CHAPTER 2
Fame and Fortune
“It was a whirlwind of high-drive excitement, a roller-coaster of extreme highs and lows, rags to riches and back again…From a rooming-house west of Fifth Avenue to a home in Westchester County, in a long series of unforgettable lessons.”
So Bob Monroe summarized the next stage of his life in an interview in the late 1980s. The scripts on which his success in the entertainment world was founded derived from his experiences as a hobo and dealt with the adventures of a crew of a freight train. Rocky Gordon was broadcast on the NBC network, five shows a week on prime time, preceding the very popular Amos n’ Andy. Bob began by writing the scripts himself, pounding away on his old Remington typewriter, but before long he moved on to production. To enhance the realism of the show he would take recording equipment to the New York Central railyard to capture the sounds of locomotives and railway stock. A photograph of him in action with his equipment appeared in the New York Times in July 1940.
At the age of twenty-five Bob was now earning a thousand dollars a week. He bought himself an aircraft, a ninety-horsepower Aeronca, which he kept at Flushing Airport and used whenever he could. All this—the aircraft, the income, the absorbing job—was on the credit side; on the debit side were duodenal ulcers. While his brother, Emmett, joined the Army Air Corps after Pearl Harbor and was posted to England to fly B-24s, Bob was deeply disappointed to be graded 4F. After Rocky Gordon had completed its run, he sought to do what he could to support the war effort. To make use of his skills he turned back to engineering and joined a firm working on a design for a flight simulator, although it never went into production. He also wrote a monthly article on aviation for Argosy magazine that brought him into contact with the National Aeronautic Association, which commissioned him to produce a weekly radio show under the title of Scramble! This was broadcast on NBC's Blue Network, hosted by Robert Ripley (of Believe-It-or-Not) with a live audience. The show's objective was to catch the interest of young men in aviation, with stories of war heroes and emergency missions flown by U.S. pilots. To encourage recruitment, it also featured some of the Air Corps’ generals.
Now with plenty of money in his wallet, Bob was able to indulge many of his current interests. As well as radio and entertainment in general, these included aeronautics, sailing, trains, electronics, theater, and film. He had also developed an eye for both stylish women and modern architecture. In the world of entertainment, he was beginning to make his mark. In 1943, at the age of twenty-eight, he formed his first corporation, RAM Enterprises, for the production of radio network programs. He acquired an agent, and began to produce programs for the government's coordinator of inter-American affairs. He was featured in the New York Daily Mirror and was interviewed more than once on the Walter Winchell show. He was recruited by Donahue & Co., a major New York advertising agency that represented MGM and Republic Pictures. Working for Donahue took him from time to time to Hollywood, where he met various leading producers, including Sam Goldwyn and L. B. Mayer. He was appointed radio production manager for Donahue with sole responsibility for placing radio commercials, and claimed to be the first such person to persuade the network to accept an advertisement for a product designed to help women with period pains. Then in 1944 E. J. Churchill, president of the Donahue agency, agreed to allow Bob to form his own company, Monroe Productions. Its first creation was a half-hour daily show for MGM entitled Screen Test. This was a live broadcast from a Broadway theater with each show featuring a young hopeful actor or actress in a short dramatic episode accompanied by an orchestra. The theater was always full, and after the broadcast the audience was treated to a show for their own enjoyment. Bob involved himself in all aspects of the production of Screen Test, which ran until 1946.
While all this was going on, Bob's personal life continued its erratic course. Since his divorce from Jeanette, he had moved out of Manhattan to a house in Mount Kisco, where he was living with Marianne, a concert pianist. Although he once described this relationship as “profound,” endurance was not part of it. When it became clear to both of them that it was not going to be permanent, they separated by mutual consent. However, it was not long before his eye was caught by one of the young actresses who featured in Screen Test. Mary Ashworth was an attractive blonde from Boston with an exceptionally good singing voice. Mary and Bob soon became strongly attracted to each other. Then suddenly she stopped calling him and answering his calls to her. Months later he discovered that Mary's agent had warned her off, claiming that her career would suffer if she became too deeply involved with him. Mary went on to perform in several popular productions, including the Perry Como Show, but she never broke through into major roles. Bob was never alone for long, however, and soon after Mary withdrew he came across Frances, an attractive girl of Russian descent whom he thought might have a future as a writer. Within a short time they married and moved from Mount Kisco, eventually settling in a farmhouse in Stormville, in Dutchess County, New York.
While they were living in Dutchess County, Bob underwent an experience that—when he recalled it many decades later—seemed to have had a special significance. The well that served the farmhouse had run dry. It was an old hand-dug well, about seventy feet deep, lined with fieldstones wedged together. He could hear water running below, but something was preventing it from being pumped up. Bob thought that he should investigate so he fetched a rope, tied it to a nearby tree, and abseiled down. He found that the well was supplied by an underground stream, but the water table had dropped below the end of the feed pipe. There was just enough light for him to gather several large stones and place them in the stream until the level was sufficiently raised.
