From left to right: Bob Jr., Catherine, Eric, Bob Sr., Chris. The Scheide family in 1967.
Robert Victor Scheide Sr. passed away on Feb. 6 at age 86 after a long battle with heart and lung disease. The retired U.S. Navy Chief, submarine veteran and United States Bureau of Reclamation power plant operator is survived by Catherine, his loving wife of 63 years, his three sons Bob Jr., Chris and Eric, several grandchildren and great grandchildren and his brother Richard.
Bob, as he was known to family and friends across the country, was born on Feb. 19, 1937, in Baltimore, Maryland. He was the first son of Victor and Lucille Scheide. Victor was a contractor and jack-of-all-trades who built the family a house on the edge of Chesapeake Bay. Bob was joined by his brother Richard five years later and his sister Mary Lee 5 years after that.
Growing up in the shadow of WW II, Bob and Richard spent much of their childhood crabbing on the bay, America’s largest estuary. Bob would stand at the front of the boat as he reeled in the 1000-foot trotline, pitching captured crabs into a bushel basket. The boys were barefoot and occasionally got pinched by crabs that escaped. Crab remained one of Bob’s favorite foods and is a staple of Scheide family gatherings.
During one of their outings when Bob was a teenager, a young girl ran off the end of a pier, plunged into the water and didn’t come back up. An excellent swimmer, Bob jumped out of the boat, rescued the girl and placed her back on the dock. Her father came running and profusely thanked Bob, offering him a generous reward. Bob was raised Catholic and taught not to take credit for good deeds. He looked at the soggy pack of Lucky Strikes in his shirt pocket, drenched when he plunged into the water.
“You got a cigarette?” Bob asked the girl’s father. He did, because almost everyone smoked in the 1950s.
One of the greatest challenges Bob faced as a youth came with the birth of his sister Mary Lee, who was deprived of oxygen during delivery resulting in severe brain damage. Bob unconditionally loved his little sister and faithfully fed and bathed her while he remained at home.
The divorce of his parents when he was 16 turned out to be a pivotal point in Bob’s life. Getting divorced in the Catholic Church was forbidden at the time. One day, Bob approached the parish priest and asked if God could heal his sister Mary Lee. The priest told him Mary Lee’s condition was God’s punishment for his mother’s sins.
From that day on, Bob was a confirmed atheist.
Bob and brother Richard with Bob’s 1952 Buick, Bowley’s Quarters, 1958.
As a young adult, Bob hung out in Bowley’s Quarters, then a blue-collar enclave and tourist hot spot in Baltimore County. He cruised the streets in an immaculate 1952 Buick listening to a radio soundtrack provided by Chuck Berry and Little Richard. For a short time, Bob worked at the nearby Glen L. Martin factory, manufacturing twin-engine bombers.
In 1956, Bob joined the United States Navy, hoping to pursue his dream of becoming a Navy frogman. The Navy needed his talents elsewhere: its growing fleet of nuclear submarines.
As a teenager, Bob had a sweet tooth with a weakness for Hostess chocolate cupcakes. When he got to bootcamp the Navy took one look at his decaying teeth and pulled all of them, replacing them with a full set of false teeth. This proved somewhat problematic when it came to practicing escaping from a submarine.
Practice took place in a 100-foot-deep Escape Training Tower. Bob entered the tower from the bottom wearing a Monsem lung breathing device accompanied by rescue divers as he made his ascent. Instructed to exhale as hard as he could at the bottom, Bob blew out his false teeth, much to the amusement of the divers. He quickly put them back in and finished his ascent. It was one of Bob’s favorite sea stories.
Though small in stature Bob was big at heart, earning the nickname Tiger from his crewmates. Later in life, he used The Grey Tiger for his internet handle.
After he completed standard submarine school in 1958, the Navy sent Bob to the Nuclear Reactor Testing Station just north of Idaho Falls, Idaho, to train on the prototype reactor that powered the Navy’s first generation of nuclear submarines. The small town of Arco near the test site was the first city in the world to receive all its electricity from nuclear energy.
One of Bob’s fellow nuclear power students hailed from nearby Jerome, Idaho. During a visit there, Bob met his future wife, Catherine. They immediately fell in love and after a short courtship, they married.
Bob and Catherine married on March 21, 1959.
After the young sailor finished nuclear power school and his wife graduated from high school, the couple relocated to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where Bob’s first “boat,” the USS Seadragon (SSN-584) awaited.
