Bob was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama and has always called it home from where ever he might have been at the time. Although he was raised as a cowboy, his mother, a singer/dancer, always encouraged him to pursue the entertainment business. By age thirteen he had a personal manager, agent and contract with a major movie/recording company. He was already performing in theaters and on stage as a professional musician with recording artists and movie stars. Upon going off to college at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Bob started American Artists Enterprises as a personal management and booking agency for professional entertainers and a firm that traded and negotiated recording contracts. It had offices in Tuscaloosa and New York. Uniquely, it was also the largest agency in the USA handling live entertainment for shopping centers and malls. Over 542 malls and shopping centers bought their live entertainment though AAE. That kept a lot of magicians and variety acts working.

At college graduation, Bob had service in the US Navy ahead of him, so he sold American Artists Enterprises and had to leave the world of commercial music forever. He went exclusively into the magic he had begun at age sixteen. In 1969, following the advice of other professional entertainer friends and to give privacy, he began working professionally as Magic By Sander. In his forty-something years in the business, Bob has performed stage shows in theaters, hotels, fairs, conventions and ballrooms around the country. He also has decades of experience in fundraisers, trade shows and sponsored corporate magic as well as talent in television commercials. His corporate clients have included the world's largest private daycare provider, the most profitable brewing company in America, some of the largest consumer electronics firms in the world, the largest shopping mall management firm in the USA, the nations largest retailer, major advertising agencies, several leaders of the computer/information industry, medical care providers and communications firms. He has turned down invitations to perform for Worldwide Magical Congresses in Mexico City and Calcutta, India.

Bob has been active in magical fraternal and professional organizations since the 1960s. Those include the International Brotherhood of Magicians, the Society of American Magicians and the secretive Wizards of the Ozarks (professional magicians of the West and Midwest), which elected him Magicians' Magician of the Year 1981-82. During that period he was doing over 200 stage shows a year, working on a Ph.D. in marketing, management, and finance; and caring for his infant son on the road with him. He has held offices in all of the major magical organizations. In the 80s he was responsible for transferring part of SAM's film library to VHS tape.

Among magicians he is best known for dove magic. Perhaps that is because he is the originator of Dove Hotline on the Internet and he wrote it for over twelve years. Tony Clark handled it for a couple of years while Bob worked on a couple of books. Bob returned to writing Dove Hotline in March 2006. Bob is on staff at The Magic Café. He also posts on PMZZ, KIDabra and the Genii forum.

Aside from magic, Bob is a published university professor, registered lobbyist, marketing and management consultant to publicly traded corporations, entrepreneur, importer, and has served on the corporate boards of directors of national and international corporations. He is the magicians' silk importer. He is married to Lucy Collins, MD, former ballet dancer and model from New York and Los Angeles, and stage magician who performs both with Bob and in her own shows. Lucy has a grown son in Los Angeles and Bob has an adult son in Birmingham, Alabama and a daughter in Wyoming who trains horses and dances with a Colorado Ballet Company. Bob and Lucy live with their many animals (horses, goats, doves, ducks and geese, and dogs) on Magic Valley Ranch in Clanton, Alabama near Lucy's rural medical clinic where she enjoys her dream of being a country doctor.