EVERY SUCCESS STORY IS A GREAT STORY
Bob McGonagle
  One day a week, Bob McGonagle walks past the drug dealers and prostitutes, making his way to the Cincinnati Health Network’s Dental Clinic. He unlocks the door, walks in, pulls out the bucket, mop, and cleansers, and begins to clean. With great pride and careful attention to detail, Bob cleans the dental clinic where he once received services. Twice a year, he strips and waxes the floor so that the patients who come in feel that they are worth something.
“I walked around for two years putting my hand over my mouth when I talked because my teeth were such a mess,” Bob remembers. Then he met Judith Allen and the staff at Cincinnati Health Network. “Dr. Allen got me new teeth,” Bob says, smiling to show them off.
Bob is articulate and engaging. His energy is effusive. “I’ve traveled all over the country. I was a businessman. I wore $500 suits.” Now, as Bob tells his story, openly and with great self-awareness, he focuses more on kindness and compassion than on jet-setting and expensive wardrobes.
Somewhere along the way, alcohol began to guide Bob’s decisions. He eventually became homeless, and by 1997, he stumbled into the Salvation Army.
Bob describes himself as a “severe alcoholic…beyond chronic, just nuts.” He pauses, then continues, “I’ve been in zillions of jails. In 1999, they were chasing me for my tenth DUI.” After his last arrest, he spent four months in jail, a long fall from his successful career. This time, he stood in front of Judge Mattingly and said, “Put me in a lock-down treatment center.” The judge obliged and sent him to Talbert House, part of the Department of Corrections.
Ninety days later, after successfully completing the program, Bob again stood in front of Judge Mattingly, who said, “You’ve done exactly what you said you would do. Now get out of my courtroom. I don’t ever want to see you again.”
“The people who helped me were the hand of God in my life at that time,” Bob recalls.
He felt like he had been given a new life. He began to work as the handyman for an Episcopal church in Cincinnati. The church sent him to a master gardener’s course, and now Bob takes as much pride in creating beautiful landscapes with plants as he does in cleaning the dental clinic each week.
Bob also began visiting the jail every Wednesday evening to do outreach for Alcoholics Anonymous. He is an Intergroup Representative for AA.
Bob is always looking for more ways to “get out of self and serve others, because once you’re comfortable in your own skin, you can do that,” Bob says with a smile. He’s now a consumer advocate and board member for the Cincinnati Health Network. “This body has been gifted with the ability to breathe and to help,” Bob says, “so I give it away every day.”
On his shirt, Bob wears an Episcopal “cross of nails” with a black and white ribbon behind it. “I lived through the race riots in Cincinnati. This,” he says, pointing to the cross and its background of black and white, “stands for racial reconciliation.”
Bob shakes my hand with the firm shake of a businessman, smiles an infectious smile, then turns and walks away.
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