REMEMBERING BOB WEIR with Phyllis Inskeep. Less than a year into their romance, Phyllis discovered she was pregnant.
Complicating her situation was the fact that her recent divorce had not yet been made final, a detail she had kept from Jack. And facing a custody battle for the two-year old daughter that the marriage produced, her condition would surely seal the issue in favor of her former husband’ s family. Desperate to keep her daughter, she took flight to San Francisco, where a secret adoption had been arranged for her unborn child. She told no one— Jack included— about her state or her plans.
To Jack and the others she left behind, Phyllis simply disappeared.
The healthy baby boy was born in October of 1947 in Atherton, a quiet community on the San Francisco Peninsula. He left the hospital in the loving arms of Fredrick and Eleanor Weir,“ Bobby’ s” joyful adoptive new parents. Nearly 900 miles away in Tucson, though, an utterly uninformed new father was going about his studies and, having not seen Phyllis in almost a year, was dating a new love.
Jack and Milena would eventually marry and raise four sons, while Jack resumed his military career with the Air Force. He’ d go on to serve with distinction in Korea and Viet Nam, more than making up for the action he missed in Europe and Japan. In time, he rose to the rank of Colonel and found himself Director of Operations at Hamilton Air Force Base in Novato.
Meanwhile, young Bobby stoked and fanned the flames of his emerging musical passions. And while bluffing his way through school on account of his undiagnosed dyslexia, he plugged into the burgeoning Bay Area folk scene, where he connected with the likes of Jorma Kaukonen, David Nelson, and Jerry Garcia. The series of bands he’ d formed and co-founded in the intervening years would eventually yield a lineup called the Grateful Dead. Ultimately, he dropped out of school altogether and ran off with The Dead.
The four Parber sons— James, Anthony, Jonathan, and Christopher— loved the Grateful Dead. James brought his girlfriend to one of their concerts, where she took notice of the band’ s rhythm guitarist and teased,“ That Bobby is good enough looking to be a Parber boy!”
James had a band of his own then, and in fact, had begun to enjoy some renown as a guitarist by the time he joined Lawrence Hammond & the Whiplash Band. Playing a fusion of progressive southern rock and bluegrass, they were signed to Takoma Records, and were beginning to make a mark when James, at 27, developed spinal cancer. He endured a painful final tour before hanging up the guitar, and with it, his dreams.
Phyllis had clandestinely spied the name in the file lying on her doctor’ s desk. The identities of prospective adoptive parents were to be legally
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