Bob in his study at his cottage in Beverwyck, a
retirement community in Slingerlands, New York

Writing has become an absorbing occupation for Bob Herman in his later years. His fondness for writing essays and poems took an unusual turn a few years ago in Palm Desert, California. He met a Chinese woman at a ping-pong table who recognized his name as the poet who had published verse in California. She represented a magazine in China that was published in English and Chinese and circulated among Chinese students trying to learn English. She asked him to write for it.

Eventually Bob found himself writing monthly columns for two Chinese magazines, Overseas English and English Salon, and answering innumerable letters from Chinese readers. Bob donates his payments for the columns to a Chinese orphanage. A selection of his columns was published, along with some of his e-mail correspondence with his Chinese readers and a selection of his poems, in a book titled, Adventures of the Mind – Wit & Wisdom with Bob, published in 2004 by arrangement with PS Leaf Books of La Quinta, California. The first half is in Chinese; the second half is the English translation.

In an article published about Bob and his book in The Observer, a British Sunday newspaper (“Bob’s Your Agony Uncle in China,” by Paul Taylor, December 19, 2004), Bob is described as “one of China’s most unlikely ‘agony uncles,’ whose advice reaches millions of Chinese youngsters through his popular monthly columns.”

Bob's columns in bilingual magazines published
in China reach millions of young Chinese readers

Writing was not Bob's earliest ambition. “When I grow up I want to be a philanthropist,” he told his parents when he was eight years old. His parents thought it was a joke.

It took Bob a while to fulfill that wish, although the impulse to do good was evident in many aspects of his career in public service and teaching. Now he is 88, and his childhood ambition was no joke. When he is not writing his columns, socializing with old friends or sending them e-mails, or writing poetry, or spending about three hours a day at a computer attending to his investments, he is giving away money.

To Bob, philanthropy is not a praiseworthy activity but a duty. In recent years he has given $250,000 to jump-start the construction of a nursing home near his home in Slingerlands, New York, outside Albany; $100,000 to the United Jewish Federation building fund; and another $100,000 to his synagogue. A covered walkway, the Robert S. Herman Canopy, runs across the front of the synagogue and shelters arrivals from inclement weather.

He has also given lesser but substantial amounts to favorite causes such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, Planned Parenthood, the League of Women Voters, the Albany Symphony Orchestra and the State University of New York at Albany (“SUNY Albany”). His donations to SUNY Albany included three gifts of $10,000 each to support a graduate student stipend and a scholarship endowment for students in the University’s Graduate School of Public Affairs, and seed money for a new program in the English Department focusing on how to define an educated person in today’s society.

Not that Bob inherited his wealth. He earned it, thanks to a combination of frugal living and luck, he says. “We never had a yacht, we never had a second home, we never took expensive vacations.” And he did better than well in the stock market. What he calls luck as an investor others attribute to shrewdness. His background in economics and finance did not hurt.

Bob in a conversation in his living room;
he can tell many stories about his life

Now he and his wife of 65 years, Beatrice, live in a trim but spacious cottage in Beverwyck, a retirement community in Slingerlands. The couple moved there from their house in Slingerlands 11 years ago. They have two sons and three grandchildren, and on at least one occasion Bob served as a substitute grandparent on Grandparents Day in school for a child whose own grandparents could not attend.

Bob was born in Newburgh, New York, the son of a man who owned a sporting goods store. His father was a dedicated conservationist, and both his parents were the source of their son’s life-long idealism. He graduated from Union College, in Schenectady, New York, in 1941 and won a fellowship to study public administration for his Master’s degree at the University of Cincinnati, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

It was the World War II period. Bob enlisted in the Army and found himself training cadets at West Point to become combat engineers. A lieutenant colonel offered him a transfer to join an engineering combat regiment headed overseas. Bob accepted the order with enthusiasm, and was looking forward to being on active combat duty. In the first bit of luck that he claims has followed him for a lifetime, the order for his transfer never reached Bob at West Point. The regiment was decimated in the Okinawa Beach landing in 1943.

After the war he wanted to teach at the college level. He was offered a job teaching economics at his alma mater, Union College. But something better intervened (“luck again”) before he took that job. He interviewed with the state commissioner of welfare for a job, and was recommended for a post, not in the welfare department, but in the state budget division, a section of the Governor’s office. He took the job and stayed with state government for 23 years.

Thomas E. Dewey was the governor in the early days. Nonpartisan, Bob became the budget division's director of research under Dewey, and when the Democrats came into office, led by Gov. Averell Harriman, he was asked to stay on in government. Later Gov. Nelson Rockefeller made the same request. Bob became assistant director of the budget division in 1963.

