Robert Aitken Potts Jr.

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Robert Aitken Potts, Jr., 84, of West Tisbury died at home on Saturday night, October 11 with his wife of fifty years, Marjory, beside him. The cause of death was complications from a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease.

A consummate journalist, he was also in his well lived life a filmmaker, a master craftsman whose joinery in the fine furniture he made was the envy of many a carpenter; a serious bike racer and builder of bikes, model boats and planes; a linguist, painter, photographer, actor, a superb cook, a unique and terrific dancer.

He was born August 28, 1930 in Manhattan, the only child of Lucile Rankin (Ranks) Potts and Robert Aitken Potts, who themselves were a talented couple of broad interests. Lucile, an artist and a pioneer in art therapy, was the first woman instructor appointed to her alma mater, the Art Institute of Chicago in 1915, when male teachers were going to serve in the war. His father, Glasgow born and a Scotsman to his core, served as a medic with the Royal Marines at Gallipoli.

After the war, going in search of work as so many British veterans did, he lived in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa and finally New York. He worked as a chemist (pharmacist), based on his experience as a medic. It was a trade he did not love and years later became a marine photographer and dealer in marine books, working for, among others, the Cunard Line, documenting all their ships in and out of New York Harbor, often taking Robert, Jr along, on the tugs that led the great ships into the harbor.

In 1932, with the Depression hurting the family, they moved to England where his father found work, first in Bath and then Twickenham, outside London. Never owning a car, they biked throughout the English countryside, with Robbie on his mother’s carrier until he could ride on his own for some distance at about seven.

In 1939, with England about to go to war, they were pressured by American relatives to come back to the states. His father, a volunteer air raid warden and loyal British veteran, was most unhappy at leaving his country at such a time, but they arrived in NY in June 1939 on the MV Georgic.

Robert was nine and very soon sailing his model boats in Central Park. He was fascinated by the bike racers who would whiz by him. Bike racing was not an American sport but he knew it was his sport, and by 14, he was riding in their club. The members were, as Robert told it, almost all “French and Italian waiters,” tough and fiercely competitive. Somehow, they accepted this very English (and nice) kid, and he remained a member of the Century Road Club from about 1946, racing every weekend he was able, until he moved to the Vineyard in 1981.

His life, even then, was so diverse. From his French and Italian bike racing competitors, to his very liberal, quintessential New York friends with whom he attended the Little Red Schoolhouse and Elizabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village, a school founded on John Dewey’s progressive philosophy of education. He praised the way he was taught there, as he remembered visiting a coal mine in Pennsylvania, to see how workers worked and where the stuff that powered the world came from. Or hearing for the first time the Venetian composer Monteverdi’s madrigals sung by the chorus at Elizabeth Irwin and feeling as though his heart would burst from the wondrousness of it.

He developed an interest in the origins of language from his mother who read widely on the subject and was further taken into the subject by his best friend Pete’s father, one Leo Gould, who emigrated to America from Russia by way of Shanghai – and who introduced Mah Jong to this country. Leo would sit with the boys in a cafeteria in New York’s Garment Center, and teach them Chinese characters and the Russian alphabet. Robert loved it and went on to Columbia University where he graduated with special honors in Russian Studies.

Then drafted in into the army, Private Potts background was noted and he was told he could spend a year at the Department of Defense language school in Monterey, California. To study Russian! It was considered a perk, although the draftee would then have to spend an extra year in the army. But he would be guaranteed to be based in Germany.

Private Potts responded that he was fluent in Russian and it would be stupid to send him to Monterey. A great waste of the army’s money besides. The officer who was in charge of this assignment was not pleased, told him he was making a big mistake, that not going to Monterey meant he would probably be shipped to fight the war in Korea.

The private took his chances, was sent to Germany and became a corporal with Military Intelligence. He taught himself German and had the time of his life. He liked to tell his children he was a “spy,” but his main assignment was driving around Soviet military defectors and serving as their translator. The only drama he experienced was when McCarthy aides Roy Cohn and G. David Schine were coming to army bases in Europe to “root out” any evidence of Communism in the army, including materials in the base libraries.

Robert’s Commanding Officer told him to find and clear out every book about Marx, Lenin or anything Communist – and hide them. Given this was a unit whose main job was to keep track of Soviet doings, everything was about that and so Corporal Potts set about cleaning out the base library of almost all contents, re-shelving the works after Cohn and Schine had done their search.

Thinking he’d be an academic, he started a graduate program in linguistics at the University of Munich, but along the way, he met an editor with United Press, who offered him a job in Paris.

Robert was on the next train and found himself managing the Iberian desk – that is Portugal – where high drama again came if he did not get the soccer returns posted fast enough. It was there that he became fluent in French. Another stint with United Press in London and then he came back to New York.

