MONDAY SESSION TRANSCRIPT

AM:   How do you feel about getting to be 87 years old and now being in this environment where we’re recording your life story?

BG:  Yeah, well, 87 isn’t the big problem, but I do recall when I turned 60 — I have to tell you this:  When I turned 60 I started inline skating, and I got into a race with our 24-year-old secretary, a foot race, because I’m turning 60 — right? — so we got into a race and she beat me by about six feet or something like that, which is an embarrassment but I accepted it.  But none of the other men wanted to compete against her.  She told me — I saw her; she was working out and doing bends and getting ready for our race; then I found out she was on her high school track team and then I found out that she was the anchorman on the relay team and then I found out that she was on the state track team. So OK, that’s fine.

AM:  Yeah. So to back it up a little bit from 87 to your early, earliest days, tell me about your family when you were growing up.  What can you tell me about your mom and dad, both in terms of your memories of them but also their backgrounds?

BG:  Yeah.  They were born in the same year.  I think they met in high school but didn’t marry until five or six years later.  They were probably 23 or 24 years old.  Dad was a — he was a strong man, not particularly endearing like, as a matter of fact, like I am with my children.  In that respect, I think I’m a better father than he was — OK? — and I expect my children are going to be better than me.  Matter of fact, they are, the fact is.  Mom was a perfect mother, like we all expect our moms to be.  And she was probably the smarter one of the two.  Dad was absolutely the head of the family.  She counseled with him.  I never saw them argue, but of course they must have. 

AM:  And where were they born and —

BG:  Dad was born in Jackson, Michigan; mom was born in Streator, Illinois.  Mom was the daughter of an Englishman; he came over 1899.  The rest of my family is totally Irish.  I was the first one to ever — on any side of my family, cousins, uncles, aunts, siblings — I was the only one to ever graduate from college.  But dad went to work for his father-in-law who owned a sausage-manufacturing company in Detroit.  It was a very successful one and dad worked for him.

My childhood was a very happy one.  I don’t know that you were asking that question specifically, but it was. We were a happy family, every night together for dinner.  I don’t really remember — I mean, I certainly can remember the several times that he actually related to me, took me to games and that sort of thing.  But if there was a problem, that I had a problem, I would go to my mom, and she would talk to him.  She was the ombudsman, I guess. 

AM:  What would you go to your dad about, and did he mentor in certain ways?

BG:  No.  No.  He did not.  God, one of my memories is when I needed a whipping — OK? — and he made me go up to his bedroom and get the big black belt that he had hanging on the door. (Laughs.) 

AM:  You had to go grab it.

BG:  I had to go get it and bring it down for him to beat my fanny.  (Laughs.)  Not that it meant so much to me but I’m remembering it 75 years later! Right?  (Laughs.)  I’ve got a couple memories like that. And when I turned 16 I remember — what’s that expression, feeling your oats or something like that? He had done something and I was going to come at him, and he was a big man and he saw me and he said: “You want to come at me, boy?  Come on.”  (Laughs.)  I wasn’t scared of him.  I knew he could whip me or beat me up, if that were to happen, but I intrinsically knew that was the wrong thing to do and someone had to back down and it was me.  And that’s the right thing to have happened.  So I certainly remember that. But I had no problem with that.  He was my father and I loved him and respected him and always felt that way.

AM:  And did you have siblings?

BG:  Yeah, I had an older brother and I had a sister — she’s 91 now — and a brother who would have been 89 and I’m 87, and then I had a little sister that came along 12 years later and we’ve lost her too.  Yeah.  Bud, my older brother, he was the first son and he was treated as a first son and —

AM:  How so?

BG:  In the respect that he was the one that got the Lionel train and I got some little toy thing, and he got the big baseball mitt and I got the play one, but I got all of his clothes two years later. 

AM:  I was going to say, you must have gotten a lot of hand-me-downs.

BG:  That’s right.  Honest to goodness, I’m telling you, it didn’t bother me; I just said, that’s the way it is.  And two years later I would get his old baseball mitt.  And when my brother died I remember saying at his wake, the only time I ever remember having a quarrel with him was when I was 12 years old and he was 14 over something or rather.  But other than that, my whole family has been close and tight, and that goes true to my family today, too, so.

AM:  And what kind of autonomy did you have growing up?  Because, for example, my dad, who was born in 1942, he often speaks about the way that he and his friends would get together every day during the summer and they’d play ball all day, and there was no Little League, there was no organized things that your parents would come out to, and he talks about just this almost paradise — (laughs) — of autonomy between the kids.

BG:  Yeah.  Correct.  All the sports were sandlot.  And you’re right.  Well, even my kids, who are somewhat near your age at least you guys even had all these organized teams and parents taking their kids to whatever activity, all the time.  I used to think of Leslie, she almost wore a whistle around her neck because she was going to all these sporting activities with Steve.  And that certainly was not true for me and us growing up.  We came home from school; we played outside until 5:30 for dinner; we all ate dinner together; in the summertime we’d go out and play street games or whatever until 9:00; she’d call; we’d come home, go to bed, and maybe the other activity just before dinner we would watch the radio shows on the big console, radio console, with “Terry and the Pirates.” 

