Robert “Squirrel” Lester teamed with singers from a rival South Side doo-wop group to form the Chi-Lites, which scored chart-topping hits in the 1970s with “Oh Girl” and “Have You Seen Her.”
Mr. Lester, 67, died of cancer Thursday, Jan. 21, in Roseland Community Hospital in Chicago, said Marshall Thompson, a fellow original Chi-Lites member. He was a South Side resident.
Mr. Lester got his nickname for his propensity to clamber up trees as a small boy in Mississippi, Thompson said. His family moved to Chicago, and he met Thompson and other singers as a student at Hyde Park High School in the late 1950s.
Mr. Lester and Eugene Record were singing with the Chantours, while Thompson was with the Desideros.
“They were modeled on the Flamingos, we were the Spaniels,” Thompson said, referring to doo-wop’s big groups of the time. The Chantours and the Desideros faced off at South Side talent shows but members from each group eventually combined forces in the Hi-Lites.
Mr. Thompson convinced an uncle to lend him money for a recording session at a studio on 47th Street. They later found there was another group called the Hi-Lites, so they added a “C” to reflect their hometown.
Mr. Record, who died in 2005, was the group’s lead singer and songwriter, while Mr. Lester sang second tenor. The Chi-Lites took awhile to get going, but by the late 1960s were on a roll. They played Harlem’s Apollo Theater in 1969 — Thompson remembered it as “crazy” — and recorded 11 top-20 R&B hits.
Members occasionally came and went, but Mr. Lester was a staple of the Chi-Lites throughout his life, playing concerts all over the world with stops in Japan, Germany, Korea and Greenland, Thompson said. His final performance with the group was last summer.
Mr. Lester is survived by his wife, Louise; his mother, Ann Hines; two sons, Robert Jr. and Carey; seven daughters, Kimberly Johnson, Tijwana, Robin, Latoia, Chrystal, Kimberly and Lynnette; three sisters, Jacqueline Wahl, Pamela Denson and Joanne Hines; and 19 grandchildren.
Services are planned for Feb. 4.
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tjensen@tribune.com
