We saw Bob’s talents in the ease with which he solved math problems, cleared a high bar, and rose up with power and grace from among crowd of basketball players to score a crucial point.  I don’t remember that I ever saw him discouraged or frustrated for more than a moment.  If I did, the event was lost in his every day competence and his frequent triumphs.  He and Nik Epanchin both left Sea Cliff on a Regional War Memorial Scholarship for Colgate.  (The award was made on the basis of both academic and athletic achievement.)  If a high school class can be said to have heroes, Bob Lucas would qualify.

No one gets to be that good without being driven by inner forces.  The passion to achieve, of course, he expressed in his dedication to practice instead of just playing.  Allan Schwartz who lived close to Bob often went to his house in our junior and senior years and fed him balls as Bob worked on improving his one-hand set shot from the left wing.  “Bob and I,” Allan remembers, “also played some stickball behind Doug's [Hoyt] home, using a window screen placed on a box as a strike target.” 

Bob’s other inner forces remained largely invisible, even to his family.  In his sister Patty’s mind he was “a happy person other than he was quiet and very shy.”  He was quiet.  He was shy.  The yearbook says, “We thought he was shy.”  Even of his academic achievement it says “a quiet brain in math.”  He caused no trouble for teachers or coaches.  He was always ready to help a classmate or a teammate.   Even in the rough and tumble world of sports and its heartbreaking defeats, Bob rarely lost his temper and never seemed discouraged for long.

Bob roomed for his first year in Colgate University with Nik Epanchin and both were recruited for the Phi Delta Theta fraternity by John Clarke (‘55).  John says the fraternity was “three quarter jock” and heavy on parties.  Nik declined to join but Bob did.  Nevertheless, John Clarke says that Bob, “Stayed in his bunker.  A very too-himself kind of guy.”

Bob stood out as an achiever in both sports (lacrosse, soccer, and basketball) and academics.  He was selected to the psychology honorary Psi Chi and was a  Regional War Memorial Scholar.  He also participated in the AFROTC Drill Team.  Yet among the forces that drove him were demons that would prove fatal.

Bob went on active duty in  the Air Force in January 1962 as a 2^nd Lt. and by ’63 he was flying the big C-130 Hercules out of Travis AFB in California and then out of New Zealand in support of Operation Deep Freeze in Antarctica.  In January of 1966 Bob’s unit began flying the long crossings to Vietnam, first with the Hercules, then with the C-141 Starlifter.  Bob received a number of decorations, including Antarctica Service Medal, Outstanding Unit Award and National Defense Service Medal.

Toward the end of his service the symptoms that would later plague him as bi-polar disorder began to appear.  If such decisive burdens spring from earlier ones, the precursors may have been gathering since childhood.  Bob was five when his father died and his mother moved with Bob and his three year old sister Patty to a modest cottage on Ransom Ave.  Mrs. Lucas worked full time for a coal and lumber company in Glen Cove.   His sister Patty says, “He had difficulty because he wasn’t ‘social social’.”  And he was serious, maybe too serious.  “He had a difficult time talking nonsense to people,”  Patty says, and she used to think it was because of his high intelligence.  Most in the class liked Bob, but he had few, if any, very close friends with whom he studied, hung out, partied.  His mother died while he was a senior at Colgate, and both he and Patty accepted an invitation to live with the family of Bob’s Colgate roommate in Pittsburg.  There he met Mary Schoffer whom he married.  They had two children, Karen and William Lucas.  William is in art design and Karen married an Air Force Captain who flew the same transport planes that her father flew. 

Lithium treatments seemed to help Bob’s condition, but not enough.  Some of his fate may have been in his genes.  Patty said he had an uncle and a grandfather who had committed suicide.  Bob’s troubles grew despite the lithium.  His marriage was troubled. He went to live with Patty in Florida for a year.  He became an outpatient with the VA.  He died in 1985.  Bob played hard, studied hard, worked hard.  For reasons we will never know, he met a challenge he could not overcome.