That was life.  Right?  And no organized activities at all. 

AM:  Yeah.  And did you have a favorite radio show or radio character? 

BG:  Yeah, I did.  I was just talking to some other old friends last week and they were all saying, oh, yeah, yeah, at 5:00 it was that and “Captain Midnight” and “Terry and the Pirates” and “Little Orphan Annie,” and a couple more shows like that.   They were all 15 minutes long from start of 5:00 until 5:30, a quarter to six, or something like that.  “Lone Ranger,” yeah. 

AM:  Are those shows that you think you could listen to today?

BG:  Yeah.  I do.  As a matter of fact, once in a while I’ll get on my radio, on my Sirius Radio, for those old-time radio shows.  I love to watch them.  I love to watch them.  And as soon as you hear the music — perhaps you’ve experienced that yourself — you just hear the first three or four measures of the song and it immediately takes you back to those times and those days and those experiences.  Absolutely.  Yeah, sure.  I do that all the time.  Yeah.

AM:  And what about other forms of entertainment?  Were you especially interested in movies or baseball?  Did you have certain players that you looked up to?

BG:  You know, it depended on the age, of course.  Right?  And I only remember — I don’t even remember — when I was a kid — I was just a kid, but I think somewhere around eight to 10 years old we played guns in this thing, and I was a Cub Scout and I liked that and I became a Boy Scout until I got cool.  Right?  I’m 13 and I didn’t want to participate in that any longer.  But I had a problem:  When I was  12, I believe, I came home and my mother said, what’s the matter with you?  And I said, what are you talking about?   And I had become cross-eyed and I think the doctors presumed that maybe I had had whooping cough or something like that, earlier on, that caused it.  But in any case, I had this weakness which caused double vision, which became a problem to me then and remains to this day, as a matter of fact.  I’ve had a couple surgeries along the way that straightened them out pretty good, but nevertheless, I was never a very good athlete because I had no depth perception.  I’d go to reach a baseball and would be two feet away from it or even a foot away; it didn’t matter as long as I missed the ball.  Right?  So that was a problem.  

AM:  But were you a Tigers fan?

BG:  Oh, of course.  Yeah, yeah.  I remember the day that I was in the fourth grade, I guess, when the Tigers played the Cubs.  They played the Cubs in 1945.  I surely remember that.  The nun brought in a radio and we listened to those things.  Of course, everybody did that. 

AM:  And the Tigers won.

BG:  Yeah.  As a matter of fact, about that time — no, I must have been a little bit older — we would get on a bus and go to what they called Briggs Stadium at the time; it’s now Tiger Stadium.  And we would go to a certain entrance and they would let a bunch of us in, maybe 20 or 25 young boys, and we would earn tips by cleaning off — taking the person’s ticket and cleaning off their seat and they would give us a dime or a quarter or whatever it was and we got to watch the game for free.  That was a great privilege.

AM:  What sort of economic status did your family have growing up?  Because you grew up in the Depression — initially.

BG:  Yeah.  Well, my family did.  I would guess that we were probably — well, everyone likes to think of themselves as just being middle class.  Right?  Nobody wants to say they’re wealthy and no one wants to say they’re poor.  But we were probably slightly upper middle class. 

AM:  So the Depression wasn’t particularly difficult for the family?

BG:  Yeah, my father said that his father-in-law gave him a raise and made him an executive so he didn’t have to pay him overtime during the Depression.  I remember that.  But, yeah, we were not hurting any more than anybody else and less than most people, as a matter of fact.  And that was true until after the war and so.

AM:  During the Depression and then the transition into the Second World War for the United States in 1941, you were only six, seven years old by the time that rolled around, but do you have recollections of there being hard times for the country and —

BG:  Yeah.  I remember the day that the war started.  You know what?  I remember that. 

My mom and dad had taken the three kids down to the Detroit Institute of Art to look at the mummies and that sort of thing.  It was a Sunday morning and I remember — I was seven years old and you remember those things because somehow you know it’s really an important date in your life.  Right?  And I remember he had gone out to get the car.  I remember going down the steps of that place, getting in the car, and my father said: “Well, it looks like the fireworks have started; we’ll clean those Japs out in six months. And why would I remember that?  Well, I did. And yeah, I remember all the things going on.  I remember my father wearing a white air raid warden helmet, for the air raids that were never going to happen in Detroit, and all the windows being blacked out.  And I remember the paper drives and the rubber — the collection of pots and pans for the war drive and everybody saying yeah, there’s a war on, don’t you know?  That sort of thing.  Sure, I remember all of that. 

AM:  Did any family members serve in the conflict?

BG:  My Uncle Ted, who was a really nice man, he was 10 years older than me and he was an Air Force pilot in India.  He flew the — they called it flying the hump; they went over China, Burma, India, and they were flying on a C-47 supplies to the Chinese army and that sort of thing.  And during that time, I told you I was a Cub Scout about that time and I remember going down to the dime store and having a picture taken of me in one of those little booths in my uniform and I sent it to him to say, “See, I’m doing my job too.”  Right?  And about 30 years later, his son sent me — it wasn’t that long ago, maybe 10 years ago or so — the son was opening his dad’s war chest or whatever and he found this picture and he sent it to me; he says, “Is this you, Bob?”  And it was.  My uncle had kept this little picture. One of those little jobs, about one-inch square, and I still have that, as a matter of fact, that he had given to me during that period. 