Then he looked up—and started to panic. What if he had disturbed the lining on his way down? The wall could collapse at any moment. He felt intensely claustrophobic, fearful that he might be buried seventy feet below ground. Trying to control his panic, he sat down on a rock, cupped his hands, and took several mouthfuls of the cool, fresh water. Gradually he began to relax, to feel calm and serene, peaceful. Then what he described as “the feeling of a warm intelligence” seemed to flow into him, blending into every part of him. It was as if the Earth spoke to him, sharing its strength with him, foretelling his destiny. Then gradually the warmth faded; he seized the rope, climbed safely to the top, and was amazed to find he had been in the well for more than two hours. The experience moved him greatly and the memory stayed with him for the rest of his life. (It is vividly recounted in his last book, Ultimate Journey.)
Bob Monroe, Radio Chief
During the run of Screen Test, Bob was earning about three hundred thousand dollars a year. After the program ended, however, nothing came into view for Monroe Productions, so for several months Bob and Frances lived off his capital. He put most of his energy into flying, hiring a Navion on several weekends to fly to a gliding club at Wurtsboro, in midstate New York, which owned six sail-planes bought from the military for a knock-down price. He joined the club, which called itself The Metropolitan Air-Hopper Soaring Association, retaining his membership until 1961. Bob was also a member of the Aviation Writers Association and was one of a group to whom the Air Force loaned a DC-4 so that they might fly to a convention in Los Angeles. On the return they ran into a severe front. As the cabin was not pressurized they were unable to climb above it. The only alternative was to fly through it. Sitting at the controls Bob watched the altimeter drop two thousand feet a minute. There was chaos in the cabin behind him, with bodies and objects falling about. It was, he said later, “wild, fun, exciting,” though it may not have felt like that to the passengers at the time.
This was all very well, but by the beginning of 1947 it became clear that something had to be done to restore the Monroe finances. Bob arranged an interview with the vice president of Mutual Broadcasting and offered him a show he had designed himself, together with the script, actors, and director, free of charge for a month. It was a risk but, he promised, it would cost Mutual nothing except for providing space, an orchestra, and sound effects. The show was to be broadcast on Sunday nights on the understanding that only if it was successful would Mutual pay for it. It was, and they did.
High Adventure, broadcast once a week for seven years, was a major success with the highest ratings for its time. It consisted of a series of dramas, many of them introduced by George Sanders, telling the stories of ordinary people involved in dangerous or dramatic situations. Some of these stories were later made into films, although Bob was disappointed with the results, declaring that the studios butchered them. Monroe Productions packaged other series, one starring Peter Lorre and another Madeleine Carroll. Bob also took advantage of the growing popularity of radio quiz shows, creating Take a Number, Meet Your Match, and Name That Tune. The most successful was Take a Number, which offered prizes up to a total value of sixty thousand dollars—a huge sum for the time—that were delivered to the winners’ homes with maximum publicity. Monroe himself controlled everything in these shows, writing, directing, and producing, driving them onward with apparently inexhaustible energy.
As well as being one of the leading figures in the radio industry of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Bob Monroe was also an innovator in the field of sound. He was among the first to make use of magnetic recording tape, which he employed in the production of his radio shows. His company was also active in the early days of television, producing several shows that were sold to the networks, but the medium never really appealed to him. He was busy enough with radio anyway, at one time having twenty-eight shows broadcast every week. He devised a way of cutting costs by taping passages during rehearsals and then splicing the best takes together, adding sound effects, music, and commercials to the completed script. Bob also composed music sequences for other radio productions, in particular themes and phrases designed to evoke emotional response in the listener, a foretaste of his later efforts in the early development of Metamusic. His attempt to create a library of musical phrasings to cover a range of dramatic situations was frustrated by the powerful leader of the Federation of Musicians, who realized that such a library would deprive his members of work. Monroe responded by flying his engineers and equipment to Cuba and hiring a local orchestra for six days to record his phrasings. For much of the time they played to an audience of one—a nephew of Cuba's dictator, Fulgencio Batista, who sat listening to what was going on with his revolver by his side.
Somehow Bob found time to pursue his obsession with flying. In 1950 he joined with an experienced pilot, Edgar Wynn, to buy two war surplus aircraft, a Lockheed Lodestar and a Grumman Goose. Together they formed a company with the impressive title of Trans-American Airways. The Lodestar did three runs a week from New York to Florida and the Grumman, an amphibian, flew passengers to the New York State lakes. Trans-American lasted until Wynn was killed when an ex-Navy fighter aircraft he was piloting crashed at the Miami Air Show. Bob then sold the company, donating the profits to Ed's widow.
At about this time Mary Ashworth reentered Bob's life. During the five years since her agent had warned her off him, she had performed occasionally on Broadway as an actress and singer. She had married, given birth to a daughter, Maria, and subsequently divorced. Bob found her even more attractive than when they had first met. Frances soon joined the growing group of Monroe ex-wives and it was not long until Bob and Mary became engaged. Mary suggested that before they married it would be a good idea for two-year-old Maria and Bob to meet. Maria was staying with her grandparents in Boston. She remembers “looking down a staircase upon a handsome young man in a navy blue suit, with a moustache and incredibly endearing dimples. It was love at first sight.”
