Imagine Bill Ford Jr. leaving Ford Motor Co. and never again being able to affiliate his name with another car company. Imagine John Paul Mitchell selling his hair-care empire and being forbidden from re-entering the industry.

Julian Osbon doesn't imagine it. He's living it.

His surname is a trademark. The Osbon ErecAid was a pioneer medical device in the treatment of impotence back in the age before Viagra made it socially acceptable to discuss the problem and gave the condition its own politically correct moniker of erectile dysfunction. Much like Microsoft with computer operating systems, it had a dominant position in the market. The Osbon is as synonymous with vacuum therapy in the treatment of erectile dysfunction as Kleenex is with wiping a runny nose.

The rights to the Osbon ErecAid have been bought and sold several times since Mr. Osbon first sold it in 1995. The current owner is a pharmaceutical company in London.

With each new owner, Mr. Osbon saw the industry's sales decline and education about the therapy erode.

It got to such a sad state that it brought him out of retirement a few years later and into a legal fray that bankrupted his comeback company and then made it illegal for him to use his own name and likeness to promote a vacuum therapy aid.

The next comeback company, Augusta Medical Systems, is run by his eldest son, Michael: an Osbon not restricted by a trademark lawsuit, an Osbon who can wield the name that carries weight with urologists who treat erectile dysfunction.

For Julian Osbon, the biggest competition is not the owners of his former company that sued him. Nor is it Viagra, Cialis or Levitra. The fight has always been against ignorance of treatment options and ineffective novelty products that prey on desperate people.

The 67-year-old visionary is preparing to launch a new venture, an Internet-based company that will market an over-the-counter version of the medical device as a way to battle the novelty companies. He is also planning to resurrect a nonprofit educational institute on the treatments for erectile dysfunction to battle ignorance.

"I'm stupid enough to not quit," Mr. Osbon said.

With fortune in hand from selling the family business, Mr. Osbon didn't kick back and take a decadelong vacation. Instead, he championed downtown Augusta and spent his money on philanthropic and entrepreneurial ventures.

"My brother Jim used to give me a lot of static. I have a saying that I don't believe in celebrating at halftime," Mr. Osbon said. "The truth is, the game is never over. Life is a process."

Robert Osborne Jr., an executive at Georgia Bank & Trust who has known Mr. Osbon for more than 10 years, said: "I admire him. He works hard. He didn't stop when he could have."

They serve together on Augusta Tomorrow, an organization aimed at revitalizing downtown Augusta.

Mr. Osbon shares that mission with the organization. He has an attachment to his stomping grounds downtown.

"Julian has been one to spend his time and money making it better," Mr. Osborne said. "He saw what he thought could happen and, of course, he's helped make it happen, downtown particularly. He and Bryan Haltermann were probably the first people that started the residential aspect to downtown, converting the lofts."

For Mr. Osbon, a downtown residence is not something he's been providing only for other people.

Visionary

Outside the white, nondescript warehouse is Ellis Street near 15th. With no signs or identification, it is as anonymous as a notable person's residence can be in the heart of a 500,000-resident community. A dozen years ago, it was a warehouse for Osbon Medical Systems. Mr. Osbon has been living in it since 2003.

In the midst of the warehouse is a glass-panel door that opens to a den of couches, plasma television, card table and a bar. Another door leads to an exercise room.

Mr. Osbon points above the room, explaining that he wants to put a master bedroom up there. Not literally put it up there himself; he says he's the visionary and will have someone else make the vision come to reality.

It is his metaphor.

"Julian Osbon has a lot of vision, a lot of good common sense, just a great asset as a citizen of this community," said R. Lee Smith Jr., the president of the Community Foundation for the Central Savannah River Area.

Mr. Osbon still sits on the foundation's board and the forward-looking Augusta Tomorrow that tries to revitalize the downtown.

He acknowledged that he is better at seeing the big picture than handling day-to-day execution.

"Osbon Medical Systems was made successful by the people around me," Mr. Osbon said of his original company.

He said he paid an executive $250,000 a year to run the first comeback company, SOMA Blue Inc., so he could concentrate on the community. And the third?

"Mike is better at execution," Mr. Osbon said of his son, one of two who are following in his footsteps. John works at Augusta Medical Systems as a manager.

It took a dozen years to build Osbon Medical Systems from $18,000 in annual sales to $30 million. In 1995, it merged with California-based Urohealth Systems in a $46 million deal.

Not long after that, Mr. Osbon left the company to retire and devote his energy to the community. One of his first acts was to donate $1 million to the community foundation.