You know, I remember wanting a real six-shooter.  I mean, not a real one but I wanted the chrome with the white handles and that sort of thing.  Didn’t make them during the war.  I remember my mom apologizing for it and got me some little thing that everybody sufficed with.  Was that a sacrifice?  I don’t think so.

AM:  Yeah.  But do you remember other sacrifices and rationing and whatnot?

BG:  Yeah.  Oh, surely.  Yeah.  One pair of shoes a year or something like that, for a growing kid, so of course, even during that time, I got my brother’s shoes.  Right?  (Laughs.)  Yeah.  And I wore knickers.  I remember wearing knickers, and when I turned 10 or 11 — I remember my first pair of long pants.  You know, I must have been 11 years old.  Yeah.  Yeah.

AM:  And do you remember playing soldier and that sort of thing?

BG:  Oh, absolutely.  Absolutely.  Yeah, we did a lot of that. 

AM:  Killing the Germans and —

BG:  Yeah.  And I remember having like a windbreaker, I’ll call it, with all sorts of military badges and stuff on it.  Yeah, those were memorable years, and, yeah — I followed the war.  I remember all the airplanes that were changing and first they called it an autogyro.  Did you ever hear that expression?  Yeah, yeah.  They don’t use it — kind of a helicopter kind of a thing.  Yeah.  And I remember they had a — there were — they called them state troops.  They were Army — it was kind of like a national guard, going to visit one of their camps nearby where we lived and seeing all the soldiers and their machine guns and all of that.  I remember my arithmetic pad with a picture of MacArthur on it saying, “We shall return.”  And a lot of memories like that. 

AM:  How did you mostly keep up with the war?  Was that through the radio?

BG:  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah. And the newspapers.  The newspapers at the time, the back page was all and only pictures, yeah, pictures of the war and the headlines. I remember that.

I also remember waking up in the morning hearing the newspaper boy saying “Extra, extra, Allies land in Europe,” or whatever.  That was June 6th, 1944.  Yeah.  I absolutely remember that.  I remember all the mothers going to church.  [Begins to cry.]

AM:  Yeah.

BG:  [Referring to his tears] Why did that happen?

AM:  I mean, D-Day was an enormously consequential part of our American experience and many of those mothers lost their boys.

BG:  Yeah.  Yeah.  I’m just surprised at what just happened.  Still doing it.  (Laughs.) 

But I followed it very closely every day and I can remember the headlines, and I remember the words Tarawa and Guadalcanal before that.

And the “dirty little Japs.”  I can still remember — I can remember this little song; it’s, “We’re going to have to slap that dirty little Jap, and Uncle Sam’s the guy who can do it, and the rising sun will set before we’re through with it.”  (Laughs.)  And other war songs — “Let’s Remember Pearl Harbor” —

AM:  And would you sing those songs or did you hear them performed?

BG:  Oh, we sang them. 

AM:  Yeah.

BG:  Oh, absolutely.

AM:  Where did you sing them, in school?

BG:  I don’t know.  I don’t know. 

[Sings] “Let’s remember Pearl Harbor.”  Did you ever hear of that song?

AM:  Yeah.

BG:  Yeah.  Yeah.  I certainly remember it. 

AM:  Was there a theater that captivated you more?

BG:  Sure.  It was the Mercury Theater.  It was a beautiful —

AM:  Oh, I meant the —

BG:  Oh, a theater of war?

AM:  — the European or the —

BG:  No, it just depended on what was going on, but I think I was more — it seemed to me I was more involved, when I think back, about what was happening in the Pacific rather than in Europe.

AM:  Seems like it, yeah.

BG:  Yeah.

AM:  Yeah.  But you got excited there talking about the Mercury Theater, so that captivated you.

BG:  Yeah.  It was a brand new theater and every Saturday — that’s where we spent every Saturday for a dime or whatever.  I remember standing in line and not letting kids get ahead of me going in.  We’d see three movies, an hour of cartoons, and the newsreels — 

AM:  The newsreels, yeah.

BG:  — the newsreels that came on, The Eyes and Ears of the World. 

Yeah, who can forget all those days? 

Those are also — a year or two later, I remember going to that theater and sitting in the back seat trying to pick up girls too.  Right?  (Laughs.)  That’s the way it worked. 

AM:  And we’ll get there.  (Laughs.)

BG:  (Laughs.)  Yeah.

AM:  That’s a different world back in the ’40s and newsreels and the kind of experience you’re describing, spending at the theater and just all the things that were happening in those days and the music and the culture that we had.  Do you miss that world?

BG:  I think it was a good world, a simpler world, in spite of what was going on.  Those are happy days, happy memories.  I have no bad memories. 

Back to that for just a moment, I remember the little [window signs] for the veterans.  Every house had red, white, and blue with the star in it — the silver stars were the wounded and multiple stars for however many children or young men that had gone to war.  I certainly remember that.  And everybody wore that with pride and us with respect for them, of course.

