Bob Butts, local humanitarian
If you have lived in Wilkes-Barre or the surrounding areas, there is a good chance that you’re familiar with a number of billboards touting how anyone can lead a healthier life by partaking in the “Water Cure” regimen. Recently, the Independent Gazette had the opportunity to talk with the man who pays for those ads out of his own pocket in the hopes of helping others, a very kind man by the name of Bob Butts, owner of the Cee Kay Auto Parts stores. After speaking with him at length, this reporter exited the interview feeling hopeful, knowing that there are truly good men like Bob Butts in the world.
Butts actually began buying up ad space and posting philosophical sayings in 1969, five years after Cee Key Auto opened, with the sole intent of enriching people’s lives, an endeavor that continues to this day. “Humanity has to win,” Butts insists, noting that, “All problems are relatively simple, but we blame the mirror.” He also finds that, “We waste a lot of time blaming each other.”
Butts laments the current education system, believing that rather than find and develop each person’s individual traits, we are often (to reference Einstein) testing goldfish on their ability to climb trees and finding them stupid. “We need to change how we value ourselves in society. In this country, businesses try to crush each other, and these are the principles we pass on to our children. How terrible.” Indeed, Butts appears to be very concerned with fostering creativity and individuality in children, and with finding ways to make doing the right thing fun. He laments how, in the current system, we tend to punish people and businesses who are helping others before helping themselves, since it seems that not furthering oneself financially first and foremost is frowned upon.
“My heart breaks at how much pleasure we [he and his late wife Connie] had making a difference in people’s lives,” he says, a true lifelong volunteer and humanitarian. Butts will need the strength that these memories bring more than ever, just after the one-and-a-half-year anniversary of his wife’s death, an event he feels could have been postponed, or at least could have transpired less suddenly. Butts claims that the event has emboldened him to be even more persistent in helping others so that they need not experience what he has. He continues Connie’s legacy by getting his positive, life-affirming messages out to as many as will listen, and has no plans to stop any time soon.
For more information on Bob Butts and the Water Cure, visit his website at www.WaterCure2.org, tune in to 94.3 FM The Talker on Sundays from 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., or go to any Cee Kay Auto location for books and CDs full of information.
