What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [44]
Robby was given a scholarship, a stipend, and an assistantship at the Gerontology Center and “was off and running” toward his doctorate. It was an exciting moment in the field. Developmental psychology was then just beginning to look beyond childhood and adolescent development into social and psychological development across the life span. Robby’s sometimes-lonely experiences as a rare older adult on campus in the 1970s led him toward gerontology. “I was the only one out there in those days. I was not only studying how people develop throughout their lives, I was an example.”
In May 1979, wearing cap and gown and the dark blue colors of a Ph.D. in Psychology at Syracuse, Robby marched to receive his diploma. “I always knew I was going to get my doctorate. I could have kept doing what I was doing for the rest of my life, but in the back of my mind, I always heard, Don’t stop here! Go on! My mother always told me I would. If I have accomplished anything in this life, it is because of her.”
The bliss of that moment did not last long. A few days after his graduation ceremony, his second marriage blew up, and he and Betsy separated for good. Now, he was broke, unemployed, in debt, facing another divorce, and fifty-nine. Moreover, though he was allowed to march in the graduation, he still had a semester of doctoral work to finish up. During that time, he lived in poverty. One month, he survived on a diet of free tomatoes given to him by a friendly farmer. To support himself, he took whatever work he could get, including as a house painter and a medical typist. “That was not a time for false pride,” he said.
The following May, at an age when others were retiring, Robby was hired by the U.S. Army Research Institute (ARI) in Arlington, Virginia, to use his communication skills and make the institute’s research intelligible to generals and other officials at the Pentagon. At the time, the army was deeply concerned about how families adjusted to military life because of the effect that domestic issues had on soldiers’ performance in training, combat, and in positions of leadership. As he interviewed military families, it became increasingly clear to Robby how the inherent contest of loyalty between the army and a soldier’s spouse—each claimed ownership of the soldier—contributed to stress, and frequently it led to alcohol and drug abuse. The experience stimulated Robby’s interest in substance abuse.
Meanwhile, Robby, who had sworn off marriage after his second one collapsed, placed a personal ad in the Washingtonian Magazine. He was still interested in female companionship, after all. “Who would like to taste life with me?” he queried. He received 235 responses. One was from Lois Rodney, a forty-five-year-old registered nurse. In addition to personal chemistry, they shared an interest in the treatment of alcoholism, a subject they jointly pursued during an on-again off-again marriage that lasted fifteen years.
To learn more about the disease, Robby attended lectures at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, where he became a clinical lecturer. Over a five-year period, he gave 350 hours of talks to recovering patients of all ranks, including generals, from all main branches of the military. By the time he retired from ARI in May 1989, he was chief of the institute’s bureau of communication and was turning seventy.
But Robby’s retirement lasted only two months. First, he took a course to become a state-certified substance abuse counselor. Then, restless for more, Robby applied and was accepted into a fifteen-month internship in a substance abuse treatment center at Blue Ridge Hospital in Charlottesville. There, “Robby distinguished himself in the classroom with his rich understanding of psychology and his pointed philosophical questions,” Dr. R. J. Canterbury, a senior dean for medical education at the University of Virginia Health System, said.
Working two days of double shifts in a row and practically living at the hospital, Robby squeezed a forty-hour week into three days and more than two thousand hours of clinical training