Robert Errol Russell

Sergeant Major, United States Army, retired - twenty-three years, and afterwards a supervisory budget analyst at the Pentagon.

He was born at Columbia and lived there with his grandmother until he was eight, then went to Washington to his mother and five younger brothers and sisters. As the eldest he helped raise them, and they went on relying on him - for money, for advice, for steadiness - all his life. After his stepfather died and his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, he took her to her day centre every morning; the staff there loved him.

He met his wife at her sixteenth birthday party, to which he had not been invited. She found him going through her records and asked what he was doing. He put Ooh Baby Baby on the phonograph and said: I'm dancing with you. They married four years later in Iowa, and shortly afterwards he left for his first tour in Germany.

He served two tours in Germany, one in Korea and one in Belgium, and retired as a sergeant major in April 1993.

They bought a seventeen-room farmhouse at Oxon Hill and he spent fourteen years making it into a home - a self-taught renovation expert, as he liked to say. He was the calm one, the one people came to. And he cooked: his Hershey pound cake and his pineapple ice cream were in constant demand, and both families spent every holiday at his house because they knew Bobby would be cooking.

The weekend before, his whole office came to a crab feast at the house to mark the end of the budget year. Every person who was there was in the building on the eleventh.

His wife Teresa, his three children and seven grandchildren, his mother Mildred, and his brothers and sisters.