Bob and Cathy’s first son, Bob Jr., was born there in March 1960. In August 1960, Electrician’s Mate Second Class Robert Scheide and the Sea Dragon departed New London for the ice-encrusted North Pole via the Northwest Passage. As the Seadragon became the first submarine to transit the Northwest Passage under the ice, the Navy flew Catherine, their toddler and all the other families to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the Seadragon’s new homeport.
The Seadragon underway at Pearl Harbor.
The Seadragon meets up with Santa Claus at the North Pole.
Thus began the formation of a nuclear family in the nuclear age, married with children, powered by nuclear fission, armed to the teeth with atomic weapons.
The Seadragon belonged to the Skate class and was armed with torpedoes for guarding shipping lanes from enemy destroyers and submarines. During these early years of the Cold War Bob and the Seadragon patrolled the Pacific, at one point setting an endurance record of 58 days underwater without surfacing, an impossible feat for yesterday’s diesel-electric powered subs.
Bob was a happy submariner.
In 1962, the Navy sent Bob back to school for more training, and the budding family moved to Great Lakes, Illinois, where their second son Chris was born. After school was completed, Bob joined the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt (SSBN-600), a George Washington class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine. It was armed with 16 Polaris ballistic missiles carrying one-megaton warheads and capable of striking targets 1400 miles away.
The Roosevelt was homeported in Holy Loch, Scotland. Each ballistic missile sub had two fully trained crews, blue and gold, which served alternating three-month deployments so the nuclear deterrent could be displayed fulltime.
A Polaris missile fired from a George Washington class “boomer.”
For the next several years, Bob and the Roosevelt patrolled the frigid seas north of the Soviet Union, putting Moscow within range of its lethal missiles. Known as “boomers,” the Roosevelt and more than three dozen ballistic missile submarines like it formed the key part in the nuclear triad doctrine that came to be known as “mutually assured destruction” or MAD.
The triad consists of land-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles, long-range high-altitude bombers and ballistic missile submarines lurking beneath the waves. The idea behind MAD is no country will dare order a first strike and risk starting a global conflagration. Up to the present day, the strategy has worked.
Submarine life is not easy and nuclear power made the service even more isolating, especially for the families. Some sailors went whole three-month deployments without seeing the sun. Families at home waiting for months worried their husbands and fathers might never return, fears made all too real by the losses of the USS Thresher (SSN-593) in 1961 and the USS Scorpion (SSN-589) in 1968. Both submarines imploded in the depths, killing all hands on board.
Bob loved his coffee, especially at sea.
Bob and Cathy had their third son Eric in 1965. Shortly after that, Bob, who had risen to the rank of Chief, was transferred from Portsmouth to Norfolk, Virginia for his first real stint at long-term shore duty. Office-work didn’t appeal to him, and he yearned for another boat. But the Navy refused to assign Bob to another submarine and joining the surface fleet as a submariner was not appealing to him.
With no submarine billet available, Bob began to sour on military service. A lifelong New Deal Democrat, Bob began having serious misgivings about the Vietnam War after rising student protests in 1967. He was worried that the war would never end, and his sons would be drafted to fight in it and possibly be killed.
In 1968, after 12 years of service, he decided to leave the Navy. He was recruited by an east coast investment corporation, but instead Bob chose to try his luck out west, moving his young family to his wife’s hometown of Jerome, Idaho.
Bob’s first job in Idaho was at the Sears department store in nearby Twin Falls, where he sold and repaired home appliances. He liked working with the public, but the pay left something to be desired. After a year of searching for something better, Bob landed a power plant operator job with Idaho Power in American Falls, Idaho.
American Falls Dam with forebay and retired powerhouse in foreground.
The hydroelectric power plant sat on the south bank of the Snake River immediately downstream from the American Falls Dam. The lake formed behind the dam, the American Falls Reservoir, was sucked near-dry every year by thirsty sugar beet and potato farms, exposing the bare foundations of the town that existed before the dam was built in the 1920s.
Water from the dam surged through a forebay and then into the power plant’s turbines, spinning the electrical generators that provided power to American Falls and the small towns in the surrounding area. It was familiar territory for Bob, the former Navy Chief Electrician’s Mate, with water turning the turbogenerators instead of high-pressure steam heated by a nuclear reactor.
Bob behind the control board at the powerplant.
