Jim and Bosé’s love story began almost 60 years ago in Lagos, Nigeria, when James Esomonu Obi, a charming, charismatic 20-year-old entrepreneur, saw Cecilia Olubosede “Bosé” Oluwole for the first time at a sports event. “My name’s Jim Obi,” he confidently introduced himself to the pretty, 17-year-old track star. “So what?” she responded as she walked past him and disappeared into her driver’s car. At that moment, Jim promised himself one day they would marry.
Being from different ethnic groups—Jim was Igbo and Bosé was Yoruba, they were destined to remain apart like star-crossed lovers. “Our languages were different, our cultures were different,” Jim explains. “She was supposed to marry one of hers and I was supposed to marry one of mine.”
But, as Jim says, “At every phase of my life, I’ve felt the hand of God.” God’s hand did bring Jim and Bosé together, and through the best of times and the worst of times for the next 56 years, Bosé’s love lifted Jim above himself and made him what he might be.
When Bosé, a lifelong non-smoker, was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer in 2014, she was blessed to be cared for by Michael Pritchett, D.O., world-renowned interventional pulmonologist and medical director of the FirstHealth Chest Clinic of the Carolinas, and the extraordinary oncology team at FirstHealth Moore Regional Hospital. “They’re like family,” Bosé said of her care team. “We are very lucky to be here.” When she was declared cancer-free just two years later, they all joined Jim and Bosé as she celebrated her 70th birthday.
The couple enjoyed nearly four more years together, visiting their children and grandchildren, traveling, and becoming
enthusiastic supporters of The Foundation of FirstHealth “Building the Dream” campaign for the new cancer center on the MRH campus. “If our experience is an example of what one person can expect from the new cancer center,” Jim says, “then think of how it will benefit those patients who considered their life totally ended and hopeless.”
Sadly, Bosé, Jim’s guiding star, passed away in May 2020. “She was my other half. My soulmate,” Jim says. “It was her dream to have a cancer center. If only God had spared her to see her dream realized.”
Bosé’s loving spirit remains by Jim’s side as he works tirelessly to “make FirstHealth what it might be” by fulfilling her dream of a new cancer center where cancer patients and their loved ones will receive world class care, just as they did—right here at home.
Jim and his seven siblings grew up in poverty after their father, an Igbo civil servant working for the British Nigerian Railway Corporation, died in 1952 when Jim was not yet ten. In Nigerian culture, “the best inheritance a parent can give to their children is not material things, but it is a good education.” It was a legacy Jim would have to earn for himself.
Determined to be the “pillar on which my mother could depend,” Jim left home at 13 and worked at “every menial job a kid could do for a living” to support his family while struggling to pay school fees for his education. At 15, he quickly worked his way up from cleaner to salesman at a large mercantile and textile trading firm in Lagos.
In 1958, Jim went to England to study business at Oxford and returned three years later to a newly independent Nigeria where he started his own textile importing business. With characteristic determination and work ethic, his business “grew very fast, thank God.”
Where Jim’s youth was difficult and challenging, Bosé’s was the opposite as the privileged daughter of a wealthy and successful industrialist, the powerful Chief Benjamin Oluwole, sovereign of the Yorubas. When Bosé met Jim that fateful day in 1963, she had recently returned from England, after, as she put it, “being properly finished.”
Despite their considerable differences in culture and background, Jim persisted in his courtship and finally won Bosé’s hand and heart, as well as her father’s approval of their rare inter-ethnic union. “You have barely begun life,” he counseled the young couple. “Take good care of yourself. You’ve got to hold each other up.”
They married on Bosé’s 18th birthday in June 1964. “I keep asking myself today,” Jim says, “Why did she marry me? I wouldn’t have married me but somehow, she did. And I know that was when I began to consolidate my life. I didn’t know how, but she knew.”
