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Meet Bob Pringle
With a sly smile Irislee fans her face with her open hand and then uses it to
tap her heart a few times.
“He was very, very good-looking,” she says.
She was recounting the first time she saw Bob Pringle at the flagpole in front
of Wyandotte High School. She was a 7th grader and she was riding her
bicycle with her friend Erlene. “There’s Pinky Pringle!!” Earline squealed.
“Pinky” was an older man, a 9th grader and already a BMOC in his
class for his good looks, his prowess on a basketball court and a personality
that wouldn’t stop. Later, when Irislee joined him at Wyandotte, he would pass
her in the hall and wink and say “Hi honey.” Irislee would go a little weak at
the knees.
“I was all in awe of Pinky Pringle,” she sighs, some seventy years later.
A lot of people shared that sentiment. Charming and intelligent, Bob Pringle
impressed thousands of people who met him at any of the Pringles’ businesses
over the years, not to mention his church family members at St. Peter’s.
Bob died peacefully in his sleep at home Wednesday (April 2) at the age of 82.
His was an intriguing life, full of triumphs, tragedies and ironies.
He served in the most dangerous part of the most dangerous service of a brutal
war yet was never rewarded as he and his shipmates should have been; He was,
literally, never sick a day with minor irritants like the flu or colds but for
most of his life he was plagued with one major illness after another; life was
good to him and Irislee but tragedy unsuccessfully challenged their faith.
He was a rare man for another reason.
“I never, in all those years, saw him mad at anyone,” says Irislee, leaning back
in a comfortable chair in their cozy Loch Lloyd home. “He was just never angry,
even with all the illnesses that he had. People liked him because he liked
people. Whatever he was into, he became the head. He was a natural leader.”
Bob (“Pinky” was for his fiery red hair…the name was jettisoned by all but his
closest childhood friends after high school) was born in Topeka but moved to
Kansas City, Kansas during his early childhood. His father, also a man of
remarkable calmness, was a salesman for a gas services company.
With five of his closest buddies, Bob joined the wartime Merchant Marine right
out of high school in 1943. He served aboard tankers for the next three years,
the most volatile ships in the service that had a higher combat loss ratio than
the Marines. Fuel was the lifeline of war so the tankers were prized targets for
German U-Boats and Japanese kamikazes. Bob’s ships participated in the D-Day
invasion of Normandy and the attack on Okinawa and the infamous monsoon off the
same bloody island. The ships plied the deadly North Atlantic convoy routes and
he visited every continent, sailing in almost every body of water from eastern
Russia to Japanese home waters. All six men made it home.
Those dangerous and taxing years on steel decks caused him to suffer from
varicose veins that, in turn, led to numerous conditions and surgeries over the
years.
Although the seamen of the U.S. Merchant Marine served under the harshest and
most dangerous conditions, the law did not recognize them as “veterans” and the
returning men were denied all the perks afforded their fellow servicemen by a
grateful nation like GI Bill funding for education or veterans’ loans and health
coverages.
To this day that negligence hasn’t been corrected despite efforts to somehow
reward the rapidly dwindling ranks of the World War II merchant mariners.
Bob came home in 1946 to spent two years at the University of Kansas with his
high school sweetheart Irislee. When she left Lawrence to enroll in secretarial
school in Kansas City, he followed to attend pre-law at the then-Kansas City
University. They were married in 1949. He got a better offer from the 3M Company
and the new couple moved to Wichita, then St. Louis and Cincinnati.
In 1954 Bob and Irislee started their own label-printing business (“Tabco”) in
Mission, Kansas. On weekends they would drive to Cameron, Mo. where her parents
owned a motel and a restaurant, the latter they leased out. Irislee would work
as a waitress and Bob was a cook in the restaurant.
In 1956 the couple took over the restaurant lease and ran it as “The Rambler.”
It was a highly successful business because of the quality of its food and it’s
location at the intersections of highways 36 and 69. (Google up “Rambler
restaurant Cameron Missouri” for a postcard view of the motel and restaurant).
In 1970, with Bob’s conditions worsening, they sold the lease. Bob went on
permanent disability in 1978.
The couple built a liquor and wine store at the intersection of I-35 and US 36
and owned it through 1985. They returned to the Cameron restaurant in 1975 and
renamed it “Pringles’”. They sold it in 1996.
Their daughter Paige was born in 1961. When she died in 2003, Bob and Irislee
were devastated. “It took a lot out of both of us,” recalled Irislee softly.
They came to St. Peter’s in 1994.
“He was not outwardly religious,” she said. “Like most men, he kept a lot of
that to himself. But I knew he had a deep conviction of what life was all
about.”
Paige’s son Ian, now six, was a bright light in Bob’s life. He spends about half
of his days with Irislee and Cooper, Bob’s well-loved Schnauzer-mix.
There will never be any doubt about what Bob Pringle will be remembered for.
“Bob was personality-plus!” grins Irislee. “If you knew him, you’ll never forget
him!”
We will not. |