There were many highpoints in Bob’s governmental career. He recalls with special pride his role with the commission that oversaw the construction of the State University of New York in the late 1940’s, and also his role in the drafting and passage of the state’s anti-discrimination law. In 1967 he was the staff director of the commission that had the job of drafting a new state constitution, but that effort never succeeded.

“We had a commission of 13 Republicans and 13 Democrats and we got nowhere,” he said, although the commission did publish a series of books on program and policy that became the basis for discussion and debate at the constitutional convention.

This was the experience that led him to a deeper understanding of the difference between power and leadership. The head of the commission was Tony Travia, the Democratic Speaker, or leader, of the State Assembly. “Tony understood power, but he was never a good leader,” Bob said, by which he meant that he never found a way to get the Republicans to go along.

Bob took away various lessons from his governmental experience. “In government what you need is complete integrity,” he says. “You have got to abide by a ‘public morality’ – no motels, no stealing money. And you have to have an understanding of compromise. Compromise is the heavy industry of human relations. But you also need to know when the principle of compromise becomes the compromise of principle.”

While Bob was working for state government he would regularly take short-term leaves to travel all over the world to advise foreign governments on budgetary systems and other aspects of public administration. He continued to make these trips after he retired from state government in 1968. Many of his trips, to over a dozen countries, were sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development. Others were sponsored by the United Nations.

In India on one of these trips after World War II, Bob met Jawaharlal Nehru and advised him on how to update the country's five-year economic plan to qualify for more United States aid. Bob provided similar assistance on a three-month trip to Iran, and on another to Nigeria, where he counseled the government on setting up a system of public administration.

The list of groups and organizations for which Bob has served as an advisor or consultant is long. To name a few: Bob was a consultant to the United Nations on program and performance budgeting; a member of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Task Force on Intergovernmental Fiscal Cooperation; a consultant to the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research and analysis institution; and a consultant to the Ford Foundation.

During the time he was in the budget division, Bob took graduate courses at New York University and received a Ph. D. in Economics and Public Policy in 1950. From 1948 to 1988 he taught economics, public administration and related subjects at various institutions, including Russell Sage College (Evening Division), Albany; Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York (in the Maxell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and to a Peace Corps group); SUNY Albany (in the Graduate School of Public Affairs); the Economic Development Institute of the World Bank, Washington, D.C.; the City University of New York, and Union College.

After his retirement from state government, Bob went back to the idea of teaching economics at the college level, studiously avoiding any activity that might take advantage of his governmental service. No lobbying role for him.

From 1969 to 1972 he was a Professor of Economics and Public Administration at Union College and chairman of the Department of Economics. After that, he served as Special Advisor or Consultant to leaders of the New York State Assembly and Senate until 1980, when he became, for 19 years, director of the Institute for Traffic Safety Management and Research, which is affiliated with the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy of the State University of New York.

Not until 1999, when he was almost 80 years old, did Bob retire, again. Then he took up investing in an even more focused way, avoiding Wall Street brokerage firms and doing all his research and investing on his own.

“Investing is like playing a game,” he said. “You need patience, and you should never invest money you can’t afford to lose.”

Other Herman investment principles: “I believe in a firm base of income-producing investments, and I do a lot of international investing. Right now I’m big in China stocks.”

Some of his poetry reflects his views on life: In “Damn You, Memory” he condemns memory for keeping alive the hatreds of the past, yet urges

. . .
But save a bit
of yourself for me

I need to remember
walks through the woods
images of truth
words of kindness
and my mother’s embrace

In “Roses and Daisies” he writes:

It would be fun
to stop
and smell the roses
and pick some daisies.
But I cannot linger
While there is work to be done
And people who need help. . . .

Bob’s responses to advice-seeking letters from his young Chinese readers are full of sympathy and understanding, and offer insights into his thinking as he nears his tenth decade. One example is his response to a query from a reader named Cheng Bo. “Hi Bob,” Cheng Bo writes, “This question has puzzled me for a long time. . . . I’m so eager to know myself. I don’t know where to start and how to do it. Can you give me some advice?”

Bob’s reply runs to nine paragraphs. In the end he cautions against spending too much time looking inward and not enough looking outward. He concludes: “If there is an ‘answer,’ it is to try to achieve a balance between looking into ourselves and looking out into the broader world that we inhabit.”

As reflective as he is, Bob has tipped the balance toward looking outward.