AM:  Something that I wanted to ask you more generally is, what were the values that your parents instilled in you growing up, and did that change as the war came and we had much more of a focus on the patriotic cause and that sort of thing?

BG:  Yeah, without a doubt, we are all our parents’ children.  That’s where we get our values and they got them from their [parents], so I can’t identify what they are, but I am who I am certainly because of them.  There was no place in my family’s world for the police.  You know, that’s just something that belonged someplace else and —

AM:  You mean there was no need for the —

BG:  It would be intolerable to have the police involved in our life.  OK?  And so with dishonesty or anything like that.  I can’t imagine someone at our school stealing a pencil.  It wouldn’t happen, that we were aware of, anyway.  So there were those kind of — I guess they called them Christian values; I guess I would just call them good human values.  There’s no place for divorce in my world.  If we got in trouble at school with the nuns, it was our fault, not theirs.  They were just kind of different in days today, I think, where they bring their lawyer to the school.  Right?  Yeah.  (Laughs.) Wouldn’t happen.

AM:  And as you got into your teen years, did you find that you had a little bit of a rebellious streak?

BG:  Yeah.  Yeah.  Just to jump — I remember when I turned 18 my mother said, “Are you happy, Bobby?”  Called me Bobby, of course, an affectionate name.  “Are you happy that you’re 18?”  And I said, “Yeah, Mom, I am.”  And she said, “So am I.”  (Laughs.)  “We’re through with that part of your life.  You can get on to being a man,” I suppose.  Yeah, my brother and sister, they never got in trouble.  My brother was always the good guy and I was inclined to get in some trouble along the way.

AM:  What kind of trouble would that have been?

BG:  Well, let’s go back to the Mercury Theater for just a minute.  Let me back off just a little bit because I told you that I was having problems with my eyes and I was cross-eyed, and so this is about the time I’m going into the seventh grade and — by the way, I’ve watched each of my children as they got into the seventh grade and it happens, like, overnight; all the testosterone and all those —

AM:  The hormones.

BG:  The hormones start rising to the top.  Girls and boys, too.  But I wasn’t invited to very many parties.  I expect it was probably because I was cross-eyed; at one time I had to wear my mother’s stocking cap on my head because I had ringworm, and I was a little pigeon-toed too, so I — (laughs) — I wasn’t the most attractive kid in the class, I suppose.  And I have to tell you and I’ve told my kids about this about Margie Missel and she was a year younger than me and she lived down the street and I remember knocking on her door just trying to come on to her, I suppose.  And she called me cross-eyed Joe, and, as I mentioned to you a little earlier, I said not that it mattered to me except that it’s 75 years later and I’m still remembering it.  (Laughs.)  But in any case, I got through those — that year or two and by the time I was a freshman in high school now, now I’m getting out of the Boy Scouts and my — I’m wearing my hair long with the D.A. in the back and peg pants and probably — I don’t want to say they were the wrong kids, it’s just that they weren’t the ones like my brother who was always so wholesome and perfect.  (Laughs.)

AM:  Yeah.  And now we’re getting into about 1950. 

BG:  Yeah.  Yeah. Maybe a year or so before — I think I went into high school in September ’48, so yeah, yeah.  So we’re like that.  And I went to the same boys Catholic college prep high school, which was pretty wholesome, always very proud. I was in the band by that time; I was playing the trumpet, but that lasted a year.  That was the year that I turned my colors, I suppose, and started not — well, I guess it’s time to tell you about the jewelry store.  Yeah. 

Five of us went out one Sunday night about that time and it was kind of a drizzly night but we were out; it was a Sunday evening about 7:00.  It must have been in the wintertime because it was dark outside.  And we were just hanging around and I remember us walking down an alley and someone said, “Why doesn’t one of us throw a rock through that window?”  I don’t know how the hell that happened but that’s what happened.  OK?  And one of us did and the alarms went off; the burglar alarms went off and we ran like crazy down the street, away from it, and about a block or two away, we said, “The cops are going to be out looking for people maybe like us,” and I said, “Cool thing to do is maybe turn around and be walking toward it now because that implies innocence, doesn’t it?  We wouldn’t be going that way.”  And within minutes a cop car cruises along us and they were just cruising with us as we walked down the street.  And one of these dummies that I was with said, “Ah, I wonder what they’re looking for,” like he knew something that they didn’t know.  And so we went into a Walgreen’s drugstore and were having a Cherry Coke or something at the thing and the cop comes in and he says, “Come on, boys, let’s go,” and he took us out the other door.  I said, why is he taking us out the back door?  Well, because the other cop is out there.  If we had run, that’s the way we would have run — (laughs) — so he was there to catch us.  So they took us down to the police station and we were getting rid of our cigarettes right in their cop car; we didn’t want to be caught with the cigarettes.  And they took us in and they grilled us and of course we had decided don’t tell anything; we didn’t do anything.  And they got done and called our parents and all the parents came down to get us and my father came and got me and he’s in the car and as he’s driving — I mean, I’m next to him in his big Buick, and he said, “Who did it?”  I said, “We didn’t do anything.”  I remember his right hand came sweeping across there, hit me right in the face.  And you know in the comic books or wherever you see pictures of people getting hit and they see stars?  I saw stars!  I remember it, just exactly what it was.  Got home, came into the house and we went right down to the basement.  My mother was down there and then she started beating me over the head with a broom.  OK?  (Laughs.)  And I still didn’t confess that we had done anything.  But we had to go back to the police department in the morning and one of the kids ratted on us, I suppose, and it all came out. 

