ROBERT THURMAN RILEY, JR.

Uncle Bob was a Navy veteran of WWII who managed to come out of the Pacific campaign uninjured. He enlisted in 1940 and had been stationed at Pearl Harbor in 1941, but shipped out of Hawaii in May and so was not there when the base was bombed by the Japanese.

In the years after the war, Uncle Bob worked for or ran several restaurants throughout Roanoke--including one (Riley's Restaurant on Franklin Road) that also employed his sister Araminta, my grandmother, in the 1970's.