Thus began a pattern that would shape Bob’s work environment for the coming decades: shiftwork. Day shift, swing shift and the aptly named graveyard shift. Countless cigarettes and cups of coffee. He worked ten days on day shift, followed by four days off, then ten days on swing shift, followed by four days off, then ten days on graveyard shift, followed by four days off, ad infinitum. The pay and benefits were good, but the hours were rough.
Bob rarely complained and made the best of his time off by taking the family on camping trips in scenic Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, where there are no crabs but the trout fishing is second to none. Yellowstone National Park and the Sawtooth Mountains were favorite spots. Longer expeditions with the family included trips to the Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde and Disneyland, often with Cathy’s Mom Doris accompanying them.
Despite all the shiftwork and the traveling, Bob somehow found the time to build a new family home, mainly by himself using skills he’d learned working for his father. He also joined the Navy Reserve, traveling once a month to Pocatello for meetings.
One day Bob came home from work early in tears. His sister Mary Lee had passed away in Baltimore. It was the first time his young sons had seen him cry.
Bob Jr. on the 1975 YZ-125 his father helped him buy.
Mostly, times were good for the Scheide family in American Falls, where they spent six fruitful years. Catherine was freed from the tense regimen of being a submariner’s wife. Bob took up motorcycling and helped young Bob Jr. buy his first motocross bike. Chris became a consummate hunter and fisherman. Eric took up music, starting with guitar then graduating to saxophone. One Christmas, Bob bought the boys an HO racing track, brand new bicycles and a snowmobile. Happy days.
But Bob was above all a driven man, and when the opportunity to work for the United States Bureau of Reclamation at Grand Coulee Dam came in 1975, he jumped at it. The shiftwork was the same grinding routine, but the benefits, pay and the prestige of working at what was then the largest dam in the world were irresistible draws.
Grand Coulee Dam, 550-feet-tall and nearly a mile long.
If you’ve never been to Grand Coulee Dam in eastern Washington, it’s worth a visit. It remains an engineering and architectural marvel. There are bigger dams today, but Grand Coulee Dam remains the world’s largest concrete structure. It’s 550-feet-tall and nearly a mile long. It holds back the Columbia River to form Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake, named for the New Deal president who signed off on the dam’s construction during the Great Depression. Completed in 1941, its hydroelectric generators provided the juice to smelt aluminum for the Boeing aircraft plant’s war effort in Seattle.
Bob arrived at Grand Coulee Dam shortly after two major additions were completed: The third power plant with its six penstocks curving gracefully down the face of the dam like a giant’s fingers and on the opposite side of the river, the pump-generating plant that feeds Banks Lake with enormous pipes you could drive a bus through running up and over the hill. The pump-generators supply wheat farmers with water during growing season, or reverse flow and go back down the hill to generate electricity when energy demand is high. Genius.
Even though Bob’s new job was more demanding, he soon started construction on a new, larger family home than the one they’d left behind in American Falls. Once again, he did most of the work himself, with occasional help from his sons after school.
The two-story home was in Electric City, one of three separate small towns including Grand Coulee and Coulee Dam that comprise the greater Grand Coulee Dam area. Perhaps because of this, there was a lack of social cohesion compared to American Falls. The schools were worse and drug use was more prevalent. The eastern Washington sky seemed a shade or two darker than southern Idaho’s.
So perhaps it was inevitable that Bob was attracted to the Golden State, California. It was 1978, and a USBR job opened at Shasta Dam in Redding. After living in Electric City for less than three years, the Scheide family was on the move again.
Bob and Cathy not long after landing in Redding, California in 1978.
The move to Redding marked another turning point for the Scheide family. Bob Jr., 18, followed his father’s footsteps and joined the U.S. Navy. Chris and Eric benefitted from immensely better schools. Chris joined the Coast Guard and Eric left home to attend San Francisco State University. Catherine earned an AA degree at Shasta College and she and her husband, on the verge of becoming empty nesters, opened a pre-school, Little Learners.
As was his way, Bob continued to push himself to the limit. Once a month, he rode his motorcycle 220 miles to Navy Reserve meetings at Alameda Naval Air Station and back again. In between shifts at the dam, he helped Catherine with the pre-school. He didn’t build a new home, but he continued his “do it yourself” philosophy.
Why pay someone to redo the roof of your house—in the middle of a triple-digit Redding summer—when you can redo it yourself? Why spend money on a mechanic when you can fix the Audi’s transmission in the driveway? In 1987, Bob’s worst habit finally caught up with him.
