Bob Huff: Ohio Born, American Made

This is Lee Habibe, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including yours. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They’re some of our favorites. And we like to tell great business stories and great entrepreneurship stories because it’s the heart of the American Dream. Bob Huff was born just outside of Dayton, Ohio, in the blue-collar factory town of Moraine City. Bob’s early life was anything but easy, but as you’ll hear, that clearly didn’t stop him. Here’s Bob to tell his own story.

I remember we had a three-room house. There was a kitchen, a living room, and a bedroom, and so, are of pop belly Stowe in the middle of the three rooms. The street had no plumbing. We didn’t have any sewage. So, as time went on, my mother and my father moved to another home. And at that time, there were serious issues between them, namely, alcoholism on my father’s part, and I didn’t realize that as a child. I don’t think you remember. So my mother and father got a divorce, so my mother became a sole income source for the family. She worked very diligently. She worked in a factory. My mother lost her job at the factory because the factory went out of business, and then it became a situation where she worked very diligently at whatever job she could get. She just worked, so my brother and I were sort of left to care for ourselves. So it was a great learning experience for me to sort of grow up with a single parent and with a parent who did everything she could to make life as normal as possible. And as it became a teenager, the reality set in that there’s time for me to get a job. My mother just told me, “So, well, you know, you’re going to have to earn your own spending money, Bob, because I can’t afford to buy all the closure want and the expenses that you have. So you’re going to get a job.” So it wasn’t anything earth-shattering. Is just what you do. I saw that she worked, and so I thought, well, it would be fun to work. I did not take college prep in high school. I just took regular courses. I wasn’t the best student in the class or the brightest, probably, and I really didn’t have any idea what it was going to do with my life. But I knew that I wanted to life different than what I had lived over the past few years, and the one less you have and taking care of yourself as a teenager.

So, on my birthday, when I turned nineteen, having experience one semester at Wright State University, I got my draft to U.S. for the Vietnam War. So I thought, well, I don’t know if I want to be drafted or if I should just join where I could select my own career path in the military. So what I had decided was that it would be better for me to join the military for four years and choose the vocation which would best suit my personality and what I wanted to do in the future. So I chose Army Intelligence. I was intelligence non-commissioned officer. I did get to travel to Japan for two years and enjoyed the beautiful beaches in Okinawa. Then I was transferred to Washington, D.C., and I was a young, single person, and I enjoyed the nightlife in Georgetown more than anything. All of a sudden, I realized I’ve got twelve months left, and I think, oh, this is great because I’m not gonna have to worry about another transfer. I really like where I am. However, the Army had a different idea. I had received orders from my commanding officer to go to Turkey, and it was another living experience, shall we say, because it was very isolated. We monitored the Russian information from that area. And it was a good year. I got to take some college horses. University of Virginia professor visiting professor, it would come and get classes, realizing that when I got out of the military, I would want to go back to college. So it was a great year for me. I enjoyed the culture and the people of Turkey, and then I came back to Columbus. My mother had remarried, and she had home Columbus, so I went there, initially signed up for a High State University. I was fortunate to get in there.

I remember I never thought that I would go to college because I had not taken college prep. But I remember Mrs. Try, my English teacher in high school, and she said, “Bob, all schools at that time, especially Ohio schools, if you applied, they would they would accept you at least for one semester.” And so that’s what happened at Ohio State. I was accepted, and I began my college career, and it was an interesting starting period. I knew I could live with my mother, so I got a one-room roaming house that I lived in and met my wife host football game with Ohio State and Michigan, and we really struck it off immediately. I mean, we were at this party. Neither one of us wanted to go to the particular house the party was, but it was free, and I like to tell the story: we met by a fish. What she didn’t know is that during this period that I was at Ohio State, I participate in Campus Crusade for Christ. And I said to her. She started talking to me, and I was talking to her, and I said, “You know, if I’m a little weird just sitting here or standing here, look at this fish tank.” I said, “I’m just deep in thought.” I said, “I just became a Christian. I want to tell you right up front that if you have a problem with that, you know, that’s, that’s fine. But I’ve chosen this life.” And she said to me, “Bob, I wonder to let you know that I’m a Christian as well.” So we sort of fell in love with each other at that very moment, I think.

And you’re listening to Bob Huff tell his story growing up in a three-room house with a potbelly stove in the middle of it, a divorce that had to rock his world. But, you know, he saw it as a learning opportunity and a growing opportunity, a great learning experience, he called it, being raised by a single man who had to just work her tail off to provide. As he put it, it, it was nothing earth-shattering, the idea that he’d have to pay his own way for things, even as a teenager. When we come back, more of Bob Huff’s story, an Ohio-born American-made story here on Our American Stories.

