Robert Edward Lee Knight 3rd died on Martha’s Vineyard on March 5.
Bob was born Feb. 19, 1927, in Dallas, Tex. to Marion Armstrong Knight and Elizabeth Ann Buell, both also born in Dallas.
His great grandfather, Obadiah Knight, was one of Dallas’ earliest settlers who sold his farmland in central Tennessee and made the trek to Texas with much of his family. In 1846, Obadiah acquired a large tract of land that is now part of the North Dallas suburbs. He was the progenitor of a very large 19th-century family, and many of his descendants still live in Dallas today.
Bob’s paternal grandfather, the first Robert Edward Lee Knight, was a well known lawyer in the small but growing city, practicing from 1890 to the 1930‘s. One of the city’s better known, and colorful citizens, he co-founded a law firm in Dallas in the 1890’s. It is still going under the name of Thompson & Knight, although no Knight descendant has been in the firm since the 1960’s.
His maternal grandfather was Frank Thomas Bull, a Canadian who changed his name to Buell and came to Dallas in the 1880’s. There he established a lumber and building materials company. It prospered and survived for a century, until Frank’s grandchildren closed it and sold its land and assets in the 1980’s.
Bob grew up in the 1930’s and 1940’s in Dallas, which was then a pleasant, comfortably-sized city which, to his regret, no longer exists. Relentless population growth has made his cherished home town part of the “Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex” where now several million people live in housing developments sprawling over hundreds of thousands of acres of previously open Texas farmland.
His father, grandfather, four uncles and an aunt all attended the University of Texas, but Bob became one of the many graduates of Highland Park High School who attended Ivy League universities. Of the Highland Park Class of 1943, two graduated from Harvard and one from Yale. The top student in the class attended MIT. The Highland Park football team, during Bob’s time, were led by two of the greatest players in Texas football history: Bobby Lane and Doak Walker. Highland Park, over the last 80 years, may have sent more graduates to the Ivy League than any other public high school in Texas.
He entered college at Harvard with the Class of 1947, arriving in Cambridge on July 1, 1943. To him this was a strange place that had cobblestone streets, old brick buildings and citizens who spoke English with a bizarre accent. But he adjusted to a stimulating new environment.
His education was interrupted by the World War II as were the educations of almost every member of the Harvard Class of 1947. The exceptions were those found medically unfit (4-F) and those accepted into medical school. He entered the Navy in February 1945. The war ended in August and he was not sent overseas. Nine members of the class died in combat. They were infantrymen, killed in France and Germany between Oct. 1944 and April 1945.
Bob spent most of the 1950’s as a graduate student and part-time teacher at the University of California at Berkeley. There he had the great good fortune to meet a fellow graduate student, Mary Carter Steele, Cornell class of 1951, from Rome, N.Y. They married in 1954. They had two children Minor and Robert.
Bob received his doctoral degree in 1958. He and Mary then enjoyed a year abroad on a Fulbright Fellowship to the London School of Economics.
In 1960, he joined the economics department faculty at the University of Maryland at College Park. Bob and Mary bought a house in College Park and lived there until his retirement in 1994. He taught primarily in the field of labor economics. His book, Industrial Relations in the San Francisco Bay Area, was one of his contributions to the history of organized labor in the U.S.
In 1964-65, he took a leave of absence from academia to experience the exotic world of Capitol Hill, where he served a term as staff director of the sub-committee on labor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
In the 1970’s, he ventured into another area of academia, taking classes in the evening program of Washington College of Law at American University. It greatly increased his awareness of the role played by the law (and lawyers) in dealing with the economic and political problems of our nation. He loved the challenge and graduated at the top of the whole school, just for fun, even while working full time. The study of law presented a perspective on American social problems quite different from, but complementary to, the view of an economist. Bob received his law degree in 1974 Washington College of Law, and passed the Maryland bar exam in 1975. He continued his college teaching.
The Knight family arrived on Martha’s Vineyard June 1, 1976, renting a cottage on Old House Pond. In a sense they never left. The two enjoyed the Island, but it was Mary who became enamored of it. She bought a tract of land from the late, unforgettable Fred Fisher, the squire of Nip ‘n Tuck Farm. A house designed by Mary was completed in 1986 and became the Knight seasonal home. Some years after Bob retired, he and Mary sold the house in College Park and became year-round Island residents.
Bob came to share Mary’s recognition of the Vineyard as a special place — a small Island with an exceptional number of congenial, intellectually lively residents, both year-round and seasonal. He participated in the good fellowship of the Rotary Club and other groups.
He welcomed the profusion of live music on the Vineyard. His favorite kinds of music, traditional New Orleans Dixieland Jazz and Bluegrass, were not on tap but he greatly enjoyed performances by other local bands, especially the summer concerts of the Vineyard Haven Band.
He eventually picked up a ukulele and spent many pleasant hours strumming and singing with the Princess Pupule Band and at the Featherstone Ukulele Jam.
Mary died in 2005, and their daughter, Minor Knight, came to live with him along with her husband, Salvatore Della Torre, and their son, Robert.
After Mary’s death, Bob maintained a strong interest in this nation’s economic and social problems through the New York Times and news on cable television. He was a close observer of the political scene, especially in recent years when the political discourse has been so poisoned by unconstrained personal vilification of opponents and an unprecedented level of hostility between the two major parties. He tried to be hopeful that a time would come when Republicans and Democrats could remain reasonably civil to one another. He occasionally sent letters to the Martha’s Vineyard Times, expressing his views on political and other issues. The Times generously printed most of them.
Having become a voracious reader at the age of seven, Bob continued to read an eclectic selection of fiction and nonfiction books. His primary interests were economics, politics, law and history. A lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union, he was dedicated to the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. He voted for the Democratic candidate in every Presidential election from Truman in 1948 to Biden in 2020.
As a child in Texas, Bob could not have imagined spending his final days way up North, living among Yankees. But he came to recognize that winters on the Southern New England coast were less of an ordeal than the long hot Texas summers. And given the nature and intensity of his political orientation, he was more at home among the people of the Vineyard than among the residents of his native city.
Bob was preceded in death by his wife, Mary, and by his three brothers: Marion Armstrong Jr,. David Buell and Henry co*ke Knight; and also by three especially close cousins, Frances Logan Tipton, Joseph Dewitt Davis and Mary Logan Lentz.
He is survived by his daughter Minor and son-in-law Salvatore Della Torre of West Tisbury; his son, Robert and daughter-in-law of Claremont, N.H.; his grandchildren Zachary,
Breanna, Robert and Colton Knight, and Robert Della Torre; and four great grandchildren. He is also survived by his stepsister Elizabeth Murphy, his sister-in-law Manuela Knight, and by his nephews and niece, David, William, Nathan and Elizabeth Knight.
Other relatives who survive him in are Peter Flynn, Mimi Lentz, Michelle Davis, Amy Davis Boccanfuso, Nora Lentz, Thomas Lentz, Nora Haines and Mary Tipton Litle.
A celebration of life will be held and the date.
