Sam Gallo, a 95-year-old Baton Rouge resident, was born in Schenectady, New York.

After graduating from high school, after a short job at the General Electric Company, he entered the United States Air Force. After leaving the Air Force, his work for the Glenn Falls Insurance Company took him to Chicago, Dallas and finally Baton Rouge.

In retirement, Gallo uses technology to communicate because he is legally considered deaf due to his military service.

Gallo served as national chairman in 1987 of the board of directors of the American Diabetes Association. He is the founder of the National Diabetes Alliance, Diabetes America and the Louisiana Diabetes Foundation. He received the 1987 Dr. Charles H. Best Award for Distinguished Service from the American Diabetes Association.

In 2020, Gallo, a widower, met his wife, Millie, at St. James Place Nursing Home. They got married at the height of the pandemic. He has three married adult children.

He is a man of many talents, including holding U.S. Patent No. 4,078,356 (also filed in 10 foreign countries) for his work developing a method to replace oxygen with an inert gas in packets of “singles” coffee at speeds of 450 units per minute.

In 2023, Gallo was diagnosed with Grover’s disease, a rare and painful skin condition that presents as an itchy rash. Building on his success with the American Diabetes Association, Gallo wants to increase awareness of this understudied disease.

Tell me about Grover’s illness.

In December 2023, I contracted Grover’s disease. Millie and I said, “What is Grover?” Because she’s never heard of it. I’ve never heard of it. We started looking for Grover and couldn’t find him. We couldn’t find out anything about it.

I called the National Academy of Dermatologists and started asking about it. They have an alphabetical list of all the illnesses the academy deals with, but Grover’s is not on the list.

The reason it’s not bad enough is that Grover Syndrome isn’t fatal, and for some strange reason they haven’t figured it out yet. There is no cure. He eliminates himself. It lasts between six months and a year. I’m on my ninth month and it’s almost over.

Tell me about Facebook support groups; were they useful?

When you have Grover syndrome, you need to soothe the itching. You can’t sleep. At first it is almost impossible to sleep.

On Facebook, someone said, “This is what you should use.” » Everyone concocts their own lotion.

Thank God for Millie. Every morning after my shower, I sit in a chair and she helps me put on the lotion. I’m like all greased.

Grover is present all over the world.

How do you try to raise awareness about Grover’s disease?

In any type of health issue, data must be centralized. I don’t care about the illness. You can’t have someone doing something here and someone doing something there, and that person doesn’t know what they’re doing.

I started looking for Grover’s – and there was nothing.

So I designed a website. It’s very simple. I got two domains out of my pocket, including one for the American Grover’s Disease Association.

The final key was to create a corporation with an IRS 501(c)(3) designation. That’s what I did. The application fee alone is $250.

No one visits the site. It was a total failure. Nobody is interested. Person.

When you go to a dermatologist, there is a display with all the different brochures. They don’t have any for Grover. I want to make one for Grover.

It’s going to take money, because I feel like the first step is to put Grover’s brochure in every dermatology office.

TTell me about the American Diabetes Association and your work with it.

It’s one of the things I got involved in because of my daughter Elizabeth, who became diabetic at a very young age – when she was 5 years old.

Because treatments were rare, diabetes was very serious then. They hadn’t really developed any better treatments than NPH, a type of insulin.

I started a statewide association in Louisiana because it bothered me that there was nothing about diabetes in Louisiana.

There was no centralized research or shared directed direction across organizations. I floated the idea of ​​centralization in Louisiana – it was difficult. We had to travel because some of these cities had small, very patient-focused diabetes support groups. They were very valuable, because after Elizabeth contracted diabetes, we began visiting and supporting young children.

I brought them together and started the Louisiana Diabetes Association. It had nothing to do with the national group. I was just doing that, and it really blossomed.

We had our first convention in Baton Rouge, at this motel that was next to the old Notre Dame du Lac that they tore down.

It was a great success. A lot of people came and the money was coming in. We rented a space, we hired a general manager and a few volunteers.

We ended up creating the theme: “One State. An affiliate.” I began traveling across the United States to sell this message.

I became involved with the American Diabetes Association and through my work became national president. Then I was asked to be on the board of the National Diabetes Advisory Board, which is a congressional committee.