“Everything is simple until you dig into the details” Robert Neiman 1974
Bob Neiman was both a complicated and a stubborn man. Unswayed by the opinions or expectations of others in the 40 years that I knew him, he focused his time and energy on the things that held his interest and ignored the rest. Always wearing a necktie to work and perhaps a vest in winter time, he donned a white work apron daily and wrestled with Mother Nature for potential raw materials to improve Whip Mix products for over 63 years.
Bob never married, but was content to live with his sister and her husband in a small home that was a convenient commute to the company. In fact, Bob never even took the time to learn to drive, preferring to use family, friends, and Yellow Cab to travel places that were beyond walking distance.
But in a larger sense, Bob was wedded instead to his mantra that Whip Mix must continue to innovate and commercialize new and existing products – making the Whip Mix brand stand out for superior products of highest quality and reliability. The company’s long term success in the world-wide dental field is testament to that lofty goal.
To understand Bob, you first have to know that he was a lifelong Orthodox Jew. This meant he kept to a Kosher diet, created no “sparks” and started nothing new on the Saturday Sabbath and walked to and from the synagogue for services on Sabbath and holy days. Perhaps it was the concentration and focus required by his way of life that helped Bob to create a similar orderliness in his work life. Indeed, Bob filled entire bookshelves with experimental notes on his experiments and could use them to buttress his views on how best to tweak a product formula or make a revision to a national or international dental casting investment standard.
There was another aspect of Bob that his co-workers were exposed to: Bob liked to keep secrets and dispensed his wisdom sparingly. For instance, he famously handed out experiments to be performed by co-workers, but with little or no explanation of why or what would be done with the results. He would even give different pieces to different co-workers and tell each not to discuss the results with other. Bob preferred to gather all the data and use his own prodigious scientific experience to optimize the properties of the resulting product and of course, to suggest that he deserved credit for the improvement.
Third, Bob had a sincere and infectious sense of humor that permeated his lab and spilled over into all areas of the plant. He always seemed to be using the copy machine to copy a cartoon out of a magazine so he could leave it on the desk, workspace or chair of a co-worker who he through would appreciate it or needed cheering up; Dozens of them were scattered in the lab and especially in his office.
Though Bob traveled infrequently and never flew, he was an enthusiastic correspondent and typed his own letters out on a manual typewriter in order to better compose his thoughts. Many of those letters to Dr. Ralph Phillips, Dr. Kamal Asgar, Dr. George Hollenback, Mr. Bob McConnell, Dr. Richard Earnshaw, Dr. Takao Fusayama, Mr. Allan Docking and others are archived at Whip Mix and testify to his humor, scientific insight and stubbornness in arguing his viewpoints on the finer points of dental standards testing protocol over many decades.
In 1998 Bob was recognized for his dental standards work, 15 U.S. patents and major advances in casting technology and materials by the Dental Materials Group of the American Association for Dental Research. They awarded him with their highest award, The Skinner Award. Needless to say, Bob was quite pleased to receive this lifetime achievement recognition from his scientific peers.
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