Robert Fulton was born in Pocatello, Idaho during the Great Depression.  His parents divorced when he was only two and his early years were spent with his grandparents on their small farm south of Twin Falls, Idaho.

 

When he turned nine, he lived several years in Arco, Idaho with his natural father and stepmother.  His father was a telephone man working for Mountain States Telephone Company during the outbreak of World War II.   In 1944 his father was transferred to Driggs, Idaho and Robert, who was 12 years old, worked part time jobs with the Teton Valley News and Price’s Mercantile.

 

When the war in Europe ended, his father was transferred to Montpelier  and when the war in the Pacific ended the family moved to Preston, Idaho where Robert finished his high school education.  As a tall and skilled athlete, he lettered in track all four years, as well as basketball and football for two years each, and baseball his senior year.  He was voted Outstanding Athlete and accepted a basketball scholarship to the University of Utah.

 At Utah he played on the varsity basketball team as a freshman.  Utah was ranked as high as 10^th in the nation and he saw action in Madison Square Gardens.  In track he won the Skyline Eight Conference in javelin throwing in his freshman year.  He later went on to professional basketball for a short time and discovered his skills and stature were not up to the challenge of the profession, so he returned to college in California while working for a major rare-earth chemical company.

After completing his degree, Robert joined the Ralph M. Parsons Engineering Co. in 1958 on an adventurous job in Ethiopia, Africa.  While setting up a field lab and performing analyses for the project, he took some of the first pictures of one of the most remote, desolate, hot and uninhabitable lands on the planet.  At present time this area, the Danakil Depression, has been rediscovered by tourists and explorers who dare to venture into an area known as the “Hell Hole of the World” with temperatures over 160°F in the shade.

On completion of the project in 1959, Robert returned to his bride, Mary, and lived in the San Fernando Valley for several years while he worked as a process engineer in the space propulsion plant for Rocketdyne, a Division of North American Aviation. 

In 1964, Robert and his wife decided to relocate to Idaho and raise their children in “God’s country” where Robert designed and managed the first Ag Chemical Manufacturing Plant for American Oil Company in Twin Falls, Idaho.  After American Oil withdrew from the area, Robert, not wanting to move back to Naperville, Illinois and join Amoco Research, elected to stay in his native state of Idaho