AM:  So one of the kids from the group had confessed.

BG:  Yeah.  And that guy became a tax lawyer in La Jolla, California.  One of them ended up being a bank president.  There was me and another guy who was always getting in trouble but I think he turned out OK.  So we were good kids, but they made us get our hair cut.  OK?  (Laughs.)  And I spent the rest of that summer in my backyard and in my house.  I never went out — oh, yeah, and Sunday morning I get to go to church.  OK?  But that was it. That’s the way I spent my summer. 

I don’t know how many times I listened to “Some Enchanted Evening,” from “South Pacific,” I guess it was. 

Oh, by the way, I didn’t tell you: It was a jewelry store.  We didn’t know that.  And the guy who threw the rock was me.  (Laughs.)

AM:  I wondered earlier when you said that one of you —

BG:  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah. That didn’t help.  But it was just a dumb thing that had no intention of anything ever happening.  It was just a foolish, stupid thing that a 14-year-old —

AM:  And did you end up confessing that to your parents?

BG:  Well, they knew it then because the guy — we got there the next morning; the cop said we know what happened; we know who did it. 

AM:  They knew that you had thrown it.

BG:  Yeah.  So it came out, so I didn’t confess to anything.  My friend who I — I ended up rooming with; he was at Georgetown University and I was in the Navy by that time.  We roomed together and I’ve seen him many times since that time.  He’s gone now but —

AM:  Yeah. You mentioned “Some Enchanted Evening.”  What other records do you remember having on your record player?

BG:  I still sing them. I would have difficulty just remembering that, but many of them are war songs.  “(There’ll Be Blue Birds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover.”  If I thought about it, I could come up with 20 of them.

As a grade schooler, it was more the funny songs, the gimmicky songs, I suppose, that caught me. 

AM:  Like Mitch Miller-type stuff?

BG:  Yeah, that sort of thing.  Yeah, I don’t think I could bring up any more right now, but I could sure as hell sing them if I even thought about them. Yeah.

AM:  Yeah.  And other Broadway shows?

BG:  Those were the years of “Oklahoma!” and a lot of good music came from there.  And all of the Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein.  But they were all great songs, great movies.  I loved going to those movies.  I told you every Saturday was — we spent the whole afternoon there, four or five hours.

AM:  Who would you go with?

BG:  My boyfriends.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  There’d be three or four or five of us.  My gang.  Right?

AM:  Yeah.  Did you ever go with your siblings?

BG:  No.  No, they were two years older, younger; they’ve got their own group. 

AM:  Yeah.  And did you eventually start going to the movies with young ladies?

BG:  Yeah.  I guess it’s about time for me to have my first girlfriend.  I remember the first girl I kissed; it was in that — back of that movie theater.  Her name was Rosemarie Selagi.  (Laughs.)  Just what kids did.  But my first girlfriend — as a matter of fact, it was right after I got released from that jail that I was in when I was going into my sophomore year I met her.  I met her at the movie theater too, two or three of my friends, two or three of her friends and her name was Mary Schmidt and it was a very nice relationship.  I’d pick her up from school; she went to the girls’ Catholic high school, and I’d pick her and we’d go home and we’d neck in her front room and I wondered why her mother never bothered us, but she didn’t.  She — what was that song about the [old] lamp lighter in the — I guess that goes back to about that period.  And she left us alone and I even bought her a ring in a pawn shop for $5 and gave it to her and she wore that for six months.

AM:  What did the ring signify?

BG:  It was a — it had hearts on it and stuff.  It was a perfect ring for her. 

AM:  Yeah.  But did that mean that you were going steady?

BG:  Oh, yeah.  We were going steady.  Oh, yeah.  Absolutely.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Sure.  But I couldn’t drive.  My brother was 14 —

AM:  I was going to say, when you said you would pick her up, did you mean on foot?

BG:  Oh, yeah, because — my brother got his driver’s license when he was 14 years old, and by the time I got to be 14 years old, the law had changed and so everything we did had to do by bus or walking, which seems so unfair at the time, of course.  Right?

AM:  And Detroit still had streetcars at that time?

BG:  Yeah.  They did.  Streetcars and certainly buses.  I told you when I was — had my eye problem I used to get on a bus once a week, get out of school a little early and drive — or take the bus all the way downtown by myself and go to the doctor and then come back by bus.  And when I went to high school I had to take a bus both ways for three years. Yeah.

AM:  So we’re in the high school years now and you’ve started dating. And I was going to just ask, you know, you speak so fondly of those times going to the movies.  Do you remember certain films that really resonated with you? 

BG:  I think I always liked the cowboy movies and the cavalry movies.  God, I loved the cavalry.  I still do!  I still watch those movies.  Yeah. 

AM:  Did you watch a lot of the war movies that came out too?

