Robert Reynold Hoyt
Robert Reynold Hoyt, called Bob, was born in April 1947 and spent his first years in Westchester County, New York. In the 1950 census he is two years old, living in New Rochelle in the household of his grandmother Beatrice Dalrymple. His father, Robert B. Hoyt, is listed there as a son-in-law and a student, and his mother, Joan, is twenty-five. Bob remembered a grander world on his father's side: a grandfather with a leather goods business near Tiffany's, a yacht club and a manor house at Pelham, the town next door to New Rochelle. That grandfather died when Bob was about six. The family moved to Pleasantville, New York, and the money went with the grandfather.
On 1 April 1956, at ten at night, the family stepped out of the car in St. Petersburg, Florida, twenty-eight hours after leaving New York. They stayed first with Bob's grandmother in her brand new house, then went home with his mother. He grew up in St. Petersburg near U.S. Highway 19, first on a main road and then in a house that backed onto a swamp. He was the eldest of three. His brother Gary was about seven and a half years younger and his sister Susan about nine years younger. At about twelve he had his first job, assembling bicycles at a Western Auto store. He had dysgraphia, a disorder that makes handwriting hard, and was still placed in honors English. He grew a beard at sixteen, which kept him out of school, and went on to junior college.
He was sworn into the U.S. Army at noon on 28 February 1968, the same day his draft notice arrived. He did basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, spent a week of it in hospital with a respiratory infection, and trained on tanks at Fort Knox, Kentucky. He served in armor in Vietnam from mid January 1969 at Quang Tri, in the far north of South Vietnam, and left on 30 September 1970. He came out a sergeant. By his own account he held two Army Commendation Medals, one for valor and one for service, and no Purple Heart. He later tried to re-enlist for the Gulf War and was told he was fourteen months too old.
His first marriage, to Judith A. Ferguson, lasted, as he put it, about two months after he got back from Vietnam. He sued for divorce in Pinellas County and the court granted it on 11 March 1971, restoring her maiden name. About the same time he met Shelley Marie Mack, three years younger. He said later that he knew her fifty years, from the start to the day she died. They married on 10 December 1973 in Hillsborough County, Florida.
The Pinellas County records follow the couple through the next eleven years. In June 1974 they agreed to buy a small house in Baybridge Heights, in north St. Petersburg, for $12,000, furnished, with $2,000 down and $90 a month. They took the deed in December 1977. That same month they bought a house in the Meadow Lawn subdivision, and in July 1978 they sold the first one. In 1981 they won a lawsuit over a sale contract and $14,263.08 in damages. In December 1981 the two of them registered Southern Star Publishing, owned half and half. They sold the Meadow Lawn house at the end of December 1984, their last recorded property in the county.
Bob's working life ran through several trades. He drove tractor-trailers, worked eight years in Florida as a carpenter and contractor with a partner, and taught as an adjunct college professor. He talked his way into publishing with a scathing letter about a school grammar series, which he called the Warner books, almost certainly Warriner's English Grammar and Composition. The company hired him, and he said he wrote the style sheets the whole company used and reported directly to the president. His son described him as a college professor and a publishing executive who specialized in English and grammar and wrote several novels.
His mother, by then Joan D. Kennedy, made him her attorney in October 1980. She died between August 1982 and March 1983, and Bob served as personal representative of her estate under her will. He settled it by assigning a $25,200 mortgage she held to himself, Gary and Susan in equal shares, and acting for his brother and sister under their powers of attorney until the mortgage was paid off in February 1984.
Around 1990 Bob and Shelley moved to Austin, Texas, with their infant son Zack, born in Florida that year. Bob said the day they were breaking up was the day she showed him the pregnancy test, and that keeping the child was one of the best decisions he ever made. The couple separated and divorced in Travis County on 28 August 1995. Zack grew up with his mother and spent a couple of days a week at his father's house. Bob chose a working-class neighbourhood and had the boy hiking the Greenbelt to Barton Springs at five. His rule as a father, as his son tells it, was this: "I'm not here to be your friend. I'm here to be your father and to raise you, so when the time comes and I'm gone you're going to be able to keep going."
In later life he lived alone in Austin, not far from his son. He had had neck fusions and lost half a lung. Every Veterans Day he took his free meal at Golden Corral in his Vietnam T-shirt, and he drove a 2014 Dodge Challenger SRT. In July 2024 he sat for a hundred-minute episode of his son's podcast and told his life story. In spring 2025 he went back to Florida and saw, as his son put it, everybody in the family. He was in hospital from 20 June 2025 with repeated pneumonia, then acute liver failure and pancreatic cancer. After chemotherapy he went into hospice care, and he died in Austin in mid September 2025, aged 78, with his son beside him. His son announced it on 18 September: "A few days ago my father passed away." His will left most of his things to friends.
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Cite: Heirology, "Robert Reynold Hoyt (1947-2025)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/robert-reynold-hoyt-1947-2025-7ba861.