I don’t remember actually meeting Bob. I would have been new at East Ride, and he was coming out from Akron once a month, so I think he just became part of the environment – on an intermittent basis. I do remember being in meetings with him from time to time. And I registered the fact that he was making a huge personal investment of time and money, just in order to be in touch with East Ridge and with Tom Powers.
Beginning in the early summer of 1968, I was usually the one who drove to Binghamton to pick Bob up, and then drove him back to the airport at the end of the weekend. Those were wonderful trips. We talked, and laughed, and argued, and compared the experiences we had both been having. The people at the airport, after a few months, got used to seeing us come and go, and it was kind of like Old Home Week for everybody when we went through.
Bob was tremendously good company – fun, loving to laugh, sympathetic to difficulties, able to help by extending friendship when that was needed. And humble enough that it was always a two-way street: he didn’t take refuge in knowing more, or being senior, or being a normapath and a very successful businessman. He was looking for a connection with God, and most everything else in his life was subordinate to that search.
There are three things I remember most about Bob, and that seem to me to define him.
The first thing is that people remembered Bob, and remembered him fondly. Over the years I met a lot of people who had gone to high school or college with Bob, or who had worked with him in Akron. They talked about him with great affection, and remarked about how sensitive, caring, and friendly he had been when they knew him. It always impressed me, because the way other people remembered and described Bob was not how he remembered or described himself. He had a notion that he was cold, and rejecting, and basically unfriendly – old friends just laughed at that when they heard it, and wondered how he could be so far off the mark in seeing himself. But again, the thing that struck me over and over again was the fact that people who had known Bob once, remembered him and remembered him so fondly.
Then there are two things Tom Powers said about Bob. In a sense, I was surprised that Tom would say such things about Bob, but I’ve always remembered them because Tom was so completely serious when he said them. Both times, Tom and I (married, by then) were having a kind of desultory conversation; I don’t remember much about the conversations except that Tom threw in these remarks about Bob.
The first time, we were talking generally about what it took for somebody to get into the AAA program, and that you had to have had a lot of suffering and personal pain before you were ready. And kind of right in the middle of everything, Tom paused and then said, “Bob Smith has had the hardest life of any man I’ve ever known.” He said it kind of wonderingly, almost as if it were the first time he had considered it, but also with a great deal of respect. I knew that Tom had been serious, but I didn’t immediately see what he meant. We kept on talking, but what he said stuck in my mind. I asked him about it later, and he said that the circumstances of Bob’s life – being an only child, excelling in school at every level, becoming so successful and so rich while he was still relatively young – made it exceedingly hard for Bob to make a connection with the Program. And to keep it. And yet he did.
The other thing Tom said was in the middle of another conversation. I haven’t any idea what we were talking about, or what the context was, but at one point he said, very seriously, “Bob Smith is one of the best men I’ve ever met.” And I just remember thinking that that was one of the highest accolades a person could get.
I feel privileged to have known Bob for so long – over forty years – and to have been his friend. He had one of the most important attributes a friend can have: in addition to giving his love and friendship openly, he was utterly dependable and reliable. You may not always have agreed with him (and I didn’t; we had some famous arguments -- about ticky-tacky houses, and Women’s Lib, for instance), but you did always respect him and count on him.
My sadness at his going has never been out of concern for him (I know he’s fine, and better than fine), but for those of us he left behind. We loved him a lot. And we miss him terribly.