Bob and Mary soon became widely known as a glamorous show business couple. Their daughter Laurie was born in New York City on April 3, 1951. Shortly afterwards the family moved to an architect-designed house in Croton-on-Hudson, Westchester County, and Mary decided to retire from the stage to become a full-time mother. At this she proved successful, providing the young girls with what Maria and Laurie later described as “an idyllic, wondrous and magical childhood.” One of their first visitors was an Irish Setter called Michael, who wandered into the garden most days. Michael helped Laurie learn to walk by allowing her to pull herself up holding his long, flowing hair. He would pace along beside her as she hung on to him while taking her first tentative steps.
The Monroes’ house stood in twenty acres with a long river frontage, a log cabin, and an extensive woodland that the children loved to explore. There was also a swimming pool with underwater speakers and colored underwater lights, a childhood dream of Bob's that he was now able to fulfill. Inside the house one wall was given over to hi-tech stereo equipment, with music being channeled into the swimming pool speakers. Delighting in parenthood, Bob created a game he called “Snipe Hunt.” A Snipe was a fictitious creature that could be caught only at night. One young hunter held a burlap bag open while the other chased the imaginary creature until both agreed it had been caught in the snare. Often on Saturday mornings he would bundle the girls into his station wagon and drive out to an auction or yard sale. He would buy them a soda and a bag of Frito's Corn Chips and hunt around to find some item of outdoor equipment or playground toy, always keen to strike a deal. He would sometimes collect them from school in his red Porsche and drive them out for riding lessons, the girls struggling to change into their riding gear in the cramped confines of the back seat. He taught them to ride bicycles and occasionally took them gliding. Laurie recalls taking the controls while Bob told her to bank to the left or right, lift the nose, feel where the glider should be, and take it there.
In contrast to his domestic life, Bob's professional career continued to be hectic, so much so that barbiturates became a regular element in his diet. Monroe Productions metamorphosed into Monroe Enterprises, with a wider range of interest, and in 1954 he was invited by RKO General, Mutual Broadcasting's parent company, to become vice president in charge of programming. The deal he struck involved Mutual buying four of his own shows. He was also made responsible for Mutual's radio stations situated in various cities throughout the United States, which gave him an insight into the rewards that might be obtained from ownership. For two years he commuted daily to RKO's offices on Broadway and in whatever time remained he busied himself with his other interests. The pressures mounted inexorably. At one time his corporation was producing a record number of nineteen programs weekly, with Monroe writing the scripts, directing, and composing the music for most of them himself. Then, midway through 1956, feeling he needed no more of this kind of life, he resigned from Mutual and threw the barbiturates away.
It was, he realized, time for a change. He was now a wealthy man with a family and with a number of ambitions that he had not yet fulfilled. He wanted to write books and plays and yearned to produce his own play on Broadway. He flirted with the idea of moving to Hollywood to enter the world of film production, but soon concluded that this would quickly exhaust his capital.
But before he came to a final decision, a totally unexpected prospect opened before him. A Westchester County neighbor offered him a partnership in an oil concession in Ecuador on which he held an option. He asked Bob if he would fund an expedition to examine the asphalt lake and oil seeps that formed the concession. The opportunity sounded too good to miss. Through his aviation interests Bob had a contact in Ecuador, Ernesto Estrada, always known as Chicho, who flew planes at the Air-Hoppers Club every summer. They arranged to meet in Guayaquil. Bob estimated that the expedition would cost about fifteen thousand dollars, which he hoped could be written off against tax, and with Mary and his proposed business partner took a commercial flight to Quito, planning to stay in Ecuador for about three weeks.
The 11,000-foot altitude of Quito presented Bob with a severe breathing problem. He was much relieved when after a few days they left, flying to Esmeraldas on the Pacific coast in an ancient Ford Trimotor with ducks, geese, chickens, and dogs as copassengers. The flight, for which the only navigational aids when crossing the Andes ridge in cloud were a compass and the steward's watch, was a lesson in itself. So was Esmeraldas, its main street a muddy track lined with single-story wooden stores, half of which were closed, and its only hotel consisting of four rooms set around a courtyard. The mayor invited them to a council meeting where one member, the council's only Communist, reviled them as filthy capitalist pigs who had come to seize the local people's land. After the meeting this Communist took Bob aside and offered him a half-share in his crystal mine for ten thousand dollars. (Years later he wondered if he had been right to refuse.)
Next day the party chartered a fishing trawler for the thirty-mile passage along the coast to the oil concession. They anchored off a cluster of thatched-roof huts built on poles that comprised the settlement of Cabo de San Francisco. They were paddled ashore in a couple of dugout canoes and were received by the young headman, Juan, who took them around the village and served them lunch. He led them three miles into the jungle to the oil seeps and the asphalt lake, where they took samples and attempted to take readings with a scintillator, a portable item of oil-prospecting equipment.
