Bob Montgomery: The Rainmaker
by Kimberly Olson
Former Make-A-Wish Greater Bay Area board president and trustee Bob Montgomery still remembers an evening at San Francisco Ballet with a 5-year-old wish kid, a ballet fan who had leukemia and wished to dance on stage during The Nutcracker.
“A stretch limousine picked up her and her family at their house in Oakland and drove to San Francisco,” he remembers. “She was dressed in a pink tutu. No hair, but a pink headband. As the limousine pulled up, she was met by the director of the San Francisco Ballet.”
Make-A-Wish Greater Bay Area arranged box seats for her, and Montgomery sat beside her during the performance. “She had already seen a performance of The Nutcracker in Oakland, and she was comparing the two ballet companies,” he remembers. “At the end of the performance, the director of the Ballet took her down to the stage. She was dancing with the prince and princess. And that performance of The Nutcracker had a sleigh that went from the stage right up to the stars. So, she got into the sleigh with the prince and the princess, and she went up into the stars. I mean, I’m still thinking about that wish and being a part of that wish.”
It was one of many special wishes Montgomery helped grant during his decades with Make-A-Wish Greater Bay Area.
It all started in the mid-1980s, when he read a story in The Oakland Tribune about Make-A-Wish sending a little boy to Disneyland. “I called the chapter office and said, ‘I’d like to learn more about the organization,’” he says.
Board member Rich Novotny, who was the Alameda County divisional director at the time, invited Montgomery to a wish celebration for a boy whose wish was to have a computer. "All the neighborhood kids were lined up waiting to see this computer get delivered," Montgomery recalls. "He felt very lonely because he was going through all the treatments. Now he’s got a computer, and all the neighborhood kids are coming to him."
After being a part of that wish, Montgomery began attending meetings and doing anything he could to help the chapter, from stuffing envelopes to helping with clean up after a crab feed fundraiser. "Doing anything it took to get a wish granted," he says. "Bottom line, I was a volunteer."
This "whatever-it-takes" philosophy was reinforced by Pat Keller, one of the founding members of the Greater Bay Area chapter and its Executive Director until December 1990.
“Pat was so passionate about Make-A-Wish,” Montgomery says. “One of the early wishes was a boy who wanted a puppy. She and her husband had a plane, and she flew to wherever the puppy was and picked up the puppy and brought it to the child.”
A 1990 issue of People Magazine featuring the wish kid Jaime and her sister
When the chapter needed fundraising help—or nearly anything else—Montgomery would get a call. “It was just a couple people doing a lot of things,” he says.
Like Keller, Montgomery was energized by the mission. He remembers a young boy living with his mother in an economically disadvantaged area of Antioch. “The windows were boarded up to stop drug dealers, and he slept on the sofa,” Montgomery remembers. “Our wish volunteer pulled up with a bed, a dresser, and curtains for the windows. Everything he had ever dreamed about came true on his birthday.”
In Vallejo, he met a girl, Jaime, who wished to have a playhouse. “She had a disease called xeroderma pigmentosum,” Montgomery says. “She had a susceptibility to any reflection of the sun’s rays. She couldn’t even go outside during a full moon because her skin started to get blisters. What was special about that wish is that 3M had developed this sheeting for the playhouse. When I got there, the whole neighborhood was out building her a playhouse.” Jaime and her sister were later featured in People magazine and even had a television movie made about them, “Children of the Dark, which aired on CBS in 1994.
In 1986, Montgomery attended his first fundraiser, the Unicure Music & Tennis Festival in Walnut Creek. “It really hooked me into learning about the passion of the sponsors and volunteers for Make-A-Wish,” he says.
He was asked to join the Make-A-Wish Board of Directors, giving him an opportunity to help take the chapter to the next level. “It was important to people exactly how to grant the child’s wish and how to enhance the wishes,” he says.
