“Female Kerr” (as her original birth certificate read) was born at home on the 9th of November 1940, to Dorothy Virginia (Stahlheber) and Foster Louis Kerr. Robin grew up across the street from the Perry County Fairgrounds, and also at horse racing tracks throughout the US as her Daddy trained and raced horses. She spent her childhood learning to love horses and tormenting her younger brother, Paul; somehow, both lived to adulthood. Once she learned to read at such a young age, she never recalled not knowing how. She became that child who read by flashlight under the covers and continued reading voraciously until a stroke took that away from her in her last years.

A 1958 graduate of Pinckneyville High School, she left on a train for the University of Miami on a General Motors scholarship. Journalism took her there, but she studied mathematics and the Russian language. She left college and then went to work in insurance, first in actuarial math. For some years in the early 1960s, she was a Group Insurance Underwriter at John Hancock in Boston – one of the first women to hold that position. (When she returned to insurance in the early 1990s, she said nothing had changed for women in the field during the intervening decades.) From Boston, she was transferred to Chicago.

This period of her life came to an end when she married her high school boyfriend, Tom Hawkins. They settled in Pinckneyville. Although the marriage only lasted four years, it did produce her only child.

Following that divorce, she worked as a waitress for an upscale Italian restaurant in Collinsville for a time. But she realized her passion when she returned to her true love: training thoroughbred racehorses. With her father and her brother in the 1960s and early 1970s, they ran Kerr-Hawk stables. She continued on as a trainer as long as it was possible to make a living at it and still be a small enough operation that she could really know the horses. In later years, she was an assistant trainer, only ever working for those men who let her do things her own way – notably P. T. Adwell and C. W. “Cracker” Walker.

It was horse racing that brought her from southern Illinois to Louisiana in 1976 during the early years of Louisiana Downs. She and her second husband, Steve Prince, settled in rural Haughton along with her child, Cashman; after that marriage ended in divorce, there she remained.

When training horses became too much in the mid-1980s, she returned to hospitality work, managing a Kettle Restaurant on Monkhouse Drive for several years, and a few short stints as a bartender. Then she went back into insurance, working at Patterson, Alliant, and finally Deep South. Although she no longer trained horses, she remained involved with the lives of those at the track through her work on the board of the Backside Benevolent Fund.

In her later years, when she could afford it, she enjoyed traveling with her son and his husband on trips they organized. She loved Tuscany in May 2014, for the food and shopping for shoes. In Scotland, July 2015, she visited the Kerr clan seat and enjoyed many of the distilleries on Islay. Later years brought trips to Asheville, North Carolina, travels along the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, and several trips throughout New England.

Robin led her life her way and remained stubbornly, fiercely independent until the end. She slipped away peacefully on the evening of the 21st of February 2026 with her beloved son at her side.

For her, strangers were friends she had not met yet. She touched the lives of many over a long and varied life.

She is survived by her brother, Paul Kerr, and his wife, Paula, of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; her niece, Megan Kerr, her husband, Matt Verden, and their children, Olivia & Nick, of Lake Zurich, Illinois; her dear friend, Margaret Bernis, of Bossier City, and her children, Joby and Frank; her grade school friend, Marsha Talley Segedy, of Carrboro, North Carolina; and her son, Cashman Kerr Prince, and his husband, Bryan Burns, of Norwood, Massachusetts.

There will be a Celebration of Life at Winner’s Circle Church, Louisiana Downs, on Wednesday, the 18th of March at 4 pm. Interment in the family plot will follow at a later date, still to be determined, at Mueller Hill Cemetery, Pinckneyville, Illinois.

You can remember her by petting a horse, supporting your public library, or chatting up a stranger.