Robert Ray Zumbach

• General Notes
  • Born 19 Feb 1932 He was born in the house near Long Bottom, Ohio in Meigs County. He was the second of three children, his older sister Beulah was 1 year older than him and he has a younger sister Nancy who was born when he was 14.
    
    Being Appalachia in the 1930s, they were missing some of the more common conveniences. They had an outhouse and they had to take a baths in the wash tub in the kitchen, as they had no indoor plumbing. Electricity didn’t arrive until the 1940s. They played a lot of Monopoly by gas light.
    
    Because of the remoteness of their home, they would sometimes run errands before taking the bus home from school in town. Beulah had bought a loaf of bread on the way home, and during the trip up the driveway had an argument with Bob. Finally in frustration she threw the loaf of bread at him. She missed, but destroyed the loaf of bread on the barbed wire fence.
    Even though Bob was ½ Swiss, he always hated all milk products, including cheese. At a young age his mother forced him to eat it, making him sick. He continued his dislike of dairy products his entire life. He would never eat pizza, was constantly sending back toast in restaurants because they put butter on it, and never had any cheese. He did however, like good ‘country cooking’. He was a good cook. He would make his own sausage, adding extra sage to it. One of his favorite meals was fried bologna sandwiches and fried green tomatoes. When I was small he would also liked to buy a pound of chocolate covered peanut clusters at the candy counter in Sears at the mall.
    
    They thought Bob would never live to adulthood because of a ‘hole in his heart’. Because of this he failed his physical when trying to join the Army for service in Korea. Once when he was young he fell out of a tree and knocked himself out. Grandma thought he was dead because of the bad heart.
    
    Once electricity did come, Bob became a big fan of the radio shows. His favorite was ‘The Shadow’. Later in life when CB radios became in vogue, his CB ‘handle’ was The Shadow.
    Bob and his friends were at times mischievous. Once they knocked over an outhouse at school with the teacher in it. He ran the projector at school to show movies. He loved to show the Bugs Bunny shorts. He loved Loony Toons his entire life. When his son David was a teenager they would watch them together as well as sit there and listen to Doctor Demento. He was the manager of the basketball team in school and received an ‘O’. He was popular with the girls. He graduated in a class of 20.
    
    Immediately after high school Bob went to Canton, Ohio to work for Timken in the roller bearing plant. He did not enjoy working at Timken and left after a short period.  He then went to work for North American Aviation in Columbus. He went with a group of friends from Meigs County. He lived in a rooming house on East Broad Street in Columbus.
    At North America he worked on Sabre’s, a single seat military jet. For years we had 11 x 17 prints of all of their planes. Ironically he hated to fly, having flown only twice in his life, from Pittsburgh to Allentown and back in the 1970s.
    
    When his future wife Eva Life’s family moved from Parkersburg to the Ohio countryside he and her brother Paul became good friends. One day not long after they moved in, another person was in the front room asking Eva’s father for permission to ask her out, when Bob was in the kitchen and asked her out directly. Needless to say he got the date. He proposed to her at a drive in hot dog place. They were married in Parkersburg on February 21, 1953, but not by her father Edmund Life, who was a preacher. Edmund refused to marry any of his children, in case it didn’t work out. One of their few wedding presents was a week free rent at the rooming house in Columbus that Bob was staying. Eva was barely 18 years old, and Bob 21 when they were married.
    
    After they were married they moved to a small rental house in Bremen. Bob commuted the long distance to Columbus each day, and Eva worked at a grocery store. Bob also was a volunteer fireman. They would go back to Meigs County almost every weekend.
    
    On January 21, 1956 their son Mike was born. Eva quit working until after Diana was in school. Diana was born October 6, 1957. Shortly after that they moved to Lancaster. On December 27th, 1959 their son David was born.
    
    There was a strike at North American and he had to go to work and had to cross the picket line, so the company had to send a guard to their house to protect mom.
    Bob used to always tell stories about the 2 lane road to Columbus from Lancaster. Now it is a very busy 4 and 6 lane highway and it is mostly city the entire 30 miles. He also used to show his son neighborhoods in Columbus that were ghettos in the 1980s that had been countryside when he arrived in the 1950s.
    
    Bob continued to work for North American Aviation until the early 1960s when he was laid off. He then got a job driving trucks for Buckeye Pipeline. This paid poorly so after a while his uncle Harry Monroe helped him get a job with another trucking company, Food Haul. They hauled groceries for A& P stores. He would leave very early in the morning, go to Columbus, get in his truck and drive back into West Virginia and deliver groceries and return. The trucking terminal was next door to the Columbus Jets baseball stadium. He told a story that the A&P bakery was across the street from the Ohio prison. In the late 1960s there was a riot while he had to go to the bakery. It was from these trips back into West Virginia that he became acquainted with all of the ‘good’ hot dog and country food places. Since they had relatives back in West Virginia, they would sometimes visit these places. We once made a trip of almost 150 miles in one direction to go from Lancaster to Clarksburg West Virginia for hot dogs. His children all had hamburgers, and he was furious. It was a quiet 150 mile trip back.
    
    It was unusual for any trip to be quiet. Bob would often give dissertations about some subject, usually on the 90 minute trip from Lancaster to Meigs County. One of the more famous ones was a lengthy, and detailed, explanation of how the combustion engine worked. He often claimed that he did not give these lectures, but in the late 60s Mike had received a tape recorder for Christmas and covertly recorded much of one. Sadly this tape was immediately destroyed once he found out!
    
