Rodney Dale Cobb was born on June 20, 1907, in the farming and sawmill village of Cotton Valley, Louisiana. For the first nineteen years of his life, he lived within earshot of a lumber mill whistle which regulated the life of his family. By 1919, his family was living in Arkansas, where the barefooted Rodney and his brother Neill built a workable printing press and began publication of The Hamburg Times.1
Later, the Cobb family moved to Bastrop, Louisiana, site of “the most famous incident of Klu Klux Klan terrorism and one of the best known murder cases in the 1920s.”2 On August 24, 1922, local Klan members ambushed and captured five men, brutally flogged two of them, and then beat to death Thomas Richards and Watt Daniel, whose bodies were then weighted down and dumped into Lake Lafourche.3 The result was deep silence. Young Rodney later attended all the Grand Jury hearings4 but justice was not done. The judge later apologized to him, admitting that the hearings were thwarted by rampant and pervasive perjury. After that, the Bastrop Klan quietly disappeared. Seeing the grim reality of violence and death under the guise of moral superiority totally alienated young Rodney from the primitive and contradictory values of Louisiana.
He found solace in the nearby forest developing an identity with the amoral and miraculous living world. On many long walks there, his interest in nature grew which, in time, was to lead him to a career first in archaeology and then in botany.
In 1941, he married Genevieve Moore, who had been a teacher in the Oklahoma Osage Indian Hills prior to becoming a University of Oklahoma employee. Cobb served four years in the military during World War II. He became a member of the Sacramento Unitarian Universalist Society in 1956.
Rodney Cobb was a member of the church until his death in the late 1990s. In January 2008, his widow Genevieve was 99 years old and still residing in Sacramento.
1 Our Cobb Family, A History, by H. Neill and Rodney D. Cobb, pp. 69-70, privately published; copyright 1975, #A 700278, Dec. 29, 1975, by Rodney D. Cobb.
2 The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest, by Charles C. Alexander, University of Kentucky Press, Lexington, 1965; pp.68-75.
3 Ibid., p. 70.
4 The New York Times reported the hearings on its front page for 14 days out of the time from 6 January to 21 January, 1923. Microfilm of the New York Times of that period is available in the California State Library, Sacramento; there are some 40 columns of newsprint on the subject, including the testimony of Fred Cobb, father of Rodney Cobb, who identified Deputy Sheriff Larry Calhoun as the leader of a “whipping squad” in the New York Times of 14 January 1923, p. 23, column 5.