David Jerome Mafille Quarton's Web Site

Denver, Colorado USA

Updated - 04/20/2008 06:12 -0600

"Uncle Bob"

"Uncle Bob" The man who wanted me to call him "Uncle Bob" - as far as I remember he was my mother's cousin - was actually named Charles Church Roberts but didn't like the nickname "Charley" as in "Charley Horse". He ran away from home ( from Belmont, Massachusetts) at age 6 or 8 or 10 or 12 - I forget which and became the cabin boy aboard a ship. Later, in the 1890s he joined the U.S. Navy and got a Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery in a ship fire. In the 19 teens U.S. Naval Intelligence called him in and got him to volunteer for them. They also gave him a poison to take if he was caught - I think it was arsenic. His job was to save what he could of the Russian royalty during the rebellion there. I asked him how he got out and he said it was with the help of the one country that paid its debt to the U.S. during World War One. If I remember right that would have been Finland. He said that they were able to get out a boy and a girl ( I got the feeling that they dressed the girl up as a boy). Later - in the 1920s - he was on the staff of the U. S. Embassy in Finland. And he was one of the most honest persons I ever met. He was pledged to secrecy and - as far as I know - never violated that pledge until he told me about it in his later years, the early 1950s. When he died - about 1954-55 - he had just been elected the Commandant of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. Another side of "Uncle Bob" was the fact that he was very much against the politics and "Red Scare" of U. S. Senator McCarthy. I think it was the 1930s that he got a job with a British merchandising company and got much art work from the Congo River area - such as a coffee table made out of an elephant's foot pad. Much of that went to the Smithsonian, although he gave me a hand-carved - I think it was carved out of ironwood - African head as well as an old book on the exploration of the Congo River area of Africa. He told me two stories that made a lasting impression on me. He once went to a particular village's open air market and saw the hams of a 13 year old girl who was captured in a village war, then killed, then cut up for food. He didn't try that meat but was told that it tasted like veal. Then there was the time he was scheduled to give the keynote speech at a conference in Texas, and the plane arrived late. When he reached the airport he called up the governor and got a police escort which got him there just in time.