As Jim grew his successful importing business, Bosé, who was pregnant with their first child, gently encouraged him to take steps to ensure that his family would be provided for “in case anything should happen.” “I was a hot head, full of brawn but no brain who really didn’t know what the heck he was doing,” Jim describes his younger self. “I didn’t have the sense to think of buying land, building a house or an income-producing property, but she did.”
Eighteen months after their wedding, their lives were forever changed when Igbos in eastern Nigeria rebelled and created the Republic of Biafra, leading to the bloody Nigerian-Biafran War. As an Igbo living in Lagos, Jim was seen as the enemy by the Yoruba. After repeated attempts on his life, Bosé, who was expecting the couple’s second child, fearlessly insisted he leave them under her father’s protection and flee to the United States where he could build a new life for them.
“America is a tough and demanding place,” Jim remembers of New York City when he arrived in December 1966. “It is a nation of opportunities and it rewards you if you put in the effort. If you want to be good, you can be very good at what you do here. But if you want to fail, the nation can help you fail with flying colors.”
A seasoned salesman, Jim decided the insurance industry would “allow him the independence to determine how much money you made rather than depending on a regular paycheck.” He spent month after frustrating month through the brutally cold winter that melted into the blazing hot summer, knocking on agency doors that remained firmly shut to him. Though they were thousands of miles apart, Bosé remained by Jim’s side in spirit with her letters of love and encouragement. “You can do it,” she wrote. “You can do anything.”
Finally, in July 1967, Jim joined the Equitable Life Insurance Company. Three months later, he was named the agency’s best salesman; within a year he was appointed District Manager. His work ethic, drive, and determination to succeed made it possible for him to send for his family a year later. In 1970, at the age of 27, Jim opened the James E. Obi Agency in New York, joining what Fortune magazine called “the bravest generation—black executives who fought their way to the top of corporate America.”
Although his business was growing and Bosé and their four children were doing well, Jim had a burning desire to “go back home to Nigeria,” an announcement which prompted his young son to ask, “Dad, where is home? I thought you always said home is exactly where your heart is. Tell me where your heart would be.” There was no question, Jim’s heart was with his family. They were his foundation, his motivator, his driving force. “I know the day I was named as Number One in the world of insurance was the proudest day for my family,” Jim remembers. “You don’t just succeed for yourself. You succeed for your children, for your family.”
During his three decades with Equitable, Jim built the most successful and lucrative life insurance and financial services agencies in New York and one of the largest agencies in the country. He was highly respected in the business-world; his career as a successful Black entrepreneur covered in magazines, newspapers and books. He served on the boards of more than a dozen corporations, NGOs and charities, including TLC Beatrice International Holdings, Inc., which recognized him in 1988 for his “outstanding contributions to the African-American community.
“Bosé was the real CEO,” Jim insists, “who ran the business of family, who understood and urged me to get out and take care of the business of providing income for the family while she took care of the home. That was my good fortune. How did she do it? I don’t know! She was a miracle!” In addition to being “Supermom” to their four children, Bosé was a respected community leader in her own right, working with charities and empowering other African American women to excel in life and in business.
She encouraged Jim to share what he had learned in America with the country that gave him birth, adopting the Nigerian philosophy of life, “As long as God has given you the strength and power to live, you have to contribute to society as much as you can.” In 1992, he formed The Obi Group, an organization devoted to business and economic development in Africa. After retiring from Equitable at the age of 55 in 1997, Jim maintained his transnational relationships by acting as a key advisor to organizations promoting education, healthcare, community development, and business and trade between the United States and Africa. At President Bill Clinton’s invitation, Jim joined a congressional delegation on a trade mission to Africa, and then testified before the House sub-committee on US-African Trade policy. As a member of the Business Council for the United Nations, Jim met with leaders from around the world and presented UN Medals to presidents and prime ministers, with Bosé always at his side.
Although Jim remained active in The Obi Group, retirement, after working six days a week for 30 years without a vacation, finally allowed the couple to spend time together, traveling the world, playing golf in Pinehurst, and planning their move from Stamford, CT, to their second home in rural Virginia. But “Providence intervened” when Jim’s bad reaction to a bee sting resulted in them driving 40 miles from their Cumberland home to the nearest hospital.
