, but here it is twenty-eight years later and I’m still here.”
He became a Canadian citizen in ·1975 .
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Grandson Erik Lane wrote this for a class project long ago.
See also a short story about the move to the farm.
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