Robert Kibort, retired middle-school math teacher from New Hyde Park, dies at 86

As a teacher, New Hyde Park’s Robert Kibort was a "mathemagician," instructing middle-school students with mirth, magic and even a monkey.

"He was a brilliant math teacher, a really smart mathematician, and he had a really amazing way with the kids," recalled Gary Cohen, a retired fellow math teacher for decades with Kibort at what is now Thomas C. Giordano Middle School 45 in the Bronx. "He made it fun. He laughed a lot and the kids laughed with him."

"He used to be in charge of putting on assemblies in the school, and once he actually brought in a monkey, a trained monkey" for an entertaining and transfixing added touch, said Cohen, of Carefree, Arizona.

On another occasion, his son Anthony Kibort said, "The school was trying to expand the curriculum, and ever since he was a kid he was fascinated by magicians. And so he convinced [the administration] to let him teach magic as an elective."

Indeed, at home, "He’d always pull out magic tricks from the time I was a very young kid," Anthony Kibort said. "He would even do the torch-through-the-arm trick," in which a flaming stick appears to pass through a tube covering a subject’s forearm, "which would freak out everyone in the family."

Robert Kibort died Feb. 7 of heart failure due to sepsis, at the Highfield Gardens Care Center in Great Neck. He was 86.

Born Robert Francis Kibort on Feb. 19, 1939, in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx, he was the elder of two sons of Charles Andrew Kibort, an electrician and later an electrical foreman for the New York City subway system, and homemaker Agnes Christoff Kibort.

Following graduation from the former Evander Childs High School, now housing the Evander Childs Educational Complex, in the Bronx, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Iona College in upstate New Rochelle. He went on to a 1962 master’s degree in education from Fordham University.

The previous year, he married Elaine Basile, whom he had met while each worked high-school jobs at a neighborhood S.S. Kresge five-and-dime store.

After a short stint teaching in upstate Port Chester, Kibort settled in at what was then Junior High School 45. America "needed math teachers," said Anthony Kibort, "because of the Cold War," when the U.S. and the Soviet bloc competed for space age scientific and military achievements.

In addition to teaching math, "Back before computers, he would arrange the program for the school for the whole year," marveled Cohen, who assisted Kibort during summers in scheduling "a couple thousand kids and I don't know how many teachers, and you had to give every teacher their classes and put the kids in the right classes. He was the brains behind it and I helped him."

Beyond the mathematical nuts and bolts, his son said, Kibort was a natural at "talking to children. He would just talk to them like they were regular adults." After the family moved to New Hyde Park in the early 1970s, he would help the community, Anthony Kibort said, by volunteering to do things like tutor "about 10 of my classmates and me in the kitchen" ahead of the Regents math exam "because my particular school had the worst math teachers I've ever known."

Kibort also could revel in what his son called "dad jokes, and punning. ... My father's favorite bar joke: ‘Two termites walk into a bar and one says to the other, ‘Where's the bar tender?’" A Yankees fan, Kibort got to pose for a photo with pitching star Mariano Rivera, taken at an anniversary party for the team’s caterer, a mutual friend.

Before retiring from teaching in 2000, Kibort ventured into entrepreneurship, opening a card and stationery shop, Elaine’s Cards, in a West Hempstead indoor vendors market, Shopper’s Village. After it closed, Elaine and Robert Kibort owned the comics portion of a combination comics and trading-card emporium in Franklin Square, named Half and Half, Anthony Kibort said.

In addition to his wife and son Anthony, of New Hyde Park, he is survived by sons Robert James Kibort, of Floral Park, and Charles Kibort, of Colorado; and three grandchildren. A younger brother, Charles A. Kibort Jr., died in 2015.

After a celebration of life on Feb. 15 at the Thomas F. Dalton Funeral Home in New Hyde Park, he was buried on Feb. 18 at Queen of Peace Cemetery in Old Westbury.