Despite having Parkinson’s disease for the past 10 years, Bob Soulen, 69, continues to play in the Montgomery County Senior Softball League.
The Washington Post published a story and a video about Bob Soulen a well known athlete with Parkinson’s disease :”….The big first baseman trudges across the pristine infield, his walker leaving a crooked trail in the dirt. He has bandages on his knees, a bald spot where he hit his head against a door frame and an old shoulder dislocation from a spill at home… But it’s game time. The hot afternoon is giving way to the shadows of evening. And Bob Soulen, 69, who has Parkinson’s disease, is going to play some ball.
Twenty miles away, 30,000 people have streamed into Nationals Park to see Washington’s young pitching sensation, Stephen Strasburg. Here on Field No. 5 in Montgomery County’s Wheaton Regional Park, a lone fan – the wife of an opposing player – sits in the bleachers to witness a different phenomenon: an aging physicist’s determination to cling to the game of his youth.
As Soulen shuffles across the dirt, the other Mustangs are arriving, limbering up and playing catch, and Soulen is careful to lift his walker over the fresh white streak of the foul line. Like the diamond, the evening seems perfect, and in a few minutes there will be a pale moon rising over center field.
Robert J. Soulen Jr. of North Bethesda is a retired award-winning scientist who worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Naval Research Laboratory. His area of expertise is superconductivity as it relates to temperature measurement and ship propulsion.
He also plays softball in Montgomery’s senior leagues and can wax about the laws of physics as they relate to bat vs. ball…” Read the story
