Robert B. “Rob” Flint, Jr.

(April 4, 1940 – May 28, 2026)

Robert B. “Rob” Flint, Jr. did not set out to be “The Antarctica Guy” in our class, but he embraced that role with gusto after he fell into it in 1963 through a job posting on a bulletin board. His life before that fateful moment was more conventional. He was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the first of the five children of Robert B. (B.A. 1927, Ph.D. 1930) and Lucile duPont Flint. After graduating from Hotchkiss, he majored in electrical engineering at Yale, where he was a resident of Trumbull and active in Dwight Hall’s tutoring service.

Rob and Marvin Eisengart met freshman year and roomed together in Trumbull the next three years. Marvin remembers Rob as down-to-earth, unpretentious, gracious and friendly, exemplified in Rob’s invitations for Marvin to visit his family in the spring of junior and senior years. After graduation, Rob went west while Marvin wound up as a physician in Waterville, ME, but they had several subsequent reunions, including an Eisengart family visit to the Flint home in California in 1986 and a meeting at the Antarctican Society in Maine in the early 1990s.

After Yale, Rob moved to California to study electrical engineering at Stanford. There he encountered a bulletin board ad calling for someone who was able to “maintain complex electromechanical systems in Antarctica, immediately.” Rob was hooked. In a fascinating pair of posts on the class website about his Antarctic adventures, he said that his motivation to say yes “probably lay somewhere between totally mad, opportunity for a really unusual experience, and ‘draft deferrable job’!” Rob soon found himself committed for 15 months at Byrd Station in central Antarctica. Thus began a career on the continent to which he returned many times including tourist visits with his family.

Rob’s Antarctic experiences were always challenging and sometimes harrowing—an example was a time when both of the main generators at Plateau Station failed in the dead of winter—amid high winds, bitter cold and 24-hour darkness. Rob slept in his full outdoor outfit for a week while he and the team disassembled and rebuilt the generators, whereupon they resumed their scientific program. He bravely insisted that none of the eight of his group felt in mortal danger, but allowed that their families at home might have been worried.

Rob wrote in our 40th Reunion Book that he “loved the adventure, the independence, the travel, and being on the edge of science.” He was gratified that there is now a Mount Flint in Antarctica, though he was disappointed to discover that it was more hillock than Matterhorn. For the 40th, he added: “The most exotic Antarctic adventure was a year (1974) spent at Vostok Station (coldest place on Earth) as a guest of the Soviets. That experience has shaped my life in many ways, giving me a perspective on my education, my marriage, and our culture—a perspective I value to this day.” As side benefits, Rob learned to speak Russian, and his Soviet colleagues served up a Christmas dinner highlighted by an extraordinary quantity of Beluga caviar.

In other years, Rob worked at a French station whose bar was open 24 hours a day. He came to appreciate the savoir faire expressed in the mantra, “eat well first, then do excellent science!” Perhaps most of all Rob loved the science. Grant funding is available only for projects that cannot be done anywhere else in the world, so both scientists and equipment are first rate. He likened it to living in the pages of Scientific American. Rob’s own work involved ionospheric studies peculiar to the polar regions and weather studies to understand the katabatic (downhill-flowing) winds, characteristic of French Antarctica. He noted that data he collected have been used in a wide range of scientific publications.

Between and after expeditions Rob was an active philanthropist, fundraiser and community volunteer. His involvement in fundraising for his children’s schools led to election to the local school board, where he served many years as president. While in graduate school at Stanford, he joined the Sierra Club, where he met his wife. Rob eventually joined the board of the Sierra Club Foundation, serving multiple terms as president. He noted that working in education and conservation had made his politics increasingly liberal.

On Rob’s death, The Almanac (a local news service in California’s mid-peninsula) wrote that after a lifetime of Antarctic expeditions, he was “best remembered in Woodside as a pillar of the community.” In small town Woodside (pop. 5,181) he was instrumental in the renovation of Folger Stable, the creation of the Woodside Community Museum and Woodside’s first community park.

Rob married his wife Susan in 1971, and they had two children, Alexis (1976) and Katherine (Katie, 1979). His family described Rob as “intellectual, adventurous, supportive, and goofy, with a British sense of humor.” Susan and Katie both said that his work in Antarctica was very technical, and neither of them really understood what he did on his yearlong expeditions.

In The Almanac story, Katie said that “her fondest memories of her father always involved the outdoors, including a backpacking trip they took to Desolation Wilderness in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Her father taught her to appreciate the natural world, inspiring her to become a conservationist.”

Rob was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2018 and his symptoms gradually worsened. Daughter Katie said that despite his growing health challenges, he remained positive and thoughtful, and his caregiver reported that he was the best patient ever.

[Rob’s wife Susan Flint and Trumbull roommate, Marvin Eisengart, both made very helpful contributions to this account.]

The Almanac article referenced above, with some great photos: “Woodside community leader and Antarctic researcher dies at 86.”

— Lee G. Bolman