Grammar stickler knew Morse code

Robert Carter was a citizen of the world by the time he was a teenager —- and he never had to leave home.

He was a ham-radio operator as a boy in Thomaston, and his skill at clicking out coded messages to the far corners of the Earth and deciphering ones he received ensured he had a good job when he entered the Army Air Corps during World War II.

When the Army saw he knew international Morse code, it put him to work teaching it to pilots, said his son, R. Michael Carter.

For the Army it was a twofer: Not only did it get a code instructor, it got one of its mechanics back to work on airplane engines, who also knew code and had been tapped for the relatively cushy instructor job. “My dad said the other guy never spoke to him again,” Mr. Carter said. “He had to go back out and work in that hot sun.”

After the war, he attended North Georgia College and Georgia Tech, where he studied electrical engineering. His teaching bent, developed in the Army, served him well and he became a professor at what became Southern Polytechnic State University after he was graduated from Georgia Tech in 1949. He soon earned a reputation as a tough task master who believed students of electricity should be able to spell as well.

“He taught ‘alternating circuits’ and he was a real stickler about students doing their lab reports correctly,” said John Keown, who taught with Mr. Carter for two decades. “The students said he made more red marks than they had ever seen. It got to the point that he had these stamps made up that said things like ‘misspelled word’ or ‘sentence fragment.’ You would see him in there stamping away.

“He was a well-liked professor. He was just very rigorous. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief when they got through his circuit class and moved on to something else.”

Mr. Carter even marked up copies of magazines like Scientific American to highlight the writing errors, Mr. Keown said. He authored several instruction manuals and a textbook, “Introduction to Electrical Circuit Analysis.”

Robert C. Carter, 83 of DeKalb County, died at the Hospice of Atlanta on Wednesday after a long battle with cancer. Visitation is from 5 to 8 p.m. Sunday at H.M. Patterson at Oglethorpe Hill. There will be a graveside service at 11 a.m. Monday at Fincher Memorial Cemetery in Meansville in Pike County.

He spotted his future wife when she was dancing at a recital as a teenager in Thomaston and he was smitten, Barbara Carter said.

It took awhile for him to persuade her parents to allow him to date her. That his father, R.L. Carter, was a physician helped win parental approval, Mrs. Carter said.

“He liked my long blond hair,” she said. “He was eight years older and I didn’t know if my mother would let me date an old man like that. He married me when I was 18.”

Mr. Carter had not only the gifted ear of a ham-radio operator but a sharp eye, which he put to use as an amateur photographer, shooting everything from weddings to car wrecks and fires. He especially liked emergency calls, said his wife of nearly 58 years. Many of those photos ended up in The Atlanta Journal, Mrs. Carter said.

“We used to chase police calls,” Mrs. Carter said. “In our early years we had a police radio in our car. The fire chief even gave us a red light to put in our car so we could get through traffic.”

He started shooting photographs as a teenager in Middle Georgia, and he was a shutterbug for seven decades. “He took enough baby pictures to fill tons of albums,” said Mrs. Carter, a former math teacher. “And we only have one son and one grandson.”

“He was a good husband and a good daddy and, from what I understand, quite a mentor.”