Bacon, Bullets, and Bob-isms:
Celebrating Robert Whittaker at 89
🕐 September 12, 2026
To know Robert Whittaker is to know a man who has built an 89-year life out of grit, faith, hard work, quiet generosity, strong opinions, sharp humor, and an unwavering devotion to his family.
All About
The Early Years
His story stretches from childhood in southern Utah and Idaho through polio, bitter winters, Forest Service trails, years of church and community service, raising five daughters with Maryl, helping Jeff and Marisa build Real Deals on Furniture, hunting trips, terrible old cars, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and thousands of small moments that have become family stories.
On his 89th birthday, this is a celebration of Dad while he is still here to laugh with us, correct us, argue with us, and hear the stories people remember about him.
The V7 Brand, Polio, Root Beer Barrels, and Bishop Whittaker
Dad’s roots trace deep into the rocky dirt and high-desert country of southern Utah, where life was measured in hard work, resilience, and early mornings. His father and Uncle Rollo partnered in raising Hereford cattle east of Circleville, sharing grazing permits across Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands. Their V7 cattle brand went on the right hip for Dad’s father and the left hip for Uncle Rollo, with an added bar underneath whenever Dad had a calf of his own to claim. Decades later, when Kennedy began selling chickens and named her enterprise V7 Farm, Dad proudly offered to pass down the antique branding iron that had hung above his desk.
Dad often remembered the severe winter of 1947, when deep snow froze the valley solid. Starlings swarmed the snowbound herds and pecked at the fresh brands and bloody flesh. Fish and Game put out poison to control the birds, and the family’s black-and-white dog, Queenie, accidentally ate a poisoned bird and died despite his father’s attempts to save her.
Antifreeze was a luxury the family could not afford, so every morning his father poured fresh water into the pickup radiator and chopped through several inches of river ice so the cattle could drink. While milking their Jersey cows in the freezing barn, his father pulled part of an old nylon stocking over his head and ears for warmth, a sight Dad never forgot and always found funny because his father would never have dared wear it into town.
Those early years gave Dad a very practical education. Life revolved around cattle, weather, water, machinery, animals, and figuring out how to solve whatever problem was directly in front of you. There was very little room for waste and even less room for self-pity. The stories he remembered decades later were usually not about grand events, but about the details: a branding iron, a frozen radiator, a river covered with ice, a Jersey cow waiting to be milked, or the family dog Queenie. Those small memories preserved the world that shaped him.
The photograph below was taken when Dad was almost two years old, sitting beside his older sister Camilla. Not long afterward, polio would change the course of his childhood and leave him with physical challenges that lasted for the rest of his life. Looking at that little boy now, it is hard not to think about everything still ahead of him: a Forest Service career, a marriage and five daughters, decades of church and community service, businesses and bookkeeping, mountains and hunting trips, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and eventually 89 years of stories.
Dad faced his own severe trial early when polio struck him at about age two and left him with physical limitations that followed him throughout his life. But he never seemed willing to let those limitations decide what he could accomplish. As a boy, he remembered rescuing a fledgling magpie along the ditch banks in hopes of teaching it to talk like birds belonging to his Lay cousins near Marysvale.
As an adult, he built a career with the Forest Service, where one tiny detail the family still remembers is the stash of root beer barrel candies kept in his office desk drawer, always ready to be handed out.
During our childhood on Monroe Street, our family was even featured on the cover of The Times News supplement for National Family Week, with all of us girls in matching long dresses and Dad on his tractor.
Dad later served as a bishop in our church, and he was not exactly a quiet or conventional one. At one point, he even called a man who wasn’t a member of our Church to serve as Elders Quorum president, the men’s organization. He pushed boundaries, became deeply involved in the lives of the people he served, and continued caring for many of them long after he was no longer their bishop.
He visited widows, some every evening, and gave away cars when people needed transportation, including a Pontiac Sunbird. Years later, people still remembered and talked about the ways Bishop Whittaker had shown up for them when they needed help. That instinct to notice someone who needed something and then actually do something about it became one of the threads running through his entire life.
View The Memories
Drive-Thru Biscuits, Terrible Cars, and Bob-isms
Dad has always had a collection of routines, food preferences, and habits that provided endless entertainment for the family. Mom could make a perfectly good breakfast at home with garden vegetables, ham, and eggs, and Dad could still somehow end up in his red pickup at McDonald’s for a hot biscuit and a Diet Dr Pepper before heading on.
On trips into Twin Falls from Mud Creek Road, the itinerary might include breakfast from the Mennonite drive-through in Buhl, another stop at McDonald’s, D&B Supply or Lowe’s, and whatever other errands Dad had decided were absolutely necessary that day.
