This week's News story has Jeff Abraham, CEO of Absorption Pharmaceuticals of Huntington Beach, mentioning how he and late partner Dr. Ronald Gilbert, who developed the company's FDA-approved premature ejaculation remedy Promescent, came from humble beginnings.
Abraham illustrates the point with the photo of himself at right.
]
Newport Beach Doctor Senselessly Gunned Down, But His Penile Wonder Drug Lives On
That image also appears on promescent.com's Management page, as does this shot of Gilbert, who was callously murdered in February:
You may notice that the backgrounds of Abraham and Gilbert's head shots are the same, but that is not because a company-hired photographer decided it brought out each of their sets of eyes.
As Abraham explained in an interview, Promescent had just been talked up on The Dr. Oz Show in 2012 when it occurred to the CEO and Gilbert that the national television exposure might lead the curious to their company website, promescent.com. One problem: the company at the time only had five employees–including both of them–and neither of the “officers” had a photo of themselves on the site.
Gilbert and Abraham, who were both Huntington Beach residents at the time, booked it over to Westminster Mall, where they posed in the Sears department store studio for the photos you see here. You can marvel at their nice shirts, ties and suit coats, but what you don't see are the pairs of shorts and flip flops each also wore that day. That's the kind of guys they were, Abraham explains, shorts-and-flip-flop guys.
“Afterward, we gave each other high fives,” Abraham recalled joyfully of the photo shoot. “We thought we had made it.”
But Gilbert was not just down-to-earth. He was also deeply religious, as Lauren Williams of the Los Angeles Times reported in July.
His urology practice was in Newport Beach, but he had lived with his wife and two sons in Tustin before eventually becoming an Orthodox Jew. He then moved his family to Huntington Harbour so they could more easily observe Shabbat, or the Sabbath, by walking to their synagogue, Chabad of West Orange County.
“Gilbert was known to freely dispense advice–medical and otherwise,” writes Williams, “and rabbis referred to him as a tzaddik, or righteous man.”
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.