"That really helped it get on its feet," Mr. Smith said. "I think his love and commitment to this community has been overwhelming."

He said Mr. Osbon has always been the type of person who wants to see the quality of life improve and "getting into the thick of it" to sort out important issues.

Mr. Osbon had been selling an improved quality of life for decades. The vacuum therapy device created by his father, Geddings Osbon Sr. was initially marketed in the 1970s as a marital aid for older couples.

When the family's downtown Augusta tire business finally folded in 1983, Mr. Osbon took over selling the medical device. He renamed Nu-potent to Osbon Medical Systems in honor of his father, who died in 1987. Geddings Osbon was an innovative person with a sixth-grade education.

"He taught himself things," Julian Osbon said.

When impotence struck him, Geddings Osbon figured out a way to help himself using the tools around him. It was the 1960s. Doctors told him that he had fathered five kids and had hit the end of the road in terms of intimate marital relations.

The Osbon ErecAid was born as the Youth Equivalency Device, fundamentally the same today: a vacuum that draws blood into the penis to establish an erection. A tension ring holds in the blood when the pump is removed, allowing the user to have a love life despite erectile dysfunction.

Mr. Osbon remembers his father was a religious man who didn't push his beliefs on people. On display in Mr. Osbon's warehouse residence are Geddings Osbon's desk and a sign bearing his motto: "Lord, nothing is going to happen today that you and I can't handle together."

The son also remembers his father for possessing an ability to reduce complex matters to their lowest common denominator.

"My strength is I can take simple things and complicate them, which is kind of funny, but in a way there's a strength in both of those," Mr. Osbon said. Complicating things can be a positive trait, he explained, if the complication adds value.

The "complications" to benefit Osbon Medical Systems: add a toll-free customer service hot line, send reps to all the corners of the globe to show people how to use the devices, create a nonprofit education foundation to operate side by side with the for-profit medical company.

"In my first company, I found I was spending about 25 percent of my resources on basic education. I created a nonprofit foundation to manage the pure education of the subject, not the product," Mr. Osbon said.

Righting a wrong

With Augusta Medical Systems poised to re-create the sales success of Osbon Medical Systems, Mr. Osbon said, he is ready to re-create that second prong: another education-based nonprofit. He's not sure when it will launch; he has an attorney checking to make sure there's a minimal chance the lawsuit against him won't rear its head.

"Part of the ruling ... and this is so ridiculous, was that I could not use my name or my history in the industry that I founded. I still don't understand that," he said.

He believes that using his name to educate people on all treatments for erectile dysfunction, not specific products or companies, should keep him out of court.

He is unsure whether the current owner of the Osbon ErecAid, Plethora Solutions in London, is as interested in keeping him out of the industry as Minnesota-based Timm Medical Systems was in 1999.

The trail for the Osbon medical device went from UroHealth to Imagyn Medical Technologies to Timm Medical. Plethora bought Timm for $9.5 million in 2006.

"The people that bought it moved it to California - prostituted it, in my opinion - went bankrupt, sold it to another company that beat it up even more," Mr. Osbon said. "They milked my reputation, my database and my customers to create revenue to do other things that flopped. Then in the late 1990s, I was real fed up with what they'd done and decided I was going to try, in my mind, to right some wrongs. I got back into it."

He bought an Alabama medical device company that sold similar vacuum therapy aids to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Before Mr. Osbon was able to sell a single device as SOMA Blue, Timm Medical filed a federal lawsuit that was initially perceived as frivolous.

"They didn't want anyone named Osbon back in the business," he said.

It was a long-term battle that was going to take its toll.

"If I had known then what I know now, I probably wouldn't have done it," Mr. Osbon said. "I'm glad I've done it, but I wouldn't do it again. It's cost me a lot physically as well as financially. It has taken a lot out of me."

By the time the case went to trial, Mr. Osbon said, he had spent $1.5 million defending SOMA Blue, a company that no longer had any value.

"What kept it going was that I was writing $100,000 checks personally. I wasn't going to let the damn thing go down," he said.

It did go down in 2003. Mr. Osbon foreclosed on his company and the next day started Augusta Medical Systems. He thought he had outsmarted the competition that had won a $130,000 judgment against SOMA Blue, which was only a shell. Then, lawyers ran to federal court in Savannah and transferred the judgment to Mr. Osbon personally.