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And we’re back with Our American Stories and with Bob Huff’s story. We just covered how he was raised by a single mom that taught him the value of a hard day’s work. Not wanting to be drafted into the Vietnam War, Bob enlisted so we could choose a career path for himself. Now back in Ohio, Bob was attending Ohio State University, and at an Ohio State-Michigan football postgame party, he just met Lynn. And as he said, they fell in love in a moment.

Back to Bob. We got married within about six months after we had met. And Lynn was a nurse and a registered nurse at University Hospital, and I was sort of a full-time student working part-time at various jobs. After getting out the Army, I had decided that I would join the Ohio Air National Guard in a medical evacuation unit because if I did that, I would be able to earn more money with the flight pay I would get for doing missions during the week, so that brought in about forty dollars per month extra income. Force was probably put on academic probation, I think, two times during that period. After two years, I had to decide whether I wanted to say at Ohio State, which required a foreign language, and I thought I could never learn a foreign language; that it’s going to be impossible for me to do that. So I transferred to Capitol University in Columbus. And now we had been married eighteen months and we had a child on the way, so our life was going to dramatically change. So I graduated from there, and I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. But my wife suggested, “Well, why don’t you go into hospital administration?” And so she was able to arrange two interview for a business at a higher state and administration. So I worked there for a couple of years, two years. It was a lot of fun. We were like the administrators after hours in charge of the hospital. Everything imaginable can happen in the emergency room in the middle of the night, or two o’clock the morning, when the power goes off and the surgery is going on. You’ve got to scramble for flashlights and that type of thing. So it was a great experience for me. However, I knew that without my master’s in hospital administration, my career would be limited. And when I graduated, I was twenty-seven years old, so I’m really getting into my twenties now, and it’s time that I did a good job and moved forward. But now I have three children instead of one child. So I thought during that period, “Well, why did I become a long-term care administrator? Nursing an administrator?” Found out what was needed in order to become a licensed administrator. It was a very exciting period, and I was introduced to Ohio Presbyterian Homes. Now, High Presbyterian Homes was a very large nonprofit organization, and they had retirement communities throughout the state of Ohio.

So I met with Mr. Yuley, was a president of the company, and so he offered me a position as executive director of a very large retirement community in Youngstown, Ohio. So my wife and I moved to Youngstown and worked in that job. I loved it. It was a great challenge. I had the previous… One of the things Mr. Yuley told me was that the previous administrator was still there, but she wasn’t producing very well, and it was a very political situation in the local community. So, at any rate, every hour that I would work, she would work an hour later. And I thought, “This hasn’t really got a change.” So I decided that I would work longer than her. She was single, I was married, three kids, and so if she worked twelve hours, I’d work thirteen. And so this went on for quite a while, about six or eight months, and I finally told Mr. Euleys and Mr. Yuley. I said, “Something’s got a change here because I have a family and I can’t work seven days a week, although I don’t mind it, and I planned to explain to her that she is not going to be able to work these hours.” And I thought, “You know, she’s going to be working nine to five, Monday through Friday.” She finally resigned, and then was sort of smooth sailing there, and I was able to turn the facility around, fill all the units which it had not been filled before. And then I thought, “Oh, I really don’t care living in this city.” Youngstown, Ohio, did not appeal to me. So I interviewed for a position in Cincinnati, Ohio. Worked there for a few years, and during that period, I thought, “Oh boy, you know, I really have the are to be in business for myself.” So I thought, well, I need to change jobs again. This is a third job that I’ve had after graduation. And I was about thirty-one at this time, so I had some years behind me of the experience, so I moved to a proprietary organization. However, the burning desire of business for myself did not see it; it just increased.