Like many men from his generation, Bob started smoking cigarettes early, at age 13. By the time he became an adult, he smoked up to three packs per day. For many years he smoked non-filtered Lucky Strikes or a pipe. He eventually switched to charcoal-filtered Larks. One day not long after he turned 50, Bob experienced chest pain that ran down his left arm, the classic sign of a heart attack.
Quadruple bypass heart surgery saved his life. The surgery was performed by Dr. Chae H. Moon, who would 15 years later be accused of conducting open heart surgery on patients who didn’t need it. Bob was not one of those patients. Dr. Moon saved his life, Bob always insisted.
Bob, Bob Jr. and friend taking a dip in the pool at their first Redding home.
In typical Bob fashion—all-in from the get-go—he never smoked again after his heart attack. He changed his diet and took up jogging. And he turned over a new leaf on life, even though it didn’t happen right away.
At first, Bob tried to be the old Bob. He took a new USBR position with the Central Valley Water Project and he and Catherine moved to the Sacramento suburbs. He planned to build a new house in Shingle Springs and even put a down payment on some land. The deal fell through. Instead of fighting it like he might have done in the past, Bob walked away from the whole mess.
After living in the Sacramento suburbs, Bob and Catherine realized they didn’t care much for the big city. They bought a new property in Spring Valley in rural Lake County and erected a prefab home. For the last two years of his USBR career, Bob stayed at Bob Jr.’s house in Sacramento, commuting the 100 miles to Spring Valley every other day. He was stubborn that way.
In 1994, Bob retired from the USBR. His pension from the bureau, combined with his pension from the Navy earned by 12 years of submarine service and 8 years in the Navy Reserve, provided a comfortable retirement for Bob and Catherine.
But Bob never really stopped working. With their retirement secured, he began helping others. When Catherine’s Mom Doris and her husband Cecil could no longer care for themselves in southern Idaho, Bob and Cathy took them in. Bob volunteered at the Spring Valley community center and took over the kitchen for breakfasts and other events.
After Doris and Cecil passed away, Bob and Catherine relocated to Whitmore, 30 miles east of Redding, where Chris and his wife Deborah had built a house. They purchased a plot of land right next to Chris and built a house in 2003. This time Bob let the contractors do most of the work.
Scheide family dinner at the Whitmore house. Bob made turducken.
Bob continued to stay busy, serving as the cook at the Whitmore community center. For a while he was running the whole show in typical Bob fashion. Then one day in the kitchen Chris noticed that Bob had turned ashen. He was diagnosed with COPD, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, the byproduct of 37 years of smoking cigarettes, and remained on supplemental oxygen for the rest of his life.
Bob took it easy after that, abandoning his volunteer work at the Whitmore community center. But he never stopped helping people. When Bob Jr. became a victim of the declining journalism industry in 2014, Bob provided Bob Jr. and his girlfriend Kelsey with shelter at the Whitmore property, where they now live.
Bob’s desire to help family members was passed on to his son Eric, who had tremendous success in the Bay Area tech industry. Eric purchased a home for his parents in Redding so they could be closer to medical care in 2018.
Bob’s quality of life, thanks to being on oxygen and a multitude of pharmaceutical remedies, remained stable until last year. He and Catherine both avoided catching COVID but a sepsis infection put Bob in the hospital last May. He spent a couple of weeks in rehab but never fully recovered.
Bob and Catherine moved to an assisted living facility in November. In early February, RSV, respiratory syntactical virus, ripped through the facility. Catherine was taken to the hospital. On the morning of February 6, Bob called Bob Jr. and left a message.
“Bob, your mom has had a relapse so she’s going to stay another day. And I’m not feeling so good myself. So here we go.”
And just like that, he was gone.
There’s so much more to be said about this man. He loved chihuahuas and owned several during his life. He was a master gardener. In the 1990s, when the internet was just emerging, The Grey Tiger taught himself code and built a well-received website for his first boat, the Seadragon.
Catherine, Bob Jr., Chris and Eric wonder where he’s gone because he’s always been there, an irresistible force of nature.
One possible answer came from his brother Richard, a born-again Christian who was never able to dissuade his brother’s near life-long atheism. According to Uncle Dick, Bob is standing in front of the boat reeling in that 1000-foot trotline on the Chesapeake Bay, pitching crabs into a bushel basket with the sun shining down on him.
It sounds like a good place to be.