Returning to Quito, Bob called his friend Chicho and they arranged to meet in Guayaquil. When he attempted to pay the hotel bill, he was told it had already been settled. “Senor Estrada owns the hotel,” said the clerk. It transpired that he owned a lot more, his father having been nicknamed “the Simon Bolivar of Ecuador.” While Mary made friends with Chicho's sister, Bob learnt to scuba dive, searching for gold doubloons in the wreck of a Spanish galleon. He inspected a gold mine, and soared up to 16,000 feet over the Andes in one of Chicho's many oxygen-equipped sail-planes. One item Chicho lacked was a helicopter. Bob encouraged him to buy one to make it easier for him to visit and oversee his various concerns. As soon as it arrived, Chicho insisted on piloting the helicopter himself despite never having had a single lesson.
Chicho admired Bob's spirit and enjoyed his company. He offered him the sulphur concession for the Galapagos Islands and told him that if he wanted the oil concession as well he could have it. For a rent of a dollar a month he could also have a distillation plant to produce liqueur from the stems of millions of overripe bananas that would otherwise be thrown into the sea.
The temptation to carve out a new and immensely profitable life in Ecuador was hard to resist; perhaps if it had come a few years earlier Bob might have yielded to it. Ecuador could have provided him with uncountable wealth. But, he said later, he felt that something seemed to be pulling him back to the States. Moreover, attractive though the prospects were, they would not provide the sort of life that he considered right for Mary and their two young daughters. Despite Chicho's many appeals for him to return, he made up his mind that the Ecuador chapter would remain closed. Several weeks later than planned, the Monroes flew back home. As a mark of thanks to his friend he sent him by air four Siamese kittens, which nearly drove the pilot mad with their screaming. In later years Bob was intrigued by the thought that their descendants might be roaming the jungles and slopes of the Andes.
Toward the end of 1956 Monroe set up an office on Madison Avenue, New York, and moved into ownership. He bought two radio stations, one in Winston-Salem and the other in Durham, North Carolina. On his business visits to Winston-Salem, he came to know Agnew Bahnson, an engineer by training, who ran a manufacturing company in the city. He had the sort of mind that appealed to Bob, being a flying enthusiast and the first person he had met who was investigating antigravity, a theory that appealed to his inquiring mind. Bahnson encouraged him to enter into the social life of the city and it was not long before Monroe felt himself quite at home there. Now that he was no longer involved full time with the production and direction of radio shows, he had time to look around for ideas and projects to investigate and possibly develop. He was attracted by a new process called Biorhythm, based on the idea that one's life is affected by rhythmic biological cycles, physical, emotional, and intellectual. Readings could be obtained and charts produced with the intention of helping you improve your life. Bob tried this out on himself, found that it had possibilities, and decided to market it. After six months, however, he dropped the idea, saying later that he failed to put enough energy into its promotion.
A second project was sleep-learning. Again, Bob decided to try it out on himself. He created his own research and development program and constructed a booth containing a waterbed and a stereo system with headphones. He developed a number of exercises that involved learning factual information, such as multiplication tables from twelve to twenty-four and phrases in Spanish and French, and recorded them on tape along with direct suggestions and various sound patterns, one of which was a simulation of ocean surf, designed to induce a state of relaxation leading the listener into sleep. He tested these tapes on himself, claiming that he could recall everything that was recorded. So far, so good, but the process had to be tested on others if it was to be found acceptable. He found eleven subjects, of whom his daughter Laurie was one, to try it out. Each subject was required to have the tapes playing during the night and on waking to use a physical-mental cue to recall the recorded information. With a reel-to-reel tape player beside her bed and speakers on either side, Laurie would fall asleep to the sound of ocean surf and her father's voice reciting multiplication tables and phrases in different languages. Laurie's cue was to touch the center of her forehead with her right forefinger as soon as she woke up. The tapes also carried suggestions that all systems in the listener's body would be working normally and effectively on returning to full wakefulness. The results were carefully recorded, although they were not sufficiently conclusive to warrant further action. Nevertheless Laurie felt they had some value, as she discovered a facility for language and math in later years.1
Now that Bob Monroe had succeeded in making the career change from writer-director-producer of radio shows to ownership of broadcasting stations, with his knowledge, energy, and business skills there was no reason why he should not expand his business interests much further—and during the next few years this is what he did. Yet although he was not aware of it, a whole new world was about to open up before him, a world that so far had been beyond his wildest imaginings.
The out-of-body experiences that Monroe recorded in Journeys Out of the Body took place between 1958 and 1963. Laurie recalls sitting with her father in the log cabin in the grounds of their Westchester County house. Here Bob would tell her stories, some of them about the adventures he later described in his first book. When she was ten years old he told her that these experiences really happened to him. She thought for a moment. “Doesn't everyone do that?” she asked. This made him laugh, and years later he wrote an inscription to her on the flyleaf of his book. “To Laurie—Who lived through much of the chronicle herein—with great unconcern.”