BG:  Oh, every one of them.  And I still watch those.  I mean, I can still remember “Wake Island” and “Back to Bataan” and “Guadalcanal Diary.” See, those are all Pacific.

AM:  I was just going to say that.  Yeah.

BG:  I was thinking about that too.  Yeah.  But I watched the others, too, “The Iron Cross” and all the Nazi movies.  There wasn’t any of them that I didn’t see.  To this day, there’s not one of those movies I didn’t see. 

AM:  And on the radio shows they would often kind of reenact some movies.

BG:  Yeah.  They took you to war.  And the comic strips too. 

During the war, the street that I lived on was just — one street probably 15 houses on each side of the street and there were 93 kids living on that street, which I thought was just amazing.  And then we all went to the — pretty much all went to the local Catholic school, which was two blocks away. 

During the war — remember, Detroit is on the west end of the Eastern Time Zone — right? — and so where the sun is in New York is already different by the time you get to Detroit. Then they went on, even during the winter months, they went on what they called Wartime, and then they went on Double Wartime — Double Wartime so that when we went to school in the morning, it was pitch black, which you could do in those days.  There was no problem; you just walked in the dark. 

I mean, my whole experience, as you can see, was just perfect.  No problems.  No problems at all.  No crime.  No nothing.  It was just the way it ought to be for everybody.

AM:  Yeah. What was Christmas like for you growing up?

BG:  Magnificent. Yeah, and that morning to go down in a room that was the only thing that you saw was that brilliant Christmas tree. I can still remember it. What a magnificent memory.  Oh dear god, yeah. (Laughs.) Yeah.  

AM:  And presents underneath the tree?

BG:  Yeah.  Yeah. And some of them packed and the big ones weren’t, the big fire engine and the big airplane or something that they couldn’t pack up.  It was just as beautiful that way.   And when my kids were growing up, I would not let them go down there without me being there.  I had to be there when they came down —

AM:  To witness it, yeah.

BG:  — and to give them that kind of a Christmas morning.

But back in that period, of course, my life changed from this perfect childhood where there were no problems, and if there were, it would be between my mom and dad and they didn’t cause a problem.  But when a kid becomes 13, 14 years old, they – it’s part of growing up.  You stop looking to your parents for approval and you look to your peers.  Right?  That’s what becomes really important.  More important than the parents, and that always disappoints the parents, but that’s the way – that’s growing up. And it isn’t till we become adults that we emerge – yeah, we go from depending on our parents for approval to our peers, and when we mature, advance to an adult age, then we begin to look to ourselves for approval.  Yeah.  But the high school years, it’s such a problem because you can’t depend on your friends to be as good as your parents are.  They can be critical.  They can bully.  They can take advantage.  In a sense, it can be an awful time for a kid, so and you have to learn.  It’s part of getting to be 13, 14 year[s] old; you define new friends that may not be the best for you but they’re ones that support you and that you’re most like and you identify with and you grow with them.  And the choice of those friends is very important, of course.  And I think that was a time that every kid goes through; you have to figure out how you get through this. It’s a time when kids could probably use a lot of good counseling.  I don’t think I had a problem with it.  I don’t think I did.  I think – yeah, I had a lot of friends and no bullying, pitying. 

AM:  Yeah. Well, it’s interesting because people of your generation and my dad’s age and my mom’s age, you know, they often do describe their growing up as being pretty idyllic.  And these days, that’s more rare.  A lot of people talk about how tumultuous and really traumatic those years were for them, and I think that speaks to the sort of societal issues that have developed over the years and —

BG:  Yeah.  I would like to think – well, I think my kids did grow up like me, other than the organization and all; my kids, I think, are pretty damn good, and I think I gave them a good life and a good background.  

AM:  Yeah. And same here.  My childhood was quite good and quite happy, but yeah, I think the – maybe the generation that my generation has brought up, they seem to have had more issues.  And maybe it was just because there was a greater awareness of psychiatry and mental struggles, and we have a million diagnoses these days and they’ll throw a label on anybody.  Oh, you’re ADD, or whatever it is.  And that just didn’t exist. 

BG:  That’s correct, yeah, but I think the numbers – the number, for example, of high school suicides is — it is different.  It must be different. 

AM:  Is that something that you had ever heard of when you were a kid?

BG:  No.  No.  Never.  Well, we heard the name but we identify it with something completely remote from our life.  Never would we consider that anybody we knew – as a matter of fact, I don’t think there’s any – I mean, there were smart kids and dumb kids in the class —expression — but nobody that had any sociological or psychological problems, and yet every school today has a health or mental health advocate, that sort of thing.  It never happened before.  As a matter of fact, there was no administration.  There was a principal and the teachers.  Right?  In my world, we never even had student counselors, or anything like that.

AM:  Yeah.  Well, in a lot of cases, those take the place of solid family units, which –

BG:  Yeah.  But ours were all solid. 

AM:  That’s what I’m saying, yeah.

BG:  That I’m aware of, anyway.  

AM:  Yeah. There’s just been a decline of that over the years because, like, my generation is the one that really came up during the age of divorce.  

BG:  Yeah.  Yeah.

