Robert C. (Bob) Halgrim has observed more of twentieth-century Southwest Florida than almost any living person. Not only has he witnessed many pivotal events, he has also played a central role in the life of the community. He first arrived in Fort Myers in 1915 as a boy of ten, and thus has the vantage point of nine decades of local history.

According to a newspaper clipping in Halgrim's scrapbook, his paternal grandfather, Ole Halgrim, emigrated from Norway in the 1880s and eventually settled in Iowa. Bob Halgrim's father, Col. Halgrim, received his unusual first name from a circuit-riding minister who was frightened by his Pawnee friends attending his baptism in full regalia, so the flustered minister baptized the boy "Col." instead of "Cornelius." Col. Halgrim worked for the Great Northern Elevator Company in Iowa. Halgrim's scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, pictures, letters, and other memorabilia indicate his father was County Treasurer of Humboldt County at about the time of Halgrim's birth on September 9, 1905. (The News-Press wrote about Halgrim's extensive scrapbooks on February 2, 1993, p. 2F.)

Col. Halgrim brought his wife and two sons, Ronald and Robert, to Florida in the years before World War I. (His sister Eleanor was born in Fort Myers when Halgrim was fourteen.) Halgrim remembers the train trip from Iowa and his first view of a palm tree in Jacksonville. His father moved the family to Southwest Florida to grow castor beans which yielded castor oil needed for airplane lubrication. The elder Halgrim secured a government contract for castor beans and bought several thousand acres at $1.25 per acre north of the Caloosahatchee about ten miles east of town. The Lee County Civic Center sits where the Halgrim's castor beans once grew.  

Halgrim's father also bought some property south of the river so far out of town the family could only travel there by mule and wagon. The developments, then called Palmetto Park and South Gardens, are today the site of the Fort Myers County Club golf course. Halgrim Avenue terminates at Cleveland Avenue (U.S. 41) north of the course. Halgrim said his father sold some of the 200 by 100 foot lots for $125, but two lots next to the unpaved Cleveland Avenue fetched $225. Today there is a KFC franchise on those prime $225 lots. Col. Halgrim eventually used this land south of town for an airport with a 8-foot wide, 200-yard landing strip.

Col. Halgrim also owned the Court Theater, where silent movies played, in the Patio de Leon in downtown Fort Myers. Bob Halgrim worked there as a teen, and it was this job that determined the course of his life. Whenever a new feature came to the theater, young Halgrim would notify Fort Myers' most famous winter resident, Thomas Alva Edison. Edison would bring an entourage of about twenty-five friends and family to the first screening. He would sit on the front row all by himself eating peanuts, while those he brought would sit further back in the middle rows. Eventually, when the Edisons needed someone to supervise their visiting grandchildren, they hired the teenaged Halgrim.  

Even though it has been more than three-quarters of a century since Halgrim first encountered the Edisons, his memories are vivid. Halgrim recounted how Thomas and Mina Edison disagreed over Halgrim's future. In the 1920s Edison immersed himself in a project to find alternative supplies of rubber. Edison understood that World War I had sewn the seeds of another world war, and he believed rubber would be a strategic material in such a war. Edison wanted Halgrim to work on his rubber project in the Fort Myers laboratory, but Mina Edison thought Halgrim should attend college. Eventually Halgrim attended Cornell, the "leading horticultural school" in the country, and Mrs. Edison gave him $200 to help "sweeten you up for the disposition I've caused you to be in with Mr. Edison." Edison did not speak to Halgrim for two weeks following his decision to attend college, and in 1929, after only two years in Ithaca, New York, the self-taught Edison prevailed upon Halgrim to return to the lab. "If you haven't learned everything up there in two years, you're dumb. I only had three months of education, the rest of it I got by myself."  

With two years of higher education, Halgrim helped grow rubber-producing plants at Seminole Lodge (Fort Myers winter estate) for Edison. He also recalled driving from Homestead through the Everglades to Flamingo to collect orchids for Mina Edison's "Orchid Lane." In 1931 at the Edison estate in West Orange, New Jersey, Halgrim acted as Edison's personal assistant during Edison's last six months of life. Edison was in his eighties and diabetic. Every two hours his butler, Horsie, would bring an agar solution and strained spinach to his bedside, and Halgrim saw to it that Edison ate, no matter what.  

During the 1930s, after Edison's death, Halgrim worked with the Army Corps of Engineers on the projects to survey Lake Ortona and Hicpochee and build locks near Moore Haven. In 1939 Halgrim married Mary Munnerlyn, a direct descendent of a Confederate leader of the "Cow Cavalry" based at Fort Meade, Florida that attacked the Union stronghold on the Caloosahatchee at Fort Myers in February 1865. During World War II, Halgrim was in charge of inventory at Page Field and then the Buckingham Army Air Field, the largest air supply subdepot in the United States. In 1947 when Mina Edison deeded the Edison Winter Estate to the City of Fort Myers, she requested that her old friend Bob Halgrim be appointed curator, a job he held until his retirement in 1973. The Thomas Edison and Henry Ford Winter Estates, adjacent to each other on McGregor Boulevard, are the City of Fort Myers' main tourist attractions.  

Thomas Edison's biographer, Neil Baldwin, described Edison as the inventor of the twentieth century, but Edison only lived to see a third of his century completed. His Fort Myers assistant, Robert C. Halgrim spent the better part of his life preserving the Edison legacy and presenting it to the ninety million people Edison predicted would eventually discover Southwest Florida. If Thomas Alva Edison was indeed the man who invented the twentieth century, then Robert C. Halgrim is the man who enabled Edison to extend his reach into the twenty-first.