Goodbye to Capt. Rob, the drifter and street drummer who found hope in a Raleigh church

In his early days around Raleigh, you could spot Rob Frohlking pounding a snare drum on a downtown corner, dreadlocks spilling out of his baseball cap, a cigarette dangling from his lip.

He played for spare change, being a drifter who lived mostly outdoors battling a lifelong alcohol problem.

But people took to his wide smile and somewhat hippie outlook on life, and they called him “Capt. Rob” when they tossed him a few quarters.

Then in 2010, a worship leader from a nearby church passed Rob on the way home from Bible study. He stopped the car, got out to listen, and asked a question: “You want to play a real drum set?”

What followed was a decade-long friendship between Capt. Rob and Stefan Youngblood, who at the time led the music for a low-key, jeans-wearing service called “The Gathering.”

“The Gathering” spun off from the main sanctuary service at Edenton Street United Methodist Church in downtown Raleigh. And once Rob started coming, other homeless followed, even forming a band that played at “Gathering” services.

For a while, Frohlking lived in the bushes under Youngblood’s office window.

He would sit in the congregation next to businessmen in expensive suits, who watched him fish coins out of his pocket for the collection plate as if they were witnessing a scene from the gospels.

In the congregation one day, he whispered to Youngblood, “I stink, don’t I?”

And Youngblood whispered back, “We all do.”

‘This guy shook the world’

If you came to “The Gathering” at the time, you saw a collection of old boxes for a service Youngblood called “Cardboard Stories,” in which members of the congregation wrote the troubles from their past on one side of a box with a magic marker, then scribbled out happy resolutions on the other.

When he walked onstage for his “cardboard story,” Capt. Rob wore a button-down shirt and tie. He showed one side of his box with “Homeless, Bound, Empty” written across the front, and when he flipped it over with a smile, it read, “Happy, Sober, Free.”

“This guy shook the world,” Youngblood said. “He shook the world of everybody who came into contact with him.”

But this is not a happy story of easy redemption. Not all the time.

Conversation T-shirts

When I met Frohlking in 2015, he had already relapsed once and moved into Healing Transitions.

There, he met Tom Richardson, also driven into homelessness after a storm of bad times and bad decisions. Tom lost his marriage, his job and his home to alcohol. Tom and Capt. Rob took long walks together on their struggle for sobriety, and they discussed how rebirth can arrive through one conversation — even a single word.

Out of that idea, they scratched together the funds and know-how to start a shirt company: Conversation Tees, for which they formed a limited partnership and a website.

Each one of their shirts carried a one-word design aimed at starting dialogue between strangers — words that begged a question and welcomed curiosity.

Obviously. Exactly. Really. Know.

“What if you had a shirt that said ‘obviously’ on it?” Tom asked me at the time. “People would come over and say, ‘Obviously what?’”

A partnership tragically ends

I bought a shirt. Lots of people did. You’d see Rob and Tom setting up T-shirt stands at Raleigh festivals, meeting new friends and admirers. Before long, they had an apartment together. And before long, Tom died at age 40 — still fighting addiction.

Tom’s death hit Capt. Rob extremely hard.

“He was my best friend,” he said at the funeral at Edenton Street. “I knew him as this silly guy. Watching him dance to ‘70s music, ‘Car Wash’ and that ‘Freak Out’ song. Watching him play guitar, or try to. Vending, and being a part of Raleigh, when we were on Fayetteville Street on July 4. That was the coolest ever.”

I never saw Capt. Rob after that.

He went back to California. He wanted to work on a farm. He had a girlfriend he wanted to be with. I don’t know many of the details, but I know he inspired a lot of people in Raleigh — myself included.

I hope he was happy

You know what’s coming next.

Capt. Rob died a few weeks ago. He was 50, I’m pretty sure.

I’m told he’d been sober. I’m told he got sick and his organs just gave out. I’m told his family loved him, prayed for him and appreciated the peace he’d found in Raleigh when his recovery seemed an unlikely hope.

I hope he was happy. I know he was happy on the Sundays when he played his drum at “The Gathering,” looking out at everyone in Raleigh with their stories scrawled on a cardboard box.