In April 1958 Bob had been subjected to the first of a number of physical seizures, accompanied by vibrations that seemed to sweep along his body. Before long the pain ceased although the vibrations, which lasted for no more than five minutes, continued. Then in the fall his out-of-body journeys began. “Gradually I became more accustomed to this strange condition in my life,” he wrote later. “More and more I was slowly able to control its movements. In a few ways it had actually become helpful. I had become reluctant to part with it. The mystery of its very presence had aroused my curiosity.”
Once he found himself able to accept what was happening to him, disturbing though some of the episodes were, Monroe began to search for others, present or past, who had reported something similar. “I was a conventional person, convinced of conventional reality,” he said. “Whom could I talk to?” Failing to find anyone who could provide help or advice, he was compelled to accept that he would have to undertake his own research, with the only experimental subject being himself. After some thought he installed a small laboratory in his home, using his technical know-how to incorporate an isolation unit, consisting of a Faraday cage suspended on a rope and charged with a hundred thousand volts. He would shut himself in this from time to time, relaxing as best he could, and found that he was still susceptible to out-of-body experiences even when isolated by the powerful charge.
It is worth noting that this was happening nine years before Charles Tart began preparing his classic study Altered States of Consciousness. In his introduction to the second edition Tart outlines the attitude of orthodox science in the late 1950s to “the mystical states, psychedelic drug use, meditation, and other phenomena that involve altering one's ordinary state of consciousness to a radically new one, all with profound results on one's religion, philosophy and life style.” These and similar subjects were not considered “respectable” for investigation. They were treated as relics of superstition or manifestations of mental illness, with no attempt made to examine or investigate them. The only references to the out-of-body experience, generally known as “astral projection,” appeared in texts devoted to magic or the occult, as Dr. Hereward Carrington discovered when editing the accounts of Sylvan Muldoon's experiences. Robert Crookall's study of 160 accounts of OBEs, The Study and Practice of Astral Projection (1960), has a strongly spiritual slant, with its conclusion that “astral projection assures us of survival” and that “the information obtained accords with that revealed in our Scriptures.” Such texts, like the phenomena listed by Charles Tart, did not attract the attention of orthodox science.
A few months after Bob's out-of-body experiences began he was booked to fly on a business trip from Newark to Winston-Salem. The previous night he had dreamt of a crash that he himself survived. This made him wonder whether he should cancel his journey. He decided to go through with it and boarded the plane. On arrival at Winston-Salem, he was taken ill with a heart attack and spent the next three weeks in the hospital. Meantime, Mary, deeply concerned about his well-being, made copies of notes he had made on his out-of-body experiences and gave them to a friend, Dr. Andrija Puharich, who she knew was interested in unusual types of experience.2 She later explained that she had done this because Puharich might be able to tell whether the heart attack was related to these seemingly inexplicable happenings. Puharich made no comments at the time, and in the relief and excitement of Bob's return Mary forgot to tell him what she had done. Three years later, however, Bob came across Puharich's newly published book Beyond Telepathy. It contained a chapter that, to his amazement, dealt with his own OBEs. “Bob Rame,” as Puharich refers to Monroe, is said to have been addicted to glue-sniffing and, according to Puharich, it was this that had stimulated his out-of-body escapades. It happened that Monroe knew about the effects of glue-sniffing, as he used to make model aircraft and ships with his daughter Laurie and was aware of the feelings that inhaling the fumes could bring about. In a previous book Puharich had focused largely on drug-related experiences and for this sequel he had shuffled Monroe's notes, making it appear that an accidental inhalation of fumes while repairing furniture, referred to in the notes, was responsible for what followed—despite the fact that a year separated the two occurrences. Monroe wanted to sue, but his attorney advised against it, on the grounds that a jury might feel his own sanity was in question rather than Puharich's libel. All this, which hung around Monroe's reputation for the next few years, led him to conclude that “the woolly world of Consciousness expansion does not necessarily include integrity, empathy, or honesty.”
In the early days of his OBEs, Bob's mind was set at rest, to some extent at least, when he discovered that Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), whose writings he admired, had also experienced out-of-body travel. Cayce, known as “The Sleeping Prophet,” whose work was being carried on by the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE) at Virginia Beach, was a trance-channeler renowned for his psychic and healing abilities, with whom Monroe felt a degree of affinity. This, however, was not sufficient verification for Monroe's inquiring mind and he was eager to discover what the contemporary academic world had to say on the subject. One of the few investigators of parapsychological phenomena at the time was Professor J. B. Rhine of Duke University. Visiting him, Monroe was disappointed to find that out-of-body exploration was not among the professor's concerns. Then, as he was leaving, one of Rhine's students who had been present during their conversation approached him and said quietly, “There's nothing to worry about, Mr. Monroe. I do it too.” Further confirmation that his experiences were not unique came when he called to discuss them with the well-known medium Eileen Garrett. She told him she went out-of-body whenever she wanted to; it was very useful, she said, to be able to pop round behind herself to see if her slip was showing.
