On July 6, 2025, the day after celebrating his 89th birthday surrounded by his son and extended family, Robert Louis White (Bob) passed away.

Bob was born in 1936 in Winter Park, Florida. He was the oldest of three children born to Mildred Free White and Milton (Mitt) White, a Texaco salesman whose job required that the family move around the South to a number of towns including Pensacola, Guntersville, and Savannah, before settling in Augusta, GA in 1950 for Bob's high school years.

In Augusta, Bob made four lifelong friends, affectionately known as "The Fearsome Five." Bob and his father Mitt were fierce tennis players who won the Men's Double Championship at the famed Bitsy Grant Tennis Center in Atlanta, GA.

In 1954 Bob attended the University of Georgia (UGA), where he was a cheerleader for the football team, became president of the Kappa Sigma fraternity, and earned membership in the Gridiron Secret Society, "the highest honor a male student may receive on the University of Georgia campus."

Upon graduating in Business Administration in 1958, Bob served in the US Army Reserve for six months at Fort Jackson, SC. In 1959 Bob moved to Atlanta, GA to work at World Gems, a company that dealt in precious and semi-precious minerals. He traveled to a Colombia emerald mine in 1960 where the prospectors were "mean as snakes" and he witnessed a brief skirmish with bandits while on horseback. Bob returned to UGA in 1962 to study geology, but discovered after a year that he wasn't a scientist. He moved to the Human Resources Department at Lockheed-Martin in Atlanta in 1963 (having learnt to fly small aircraft in high school), and subsequently gained employment with the Xerox Corporation in 1966, a job that took him to Rochester, NY, and then to New York City, where he would live from 1968 to 1981. He saw the twin towers of the World Trade Center being built from his office in the Rockefeller Center.

Bob immersed himself in the cultural adventure that was 1960s and 1970s New York. He learned to play Bob Dylan songs on the guitar, worked as a carpenter and for Rolling Stone magazine, and participated in Summer Stock theater in the Catskills. In 1976 Bob met his future British wife Georgina while he was on a trip working for the Mideast American Business Company, which took him to Jordan, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and London. In 1977, he worked with Judy Lynn McDowell and Bill Butler to found Goodskates, a roller skating organization based in Central Park that celebrated dancing, "jamming" (a combination of dancing and skating), and community. Among their patrons were Mick Jagger, Dustin Hoffman, Stevie Wonder(!), and a young Kevin Bacon.

Marrying Georgina in 1982, Bob relocated to Washington, D.C. where he worked in fundraising at the American University. There he became a father with the birth of his son, Oliver (Olly), in April 1984. He and Georgina and Olly then moved to Allentown, PA in 1986, where Bob managed the Westend Racquet Club and served as its head tennis professional. That job

ended in 1989 when Bob and Georgina separated and Georgina took Olly back to England for his education.

While Georgina and Olly lived in Oxfordshire, Bob moved to London for work. He sold tea and coffee in the Harrods department store, and recognized the coming wave of gourmet coffee in the UK as it was catching fire in the U.S. He claimed to have sold the first cup of Starbucks coffee in Britain. During these years he lodged with author Rosen Ingrams in the fancy district of Knightsbridge, in an apartment opposite Lord Mountbatten's daughter - all part of his "charmed life", as he was fond of saying. He went on to do bookkeeping for the AIDS Treatment Project charity and concluded his bewildering succession of jobs by beguiling customers with his Southern accent in the Medici Gallery card store in South Kensington.

In 2006, at the age of 70, Bob retired to Carrollton, GA where he had family. Olly moved to America in 2010 to pursue a career in planetary science research that led him to work at NASA, and Bob maintained a close and adventurous bond with his son, who organized regular trips with his father to explore National Parks all around America.

Bob was a lifelong writer of notes, letters, stories, and books to his family and friends, including a published book "The Wish", which tells the story of a twelve year old protagonist, Jesse, who embarks on a search for meaning through a series of magical experiences around New York City. At the end of the book, the narrator explains the value and meaning of living an adventurous life: "The memory of his journey never left him. Every incident, the people, things they said, sensations. He could repeat by heart the entire adventure… The adventure was always with him."

- Survived by his son, Dr. Oliver White, his sisters Marian Tisinger and Kathy Padgett, and other extended family members and dear friends.

A Celebration of Life service will be held at a later date.

Messages of condolences may be expressed to the family online at www.almonfuneralhome.com

Almon Funeral Home of Carrollton has charge of arrangements.