I Lost My Best Friend

LOMA LINDA>> Robert E. (Bob) Schaefer died on Dec. 30, 2016. He was my best friend. We both enjoyed being identical twins, but he really enjoyed it. On a visit to the EPCOT Center in Orlando, Florida, he bought us hats and shirts alike so that we would look identical. Some people must have thought we were members of the staff, because they asked if they could pose for pictures with us. Every time he saw some little people who looked alike, he would ask their parents if they were identical twins. None were, until we started to leave the park. When he asked a woman pushing two 4-year-old boys if they were identical, she said yes. Within seconds, a couple carrying two 11-month-old baby girls walked up behind us. It was a pregnant moment. Someone suggested that we needed to take a picture. So, they handed their precious little girls to two ol’ codgers they had never seen before for a picture. The entire episode took about two minutes. On another occasion, we got a job cleaning a Stater Bros. Market on Yucaipa Boulevard just before it was completed by the building contractor. It is now a Big Lots store. On a warm spring evening, Bob and I were washing the windows, when the Stater Bros., Leo and Cleo, drove into the parking lot to examine their newest market. That’s when the Stater Bros. met the Schaefer Bros. Although there were many years difference in our ages, we had a nice chat and sudden bond with them as they, too, were identical twins. Later, Bob owned Apollo Mobile Home Supply, where he provided goods and services to thousands of satisfied customers and jobs for more than 400 workers—up to 28 at a time. His business had branches in Palm Springs, Hemet, San Bernardino and Mojave Valley, Arizona. He had 26,000 contracts, including 6,200 for reroofing mobile homes, mobile offices and mobile classrooms. We were so much alike in so many ways, but also so different. We both didn’t like history in high school or college, yet he became an author and legal historian and I became an author and medical historian. He studied law for 35 years, and was introduced by a judge in the San Bernardino County Courthouse as her “favorite constitutionalist.” Due to some bad experiences, Bob had decided to study law from the beginning. He studied everything from the Magna Carta, Mayflower Compact, Declaration of Rights to the Tready of Guadeloupe Hidalgo. Then he studied modern laws from codes, statutes, rules and regulations, to the California Code of Civil Procedure, the California Civil Code and the California Penal Code. Bob, although not an attorney, had more than 9,000 law books and clients from Arizona to the Pacific Northwest. He became a national expert on Spanish and Mexican Land Grants, Common Law and the Land Patent. He scheduled live seminars on these subjects and had large internet audiences. Some people believe he had a photographic memory. In court, he usually won by denying his opponents jurisdiction. If he lost, he knew his way to the Appellate Court. Although we were identical, many could tell us apart. Our mother only mixed us up twice that I can remember, once when we were adults and once when we were small children. She chastised Bobby for doing something she had just asked me not to do. Bob and I had similar life experiences. We lost our hearing at the same time. We lost our hair at the same time. We both got skin cancer in the middle of our chins removed at the same time. We were told that we had the same DNA, but not the same fingerprints. But, he was able to unlock my iPhone with his fingerprint. When he came down with Acute Myeloid Leukemia last July, I got concerned, especially when I learned that one of the risk factors of getting the disease was being an identical twin of someone who had it. Through a world authority contacted by one of my colleagues at Loma Linda University Medical Center, I learned that, yes, identical twins can both get it, but it’s usually when they are young. The scientist said he knew of no twins over the age of 20 who both got it, and concluded that my chances were the same as anyone else in the general population. Phew! Bob was a volunteer fireman with the Forest Falls Fire Protection district for 7 years, and a deputy with the San Bernardino County Sheriff Department’s Valley of the Falls Search and Rescue Team, also for 7 years. Bob also followed our father’s interest in antique automobiles. His most unusual classic car was a 1931 Lincoln that had been custom-built and armor plated top, sides and bottom for New York gangster Arthur Flegenheimr, also known as Dutch, “the Beer-Baron” Schultz. The car had 1-inch thick bullet-proof glass on all sides, and machine gun slots in all four doors, with a custom-built storage compartment in the floor of the passenger’s side for a Thompson sub-machine gun. When the windows were rolled up, it looked like any other ’31 Lincoln; but when the windows were rolled up farther into the door, machine gun slots appeared. He owned the car for 33 years, and sold it in 1994 through Christies, the world famous auction house, to Whiskey Pete’s Casino at Stateline, Nevada. It is known there as “the Dutch Schultz—Al Capone gangster car.” Whiskey Pete’s took a year to restore the car, and wisely kept the 105 bullet holes it received during its capture by the Chicago Police Department. It is currently on display next to Bonnie and Clyde’s death car. Bob also helped more than 100 homeless people, some of whom lived on his rancho in San Bernardino. Most appreciated him. Some stole from him. When I confronted him with this, he quoted Jesus as saying, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye he done it unto me.” Matthew 25:40. Bob was a good man and I miss him. He is survived by his children, Robert II, Carolyn Montgomery, his father, Robert A. Schaefer, his twin, Richard A. Schaefer, four grandchildren and two great grandchildren.