This book tells the story of Lexia Learning Systems, one of the most highly regarded providers of reading software in the nation today. It also tells the story of its author, Lexia founder Robert A. Lemire, an investment manager and conservationist out of Yale and Harvard Business School who gave it all up to pursue a more urgent calling: to take the dys out of dyslexia.
Begun in 1984 in a one-room office, Lexia had conviction and intellectual firepower on its side, a bit of luck, and never enough money. While Lemire was not a teacher or an educator, not a grant writer or a programmer, his vision would eventually become reality: Lexia grew to pioneer products that would re-equip the toolset of young readers across the country, and even across the pond.
This is a story of imagination, perseverance, frustration, disappointment, and tender dynamics. It is also a story of how one man's vision continues to change the lives of millions of young children as they learn to read the English language.
Bob Lemire was born in 1933 in Lowell Massachusetts. Bob was raised in a French and English speaking family. He attended Lowell High School, and then Yale University with a full scholarship. Soon after graduating Yale, Bob joined the Navy for two years serving on the USS Baltimore. He then attended Harvard Business School on the GI bill graduating with an MBA degree in 1958.
Paine, Webber, Jackson, and Curtis, a well-known Boston brokerage and financial firm, hired Bob to work in their corporate underwriting department.
He married his wife Virginia in 1960 while living in Cambridge. They moved to Lincoln Massachusetts a year later. After commuting by train several years to Boston, he started his own investment advisory business, Lemire & Company.
Bob and Virgina's daughter Elise was born in 1964, and their son Bo was born in 1968.
On his train commutes to Boston, he became close friends with several town-government volunteers. Bob was soon appointed to the Lincoln Conservation Commission, joining the ranks of numerous volunteers who spent their spare time governing the town. During his 15 years as chairman of the Lincoln Conservation Commission, the town put some 1400 acres into permanent conservation. His Lincoln land-use experience led to consulting requests from the Nature Conservancy, the Conservation Foundation, and other national organizations.
During the day he worked in his investment-management business, and pursued his conservation interests nights and weekends. Bob also taught evening land-use classes at the Conway School of Landscape Design (Conway, MA) and in the landscape-architecture departments at Harvard University and Rhode Island School of Design.
By 1981, he had his business and teaching career going quite well. Life was good and he had no reason to change anything.
Suddenly a change occurred that was to affect the rest of his life.
