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novel or magical about Robby’s therapeutic approach. He says he wants to learn everything he can about his patient. “I want to know what you had for breakfast, how you’re getting along with your wife, how you slept last night, what medications you’re taking, how many milligrams, and for what purpose. I want to know about your educational background and your sex life.” Part of his job as a psychotherapist, he believes, is to model a way of thinking. “Why do you think you do this?” he often asks an addict about some destructive behavior. Just as often addicts will answer, “Because it brings me happiness.” Robby then points out that nothing in the patient’s description of his substance abuse sounds much like happiness. “I try to help them learn to think for themselves so that they don’t look back and say they’re doing something because some old guy told them to. When their behaviors change I say, ‘Now you’re using that good brain of yours and you’re much stronger than you were.’ ”

From the start of the economic tsunami in 2008, as the value of homes and stocks plunged and Americans lost their jobs in record numbers, the demand for Robby’s services soared. “The recession has had a very definite effect on my work. Anxiety is up. Clinical depression is up. Use of alcohol and drugs is up. I am working later. I used to say to prospective patients: ‘I have an opening this Thursday.’ Now, I say, ‘I think I can see you in two or three weeks.’ ”

Robby also found himself illustrating his philosophy more frequently than ever with the story of his life, his transition to a new career, and his late-life success:

The roots of Robby’s unremitting drive to improve himself were scripted in his heart by his mother, Lottie, a literate, civically active woman of Swedish and Dutch ancestry who loved music and wrote poetry. She also wrote articles about the plight of World War I veterans abandoned by the government, like Robby’s father, Casto Iadeluca, who returned from the Great War paralyzed on his right side, suffering from “shell shock,” and unable to ever work again.

Lottie invested her energy and ambitions in her son, Robert Banker Iadeluca. He was born in New York City on September 25, 1920. When he was six, the family moved to a small house in the then rural town of Islip, Long Island, not far from the Great South Bay, where he would spend the rest of his childhood reveling in nature, enjoying scouting, and raising homing pigeons. While the house, bought for $2,500, had little in the way of modern conveniences, Robby’s mother made sure he had violin, trumpet, and piano lessons and that he sang in church choirs of various denominations. The motto inscribed on the façade of Islip High School, which Robby says he read almost every day he entered school, underscored Lottie’s instruction at home: “Enter to Learn; Go Forth to Serve.”

More painfully etched in Robby’s memory is the February night he saw his mother sit up in bed and begin to convulse as she was signing his sixth-grade report card. After school the next day, he visited his mother in the hospital. “Always be good, Bobby. Do what is right,” she told him as he left her. Those were the last words he heard her speak.

When Robby graduated from high school in 1937, his grades were not quite high enough to make him valedictorian or salutatorian. But his English teacher, Miss Goodrich, was determined to make use of his well-honed writing and speaking skills. She asked Robby to read one of his essays, titled “On the Desirability of Being Oneself,” at graduation. When he arrived at graduation without a copy in hand, Miss Goodrich nearly fainted from anxiety. Unflustered, Robby stepped to the podium and recited the essay flawlessly from memory, displaying a skill that would serve him well the rest of his life.

For his first jobs, he traveled into New York City, working first as a lunchtime delivery boy for the Ritz Shoppe on Forty-seventh Street, and then in the mailroom of Madison Avenue advertising giant Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBD&O). Despite his low station, the eighteen-year-old