Robert Ray Wallis

Bob, as he preferred to be called, was born on a farm in Hardwood, Oklahoma, in 1927. His earliest memories were of the great Dust Bowl that plagued the prairies in the 1930s. As a child, he would run in from playing in the fields when the sky blackened and the billowing dust began to choke. Still, he loved life on the farm. He said that, being so close to nature, he lived a child’s dream—swimming in ponds on hot summer days, gathering arrowheads in the hills, riding his horse through the windswept grassland.

Following his three older brothers, Bob joined the fight in 1944, signing up for duty on the USS Southerland (DD-743). After the war, he attended the University of Oklahoma. As an undergraduate student, Bob was a leader in the movement to integrate the school. In 1965, he was awarded a Ph.D. in psychology. For the next thirty-some years, Bob had a successful and satisfying career as a psychologist. His crowning achievement was serving as the CEO of Ancora Psychiatric Hospital from 1979 to 1981. Colleagues and patients alike unfailingly described him as a brilliant, compassionate, and kind doctor.

Everyone who met him was struck by these same qualities. Coupled with his fierce intellect was an extraordinary gentleness, a playful wit, and quirky sense of humor.

Bob had a lifelong love of literature and American folk music. He loved singing the old cowboy songs that he heard as a young boy. He loved reciting poets from Ogden Nash to William Blake. He loved chocolate and hot sauce. But mostly he loved Joan Wallis (née Josephine Elaine Martino), his wife of sixty-two years, and his five children and eight grandchildren.