Robert L. White, who turned a chance autograph from President John F. Kennedy into an obsession and then into a makeshift museum, died Oct. 11 at Howard County General Hospital after a heart attack. Mr.White, who lived in Woodbine, Md., was 54.
From the moment a young White received his Kennedy signature, he became gleefully caught up in the Camelot myth. He bought Kennedy artifacts as they became available, storing the property in his mother’s Catonsville, Md., home for years. There, in her basement, he co-mingled JFK’s christening ring with the president’s rocking chair.
He also housed hundreds of items “once touched by” the president or his confidants. Such goods — perhaps a coffee cup that touched the candidate’s lips at a campaign stop — might have dubious historical value to many, but they seemed to fill Mr. White with a sense of deep purpose.
Mr. White was said to have kept the largest assemblage of Kennedy memorabilia: about 25,000 pieces of correspondence and items of Camelot chattel.
His mother liked his use of her basement for the collection, especially because it assured her a daily visit from her son, who wanted to check on the Kennedy wallets and passports, the reading glasses and lockets of hair.
As word spread of the curious collection, he received visitors by appointment and never charged them.
The collection expanded because of Mr. White’s friendship with Kennedy’s former personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. After her death in 1995, she bequeathed to Mr. White hundreds of items she had as mementos from her own Kennedy association.
Mr. White’s accumulation remained a largely private affair until the mid-1990s, when he left his longtime job selling industrial cleaning supplies to start a more formal JFK museum. He’d hoped for public funds to help the effort, but nothing was finalized.
While his Kennedy possessions brought him the most attention, he held on to tens of thousands of other items related to the worlds of film, sports and, sometimes, infamy. He had a piece of bloody towel he claimed was used to wrap Abraham Lincoln’s wounds after he had been mortally shot in 1865.