For some years following, he was an editor and translator with the Current Digest of the Soviet Press, based at Columbia University, which provided in English the news from Pravda, Izvestia and many other publications.

From there he went on to become news director of WBAI, a small FM radio station, but powerful in its independent and wide ranging programming – much like NPR today. It was here he met Marjory, who became his assistant and a partner in much of their work for the rest of his life.

When Channel 13, New York City’s public television station was setting up their first news program, Robert was hired as one of their two reporters and later anchored a show called “World at Ten.” For the next fifteen years, he became a well known New York reporter, working for CBS, NBC and on occasion for NPR covering everything from politics to education to art and food. He was given his own spot on the nightly news shows, “Robert Potts’ New York” on which he did quirky features in his own inimitable witty and erudite style. Andy Warhol once commented in Esquire Magazine that his great pleasure was “watching Robert Potts eat on television.”

But more than features, Robert loved local news. He loved to do stories that focused on neighborhood affairs, he knew people cared about and wanted to hear about what happened close to home, village or city.

The Potts’ had been summer renters in West Tisbury since 1971. In 1978, they built their house a mile from the village center, planning to live here “someday.” But someday became that day and in 1981 they came to stay.

Although Marjory had in mind that Robert would make furniture and she might run a restaurant combining food, poetry and art, Robert, luckily, did not have that in mind. By chance, WMVY Radio was starting up and he became news director but had to start immediately, before the family move in July. So with only one car between them, Robert came that May and took to covering Island stories on his bike (WMVY would not spring for a car.)

He learned quickly about Island politics. They were feistier than New York. He called his wife and said ecstatically, “This little Island is made up of Six Baltic Nations. They have border wars. They are crazy.” And wonderful. When Marjory moved up with their children, luckily for Robert, she worked for the Cape Cod Times as an Island reporter. Lucky because he had virtually no staff and she would feed him her stories, but not let him air them until she’d gotten them in print.

A year later, they decided it was time to move on (with work) and do something they’d long talked about – filmmaking. Robert had the production knowledge from his television experience, they were both writers and full of ideas. But when they realized their efforts to sell to PBS or Cable (in its infancy) were not going to send their children to college, they focused on educational and teacher training work, something that Robert, with his passion for language learning and how children learn to read among other topics, was well suited to. For twenty five years, they produced films, many of them shot in whole or part on the Island ranging from their first effort, a short documentary about the world renowned (but then very young) Emerson String Quartet to a major documentary on the “most forgotten woman of the 20th century,” the very important Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor. In between, were extensive series on teaching to children with learning disabilities and others on storytelling, art and Shakespeare.

But as the years went on, Robert’s interest in what did and did not get covered in local politics only increased. In March 2000 he began publishing “The Broadside,” a one sheet, two sided newspaper, no ads and selling for “one thin dime.” In it he wrote about West Tisbury politics and anything else on Island or in the world that he thought should be told. He devoted many stories to “Media Affairs”, making fun of something the Gazette or the MV Times did or did not do. When his wife suggested he was too hard on them, he replied, “I love those papers, they do a great job, that’s why I have to tell them when they don’t!”

The Broadside became widely read as hundreds of people waited each week to read Robert’s humorous and satirical take on the Town and everything else. It was a weekly for twelve years, in the last year a “sometime weekly” as Robert’s health declined and at 428 issues, it ceased publication in June 2012.

Robert Potts is survived by his wife, Marjory Ann, whom he married in July 1964 and with whom he danced at any chance for the next 50 years. In August, at Memorial Wharf in Edgartown, when she was dancing to the Bluefish with their nine year old granddaughter, Ellie Marie, Robert pulled himself up with great effort and whispered to Marjory, “I want to dance,” and so he did.

He is also survived by his children, Oliver Aitken Potts and wife, Christina of Arlington, Virginia; Phoebe Bess Potts and husband Jeffrey Marshall, of Gloucester, and grandchildren, Aitken, Owen and Ellie Potts and Lemi Moses Marshall.

Robert’s ashes will be placed in the heart of the town he loved so much. There will be a private graveside service on November 9th, at 3 pm at the West Tisbury Cemetery. A Memorial Celebration of his life will be at the West Tisbury Grange (Old Ag Hall next to the Town Hall) at 3:30 p.m.

Donations in his memory may be made to the Rabbi’s Discretionary Fund. MV Hebrew Center, 130 Center St, Vineyard Haven 02568; The Compassion Fund of Hope Hospice, 765 Attucks Lane, Hyannis 02601; or give the wonderful gift of volunteering for Vineyard Village at Home, whose members so helped Robert and Marjory over the past difficult years: www.vineyardvillage.org; 508-693-3038.