Bob shares his story

When Bob suddenly interrupts a phone conversation to perform quite beautifully Beethoven’s classic “Ode to Joy” on his harmonica, you realize you’re talking with a guy who is a lot more interesting than the medical policy writer/researcher his job description says he is.

“That’s my day gig,” he explains as he shares the rest of his story.  “I’m actually a poet.  I got my first poem published in one of the Boston newspapers when I was in fifth grade, and they sent me five bucks.”

Now 71 and living with his wife Sandy on the south side of Indianapolis, Bob has covered a lot of territory in his life, which started out in Connecticut and then wound its way across America picking up a Bachelor of Arts degree in New Orleans and a Master’s degree in library science in Indianapolis.  His lifetime love of rock ‘n roll blossomed in the Big Easy  with its deep cultural traditions of jazz and the Blues.  He became accomplished on the guitar and harmonica and other instruments, sometimes playing the washboard simultaneously with his blues harp and vintage 1966 spruce-top guitar in honky-tonk bands. 

Through it all, Bob never lost his fascination with ferreting out often obscure information tucked away in library stacks.   It started working as a page in the closed stack archives at the public library in Hartford.  When he was getting his bachelor’s in New Orleans, Bob worked his way through school working in the university library. That’s always been part of my education trying to help people find the information that they needed, and that’s still basically what I like to do today in my job.”

Bob holds honesty and kindness as the principles that have guided him through his life.   “It doesn’t cost anything to be kind to people,” he says.  “I wasn’t good at sports, I was more of a musician, a poet kind of guy.  I got chosen last and I always hung out with the underdogs and tried to help them, you know, build them up a little bit.” He stays healthy, swimming a good 20 laps in his community pool every day before work, and tries to walk a couple miles around his neighborhood daily when he can.

About four years ago, he began to notice some mild slipping in his memory.  So, after seeing Prevagen commercials on TV, he decided to give it a try. “I gave it a while and I really did start to feel my cognition was improving.”

The benefits Bob felt have continued since starting with Prevagen back in 2019 and have also had another effect on him in his new technology research work. “ Thanks to Prevagen I feel more confident, as I am keeping up with my team of medical writers/researchers, and they are always requesting that I help them with complex research projects,” he reports.

For a medical writer whose life’s road has led through the stacks of libraries and into the harmony of beautiful music played on many instruments, the ability to push has been yet another good thing…possibly a poem.