When it came to food, he loved simple comforts: Mom’s homemade baked custard, elk steak smothered in canned-milk gravy, Grandpa Kent’s baking powder biscuits, and anything that fit comfortably into one of his established routines. As Mom once put it, some old farmer habits simply never die.
Our family history is practically mapped out by the questionable cars Dad sent us girls out into the world driving. There was the old Datsun B210 with holes rusted through the floorboards, big enough that we could watch the pavement rushing underneath us and toss banana peels straight through the floor.
Dad had no sons, so apparently his solution was to make his daughters work like men. We used that poor car all summer while we irrigated, tracking in so much mud that when irrigation season was over, we would literally stick a garden hose inside, turn it on full blast, and wash the mud right out through the holes in the floor.
Then there was the little red car Wendy drove in college that needed power-steering fluid so often she practically had to add it every time she drove it. One night, a couple of basketball players from CSI saw it in the dark with the lights off and somehow thought it was a Porsche, which may have been the greatest compliment any Whittaker family car ever received. In daylight, it was miles away from being a Porsche.
Apparently vehicle safety, car maintenance, and child labor laws were all interpreted rather loosely in the Whittaker household. 😂
For Dad’s 82nd birthday, Carie summed him up perfectly: “Happy birthday, Dad! So happy to have you down the road to share your bacon, bullets, and Bob-isms with the boys. Hope you have a fabulous day and you treat yourself with a book under a shade tree.”
That phrase stuck because it really does capture him. Dad loved books, guns, hunting, mountains, food, strong opinions, telling stories, and teaching the next generation the things he thought they ought to know.
In October 2015, even when getting around had become harder, Dad spent opening night of deer season under the mountain stars with Steve Feil and called home after dark simply to express how happy he was to be back on the mountain. That is Dad too: happiest when there was a little dirt on the tires, a mountain nearby, and preferably someone around who would listen to one more story.
Forest Service Trails, Pine Nuts, and the Late-Night CFO
Dad carried his love of the outdoors directly into his career with the Forest Service, working across the rugged mountain country of Utah and eventually Idaho. The work gave him an intimate knowledge of canyons, back roads, reservoirs, timber, public lands, and places most people would drive past without ever knowing what was hidden beyond the highway.
He remembered old teepee tents pitched on mountain slopes above Kingston Canyon and could recall the details of deer tags, hunts, fishing holes, and family road trips decades later. To Dad, the mountains were never just scenery. They were a place to work, teach, test yourself, tell stories, and build character.
He loved passing that knowledge on. Dad taught younger generations how to shoot clay pigeons, handle a rifle safely, cast a line, hunt, and appreciate being outside. He planned fishing trips, target-practice sessions, and outdoor adventures with the same enthusiasm other people reserve for vacations.
His plans could get wonderfully specific. Summer gatherings might turn into discussions about finding a place to fish for sturgeon along the Snake River, while another visit became an excuse to set up target practice for Harrison and Kiki. Dad did not just love the outdoors himself. He was always looking for a reason to pull somebody younger into it with him, teach them something, and give them another story to remember.
One of his favorite traditions became gathering wild pine nuts in the Nevada high desert with Jackson and Carter. He loved remembering their stays at the Bristlecone Pine Motel in Ely, wandering among the pinyon pines and filling burlap sacks with nuts to bring home to Maryl and the family. Even years later, Dad would cheerfully insist he could still gather five hundred pounds of pine nuts in thirty days if somebody would just take him.
But behind the mountain man was also a man who could spend hours staring at numbers until they finally balanced. For more than fifteen years, Dad worked with Jeff and Marisa at Real Deals on Furniture as their Chief Financial Officer and became an indispensable financial anchor for the business. He managed QuickBooks, payroll, balance sheets, profit-and-loss statements, vendor invoices, reconciliations, tax information, and all the behind-the-scenes work that had to be right even when nobody else saw it.
Long after normal business hours, Dad could still be at his desk with spreadsheets open, trying to understand why a number was off. When business was difficult, Dad was often the one sending a late-night email with a subject line like “Good News,” followed by numbers, explanations, warnings, or reassurance.
He rarely wanted extra compensation and sometimes joked that what he really wanted was for Harrison to track down another good used pickup like his beloved red truck. Through years when Jeff and Marisa were building Real Deals, managing employees, juggling growth and dealing with seemingly endless problems, Dad quietly carried an enormous amount of financial responsibility behind the scenes.
For him, the bookkeeping was never just bookkeeping. It was another way to take care of his family.
Friendshipping, Generosity, and Eighty-Seven Memories
Dad’s generosity has never been particularly quiet or conventional. On trips into town, he practiced what he called “friendshipping,” which generally meant talking to strangers, learning something about their lives, buying things in bulk, and handing them out to whoever crossed his path.