At first, Mary was supportive of Bob's ventures into this little-known world of psychic exploration. She had an open and inquiring mind and, although brought up as a strict Catholic, she had no problem in accepting, for example, that communication with those who had died was possible, and she admitted that on more than one occasion she had herself conversed with her deceased mother. However, there were now signs that the couple were beginning to grow apart. Bob, concerned with creating and developing business opportunities in Winston-Salem and then in Richmond, was often away from home. Mary missed her social life and shared few of his outdoor interests. She was also fully occupied with bringing up the two girls. At first she had taken an interest in her husband's out-of-body experiences, which he had been ready to discuss with her, especially his attempts to check out their validity. But as they continued, becoming more and more removed from “everyday life,” he ceased to confide in her. She began to feel rejected and also became uncomfortable with the different sorts of people who now visited the house to talk with Bob about his other life in which she had no part. It may also be relevant that Bob discovered that during his frequent out-of-body experiences he needed to control his sex drive if he wished to venture more than a few feet from his bed.
In 1961 the Monroes moved to Richmond. It was not only business opportunities that attracted Bob to the city. Richmond was on the same latitude as his hometown of Lexington and he assumed its climate would be similar. Also, it was not far from the ocean, where he enjoyed sailing whenever he could. For the previous thirty years the city had been almost stagnant, with not a single office building erected within its boundaries. Suddenly, there was an explosion of commercial activity, with the downtown area rapidly transformed by an upsurge of skyscrapers. A new city hall together with a vast coliseum formed a civic center, and construction began on an ultramodern expressway system. It was an exciting place to be and for a while Mary seemed to flourish there. Her interest in acting was revived and she took leading roles in several plays staged at the Virginia Museum, becoming widely known in the locality for her beauty and her sociable nature. Meantime, Bob became the owner of two radio stations and a recording studio, Richmond Sound Stages, and moved into the forefront of local entertainment. One of his radio stations, WGOE, concentrated on popular music, while the other, WRGM, played mostly easy listening and classical and also broadcast what Monroe considered to be the “good” news. If there was any “bad” news that might disturb the optimism of this go-ahead area, it was carefully played down.
At the same time Monroe's out-of-body experiences continued. He had brought with him his laboratory equipment and the records he had compiled, and he continued to research these experiences when time permitted. Then he discovered a new dimension to the OBE when two of his closest friends died within a short time of each other. The lawyer Agnew Bahnson was killed when his aircraft crashed and caught fire. Three months later during an OBE Monroe expressed the desire to meet him. He was led to a level area and told to wait. As he described it, a cloud of what appeared to be something like gas emanated from a gap in the floor and formed itself into the appearance of Agnew. He spoke to Monroe about the hi-tech activities he was busy with, and then disappeared as he had come. He looked young and strong, as Monroe remembered him. Shortly afterwards Dr. Dick Gordon, whom he had first consulted about his OBEs, was found to be suffering from cancer and died. Monroe waited a while and then in the out-of-body state asked if he could see him. He was escorted, as he put it, to a place where he observed two men on what looked like a stage, as if they were performing in a theater. A younger man hurried in, stared at Monroe, and declared, “I see you.” Later Monroe saw a photograph of Gordon as a young man, enabling him to confirm that this was indeed Gordon whom he had seen. These glimpses into the afterlife are recorded in Journeys Out of the Body as if they are nothing out of the ordinary.
As far as his business life was concerned, Monroe found Richmond less congenial than he had hoped. It was highly competitive and not everyone he had to deal with was trustworthy. Instead of a word or a handshake, contracts drawn up by notaries were essential, and even then bills were not always paid. But before disillusion could take over, a new prospect appeared. While on a flight from El Paso, where he had gone to investigate the purchase of another radio station, a media broker he was traveling with mentioned CATV—Cable-Antenna Television. Monroe, always on the lookout for innovation, became interested immediately. He investigated the possibilities but soon realized that to install this system in a city as large as Richmond would cost him far more than he could raise. Moreover, he felt that there was nothing to keep him in Richmond and a change in both direction and location would be welcome. His inquiries revealed that the CATV franchise was available for the nearby and rapidly developing city of Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia. This was more like it. To raise funds for this new and exciting undertaking he sold his radio stations and obtained a four hundred thousand-dollar loan from a courageous life insurance company. Once negotiations were completed, the Monroes moved to Charlottesville.
Jefferson Cable Corporation was the name of Monroe's new company. The Charlottesville installation was only the second twelve-channel cable TV system in the whole of the United States. Before it was completed, Monroe also obtained the franchise for nearby Waynesboro. This meant selling the insurance company's interest and most of his own shares to a financial house, American Financial Systems. Both systems quickly proved successful and Monroe became deeply involved in developing these new businesses, buying a feature film package and instituting one of the first twenty-four-hour movie channels. Within a few years both cable systems were fully operational, eventually being extended to ten cities as far south as Lafayette, Louisiana.