When he was elected president of the chapter's Board of Directors in 1991, Montgomery insisted that every board member be a part of at least one wish a year. “It’s nice that you have the ability to write a check, but you need to understand what the mission is about,” he explains. “We’re not here to enhance our resumes. We are here to make a difference and to grow the organization.”
Realizing that the chapter was rapidly running out of funds due to committing to wishes without having a plan to pay for them, Montgomery helped the board focus on increasing the chapter’s visibility in the media and securing more high-profile fundraising events. “We got a lot of media exposure because the sports people, the news anchors, and a lot of celebrities were there,” says Montgomery about the Don Johnson Golf & Tennis Classic, hosted by Blackhawk.
In the early 90s, the chapter got an invitation to meet with Brice Cutrer Jones, founder of Sonoma-Cutrer Vineyards, which had previously raised $65,000 for the Polly Klaas Foundation. “I went up to his winery, which certainly is really tough duty,” Montgomery quips. “I brought eight volunteers up in Napa and Sonoma counties with me, and he was really impressed with the fact that we were so committed. The first year we were involved, he raised over a hundred thousand dollars for Make-A-Wish with a world championship croquet match. At his winery, he had two croquet lawns right in the middle of all the grapes.”
Montgomery gave presentations, radio interviews, and television interviews—all to get the word out about Make-A-Wish. “As we started getting more publicity, more people started joining us in terms of people who could write a check,” he says.
An excerpt from Wishline, the chapter's print newsletter, that lauds the first two croquet tournaments at Sonoma Cutrer, and a photo from the 2012 event.
Bob Montgomery at Make-A-Wish Greater Bay Area's Wish Insiders Summit in September 2023.
A scan of the1994 summer issue of the Wishline, a newsletter that Bob produced while on the Board. He also saved hard copies of the newsletter and other documents for our chapter for 30 years.
Bob Montgomery with CEO Betsy Biern and former board member Dan Karthas at Make-A-Wish Greater Bay Area's Wish Insiders Summit in September 2023.
Make-A-Wish Greater Bay Area Executive Director Lynda Carr and Bob Montgomery while serving on the Board of Directors as president in 1993.
He was also president when the chapter hired its first full-time paid staff member, Executive Director Lynda Carr. Some months earlier, because her health was declining, Pat Keller had to step down from running the organization as a volunteer. Keller had always been adamant that the chapter remain an all-volunteer group, so that 98 percent of the funds raised would continue to go directly toward wish granting. Yet the chapter was able to grant just one wish a week. As Montgomery says, “The saddest part is getting a phone call from a doctor saying, ‘I understand that Johnny is on your wish list. You need to make his wish come true within the next couple of weeks.’”
Over time, hiring paid staff helped the chapter stabilize fundraising efforts, reach more children, and grant more wishes. “There’s more paid staff but you’re doing more wishes,” Montgomery says of the evolution. “The wishes are more complex. And you’re getting wishes earlier on in the child’s diagnosis so the child can understand and appreciate and value the wish.”
Patricia Wilson, who served as the chapter’s Executive Director from 1998 to 2016, describes Montgomery as one of the rare ones. “Bob had just cycled off the board when I joined, but when I created an advisory board, I asked him to be on it,” she says. “He understood the need for the chapter to really mature and grow and—and he was a huge cheerleader and would still come and volunteer. I think he even articulated this to me, that he just felt like a proud parent. Seeing the chapter grow not in terms of number of wishes, but the level of fundraising that we did—he was so proud to be affiliated with it.”
The chapter now grants 350 wishes a year, which equates to nearly a wish a day. This growth came in no small part thanks to Montgomery’s passionate support, from his envelope stuffing in the mid-80s to today.
“Every one of us has the capacity to make a difference in somebody’s life,” Montgomery says. “Just to see that smile on someone’s face when they get that toy or see that grandparent who they haven’t seen in a long time. Make-A-Wish helps create memories that will last a lifetime. We can’t control the lifetime, but everyone participating in the Make-A-Wish experience is able to say that they were part of making a dream come true.”