In 2020, he befriended a family whose children played near an irrigation pond along his route home. Before long he was pulling into their driveway, honking the horn, and handing mini Tootsie Rolls and boxes of Costco chips to Dillon and his siblings.
He became friends with their mother, Shirley, and started arriving with tempura shrimp from Costco and plastic bottles of Absorbine Veterinary Liniment Gel, which Dad enthusiastically recommended to practically anyone with a sore joint or knee. He bought so much of the stuff that he basically handed it out like bubble gum, much to the bewilderment of his wife and daughters.
Even lunch could become an act of Bob-style generosity. If Dad bought a Costco hot dog, he might eat half in the pickup and toss the other half into an open field, insisting he was not littering but “scattering feed for the hungry hawks and roadside inhabitants.”
When Shirley once asked why he did not save some of his treats for Maryl, Dad explained that Mom was not much for sugary desserts. Shirley immediately replied, “She doesn’t need sweets because she has you!”
Dad could turn an ordinary errand into a story, and underneath the eccentricity was something very consistent: he liked people, he noticed people, and he liked feeling that he had made somebody’s day a little better.
One of the most meaningful examples of Dad’s impact came when Raymond Westfall visited Mom and Dad and told Dad how blessed he felt to have grown up around our family. Raymond thanked him for helping keep him straight, teaching him valuable skills, and providing the steady male role model he had needed.
Dad became emotional and began apologizing for the ways he thought he had fallen short over the years, while Raymond kept assuring him there was nothing to apologize for. It was one of those moments that revealed how little any of us really know about the ripples our lives leave in other people.
For Dad’s 87th birthday, the sisters decided to make some of those ripples visible by gathering 87 memories and kind notes from his children, grandchildren, and extended family. Mom made two small angel food cakes, his lifelong birthday favorite, using her 206-degree temperature trick, and Karmelle read the memories aloud while Dad listened, laughed, and beamed.
Among the memories were little things no formal biography would ever capture, like Dad sitting on the edge of the bed pulling on his socks while singing, “Everybody hates me, nobody likes me, guess I’ll go eat worms.”
A year later, on Mom and Dad’s 64th wedding anniversary, Karmelle brought Mom an antique pincushion and Dad a puzzle, while Nate brought Dad crab salad from the deli, a favorite Dad had introduced to him years before.
Somewhere in the middle of that evening, Dad looked at Karmelle and asked with characteristic directness, “Was I a good father to you?” It was such a simple question, but maybe it is the question every parent eventually wonders.
Because I’m Home: Five Beautiful Daughters and a Living Tribute
After a hospital and rehabilitation stay, Carie brought him home on June 4 and settled him into his own bed, with his noise machine set precisely where he liked it, his favorite news on television, and familiar food around him. Almost immediately, he seemed more like himself.
When Myles asked why he was suddenly doing so much better, Dad smiled and simply said, “Because I’m home!”
That evening he looked across the room at a framed portrait of his five daughters and called them “my five beautiful daughters.”
Two weeks later, Dad was at Jake and Liza’s wedding, surrounded by his family. We gathered around his wheelchair in our dresses, leaned in to kiss his cheeks, laughed, and took ridiculous pictures together. Despite everything it had taken to get him there, having Dad right in the middle of the family festivities meant the world to us.
In early July, he got a fresh haircut and used an Arctic Circle gift card for a treat with Karmelle. Later that evening, while sitting outside watching Truman push him around the yard and light summer fireworks, Karmelle asked Dad what he was thinking about. He looked over at her and said, “Oh, just thinking what a pleasure it is to spend time with you.”
Dad’s affection has also shown up in hundreds of smaller ways that would be easy to forget: signing messages “Dad/Grandad,” sending strings of hearts and prayer emojis, asking about the grandchildren by name, and wanting reports on what everybody was doing. Those little check-ins rarely feel historic while they are happening, but strung together across years, they become part of the record of how a person loved his family.
And now Dad is 89. On his birthday, Carie took him to Arctic Circle with some of the youngest grandchildren and one of his great-grandchildren, where of course he got his little root beer. Later there was chicken, angel food cake, ice cream, poppy seed cake, and family around him.
At 89 years old, Dad remains entirely himself: generous, funny, opinionated, endlessly memorable, and deeply loved. Husband, father of five daughters, grandfather, great-grandfather, Bishop Whittaker, Forest Service mountain man, Real Deals CFO, giver of cars, owner of terrible old cars and trucks, feeder of hungry hawks, and the source of a lifetime of bacon, bullets, and Bob-isms.
We love you so much, Dad!
More Than Photos. A Legacy Of You.
Turn everyday moments into something lasting.