AM:  And a lot of us 12, 13 years old were suddenly going home to single mothers who were working and that sort of thing.

BG:  Yeah.  Yeah.  I certainly remember back during the ’60s when this started taking place that — what our children were going to lose because the mother is no longer going to be at home.  But it appears – well, I don’t know; maybe we haven’t done so well – it appears that that’s the way it is and that’s the way we grow up.  Nevertheless, it does mean that everybody – and we must acknowledge that there is a significant difference, just because of the numbers that we are aware of.  Well, you remember the story about General Patton slapping the soldier because he was shell shocked, and yet, when we look at the numbers today, my god, it seems like most of them come back with some –

AM:  Well, and I think also those numbers have increased because there’s that many more psychiatrists in the military who are diagnosing people.  

BG:  Yeah.  Right.  Yeah.  Yeah.

AM:  Yeah. So, actually, why don’t we use that as a segue to talk about your naval service?

BG: OK.

AM: You finished high school, graduated from the Catholic school in Detroit, and what did you do from there?  Did you go straight into the Navy or? 

BG:  No.  No.  It takes me to my college years first.  I didn’t go in the [active] Navy until I finished college.  Well, that’s not quite true. 

It was expected that I was going to go the University of Detroit as a day student.  I didn’t pay much attention to it.  I didn’t pay any attention to it at all, as a matter of fact.  Did nothing to prepare for college other than go to college prep school.  I was a B, C student; didn’t do anything special.  And that summer I was on my – out in front of my [house] with a baseball hitting it against the stoop catching it, throwing it against the stoop, catching it, and my friend drove up and he said he was going to go up to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to look at the University of Michigan and would I like to go along, and I said I’ve got nothing else to do, let’s go.  So I went up there and I was so blown away with the university that while we were there, we managed to take the test for admission, the two of us –

AM:  You could just do that.

BG:  Yeah.  Yeah.  That’s right.  Yeah.  And I went home that night and talked to my mom and dad about whether I could do that or not and – by the way, the tuition was $90 per semester; this is in September of 1952 – $90, and the room and board for a semester was $335 or something like that, so I could get room, board, and tuition for $900 that year.  Which seemed fair to me.  (Laughs.)  And so off I went.  OK?

AM:  So you were able to get into the University of Michigan?

BG:  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  And it was the most pivotal month in my life, because by the end of that month, I had changed completely from this carefree kid with the long hair and the peg pants who did as little as he could to get through high school to a kid who studied five hours per night and got my white – changed my Levi’s into white buck shoes and short hair and –

AM:  Because it sounds like, from what you were saying earlier, homework was really not part of your experience.

BG:  No.  I did as little as I could. 

AM:  Yeah.

BG:  I skimmed over it and figured I had to wait until the teacher taught me rather than what I subsequently learned is that it’s a hell of lot better to study and be prepared and have the teacher confirm or fill in some blank.   But that happened.  Immediately I was blown away by how every student was there to study.  OK?  And it may have been – yeah, I think it had something to do with the University of Michigan rather than University of Detroit day school; these are more select – far more selective.  It’s a hell of a school.  But I remember at Christmastime coming home and I went down to the library to find out just how good Michigan was and I looked – there’s many ways of gauging the quality of a university and they were by four different surveys, they were number three, four, four, and six.  Great university then, great university today.  It just changed me.  Everything about my whole life was changed that month – within a month.  And I joined a fraternity and –

AM:  Did you kind of leave behind those high school friends then? 

BG:  Pretty much.  Yeah.  Yeah.  My best friend, when I graduated from high school, he joined the Marine Corps and I went to college and I didn’t find him again until about five years ago.  He was down in the Villages down in – he was a smarter kid than me, but he didn’t go to college; by that Christmas, he was in Korea, and I was enjoying Christmas vacation, as a matter of fact.

But anyway, it was a marvelous year and at the end of the year I came home and I was talking to my father — and I had not done well. OK?  I’ve got to tell you, I was just still trying to learn how to learn, but my father determined that there were too many communists and atheists at Michigan, and that was true.  OK?  Back during the Joe McCarthy days and there was a lot of stuff going on there.  

Anyway, I left Michigan that year and went back to University of Detroit and went on to finish my college days there.  I told you my first girlfriend was Mary Schmidt, and in my junior year in high school I met a girl named Rosemary Kapps, and she moved to Chicago the same time I went off to Michigan.  And we parted and I always remember every day looking for her letters to come – to see my mailbox.

We had been in an automobile accident over Labor Day the week before I went to school –

AM:  The two of you were?

BG:  Four of us.  There were two couples; the other guy was driving.  And we went over to Canada.  We were involved in an automobile accident that a farmer – we were driving this way and the farmer and his horse and cart pulled directly in front of us, smashed into him, and the man died, and we were unconscious on the side of the road.  And it wasn’t our fault.  They released us that day.  I guess the man had done things like that before, but anyway, traumatic going-away present.  But we were very much involved until later that year and we drifted away.