    Because of the necessity of growing up dirt he learned to do a wide variety of things on his own. At some point in his life he built houses, including carpentry, electrical, and plumbing. He usually had a 2nd job, often involving working on houses. At times this would be his primary job if there had been a layoff at either North American or Food Haul. He also worked at Tiki Bowling Lanes at times for a second job. This was liked by the family because they could bowl for free and they also had a private swimming pool by membership that we were permitted to go to, and it was just down the street from our house.
    
    For a while they had a ‘cabin’ at Burr Oak Lake, in Southern Ohio. These cabins were supposedly old dormitories from the 1920s Ohio University, but in reality they were shacks down an abandoned railroad track bed up the hill from this lake. He loved to go there though, and usually one of the days they would get up at 4 AM and go down to the lake to go ‘Frog Gigging’. It was at this lake that David once got lost and after about 4 hours came out about 5 miles away on the other side. He was so happy to see his son he didn’t punish him for wandering off.
    He loved music, and would often put a stack of albums on the large Zenith console stereo. His favorites were Marty Robbins, or Hawaiian Music. He would often sing, in his deep voice. He would watch Hee Haw and the Grand ‘Ol Opry on TV. He also liked detective shows like Burke’s Law.
    
    Bob completed an entire correspondence school for electronics from the Cleveland Institute of Electronics. It fit perfectly with his ongoing desire to understand all things mechanical and electrical. He built a radio and TV as part of this effort. He also had many do it yourself books.
    
    For years the family never had enough money to buy a house, so they intermittently would move from one rental to another around Lancaster. They lived in 4 different places before they were able to come up with a ‘land contract’ purchase of a home on East Fair Avenue. They moved into this house in 1967, and lived there until 1973. He later would claim selling that house and moving to Northern Ohio for work was the dumbest thing he ever did.
    
    In 1973 Bob was offered a job as a Terminal Manager for the trucking company, but he had to move from Columbus to Salem, Ohio, near Youngstown. This was a big opportunity for him,so he took it. Mike was going into his senior year in high school, Diana into 10th grade and David was going into 8th grade. Most of the family was not happy about this move. They sold the house, but did not buy one. Instead They rented a small house in the small town of Columbiana. Diana’s room as about 6 x 8. The culture shock of moving from the Columbus area to Columbiana was tremendous. The added pressure of being in charge, along with the move, made these challenging times.
    
    The Youngstown area has always had a history of organized crime, and on their first trip up asked for a recommendation of a restaurant. They suggested one in the country between Salem and Youngstown, which had no windows. The kids made so many mafia jokes that Bob didn’t want to go in, but in the end we did. It had fabulous food, and very friendly people.
    Most of his drivers in Salem were of Italian descent. His union steward was Sam Legese. He and his wife Bernice Legese became camping friends with them. Sam would often tell him stories of 1950s Youngstown Mafia activities. The times in Salem in the 1970 were difficult, as there were many strikes and other labor unrest. He was often very stressed during the union contract negotiations. His drivers however accepted him more than most since he himself had been a driver. In addition to the Salem terminal, he was later given responsibility for one in Ypsilanti, Michigan and Jacksonville, Florida. We were supposed to move to Jacksonville in 1976 but this was at a time that A&P closed many of their east coast stores, and the Jacksonville location was closed and we remained in Northern Ohio.
    
    In 1978 Bob was offered a job as the Director of the company, and was relocated back to Columbus. This position left him in charge of a number of terminals. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 one of the first things he did was deregulate the trucking industry. As a result there were many low cost carriers come along. Their union contracts put them in an unfavorable position with their contracts, and eventually after laying off 400 people he laid himself off. Officially since he had been there 15 years he retired.
    
    Finding himself out of work at age 50 he went back to working with a heating company, doing installations around Lancaster. He did this for a couple of years until a chance meeting with an old friend at a local mall who still worked for the aircraft factory. By this point North American Aviation had been taken over by Rockwell. With Reagan being elected, he ramped up defense spending, specifically on the B-1-B bomber. They were looking for supervisors and he of course had years of experience, so in 1982 he went back to work at the aircraft factory after being technically laid off since 1962. As they used to say in their house, Reagan takes away and Reagan gives. He worked at Rockwell until the late 1980s when they started ramping down the production of the B-1-B. He received numerous certificates for innovative ideas. In 1987 he officially retired from Rockwell.
    
    Bob was the kind of person who would give everyone a big hug if he hadn’t seen you in some time. From the first day he met Kim he treated her like his own daughter.
    When Bob and Eva would go to the mall, she would go shopping and he would go to the hardware section of Sears and come home with some sort of tool. When Bob passed away and his two sons and son in law divided up his tools and they found, among others 15 ½ socket heads.
    
    Shortly after this Bob went back into the trucking business as a Manager for Lake Wales Trucking, a fruit shipping company from Florida that had a terminal in Columbus. He was working here when he passed away of a heart attack in 1991.
    
    Even though Bob had a number of houses, he had even more cars. Among the more notable ones were a Red 1962 Ford Fairlane (with ‘3 on the tree’), an old used Ohio Bell truck, and a VW beetle (which was once backed into from a gravel truck). Once when he was in Jacksonville Florida (where we were supposed to move to) he had a rental pacer (aka the mooncar).
    Bob never lost his love of the country and the mountains. The family went to the Blue Ridge Parkway on vacation a couple of times. He always wanted to move to the mountains and have a mom and pop grocery store.
    

Click here for details of Robert's family with Eva Elizabeth Life

¹ David Zumbach
Source/Citation David Zumbach

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