Column: Limited Edition
When Ann died a short while ago, you knew that Bob would soon follow. You never thought of one without the other. Ann and Bob. Bob and Ann. They loved Ann Arbor and believed that this was the best place to raise a family.
I thought I knew Bob Gregory well. He grew up in the Cass City area during the Depression, graduated from Middle States Teachers College, now called Central Michigan University. He was quiet, reserved – a Midwestern meat-and-potatoes sort of person.
When I attended his recent memorial service, I realized that I really didn’t know him that well at all. He wasn’t just in the Navy. He flew PBMs searching out enemy submarines and flying escort for ships carrying troops to Europe. He was a Patrol Plane Commander and Navigation Officer of the Squadron. He never mentioned this to me, because he likely would not have wanted to repeat the experience.
He was not just a forestry professor at the U; he introduced economics into the international forestry debate. His textbook – “Forest Resource Economics” – was the standard, used throughout the world, and not much has changed since.
William Strauss and Neil Howe, in the book “Generations” (Quill, 1991), would place Bob squarely in the middle of the “GI” Generation. Born between 1901 and 1924, they were the new children of the new century. Tom Brokaw called them the Greatest Generation. It was a generation that stressed the group over the individual, one for all and all for one. Loyalty and commitment were more important than self expression. They were shaped by the Depression, WWI and WWII, the post-WWII economic boom, McCarthyism, Kennedy, and the Cold War. “Regular guy” was a compliment to this “can-do generation.”
Beginning with the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, they were group-oriented and believed in public harmony and social discipline. They held the presidency longer than any other generation in American history (Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 1). They won 99 Nobel Prizes and held majorities in both houses of Congress for an unprecedented 20 years. They created the largest jump in educational achievement in American history. It was also a time of Blackjack chewing gum, wax coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water, home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers, newsreels before the movies, washtub wringers, and telephone numbers with a prefix (Olive-6933).
The memorial service was held at the Greenwood Church in Ann Arbor, a perfect place with its sanctuary in the woods. Bob would have liked it. Aaron Riley, Bob’s grandson and an accomplished violinist, ended the service with “Ashokan Farewell,” the mournful classic made popular in Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary. To me, Aaron was playing for a whole generation of Americans that will soon be gone.
Strauss and Howe believe that every generation repeats itself sequentially in a fixed pattern. If they are correct, hopefully my grandchildren, born after 2001 as part of the Millennium Generation, will be a lot like Bob and Ann.