Bernard R. "Robin" Baker III

1946 - 2024

News story
By Mark Zaborney
Blade Staff Writer

Bernard R. "Robin" Baker III, a Perrysburg native based in South Florida for much of his law career, whose volunteer service followed the example set by his well-respected parents, died Jan. 28 in Trustbridge Care Center, West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 77.

He had a stroke in December, his family said.

Mr. Baker most recently was chief executive of UseMyBenefits.com, which he founded nearly four years ago as "a personalized search engine for credit card and loyalty program benefits," he wrote on his LinkedIn profile. He also was an inventor of related methods and processes, held patents, and applied for others with such titles as, "affiliate-driven benefits matching system and methods," according to online databases.

"He liked building something new," his daughter Abigail Baker Falls said.

For more than 27 years, until June, 2020, he was president of Premier Title Co., which he founded to focus on real estate purchase, sale, and mortgage closings, concentrating in southeast Florida, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He was a former partner of Gunster, a West Palm Beach law firm, with which he was affiliated for nearly 40 years. He focused on real estate and developed a specialty representing private clubs and resorts. He traveled the country and the world in that practice. He became known as a public speaker and served on committees of the Urban Land Institute.

He was a former president and director of ARC of Palm Beach County, which works with those who have developmental disabilities and their families. He'd been a director of Boys and Girls Clubs in the county and took a particular interest in literacy programs, through DePorres P.L.A.C.E., an adult literacy center, and Opportunity Early Childhood Education & Family Center in West Palm Beach, where he read to children ages 3-5.

"It's amazing all the different agencies he worked with," said his cousin, Eleanor "Sis" Hight. She was 10 years old in 1960 when she and her brother, Frank Hight, went to live with his parents, Elinor Shutts Baker and Bernard R. Baker II, after the death of their mother, Marion, who was Mrs. Baker's sister.

"He really was like my brother," Ms. Hight said. The elder Mr. Baker, a prominent retailer, lawyer, and former corporate secretary of The Blade, served on the boards of Goodwill Industries and what was then the Toledo Boys Club, but also Maumee Valley Country Day School, and Medical College of Ohio.

Mrs. Baker, whose father, Frank Shutts, had been publisher and owner of the Miami Herald, was the first president of the Toledo Opera Guild and served on the Toledo Symphony board. She also served on the boards of Family Services in Toledo, what was then called the Toledo Society for The Blind, and the Toledo Animal Shelter Auxiliary. She also wrote for The Blade under the pseudonym Lynn Stevenson.

"He grew up with those same values," Ms. Hight said. "He had good, friendly Ohio values."

He was born Nov. 24, 1946, and grew up on East River Road in the family home named Inwood.

"We just ended up growing up together," said Scott Barnes, of South Carolina and a tax lawyer, whose parents knew the Bakers. "I remember going to his house, spending the night."

They took the bus together to Maumee Valley Country Day School. They stayed in touch through the years and would meet up in Palm Beach, where Mr. Barnes' mother and stepfather had moved.

"The reality was we all grew up in a pretty privileged lifestyle. Robin never let it affect him at all," Mr. Barnes said. "He worked very hard. He didn't let privilege get in the way of making a living."

Mr. Baker was a graduate of the Taft School in Watertown, Conn., and then the University of Toledo, where he studied history and English.

"I know he would have been a brilliant history teacher," Mrs. Falls said.

He was a 1972 graduate of Case Western Reserve University law school. While there, he regularly brought classmates back to his parents' Perrysburg home, for a warm welcome, dinner, and engaging conversation, said Jerry Weiss, who remained a friend.

"Ellie and Bernie were just so generous to us young people in law school. We needed all the love we could get, I say with a smile," Mr. Weiss said. "Not all of us came from the same means they had, which was pretty apparent by what appeared to us as palatial surroundings."

Mr. Baker enjoyed being with those "who were grounded in a more realistic sensibility, without any condescension whatsoever."

He worked for the Internal Revenue Service in Buffalo until 1977, when he and his then-wife Laurel Toss Baker moved to Florida.

Mr. Baker was a skilled and competitive sailor through the years, starting as a teenager on the Maumee River, and was a former commodore of the Palm Beach Sailing Club.

Like his mother, he was optimistic, Ms. Hight said.

"When people were with him they had a nice time," she said. "He cared for people."

He made a point of taking each grandchild on a trip, just the two, whether to Washington or whitewater rafting in Montana. On Monday nights in recent years, he and his two grandsons met on a live video chat to read stories and talk and tell jokes.

"He did love his grandchildren, and I'm grateful that he got time with them," Mrs. Fall said.

He'd been a lector and usher at the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach.

Surviving are Janet Plitt, his life partner of 20 years; daughters Abigail Baker Falls and Katherine Baker Hanna, and four grandchildren.

Public services have not been scheduled. Arrangements are by Quattlebaum Funeral, Cremation, and Event Center, West Palm Beach, Fla.