His mother was very proud of him and said "Bobbie, one day your dream of becoming a great inventor will be realized. You have not been wasting your time tinkering around with your father's tools trying to make things." His brother, Ralph, continued to call him "Fool Bobbie" and "Mother's dream"; said he would never amount to anything because he wouldn't work on the farm like the rest of them. Bobbie always found a willing listener in his mother. She helped him with his studies in school and encouraged him in every way and showed that she believed in him and had faith that one day he would be a great man. This encouraged him to do greater things. The success with the water bicycle had kindled his ambition and created a desire to complete other inventions that he had in mind. He told his mother of a dream he had of a white-winged bird that flew across the ocean thru the air; that he was riding the bird and that he received a great triumph and reception when he visited the foreign countries, and how his own people received him in great glory when he returned. His father called these stories "pipe dreams," but his mother took great interest in them and always encouraged him. Robert talked very little to his father or brother but always went to his mother and talked over things and confided in her. She encouraged him because she felt that he was an answer to her prayer, after her eldest son had died,--that God might give her another son who would live and that she might have her desires and hopes realized which were lost thru the death of her eldest son. Robert was entirely strange and different from other boys. He never seemed to want to play with them, but kept very much by himself; talked along different lines, and made a confidant of his mother only. She seemed to understand him as no one else did and he always came to her for an explanation of his problems, and for consolation in time of trouble. Robert's mother often talked to Capt. Gordon about him--told him that he was a peculiar and most unusual child and that she thought that his refusal to work at manual labor was not because he was lazy but because she believed that he had a superior mind, and that if properly educated and trained, he would become a great man some day, an honor to his parents. She told him that Bobbie had advanced ideas fully a hundred years ahead of his time and that he should be educated and allowed to follow his own ideas. His father, failing to understand him, agreed with his mother and decided when Robert was about thirteen years of age, that there was no use trying to keep him on the farm, but that he should be sent away to Texarkana to school, to learn something and to become interested in the things along which his mind seemed to lead.