NCSU Libraries Focus Online

Volume 28 number 3 - Spring 2008

A Man Before His Time

By Anna Dahlstein, External Relations

What causes a mind to take flight and soar? How is the seed of curiosity first planted in a farm boy with an inexplicable love for book learning?

Reared on a modest farm in Rural Retreat, Virginia, as the eldest of seven children, Robert R. Buckley seemed unlikely to attend college. Nobody in his family had. Their community was built along the railroad at one of the highest spots in the Blue Ridge Mountains that could be reached by train. But Robert Buckley aspired to even greater heights. He dreamed of space exploration at a time when the Wright brothers had not yet gotten their first airplane off the ground.

Demonstrating a knack for math and science, he went on to study both subjects at Emory & Henry College, then transferred to Clark University in Massachusetts. After graduating, he worked as a school principal in northern Virginia. Eventually, he left the teaching profession to become the owner and manager of two general stores in Rural Retreat, but he remained the local authority on most topics under the sun.

"People used him as a kind of encyclopedia. He had an answer to almost any question you could think of," recalled his oldest daughter Katherine Isabelle Buckley. Although the town was too small to support its own public library, she remembers him poring over scientific magazines and speculating about whether it would be possible to travel to the moon. He accurately calculated that any contemporary (1920s) aircraft would burn up from the friction generated when blasting through the atmosphere at the speed required to leave orbit.

"Had he been alive today, he would have been amazed to see that we didn't just make it to the moon, but also to Mars--using rocket nozzles and other heat-resistant parts made by textile engineers here at NC State!" said his daughter. He passed away in 1943, fourteen years before the Soviets launched the world's first artificial satellite and twenty-six years before the moon landing.

Isabelle Buckley, an associate professor who retired from the NC State Department of Extension Home Economics in 1983, joined several friends in setting up incubator funds in response to an Association of Retired Faculty drive in the 1990s. She honored her father, an avid reader with a prescient vision of the future, by naming it the Robert R. Buckley Memorial Endowment. The endowment supports the NCSU Libraries' collections in mechanical and aerospace engineering--and political science.

"I wasn't sure if the library needed so many books related to space exploration, so I decided to broaden the scope," she explained. The addition of political science to the endowment purpose reflects one of her passionate interests. "A friend of mine calls me her pundit," she laughed. She has been following the presidential campaigns closely, analyzing all of the candidates' strategies in detail and celebrating the emergence of America's strongest-ever female and African American contenders for the office of the president.

In between reading the newspaper and firing off letters to her congressional representatives, Buckley is taking a heavy course load at the Encore Center for Lifelong Enrichment and attending meetings of the United Nations Association, United Methodist Church, Raleigh Woman's Club, and other groups. Her level of civic engagement and awareness of current events would be impressive enough in a thirty-year-old--but they are all the more so in a nonagenarian.

Appropriately, she is an expert on aging--a gerontology specialist who used to analyze new research findings from Duke University in geriatric medicine, nutrition, economics, and numerous other disciplines and figured out how to apply that knowledge toward improving the quality of life of the elderly and their families. At North Carolina Cooperative Extension, she authored countless brochures, handbooks, and training packets for county agents, social workers, adult and youth groups, and other audiences.

At the time, the science of gerontology was a relatively new and rapidly changing field--the second-ever White House Conference on Aging was only held in 1971. Buckley's innovative publications and training materials made the very latest, ground-breaking research findings accessible to general audiences. Her pioneering work was recognized with the Outstanding Extension Service Award in 1976, among other accolades. Always a step or two ahead of their time, both Isabelle Buckley and her father seem to have been destined to be trailblazers.