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Robert G. Fox
Morning visitation will be followed today (Wednesday) by the 1 p.m. funeral service for Robert Glenn Fox, 73, Austin, at Grace Covenant Church of God in downtown Austin.
The retired educator died on his birthday, Saturday, December 11, at Hampton Oaks Health Care Campus in Scottsburg.
Fox was born in a log cabin in Lee County, Ky., to the late Clifton and Nanny Barnett Fox. The family eventually moved to Scott County, and he graduated with the Class of 1957 from Austin High School. He attended Cumberland College in Kentucky and earned a bachelor degree in education with a minor in history at Eastern Kentucky University in 1960. He was the first in his family to obtain a college education.
He later added a master’s degree in that field from Indiana University-Bloomington.
He began teaching in 1960, for three years at Silver Creek in Sellersburg, then teaching from 1964 to 1974 in Austin schools. For the next 20 years, until his retirement in 1995, he served as Austin Middle School principal when the middle school was in the old high school building.
“I considered him a close friend. We graduated high school together and worked on our IU degrees together, and, of course, we taught together at Austin, so we knew each other most of our lives. He was a good person and a good friend, and we will miss him,” stated Berley Goodin, Superintendent of Scott School District 1.
Aside from his family, Fox’s interests also included farming, raising beef cattle as well as grain, tobacco and hay on the farm southeast of Austin that he and his wife, the former Karen Wheatley, developed over the years. He was also a contractor/builder from 1960 to 1975, building over 100 homes.
Fox was also an amateur historian, and his travels over the years took him across the United States and much of Europe, where he researched and visited historic sites. He was considered a regular visitor to Gettysburg, Pa., and Washington D.C., where he particularly enjoyed the Smithsonian Institute. He also visited many Civil War sites and Presidential homes and libraries. His primary historical interests centered on the Civil War, presidential history with an emphasis on Abraham Lincoln, and World Wars I and II.
Locally, he was known as the source of information about the Bovard family, who lived in the Alpha area and which gave the world talented sons who helped found the University of Southern California and other colleges. He researched and published the family’s history. A congenial person and a man who loved to talk about history, he was a well-known speaker for the Scott County Historical Society on the Bovards and other local topics as well as Lincoln and the Civil War.
His interests also lay in the area of poet and author James Whitcomb Riley and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the English author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. He included these men’s homes in his travels.
Fox was preceded in death by his parents and brothers and sisters.
His survivors include his wife Karen; a son, Glenn Edward Fox and wife Kellie of Sellersburg; two daughters, Laura Lynn Nowling and husband Brian of Austin and Jenny Lou Fox of New Albany; and seven grandchildren, Aarika, Chloe, Quinton, Kameron, Kayleigh, Caroline and Sadie.
Calling was held at Grace Covenant Church of God on Tuesday evening, December 14. Today, visitation is planned at the church from 9 a.m. until the funeral service at 1 p.m. The Rev. Steve Gwaltney, the Rev. Larry J. DeWitt and the Rev. Don Watts will officiate.
Burial will be in Wesley Chapel Cemetery northeast of Austin.
Memorial gifts may be made through the staff of the Buchanan Funeral Home to benefit the American Heart Association, American Kidney Foundation or American Diabetes Association.
On-line condolences may be expressed to the family by visiting www.buchananfuneralhome.net.
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