Samuel Robinson Papers (1891-1973)
M96.3.1, OS96.3.1, OS96.3.2

[Written on the back of the photograph], "Grandfather, Pack Square", Samuel Robinson Collection,
D.H. Ramsey Library Special Collections, UNC Asheville

Student Assistant in Applied Math, Vice President Engineering Department
"His long suit is calc and politics, and an inborn desire to eradicate aristocratic tendencies.
Sam will have an idea on any subject, no matter how insignificant.
He is one of the Russian trio, though, and may be an anarchist some day?"
[From Cactus, 1913 yearbook of the University of Texas.]

Samuel Robinson was born in Grodno [Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth] in 1891 and came to the United States with his family in 1901. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Texas with a degree in engineering. He worked with fisheries in Texas, and in the oil fields in Louisiana. He was a surveyor for the Houston harbor. He later received his degree in optometry and practiced this profession in Asheville until he was in his early eighties. He was married to Esther Kroman after moving to Asheville.

He was an active member of the Carolina Mountain Club, and was a member of its board of directors. In 1961 he instigated the naming of a 6,000-foot peak in the Great Smoky Mountains for George Masa, a founder of the Carolina Mountain Club and a noted photographer. Dr. Robinson was a noted local Boy Scout leader for more than 25 years, and was a member of the national council of the Boy Scouts of America. He worked for the American Forestry Association and the [Asheville] Metropolitan Planning Board. He was an active member of Temple Beth Ha Tephila in Asheville for fifty eight years, missing services only when out of town.

Dr. Robinson performed his own laboratory work in his optometry profession. During the Depression, and at other times, he never turned away patients, making adjustments for payment according to the patient's ability to pay. He was known to have lost white patients due to his insistence on serving blacks first who had arrived first, even during the Depression years. He worked to integrate the black scouting movement within the Daniel Boone Council. He strove to raise standards within the optometry profession, and lectured at professional meetings on difficult optometric problems, on complexities of prisms, and on his own method of glaucoma therapy. He had seven children, seventeen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren at the time of his death on December 22, 1973.