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Bob Moog spent his youth and early adulthood in New York City, but his legacy is perhaps most vibrant in the city of Asheville, NC, the adopted hometown where he raised three kids and found much-needed serenity.
Moog had a love-at-first-visit experience with Asheville. He visited the city in the late 1970s to participate in a musical instrument building conference and “he and my mom just fell in love with the place,” said Michelle Moog-Koussa, the youngest of Bob’s children. Moog and his wife bought a couple pieces of property—at a time when it didn’t take much money to own land in the area surrounding Asheville.
Moog-Koussa was 10 when the family moved full-time to Asheville. “We lived at the end of a dead end where there was no one around for miles. The beauty of this area created the solace Bob needed to balance his work at the edge of sonic reality.”
Moog could spend hours immersing himself in the business of creating sound, then head outside to chop wood or go hiking. It was a dichotomy that leant Moog’s life a needed balance, the kind of balance he could not achieve in Buffalo, where the family had previously moved to be closer to the person who invested in Moog’s struggling innovations.
Moog-Koussa, who left Asheville briefly for school in Washington, D.C., and some time abroad in West Africa, has been in Asheville continuously for the past 14 years, raising her own family. “We love it here for many of the same reasons that Bob did,” she said. But Moog-Koussa also highlights another aspect of Asheville that makes it home: its thriving creative community. “During the latter part of Bob’s career, from about 1995 forward, the Moog legacy and the creative community of Asheville seemed to grow in tandem.” Today, Asheville is known for its abundance of local businesses, live music venues, unique restaurants, and public artwork.
The thriving creative community makes Asheville not only the perfect place for Moog-Koussa to raise her family, but also to run her small but growing, non-profit: The Bob Moog Memorial Foundation, which aims to ignite passion, creativity, and innovation through Bob Moog’s legacy—a legacy that is tied closely to both the area of Asheville and its residents.
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