What spare time Bob had was devoted to working on the book he had decided to write about his out-of-body experiences. He was intent on conducting research into OBEs but felt it essential to keep the funding for this separate from his cable interests. To raise these funds he turned to the property market and founded a company, Monroe Industries, to build prefabricated houses for students and cheap rural housing for farm-workers. In this he was following the example of his father, who also invested in property. To begin with, however, he was less successful. There was nothing wrong with his ideas, but he soon ran into difficulties with his suppliers and the local authorities. Eventually, he was compelled to close the construction business and Monroe Industries went into abeyance. The opportunity for research into the out-of-body state had not yet arrived.
Meanwhile the situation between Bob and Mary continued to worsen, so much so that they decided to consult a marriage counselor. Surprisingly, in view of the fact that the counselor was a Roman Catholic priest, he gave their marriage little prospect of continuing. They struggled on until, in 1967, after eighteen years together, they decided to separate. Their children were now spending much of their lives away from home. Maria, whom Bob later adopted, had moved on to college and Bob, sensing difficult times ahead, had arranged for Laurie, now sixteen years old, to attend boarding school in Pennsylvania. In the following year the Monroes divorced. A financial settlement was agreed upon and Mary moved back to Richmond, where she later remarried.
Among the friends they had made in Richmond was Nancy Penn Honeycutt, a member of an old Virginia family. Nancy's husband, Bud, was an officer in the Marine Corps. They had three daughters, Virginia Penn (Penny), Nancy Lea (usually known as Scooter), and Lucinda Beale (Cindy), and a son, Terry (known as A. J.). Penny and Laurie soon became friends, often visiting each other to play together. It so happened that both families had left Richmond in 1965. Contact, however, was interrupted for the time being, as Bud Honeycutt was assigned to a three-year tour of duty in California. Nancy and their three younger children accompanied him, while Penny was sent to St. Anne's boarding school in Charlottesville.
After three years in Charlottesville, Bob came to the conclusion that cable television, although profitable in comparison with some of his previous business ventures, was not providing the fulfillment he now sought. There is no doubt that his frequent out-of-body experiences had unsettled him. He needed more time to investigate them, to consider what meaning they held and what they had to teach. He resigned from Jefferson Cable Corporation and turned once more to property development, in the belief that it would provide him with more free time to pursue his researches and to complete his book. However, instead of venturing into the construction business, he purchased two existing apartment complexes in Charlottesville, the Jeffersonian and Cavalier Court. Now all he needed was someone reliable to manage them for him.
About this time Nancy Honeycutt left California, returning to live in Charlottesville, where she was hoping that she and her husband would be able to obtain their graduate degrees. It might also, she thought, be a good place to settle when Bud retired from the Marine Corps. But despite these hopes her marriage was now failing, and before long the couple decided to separate. Bob and Nancy resumed their friendship and, while she was awaiting completion of divorce proceedings, he was sufficiently impressed by her ability to employ her to manage his apartments. Soon they became close. They discovered that they had many interests in common, most strikingly a deep interest in the paranormal. For Bob, this was an unexpected bonus. Nancy was a Christian mystic, well versed in the Bible but able to see beyond the expressed belief systems of the church and with a sympathetic attitude towards Bob's accounts of his OBEs. She was also a very practical person, having from time to time been a schoolteacher, a music teacher, an interior decorator, and a real estate manager. In addition she had, in Bob's own words, “a bright, warm and joyful personality.”
On February 6, 1971, they married and Bob found himself at the age of fifty-four stepfather of a considerable brood. Fortunately, the children soon took to him. Cindy remembers him sitting on the white couch telling them stories of his adventures in New York—they could never decide if they were true or he was making them up. She also recalls the excitement he brought into their lives. He would appear after work “in his blue-black Mustang with a souped-up engine and the fast-back window. Terry and I used to love to ride in the back seat and look at the dials and extra light-things which ‘Mister Monroe’ had installed around the dash. He had a horn that he switched a flipper-switch to blow and it sounded like a freight train.” For the youngsters life with Bob Monroe as Dad might be unpredictable, but it was certainly fun.
Meanwhile, Dr. Puharich suggested to a young researcher, Charles Tart, with whom he shared an interest in OBEs, that he make contact with this Robert Monroe who had something to say about the subject. Tart, who was concerned with altered states of consciousness, had recently obtained his PhD, and was currently researching at the University of Virginia under Professor Ian Stevenson, widely known for his work on reincarnation theories, took this advice. He soon became intrigued by this middle-aged businessman with no background in metaphysical studies but with plenty of practical intelligence and experience. Although the two of them functioned in totally distinct worlds, they found they had many interests in common. Together they conducted a series of tests at the University Medical School to see if Monroe could produce an out-of-body experience while connected to various instruments measuring physiological functions. The requirement was for Monroe to leave his body and visit the control room, where certain digits were written on the wall. He was to read these and report at the end of the session. To begin with he found this impossible, until one night he managed, as he put it, “to roll out of his body” and enter the control room. It was empty. He looked along the hallway and saw the young technician who was supposed to monitor the experiment standing outside the control room talking to a friend. After trying unsuccessfully to attract her attention, he returned to his body and called out. The technician ran in and, to her amazement, he told her what he had seen. After he assured her she would not get into trouble for leaving the room, she confirmed the accuracy of his account.
