WALNUT CREEK - Robert “Bob” Carl Bahr, Jr., 82, passed away on Wednesday, August 27, 2025, at Eden Hospital near his home in Walnut Creek, California.
Bob was born in Clarksville, Tennessee, on July 23, 1943, the eldest of three children. His father, Col. Robert C. Bahr, Sr. left to serve in the U.S. Army’s Twelfth Armored Division shortly after his birth. Bob’s early childhood bore all the traditional markers of a military family, including several years in Okinawa, Japan, where he once joyfully and unwittingly brought an undetonated bomb into the house to show his parents. In 1956, Colonel Bahr’s work with the Army Corps of Engineers took the family to Savannah, Georgia, which Bob considered his true hometown throughout his life. He graduated from Savannah Country Day School in 1961 and went on to attend The Citadel, graduating in 1965.
Bob spent eight years in the Air Force after graduation, earning the rank of Captain. He served stateside as a supply officer in the Vietnam War and was honorably discharged in 1973. Bob was a born salesman, who as a teenager sold his sister to an Italian man on the train from Paris to Livorno (she was bought back by their father upon arrival). He translated his natural sales talent into a four-decade career, spending his final 10 years at General Chemical as the sales representative for the Northwest Territory.
A life-long bachelor, Bob passed two decades of Christmases entertaining his nieces and nephews by juggling peanuts and giving them the presents most likely to irritate their parents. He was a joker and an avid runner, once completing a race in a top hat and tails, brandishing a sign that read, “I run slow, but with class.” He became a dry fly fisherman in his forties and travelled to Montana to fish the Blackfoot, Bitterroot, and the Clark Fork rivers, as well as others, every year for the rest of his life. A known prankster with a quick wit, his family remembers him best by retelling his myriad stories.
Bob is reunited in death with his parents, Col. Robert “Bob” C. Bahr, Sr., and Mary Ann Bahr, and his brother-in-law, Dr. William “Bill” Tillery. He is survived by his sister, Julia Ann Tillery; his brother, William Henry “Hank” Bahr, and sister-in-law, Lane Winfree Bahr, as well as his nieces and nephews, William Virgil Tillery IV, Robert Carl Tillery, Meredith McNamara, Robert Trent Bahr, Dr. Michael Henry Bahr, and Julia Katherine Williams with a combined seven grand-nieces and -nephews.
The funeral service will be held at 10 a.m., Friday, October 3, in St. John’s Episcopal Church and conducted by The Reverend Johnathan Jameson. Interment will follow at 1:00 p.m. in Beaufort National Cemetery. Remembrances: Apostles Anglican Church—1540 Robinson Road, Knoxville, Tennessee 37923. Fox and Weeks Funeral Service, Savannah, is in charge of arrangements.
Robert Carl Bahr, Jr.