PRC-Saltillo provides voice for those without one

WOOSTER — On paper, they were two men who couldn’t have been much different.

Ed Prentke was three times the age of Barry Romich. Romich was a country boy, the son of a farmer and a schoolteacher from northern Wayne County whose interest in electronics began when he read a book on the topic while attending Buckeye Boys State. Prentke, the product of a Jewish family that seldom ventured outside the city, started his career servicing radios door-to-door while nurturing his interest in photography.

By the mid-1950s, Prentke was thinking of retirement, but knowing it would not be for him, moved on to a position in the research lab at Highland View Hospital, a rehabilitation facility.

It was through his work in a federally funded research program there in the early 1960s that Prentke met Romich, then a young engineering student at the Case Institute of Technology. Their first work together involved designing and building assistive technology for people with high-level spinal cord injuries.

In spite of the duo’s obvious differences, “we seemed to resonate with this notion of helping people with disabilities live better lives with technology,” Romich said. “(Prentke) had no kids, so I think he kind of enjoyed that connection (to a younger person). It was just a really nice relationship.”

The relationship turned into a business venture: In 1966, the two men formed the Prentke Romich Co.

“I had no connection to anyone with disabilities,” said Romich, who noted that in the early years the people served by assistive devices were typically adults with disabilities who often suffered some sort of accident. As he met some of the patients at Highland View, Romich said, “I couldn’t see any reason why I wasn’t the one lying in the bed with someone else trying to take care of me.”

And that, he said, was part of the driving force behind the establishment of the company — creating adaptive and assistive devices to help people live better lives. And that is also part of the reason the company — which last year merged with sister company Saltillo to become PRC-Saltillo — has been named the Wooster Area Chamber of Commerce Business of the Year.

The company will be honored at the chamber’s 120th annual meeting Thursday at the Wayne County Fair Event Center.

“The company is being recognized for its impressive longevity, its growth from local to national to international throughout the years and its ability to advance its products in an ever-changing and fast-moving technology economy,” chamber President Justin Starlin said. “They are one of, if not the most, humble businesses in Wayne County, but playing a vital role in the lives of thousands throughout the world. To have the opportunity to highlight their story and to shed light on their successes made them an easy selection for Business of the Year.”

There’s been a lot of change since those early days, when PRC moved from Romich’s basement in Madisonburg to a facility outside Shreve that would also become the headquarters of another of his business ventures — RBB Systems — an industrial engineering services firm named for himself and co-founders and fellow Case classmates Dick Beery and the late David Bayer. The three men eventually went their own ways, though RBB Systems — last year’s Chamber Business of the Year — continues to thrive.

The two businesses are just a few miles from each other — RBB on Old Mansfield Road, PRC-Saltillo on Heyl Road just off state Route 3.

In PRC’s early days, the devices it engineered were fairly straightforward — buttons to ring bells, machines to move wheelchairs smoothly. Lives were impacted, but nothing was the same after a happenstance meeting brought Romich and Bruce Baker of Semantic Compaction together.

Baker was a linguist who met Romich through a mutual friend. The Pittsburgh innovator had an idea about creating a system that would give voice to the voiceless. He explained, Romich said, as only a linguist could.

“We parted ways and I really had no idea what he was talking about,” Romich said. “He was a linguist and I was an engineer.”

But Baker and Romich were reunited at PRC when a film crew came to the company and Baker showed them a client who was using his technology. That MINSPEAK vocabulary became incorporated in PRC devices, allowing clients to touch or otherwise manipulate a keyboard or wordboard that would artificially give voice to what they pointed to.

“That,” Romich said, “made a difference to me.”

By that time, Ashland County-West Holmes Career Center student Dave Hershberger started working in the PRC production department and then moved to a full-time position in research and development with the company even as he worked to earn an electrical engineering degree from the University of Akron.

In the 1990s, PRC continued its focus on assistive language technology, but largely for people with physical impairments like cerebral palsy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease). Hershberger, however, became increasingly interested in helping people with cognitive or language disabilities, including autism and Down syndrome. With that idea in mind, he launched Saltillo.

In 2008, PRC both acquired Saltillo and became a 100 percent employee-owned company. But Saltillo, Hershberger said, was run autonomously until last year, when the two combined to become PRC-Saltillo. Hershberger became CEO of PRC in 2018.

“The stuff we do now we really couldn’t have imagined 30, 40 years ago,” Hershberger said, especially since the advent of handheld devices and the applications that power them. “Many clients who would have received a custom project, now with an app can get the services they need.”

And that’s particularly important, he said, in cases where a client has no insurance or the carrier won’t cover the cost of the device. For the last 20 years, the company’s products have been designated as medical devices.

At the same time, the advent of mobile technology forced any number of PRC-Saltillo competitors out of the business. The local company has not only hung on, but has an established international presence in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany. And with that comes the work of creating programs for non-English speakers.

There are 215 PRC-Saltillo employees in the U.S., another 50 in global offices. A total of 150 work in Ohio, according to Hershberger, including 10 at the Saltillo facility in Holmes County. In addition to those who work on the development side, the company employs clinicians who work with clients in the field, insurance specialists, repair personnel and customer service specialists who work with clients and client families over the phone to resolve problems.

There’s more to come, Hershberger said, as university research already is ongoing on a “Brain Control Interface” that could someday decipher and analyze brain waves to determine what a person wants to say.

It is a job unlike any other, Hershberger said.

“Every person I talk to who has a voice because of what we do is a really special feeling,” heh said.

One of those people is Brad Whitmoyer, who has cerebral palsy and received his first PRC communication device when he was 5 years old. The central Ohio man wanted to work with computers and was determined not to let his disability prevent him from having a career.

Whitmoyer was two years into college when he decided he could teach himself what he needed to know. That, he said, was the beginning of bbradley.net, a computer services and web design company formed in January 2003.

“I currently use a (PRC) Accent 1400 with eye gaze,” he said. “Before I started using eye gaze, I was a scanner and an extremely fast and effective one at that. But the difference between scanning and eye gaze, in almost every sense of the word, has been life changing.”

When he scanned, Whitmoyer said, it took two to three hours to type a page. The eye gaze technology has cut that to 20 to 30 minutes.

“This difference also is a big help with communicating,” he said. “With eye gaze, I don’t hesitate to use it to communicate with people who don’t know me. I even call my bank, utility companies and others when needed, instead of having others call on my behalf.”

It’s a testimonial like that that brings smiles to the faces of both Romich and Hershberger.

“I had no projections” about where PRC would go when he joined Prentke to form the company, Romich said. “We did just what we thought needed to be done.”

Prentke, who retired from the company in 1979 but continued working well into his 80s, died in 2007. He was 103.

For his own part, Romich, who retired from day-to-day operations at PRC but remains on the board, downplays his role.

“I’ve had a lot of help along the way and a lot of good luck,” he said. “I’m not that smart.

It will be Hershberger leading the company into the next phase of growth and development, which started in 2018 with a multi-phase renovation and second-floor addition to the Heyl Road facility. During companywide meetings, he said, employees often will hear from a client or client family about how their lives have been transformed by PRC-Saltillo devices and service.

“I don’t think I could think of anything else I could do,” he said. “The job satisfaction in incredible here.”

CREDIT: TAMI MOSSER