Named for his grandfather, Robert Buxton Allen of Truxton, Missouri. He was the eldest child to live past infancy. His older siblings were born in a lead mining town.

He moved with his growing family across Indian Territory, living in dugout houses in two different locations. His father was a freight hauler and cattle raiser. The responsibility for tending the cattle fell to R. B. while his father was away hauling loads of buffalo bones to be ground into fertilizer up to the rail heads and supplies back. His parents were educated people and their necessary goods included books. His namesake grandfather had founded a school and seminary in Truxton, Missouri. R. B. got an education among the wilds of Indian Territory that enabled him to become schoolteacher himself by the time he was still just an older teenager.

His family eventually sold out their holdings in Indian Territory and took the railroad to California to consider settling there. His father decided that it wasn't to his liking and on the advice of an old acquaintance moved to the Concho Valley of Texas and settled in the Orient community of Tom Green County just a few years after the beginning of the twentieth century.

While teaching school in the Tennyson community near Orient he caught the eyes of some of his female students. He was apparently considered especially eligible not only because he was educated but because unlike most of the young men of the community who only rode horses, he had a fashionable wagon that would accommodate a female passenger (and also a chaperone). In 1906 he married Mary Gaston, one of his students, who won out over the competition of one of her sisters, who was also a persistent chaperone, as well as other girls. (There were almost no respectable unmarried young women in the area except settlers' teenage daughters and few opportunities to meet them.)

He and his ever-growing family moved back and forth across Coke County, Texas, as he taught school on two year contracts in a variety of constantly changing school districts, nearly all of them either in the or near the southeastern corner of Coke County near the Tennyson or Orient communities or in or near the northwestern corner of Coke County near the Silver community. He also rented farms where he taught and tried to raise cattle as well. Eventually he and his family got tired of moving after having spent several year in a row in the Silver area and he quit school teaching to become a storekeeper and postmaster while still farming and raising cattle.

More than once he sold a house that he owned in order to get money to build another house. On one of these occasions the new owners wanted immediate occupancy and his rather large family lived out of a single room in the back of the store while the new house was be built. It was apparently worthwhile, however, as it was reputedly one of the nicest houses around at the time and it was where he and Madie lived for over thirty more years. Due to failing health, he and Madie moved to San Angelo about 1960, where they could be close to health care, their children, and also enjoy the comforts of central heating and cooling.

He became active in politics as a result of the Great Depression. In that part of Texas that meant being active in the Democratic Party, so he became known to Lyndon Johnson and received congratulations on his 60th wedding anniversary from President Johnson, which caused quite a stir among his daughters.

Declining health caused him to retire from