Mr. Osbon said he was amazed that it happened because Timm had to prove that he was personally running SOMA Blue. During that time, he was the chairman of a Georgia Senate study on the future of the Medical College of Georgia; president of Augusta Tomorrow, Historic Augusta and the history museum; and chairman of the University Hospital Health Care Foundation and the CSRA Community Foundation.

"I was working 70 hours a week on community things," Mr. Osbon said.

He lost anyway. "A year ago, I wrote them a check for $160,000 and got rid of it."

Augusta Medical Systems has no mention of Mr. Osbon's name anywhere, so it is safe from the former litigation.

Mr. Osbon said he plans to keep his new Web-based commercial venture, Madison and Edison Medical Group, safe by keeping his name out of it.

"It won't have the name on that product. It doesn't mean anything to the general public, nor to the general medical community," Mr. Osbon said.

Until a recent U.S. Food and Drug Administration ruling, the erectile dysfunction aids were available only with a doctor's prescription. Augusta Medical Systems can now sell an over-the-counter version of the product.

Mr. Osbon said he wants to cut out a niche selling such a product on the Internet, outsourcing some of the support services to his son's company.

"There's enough people who will want a product without going to a doctor," Mr. Osbon said. "I think there's a niche for a good ethical product in an Internet environment. There may not be, but I think so."

The ethical component, Mr. Osbon explained, is telling buyers that a change in sexual function might be an indication of a health problem, such as cardiovascular disease or diabetes.

Mr. Osbon said his products probably saved some lives over the years because clients had to see a doctor before they could buy one.

Despite this work, Mr. Osbon said he's slowing down.

"Julian's definition of slowing down may be different than most," Mr. Osborne said. "With Julian, it is hard to know where - and me, too - where does your business stop and social life start. The line gets fuzzy because it is all so interrelated."

Mr. Smith doesn't believe it, either.

"I don't think Julian is the kind to slow down," he said. "With his brain power and energy, he may be getting into different areas."

He is.

The downtowner

"This area here, when I was a kid, we used to change tires. I jacked up many a car in this spot," Mr. Osbon said in a red-walled room lined with musical instruments.

The old Broad Street tire shop is now a multitenant commercial building. A tenant is one of his new entrepreneurial ventures: a recording studio owned by his middle son, Christopher, called The Factory Recording Studio.

Musically, Mr. Osbon said he still enjoys the first decade of rock 'n' roll. After all, Elvis adorns a wall at home.

"The Beatles came and destroyed everything," Mr. Osbon said.

"That's where we start to disagree," Chris retorted.

Mr. Osbon said there's a lot of similarity between him and Chris, stemming from the fact they were both the middle child. Mr. Osbon was the third of five children, chris was the second of three.

The middle child tends to march to the beat of a different drummer, which isn't a bad thing, Mr. Osbon said.

He hasn't taken a paycheck in 10 years, but that hasn't stopped him from spending millions helping family and former associates begin companies. He cannot recall the exact number of companies that he has formed over the years - he thinks it is between 15 and 20 - but does remember that most of them folded without success.

"They all cost me a lot of money, but you roll the dice and take the chances," Mr. Osbon said.

The most successful venture outside of the erectile dysfunction industry has been downtown real estate, most of it commercial.

"It generates a pretty good bit of money, so it has allowed me to do some of the things that I'm doing."

Mr. Osbon also rents out 17 apartments downtown.

He is selling real estate that is in south Augusta, one of the ventures that flopped, an upscale manufactured housing subdivision called Hancock Mill.

"The subdivision was a wonderful thing until Fannie Mae fell flat on her face. Fannie Mae was the funding instrument," Mr. Osbon said. "We were doing fine with it until the financing disappeared."

Mr. Osbon said it was a good concept. Out of the 230 acres, 60 acres were developed with paved streets and driveways. He said he has buyers interested in taking the developed and undeveloped land off his hands.

Julian Osbon looks on the failures and says that, on average, one in 10 entrepreneurial ventures works out.

The shining success remains the company that took his father's Youth Equivalency Device and marketed it to urologists as a safer, more effective solution to erectile dysfunction than implants.

Mr. Osbon's life has been at both ends of the spectrum. He was penniless in the interim between selling tires and selling medical devices. The state of Georgia paid for the surgery to reattach a retina. If not for that, it is likely he would be completely blind now, because the other eye failed, too.

Mr. Osbon said the best compliment he ever received was from friend Warren Daniel that whether rich or poor, he's always acted like the same person.

Reach Tim Rausch at (706) 823-3352 or timothy.rausch@augustachronicle.com.