Man of Steel

We have a lot of time machines scattered throughout our home. They don’t run on electricity, but their memory capacity is extraordinary. They’re the scrapbooks that my wife Bambi lovingly and painstakingly kept before she passed away in June of 2017, and they record her life, our lives together and the lives of our children and families.

One of the main characters in them is her father, Robert Bihler Bachman, who recently died at the age of 98. To say that he was a wonderful man is to give him short shrift, and to call his life well-lived does not do him justice. Born on December 6, 1922, he grew up in Coatesville, PA, where his father ran the general store for the Lukens Steel Company. He went to Franklin & Marshall College, graduating in three years so he could enlist in the Navy’s Officer Candidate School during World War II. When the Japanese surrendered, he had to take the coastal carrier he commanded back from the Phillipines through a horrendous typhoon back to Guam. You’d get seasick just listening to him tell that story.

When he returned to Coatesville, Bob became a salesman for Lukens, selling the very steel used to make the ships he served upon. He was so good at the job that he was still selling metal when he was 95 years old. Little wonder that Franklin & Marshall’s alumni magazine once profiled him as “The Man of Steel.”

His loved ones knew him as Pop Pop, or Doo Bird, or just plain Bob, though there was nothing plain about him. When he died, he was the oldest member of the Brae Burn Country Club in West Newton, MA and the youngest at heart.

Indeed, he was a fine athlete who won a national title in badminton (Masters, mixed doubles) and played golf with the likes of Bob Hope and 1913 U.S. Open Champion Francis Ouimet. But his crowning achievement was the family that he and the former Libby Frolich raised in Wellesley, MA. My incredible luck in marrying Bambi was compounded by the warmth with which I was always treated by her parents, her three brothers and their wives.

Bambi and I had met at Sports Illustrated, where she became the golf reporter—as such,she occasionally showed her family the ropes of major tournaments. We married in October of 1984, but only after a golf tournament and a softball game. There’s this lovely photo of Bambi pitching in a veil as her father stands behind her. Bob had it by his bedside when he died on January 17 at the North Hill senior community in Needham.

Pitch and Woo

Bambi and Bob’s team was the Veiled Threats. Mine was the Husbandry Animals.

Bob is survived by Libby, his wife of 67 years, their three sons and their spouses, 12 grandchlldren and four great-grandchildren. He had other close-knit families, as well—the clients he called upon in the Northeast and Canada, the parishioners at the Wellesley Village Church, the members and staff of both Brae Burn and the University Club in Boston, the folks at North Hill… he enchanted pretty much anybody he ever met with his friendly demeanor, his story-telling skills and his photographic memory.

There’s this one picture that I found of him, standing and talking to a policeman before a Dartmouth football game, and you’d swear the two of them had been friends for years. In the days after he died, I began going through all of the old scrapbooks. He seamlessly goes from doting on his own kids to doting on theirs. He’s especially happy at Christmas, opening presents with them. He and Libby also loved to take us to the Otesaga Hotel in Cooperstown, or The Balsams in New Hampshire. There he is, standing with Libby and our young boys on the putting green at the Otesaga, sitting with our twin girls at The Balsams pool.

There are birthdays and weddings and anniversaries and the Bachman Family Reunion in Bird-In-Hand, PA. There he is in his Ben Hogan golf cap teeing off, or in his paper Medieval Times crown, celebrating the silliness with the kids.

He didn’t always have it easy. Lukens had to let him go in his mid-60s because of the downturn in the domestic steel business, so he reinvented himself as a manufacturer’s rep and found renewed success. He had a few health scares, but always forged ahead, knowing that lunch at Brae Burn, a Whiskey Sour in the evening, and a visit from one of his kids or grandkids was on the horizon. In the last decade, the death of his beloved sister Jane and then her namesake, daughter Bambi, hit him particularly hard. But he did live long enough to learn that our son Bo’s wife Rachel had given birth to another Jane on Halloween.

In that magazine story, Bob was quoted as saying, “I have been very fortunate.” Truth be told, the people who knew and loved him were and are the lucky ones.

God, he was a great guy.

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