Well. The company I worked for wanted to expand their business, so I located a realtor, and he and I started looking at various northern homes for sale if they were potential acquisitions for this large company I worked with. However, they weren’t, and so after about going through maybe ten facilities, the realtor said, “Bob, why don’t you just buy a place yourself?” And my response was, “I would love to do that; that’s my goal, but I have no money.” And he said, “You don’t need any me. Let me tell you what to do.” So that was the beginning of my relationship with George. George was a wonderful guy, very patient. Fortunately, George knew how to put an organization together. So Lynn and I looked at a facility. It was a small, thirty-five-bed nursing home in Dayton, Ohio. They only had about sixteen presidents. When we were able to negotiate a contract, Mrs. Schultz, who was the owner of the nursing home. Was very particularly about who would take over her lifelong work. But she wanted a thousand dollars down, and I thought, “A thousand dollars?” How would ever come up a thousand dollars? Well, fortunately, the Lord does provide, maybe not at the interest rate we want. It was in nineteen eighty, and the interest rates were like eighteen, nineteen percent. So I got a card through the mail from a loan company to borrow, that I qualified for twenty-five hundred dollars. And I thought, “Wow, twenty-five? I wonder if this is true.” So I set the card back in, and I was contacted, and they said, “Yes, we’ll lun you twenty-five dollars.” I said, “Great, because now I’ve got my thousand dollars.” This all occurred within about a month or Mrs. Schultz, and so we bought the facility. Lynn and I quit our jobs, our great jobs that we had in Cincinnati. She was a director of nursing of facility and did some home healthcare and did a variety of different things. So we took over the operation of our first facility. There was another home in Wilmington, Ohio, that was an eighteen bid facility, very small. The owners were going out of business, and I went over negotiate a deal of seventy thousand dollars. And unfortunately, during that time, Lynn and I were successful. We bade cash for that nurse home, and so I would go over. I was the administrator. Lynn was the D.O. And at two facilities now, and so I did all the painting, wallpaper, finishing, carpentry, flooring. You know. We actually had it going very well. And then I had a company that game, and I wanted to buy it. And I thought, “Oh, I don’t know, you know,” but they wanted to pay me three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And during this period, I’d also gotten a call from George. George had a nursing home. It was a one-hundred-and-forty-bed facility in Cadiz, Ohio, and Eastern Ohio, and he asked if I would like to buy that facility. And again I said, “George, I don’t have too much money, you know, have more than what I had before.” And he said, “Will you just come and look at it?” So I went to Cadiz, Ohio. It was an older facility; however, it had one flour that had sixty beds on it’s one-hundred-and-forty-bed facility. So now we’re getting up to a much large nursing come. The census at that facility, out of one hundred and forty, was about forty patients because it wasn’t very well operated to look terrible, and the management was terrible as well.

And you’re listening to Bob Huff, and you’re listening to how American entrepreneurs do what they do, which is add value after a lot of experience, feeling that burning desire to go out on your own and take a risk. And as he said, when he got the loan he longed for, “The Lord does provide.” And then that pause, “Maybe not at the interest rate I’d like.” When we come back, more of Bob Huff’s story, the story of entrepreneurs across this great country. Here on Our American Stories.

And we returned to Our American Stories in the final chapter of Bob Huff’s story. When we’d last left off, Bob and his wife, Lynn, who was a registered nurse, had begun buying and refurbishing less-than-thriving nursing homes with their business partner, a real estate agent named George. Let’s pick up where Bob last left off.

I went into the facility, and it was very rough during those periods of time because there was actual patient neglect going on, patient abuse going on. Our philosophy is that we take care of patients away we would want our own mothers and fathers and be taken care of, and that’s been a philosophy we’ve had throughout our lives. We did have a couple of riots there. I came in one day, and I had a director nursing there, and I said, “You know, things that’ve got to change here, and you must make rounds.” I do rounds myself three times a day to make sure the patients are getting the care of that they want. She came in a few days at that hour. But within a couple of weeks, I noticed that the quality of care was not improving. And I had a family that came down on Monday morning, and they were complaining, rightfully so, their father had not been shaved. I said, “Let’s go up and see,” and they were right. This was about seven o’clock in the morning. So I said, “You know, I had that situation taking care of immediately,” and I went downstairs and got a box at the dumpster, and I went to the deal into office, and I started packing her up. So she came in around nine or ten o’clock in the morning, and I was curious why I was in her office. I said, “One packing your things up?” She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, you—you’re fired.” I said, “Did you remember what I told you hop aways go about coming in early, making rounds?” I said, “Did you come in early today?” “Well?” I had things to do. And I said, “Me too. Taking care of patients with number one.” And so I said, “You’re being fired,” and so I terminated her immediately, not knowing what I was going to do. However, my wife is an R.N., and I called my wife, and we got my mother and my mother-in-law were able to care for our children for a few days, and Lynn became the new director of nursing at the building, the third building that we own. So she came up, and we sort of tag team for the next few weeks, getting things that are better control, giving better guidance, direction to the staff, let them know what our concerns were and what would happen if they did not follow our directions. So one day I got a call from Lynn. I was back home with the other facilities, and she said, “Bob, they’re rioting the staff at riot, who was rioting.” “Who?” I said. “Oh my goodness!” And she said, “They wrote profanities, very profanity, inside the building. They’re outside.” And I said, “Okay, I’ll be there immediately.” But in the meantime, we had an L.P.N. that worked force, who was an excellent employee, and it just so happened that her husband was the S…