Robert Paul Bonner was born in 1880, descendent of a line of ambitious Bonner fathers. For three generations before him, fathers died in their mid-4os, leaving young sons. Two assumed responsibilities, with their mothers, for their younger siblings as best they could. Economic recessions and changing Southern cotton farming reduced the property and fortunes left by his forebears. This legacy would haunt my grandfather, and his wife Mary Florence Stafford, for the rest of their lives.