Remembering Bob Anderson

ROSLINDALE, MA — Robert "Bob" Anderson took over Diane's Bakery in 1968, and worked until cancer got in the way. When he couldn't be there in person, his family brought his customers to him, collecting their well wishes and comments in a book. After one day, his granddaughter said, there were over 80 entries.

Instead of showing how overwhelmed or touched he really was, Bob did what he always did, and wrapped all those feelings up into a joke.

"I'm going to die before I get through all these!" he said, according to granddaughter Haylee Foley.

Those who knew him say that's typical of Bob, who died in his Stoughton home last Wednesday, at age 73, after fighting multiple myeloma‎ for almost four years.

His gallows humor prediction was close, but not quite right. Bob passed shortly thereafter, but not before Foley and other members of the family read those customers' kind words aloud to him from the book.

To Foley, it felt like every other entry was an inscrutable inside joke.

Customers signed off with nicknames—"the hat guy," "the pecan lady," "the bird lady"—and Foley said her grandpa knew every one of them, and the goofy joke or crazy instance that made those nicknames stick.

He had decades' worth of material to draw from.

Bob started working at Diane's in 1964, after his honorable discharge from the U.S. Marine Corps. He and his late wife Patricia ran it together until her death, a few days before Christmas 2007.

Working alongside them for 41 of those years was Sue Vittorini, capable of instantly firing off the story behind any given nickname in that book of tributes to Bob, and doing so with a side-splitting, infectious laugh.

She and Foley both recalled one story in particular, about a frequent customer who got a Diane's Bakery cake for his birthday every year.

As they told it, the man's wife forgot to order his birthday cake until it was too late one year, so she tried to pass another bakery's brand off as the real thing. "Her husband knew right away," Foley said. He went to the bakery and told Bob, who immediately called up the guy's wife and started giving her a hard time, demanding, "What are you trying to pull here?"

That, said Foley, was her grandpa in a nutshell.

"He was an instigator. That's how he bonded with everybody," she said. "And the customers love it. I swear, they show up to the bakery just to get picked on."

Vittorini agrees, describing how Bob could sit with customers and listen to their stories, then tell them, "Scram, I got things to do." Or, "Did you pay for that paper?" "Are you still here?"

"A lot of people are going to miss that," she said.

He'll also be missed by the community at large. Bob used the business as a way to give back to Roslindale — "anything anyone needed," Foley said.

"I'm sure he didn't have a whole lot to give," said Vittorini. "But if anybody asked for a donation or something, he was there to give it to them. He always put himself out."

That generosity often included Roslindale Village Main Street, where the executive director calls Bob "one of the true Roslindale originals."

"We will truly miss his presence in the Square, the holiday cookies he donated every year to the RVMS Tree Lighting, and his sense of humor," RVMS Executive Director Alia Hamada Forrest said by email.

Anderson's son Robert "Bobby" Anderson will continue the family business.

"We are so happy to see the bakery stay alive as a tribute to Bob’s hard work as a baker and local business owner," Forrest said.

Vittorini said Bob was a private guy who didn't share news of his illness until the last month of his life. Only a few weeks before he passed, she said he came in to do his usual office work, even though he had trouble standing.

The bakery was his life, she and Foley said. It was where he loved to be.

Photos courtesy Haylee Foley