Tart wrote up the series of experiments for the December 1967 issue of the International Journal of Parapsychology. He commented that the most important aspect of the investigation “is the demonstration that OBEs and similar ‘exotic’ phenomena are not mysterious happenings beyond the pale of scientific investigation,” and expressed the hope that such experiences should no longer be regarded as “weird” but required proper scientific study. Soon afterwards Tart moved to the University of California at Davis, where Monroe visited him and took part in further tests in better conditions, this time producing two brief OBEs. Before he left, Monroe gave Tart a copy of his recently completed book, then unpublished, which Tart found wholly fascinating.
Shortly afterward, Monroe received a phone call from Bill Whitehead, who introduced himself as an editor at Doubleday. “We'd like to publish your book,” he said. At first Monroe didn't know what he was talking about. He had sent a copy to a literary agent, but that had been more than a year earlier, and he had heard no word. Tart, discovering that Monroe had heard nothing from his agent, had mailed his copy to Whitehead, who was the editor for his own book, Altered States of Consciousness. Doubleday is due much credit for accepting this unusual manuscript from a hitherto unpublished writer.
In the meantime Monroe's physical health was causing concern and, while Journeys Out of the Body was in press, he was advised that he urgently needed surgery on his carotid arteries. It was arranged for this to take place in Dallas, then the only city where this particular operation was performed. Nancy, Maria, and Laurie accompanied him to Dallas. While Bob was having his preparatory examinations in the hospital, they went into town, did some shopping, and—on the spur of the moment—asked a cab driver if he knew of any good psychics. To their surprise he said he knew of a very good one and drove them into the country to a small cottage at the end of a dirt road. Laurie, skeptical about professed psychics, made sure that no information about who they were would be revealed, only that a relative of theirs was about to undergo surgery. They were amazed when the woman told them that a lady named Georgia, who described herself as Laurie's grandmother and who, as they knew, had died three years previously at the age of eighty-four, was accompanying them, and that she would be present at the forthcoming operation along with several others in white coats. On their return to the hospital, they told Bob what the psychic had said. He was greatly heartened by the idea that his mother with her medical experience would be assisting at what was then regarded as a particularly risky procedure—which proved successful.
Later that year as word of Monroe's experiences began to circulate, he was invited to speak at the Harold Sherman Parapsychology Conference in Hot Springs, Arkansas, along with several of the better-known psychics and healers of the time.3 In the audience was a psychologist, Dr. Ray Waldkoetter, whose inquiring mind had led him to attend. Monroe was scheduled to speak late in the afternoon, by which time the audience was in a cheerful, chatty mood, so much so that the chairman's introduction was barely audible. Monroe, no stranger to showmanship, waited until all were silent. From then on, he captivated the audience for over an hour, describing, to their surprise, not his OBE adventures but an interest that he had only recently acquired. This derived partly from his experience in radio and was concerned with developing means of using sound to modify behavior. Despite the nonparapsychological nature of the subject, he imbued his audience with what Waldkoetter described as “a taste of wonder.” This also marked the beginning of a friendship between the two, with Ray Waldkoetter eventually becoming one of the first members of The Monroe Institute's advisory board.4
Monroe, as he once said himself, was a driven man. He had experienced the Depression years; he knew what it was like to be hungry and have nowhere to sleep. He delighted in living on the edge of danger, in gliding, sailing, flying rickety aircraft, and driving fast cars that he had built himself. His college education was a thing of shreds and patches, bits of this and bits of that; what he could do best was the result of observation, experiment, and self-teaching. He was certainly curious as to how things worked and was eager to test any new discovery upon himself. For humankind in general, however, at this time in his life he seemed to have little concern. Up to this point there is no evidence of vision, of altruism, of a sense of there being anything other than what is tangible, explicable, and subject to control. If Monroe ever looked forward, it is likely that what he envisaged was a growing business empire based on property ownership, enjoying his role as parent of a lively young family, and eventually years of active retirement, exploring the influence of sound, flying, sailing, and so on, although not taking quite so many risks as when he was younger. How wrong he would have been.
Notes
1. Elements of this procedure were later adapted and incorporated in The Monroe Institute's training programs.
2. Puharich, sometimes nicknamed “the mad scientist,” was best known for his pursuit of the magic mushroom and his research on Uri Geller.
3. Harold Sherman (1898-1987), though an author and playwright, was best known as a leader in the field of psychic research, cooperating in experiments with various notables, including Dr. J. B. Rhine, Sir Hubert Wilkins, the famous Arctic explorer, and the astronaut Neil Armstrong. The conferences he organized brought together many of the most forward-looking thinkers of the time.
4. Waldkoetter came across Monroe again at another Parapsychology Conference, this time in St. Louis. They lunched together afterwards, and Monroe promised to support him in his own research. A few years later Waldkoetter experienced Hemi-Sync for himself and began to look for the opportunity to use the technology in his own practice.