That experience made them realize they were getting older and their need for health care was increasing. “Healthcare has a different meaning for us than it had years ago,” Bosé acknowledged. “We’ve got to go to a place where we can have easy access to a hospital.” And that was Pinehurst with its world-class hospital just three minutes from Pinewild Country Club where they built their beautiful home. “FirstHealth Moore Regional Hospital was the decider for us.”
Just two years after the couple moved to Pinehurst in 2012, Bosé woke in the middle of the night with a pain in her back and asked Jim to drive her to the hospital. “Bosé is not somebody who complains about things,” Jim says, “so when she said something, you took her seriously.”
Later that morning in the surgery waiting room at MRH, Dr. Michael Pritchett, pulmonologist and medical director of the FirstHealth Chest Center of the Carolinas, told Jim the bad news. “She has cancer,” Dr. Pritchett said. “Stage 4 lung cancer. We’ll do the best we can to look after her. Hopefully, we can give her six months.”
Diagnosed at the age of 67, Bosé was healthy, athletic, “a food nut who always took care of herself.” “Of all people,” Jim thought, “Why must it be you? The idea that she was sick—seriously sick—was alien,” Jim explains. “It didn’t seem within
the realm of possibility. When you’re told that the person with whom you’ve spent your entire life will not be there six months later, how does one feel? This cannot be explained. I fell apart. With news as devastating as that, of cancer, your life changes. But what followed is probably the most sustaining that one can experience.”
“I remember telling Mr. Obi about his wife’s surprising diagnosis,” Dr. Pritchett recalls of that first, difficult meeting. “Somebody who’d never smoked before, that I just told him has advanced stage lung cancer. And I remember the grief and the heartache, and I’ll never be able to forget that.” “Because he saw the look on my face,” Jim remembers of that terrible moment, “that has been the basis of our friendship.”
“You’re not a number here,” Bosé said. “They know who you are. They know you by your name.” “Our physicians, our oncologists, our pulmonary doctors aren’t our doctors anymore,” Jim agrees. “They’re our friends.” “They’re like family,” Bosé added. “We are very lucky to be here. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve got the best of care.”
“We’re proud to say we were able to personalize her care,” Dr. Pritchett says. “That’s what we seek to do with every patient here at FirstHealth Chest Center of the Carolinas. The most rewarding part of my job is my connection with my patients. I feel a great sense of responsibility to them as I guide them through the various stages of their medical journey.
This can also be the most challenging part of my job as well. I think we often find in life that the things that challenge you the most can be the most rewarding.”
Dr. Pritchett introduced Jim and Bosé to The Foundation of FirstHealth in 2015, at an event where they learned more about his groundbreaking advances in lung cancer diagnosis and treatment, and the overwhelming need for a new, consolidated cancer center. “The place where we have a ‘cancer center’ is not really a cancer center,” as Jim and Bose knew from personal experience. “You have to go to several places to be treated. It’s so confusing. I am happy for the thoughtfulness and the thoroughness with which they have designed it as a one-stop center for cancer patients,” Jim says. “And for such a serious disease with such good doctors,they should have something. It will be the crowning jewel of the FirstHealth hospital system. Thank God for that.”
WHEN THE STILLNESS COMES, WE’LL BE THERE
With Bosé’s spirit continuing to guide him, Jim is generously giving his time, talent, and business expertise as a board member of FirstHealth of the Carolinas and to the Foundation of FirstHealth as a member of the Scroll Society, Foundation board, and one of the leaders of the “Building the Dream” campaign for the new cancer center.
“I’ll lend my voice to whatever I can to help the Foundation to keep growing and to continue to serve this community and this hospital. We are small as far as communities go. To have a hospital that has the significance, the importance, the reach that this hospital has is a special blessing to this community.
“If this is our hospital, we owe it support. It has earned the right to expect support from us. That’s my feeling. We should support it in every way possible.”
