Robert Leslie Rodgers, Jr. was born on Thursday, February 9, 1922 to Elizabeth Rawlings Rodgers and Robert Leslie Rodgers, Sr. He was born in his family’s house in North Philadelphia as were his three younger siblings: Walter, Mary and Caroline. He always said that his happiest childhood memory was of listening to his mother practice her piano as he was lying in bed drifting off to sleep. The Rodgers house was a musical one. All the children sang, and so did Grandpop Rodgers. His booming bass blending with Dad and Walter’s dulcet tenor and Mary’s soprano were accompanied by Grandmom Rodgers at the piano. Soon, little Caroline chimed in with her own sweet voice and her virtuoso piano skills. Although Dad took violin and piano lessons in his younger years, he never excelled. It was his voice that was his trademark and, to this day, all other tenors for us are measured against his, and never favorably.
Before there was the internet, cable, or even television, the Rodgers family would entertain each other in their parlor and put on shows for other neighborhood families.
Grandpop Rodgers worked the night shift at Budd Company on Huntington Pike. He was coming home as the kids were leaving for school and was asleep when they got home. He rarely ate dinner with the family because of this. Dad was determined that he would be home for dinner with his own family, every night. When we were growing up, dinner was a sacred hour and everyone was expected to be there on time. Every night. We never understood the importance of this to our father until years after we had grown and left the house.
Church was always central in Dad’s life. While Dad was growing up, the family attended a church in North Philadelphia. Then, when his family moved to Frankford, they began attending North Frankford Baptist Church. He was involved in the youth group and, of course, the choir.
When he graduated from Northeast High School for Boys (later the school became Edison High School), he followed Grandpop Rodgers and went to work at Budd Company as an apprentice draftsman and tool designer. His job there was considered essential to the war effort and his enlistment in World War II was delayed until May of 1944. While on leave in 1945, he and friends from North Frankford Baptist were riding on the Frankford El to a Christian Youth Rally in Center City. Youth from other Baptist Churches were also riding on the train that day, including a young lady from Frankford Baptist Church – Dorothy Faust. The two struck up a conversation and, as our mother used to tell it, she told him she would like to have a nice Christian soldier that she could write to. Although Dad was a sailor and not a soldier, it was a good line, nonetheless. They exchanged information and began writing.
Dad crossed the Pacific near the end of the war and arrived in Japan after the surrender. When he talked about that time – which wasn’t a lot – he always talked about how the children were afraid of him. It was such a jarring experience to him, I think, that anyone would be afraid of him.
He came home in 1946 and married Mother on September 6, 1947 at the Frankford Baptist Church. Dad joined the church and the two of them dove into service that would span over 40 years. They were youth leaders, Sunday School teachers, Sunday School superintendents and deacons. Of course, they sang in the church choir and Dad was often the featured soloist.
Dad went to Temple University on the GI bill to study to be a minister. But his heart was not into academics. He never finished. Instead, he went back to the Budd Company where he worked for more than 40 years. He was proud of the work that he did at Budd and many Sunday afternoons he would take us for rides on the trains that they built – including the Frankford El and some of the suburban lines. A few years ago, he toured a train museum in Galveston, Texas and there he found a Budd train. Dad still reveled in explaining how the train’s side panels were made.
He continued to pursue Christian ministry as his avocation. He took several courses at Eastern Baptist Seminary and in 1968, he became a licensed lay preacher in the American Baptist Church. Dad and Mother also were active with the Philadelphia Baptist Association and, in the 1960s Dad became involved in the social outreach programs of the Good Shepherd Ministry. He conducted Bible studies at the Youth Detention Center and was soon asked to do the same at the Holmsburg Prison as well as the Adult Detention Center. I asked him how this came about. I expected it was some sort of calling or epiphany. He said that he started doing it simply because he was asked to and he thought, “why not?”
Being a product of his time, he told me that when he first started ministering in the prisons, he was confronted with a sea of black faces. He said, “I asked God, ‘How am I supposed to love these black people?’ But the more I went, the more I saw they were men, like me. That it could have been me in that prison, if things had worked out differently in my life.” Dad was realistic about this work and always told me that most of the prisoners came to his services to better their chances for parole or lighter sentencing. But he told me once that a young man approached him at a PBA gathering and told Dad that he was one of his pupils at a prison Bible study. The young man was now attending church and studying to be a minister himself. As far as I know, that was the only time this ever happened. But for Dad, it was enough.
In the early 1980s Dad retired from Budd Company and in the early 1990s, Dad and Mother moved to Somerton and joined the nearby Abington Baptist Church. It was there that Dad branched out beyond the church. He joined the Neshaminy Valley Musical Theater (thanks to Mark and June Horton) and played parts in the Chorus of Guys and Dolls, How to Succeed in Business and Barnum. However, his tour de force was playing the Rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof. He also joined the Neighborhood Watch, served on the board of the condo association and became a Republican judge of elections. He also worked in the office at the PBA for many years and delivered papers for the News Gleaner once a week until he broke his hip at the age of 86. With all that, he still found time to be an active member of Abington Baptist serving as a deacon, council member, pulpit committee member and, of course, he sang in the choir. Around 1991, he went with the Youth of Abington and minister Charles Chapman on a mission trip to The Dominican Republic.
During that time, Dad and Mother also took three trips to Europe to sing in a choir under Glenn’s direction.
For all his work and for all his talents, he was a humble man. Sometimes painfully so. I wish he could have enjoyed the praise of others, the accolades for his voice, his piety and his work ethic. I always got the sense that he felt his life had not meant enough, that he had not done enough. A few years ago he read a book I had given him about the Amish school shooting and how that community had forgiven the shooter. He lamented to me that he had never done anything so courageous or meaningful as that. He expressed this despite his years of service in the church and in the prisons, his years of caregiving for my grandmother Faust and then for my mother, not to mention his incredible musical talent.
His self deprecating manner did not stop him from being a loving man and a generous one. He would sit for hours and listen to my grandmother Faust talk about her life, take my mother on trips and lend a listening ear to our neighbors’ troubles. He came in every night and read books to us kids, kissed us good night and made sure we said our prayers. His grandchildren were the light of his life and he enjoyed making sand castles with Susie, Doug and Jill in Ocean City and reading stories to Alexa and Jack. His few encounters with Jake, his great grandson were endearing and he was thrilled that he had a new great granddaughter, although he and Maddie never got to meet. Whenever I would go to see him, as I was leaving, he always told me “I love you, sweetheart.” He did so right up until the day before he died.
Dad was not always an easy man and Glenn and I often found ourselves at odds with his world view. But as he aged, rigid dogma gave way to a more pragmatic, more tender side of our father and I think we all grew closer as a result.
Our annual trips to Ocean City were the centerpiece of our family life together. Dad loved walking the boards with us and always took time by himself to stand at the edge of the boardwalk on a warm summer night, gazing out to the sea. Those were the times that he seemed the happiest, the most at peace. It was for this reason that we planned a vacation for the first week in August when we all are to meet at the Outer Banks in North Carolina to stay in a house right on the beach. Dad and I talked about how he could sit on the porch of our rented house and look at the ocean all he wanted. I guess we will be enjoying the view for him, instead.
Dad was complex, intensely private and deeply spiritual. He was a faithful and fierce friend and a loving husband and father. It is a different world without him, and, whether or not he could admit it to himself, it is a better world for him having been in it.
