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Turner’s father—a retired colonel, also by the name of Robert Turner—died of a heart attack on a sunny autumn afternoon in Danbury, Connecticut, when his only son turned twenty-five. Later, it became clear that he had suffered from a congenital heart disease that nobody had known about as none of his medical exams had detected it. He lived fifty-one years.
Father and son had severed ties long before that, and Robert Turner, Jr. did not even attend the funeral. He was the complete opposite of his father, an apple that fell far from the tree.
As a child, Turner was full of spirit, and he had always had an interest in modern things and the pleasures of life; meanwhile, his father was old-fashioned and conservative, a strong, tall man who, in his later years, after leaving the military,
