[1] At the time, White's father was working with the Igorots, though he later became an Army chaplain, and thus the young family—including Robb's brother and two sisters—traveled extensively before settling in Thomasville, Georgia.

[2] On a 1958 episode of the television show This Is Your Life, White's sister said that "young Bob was the proverbial minister's son, a rebel against all rules and full of deviltry"—as exemplified when the boy rolled eggs off the roof onto a Ladies' Auxiliary meeting on the front lawn.

He later attended the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, graduated as an ensign in 1931, and then worked briefly as a draftsman and construction engineer for DuPont.

One afternoon, after landing on what they thought was large and better-known Great Camanoe, White walked off in one direction along the beach and Rodie in the other.

[5] He produced numerous articles and stories for The Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, and Boys' Life, as well as the United States Naval Institute's Proceedings and various risqué publications; as he told interviewer Tom Weaver, "I wrote as a woman for True Stories and got raped in a hayloft about once a month.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s he worked with director William Castle on five films: Macabre (1958), House on Haunted Hill (1959), The Tingler (1959), 13 Ghosts (1960), and Homicidal (1961).

Most of his books are adventure stories aimed at younger readers — including The Lion's Paw (1946), Deathwatch (1972), Up Periscope (1956) (filmed with James Garner in 1959), Flight Deck (1961), Torpedo Run (1962), and The Survivor (1964).

[7] According to a Central PA newspaper tribute to the author honoring the 100th anniversary of his birth, the widely traveled White was a member of a 1950 Harvard anthropological expedition to the Middle East; "he lived in California, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, England, Ireland, Scotland, Italy, the West Indies and the French Riviera.

White's son, Robb IV (1941-2006), was a Georgia boat-builder who penned a 2003 memoir entitled How to Build a Tin Canoe; shorter writings were collected in 2009's Flotsam and Jetsam.