Robert (Bobby) Peters

Robert Louis Peters, a standout high school and college football player who was a jack of all trades as an adult in East Hampton, died on Oct. 18 in St. Petersburg, Fla., where he had gone to visit a sister. He was 64 and had an incipient liver condition.

Mr. Peters, a 1969 graduate of East Hampton High School who was called Bobby, graduated from the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut in 1974, where he was captain of its two-time National Collegiate Athletic Association Division II championship football team and was named an all-New England middle linebacker.

He was born on Aug. 10, 1951, at a naval hospital in Jacksonville, Fla., to Paul L. Peters and the former Lucille Mott. The family were frequent visitors to East Hampton, where Mrs. Peters’s parents and siblings lived. They came to live here full time when he was a junior in high school and his father retired from the Navy.

Mr. Peters was a fervent supporter of the East Hampton High School football team. When the Bonackers returned to the field this year and defeated Southampton High School in September, after having failed to play in 2014, Mr. Peters was asked to pose for photographs with the team. Earlier, he had been involved with a local youth football league and was one of the founders of the East Hampton Touchdown Club, an early booster group at East Hampton High School. He was also a baseball fan.

In 1975, he and Encie V. Peters, whom he knew from high school, were married. She survives. In his working life, Mr. Peters owned and operated Pete’s Coop, a chicken-and-hamburger eatery in East Hampton in the late 1970s, and had been an East Hampton Town bay constable in the mid-1970s. He also had been a lifeguard, a buyer and seller of seafood and sea sponges, and a real estate broker. He enjoyed the bays and the oceans of the East End, and loved cooking and spending time with his family.

“People kind of gravitated to him. He always had a very positive personality and kind of a jovial side,” said his son, Robert Peters Jr. of East Hampton. “He was a good guy, in general. Very joyous, very loving.”

Among his pastimes, his son said, were backgammon and games such as Yahtzee.

Mr. Peters’s daughter, Kalie Peters of East Hampton, also survives, as does one grandchild and the sister he had been visiting, Nancy Cummings of Punta Gorda, Fla.

His family will hold a memorial gathering here in the spring. A funeral and burial service had been held at Palms-Robarts Funeral Home and Memorial Park in Sarasota, Fla. Memorial contributions have been suggested to the East Hampton Athletic Booster Club, 81 Newtown Lane, Box 153, East Hampton 11937.