Bill shares his story
“I am now a regular user of Prevagen and my memory is great at 95 1/2 years old.”
Bill, 95
Retired Government Economist
Bill is enjoying the good life these days in an active lifestyle community on beautiful Lake Geneva in southern Wisconsin. He’s only a short drive from where a granddaughter and her family live in northern Illinois, but this 95-year-old is a long way from the life he once led as an economics expert in the federal government.
“Actually, I'm a native Hoosier,” he begins his story. “I grew up in southern Indiana and college there where I ran cross-country and competed in the half-mile on the track team. I graduated with a degree in economics before moving to the East Coast to go to graduate school on a fellowship in labor economics.”
He’d spent time in Washington on summer internships and after earning his Master of Arts degree in economics he went back to the nation’s capital to work full-time on an economic research project for an arm of the federal government. “I had given up my educational deferments,” he explains, “and I was called for a draft physical which I passed so I ended up with two years in the military including a year spent doing finance work in the Korean War.”
After military duty Bill returned to graduate school to work on his doctoral dissertation, but Washington and opportunity called again. “I got a letter from a federal agency saying they had a job they thought I might be interested in. It turned out to be a great career,” he says.
It was a career that led to leadership posts as an economics expert in the government’s budget, housing and finance offices across nearly 20 years, culminating in a job opportunity with a private company that brought him back to the Midwest.
“I got an offer to go to Milwaukee to start a new mortgage investing service,” Bill explains. “It was starting to be successful, but it was blown up by the interest rate crisis of the early 1970s. I stayed on with them in various capacities until that market started to collapse and I took early retirement. So I started a financial consulting business.”
That chapter of his life kept him busy, kept him in Wisconsin, and ultimately became a large part of the active lifestyle he’d always enjoyed. Bill relates, “When I first arrived in Wisconsin, one of my daughters and I got interested in camping, and we saw an announcement that a youth hostels group in Milwaukee was having a presentation about their trips. So we went and got interested. I bought a canoe and we canoed with them a couple of years and then the leader aged out and I took over as the leader for the next 40 years.”
In addition to paddling many of Wisconsin’s many rivers and taking occasional canoe trips into the Quetico Superior Boundary Waters, Bill has maintained his healthy lifestyle of swimming and bicycling. He also pursues another passion, which is enjoying music, and in particular, opera.
Bill says, “Back after my wife died and I had moved down here to this unique community, when I was trying to talk about operas, I occasionally had mild memory issues. I got interested in Prevagen about a year ago and I did buy a bottle of Prevagen and gradually I saw improvement.”
He adds, “I am now a regular user of Extra Strength Prevagen and my memory is great at 95 1/2 years old.”