So while I was a freshman, I joined the Naval Reserve with that same guy that talked me into going to Michigan, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  And I stayed with the Naval Reserve during the next three years and every year I went on my training duties to boot camp at Great Lakes and then I went to communication school, and then I went aboard – in my junior year, they sent me aboard the battleship USS Iowa, which is a sister ship to the Missouri, which is where the Japanese surrendered in 1945.  And they put me in with what they called the deck gang.  The deck gang are the real – (laughs) – sailors who swab decks instead of doing anything that was meaningful in an intellectual way.  I remember telling people that all they talked about all day long, over and over again, was who could kick the hell out of who and how “short” they were, which meant how many days they had to go before they got out of the Navy.  Over and over and over again.  (Laughs.) And I said, you know what?  I could spend two years in the Navy as an enlisted man or I could try to get a commission, three years and four months, and that made up my mind that time; I said I can’t do that.  I can’t do that.  All my friends ultimately just went in the Army for two years and got it done.  I understand that, but I elected to try to get a commission. 

AM:  Yeah.  And what had attracted you to the Navy?

BG:  It goes all the way back.  I’ve thought about that many times.  I remember a TV series called “Silent Service,” and I remember there was a comic book hero; his name was Don Winslow.  And I hadn’t realized that that was such a draw for me, but it was.  It was the right thing for me. 

So I went down to the Office of Naval Officer Procurement in Detroit, as a matter of fact, and I took their test and the sailor who had taken the test talked to me afterwards and he said, this is amazing; he said, “You had the highest score that anybody’s ever scored on this examination.”  And I said, “That’s hard to believe; there must have been a mistake,” because I was not that great a student. 

AM:  Yeah, because at that point, yeah, you had not seen that sort of academic success.  (Laughs.)

BG:  Well, that’s right. I was finishing college now.  I was finishing off – I sure as hell wasn’t an A student.  But nevertheless he told me that.  But now the second part is is the next day was my physical examination, which included an eye examination.  Right?  And remember, I’m still seeing double and my visual acuity wasn’t all (aligned ?).  These are the days when they didn’t want you even wearing glasses.  OK?  But I went home and before I left there, I got – I wrote down the eye chart and I memorized it that night.  I can remember it right now.  Want to hear it?

AM:  Sure.

BG:  (Recites chart.)  

I get a little confused now.

AM:  That’s pretty good.  Yeah.  I’m convinced.  

BG:  Yeah, yeah.  Couldn’t do it backwards!  (Laughs.)

But anyway, I got through that and finished – that was in the fall of ’56, and in January I finished my work and was notified that I had been selected for admission [to Navy officer candidate school].  I went into it in March. And it was difficult for me.  It was four months long and we covered every naval subject that they did in Annapolis in four years in four months.  Now, I’m not saying it was in that much depth, but enough to – whether it’s navigation or engineering or military law or all of it – all of it!  I mean, they’d be a chief petty officer and they’d say, this is a [five]-inch [3]8-caliber [breech-loaded, air-cooled] – (laughs) — whatever it was, and it went on like that for four months and they tested us every day in every subject.  It was arduous. 

AM:  And where were you stationed during that time?

BG:  This is in Newport, Rhode Island. 

AM:  OK.  And had you been that far away from home ever?

BG:  No, I guess I hadn’t.  Yeah.  Yeah.  And there were – it was a trying period.  And the reason that I went into that much detail is to tell you that I took solace in a song and I have conveyed that to my children, and you’ll recognize this song.  [Sings “You’ll Never Walk Alone”.]

Do you know the song?

AM:  Back to Rodgers and Hammerstein. 

BG:  Yeah.  It was, wasn’t it?  I don’t even know what song it was or which play it was.

AM:  “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from “Carousel,” right?  

BG:  Yeah, I think you’re right.  I think you’re right.  But in the course of my life, and we all have our trials, that song always comes back to me, and I have conveyed that to my children one time or another.  It gave me sustenance and support.  Isn’t that interesting?  Yeah. 

AM:  When I graduated from 8th grade, we sang that song.  

BG:  Did you, yeah?

AM: Where else did the Navy take you?  

BG:  Well, when I finished there, I was going to be commissioned an ensign, and I expected that most of us – they were going to go to all sorts of places, but the likelihood of me being sent aboard a destroyer in the north Atlantic was a likely set of orders that I expected to receive, but it didn’t [happen].   And they —

AM:  Set the stage for us in terms of what was going on in the world at that time, because the Korean War had passed by then. 

BG:  That’s correct. 

I had joined the Naval Reserve in the last few months of the Korean War – you’re right – and so it was a peacetime military. And you’re right; I think Eisenhower is the president at the time.  Yeah, so that’s what it was.  There wasn’t any major war going on at that moment.  Yeah, right.

AM:  But we still had a large presence in Europe –

BG:  Oh, absolutely.  Yeah, we were in Japan and Europe, and yeah, we were a world power, of course. 

So anyway, the orders came through and, lo and behold, they sent me to the Naval Security Group headquarters in Washington, D.C., and I spent three years in there and at the Pentagon, as a matter of fact, and I had a top secret cryptographic clearance, and I did that sort of stuff. 

AM:  On land. 

BG:  Yeah.  Yeah. 

AM:  (Laughs.)

BG:  I stayed right there at the headquarters and they had their listening posts all over the world. 

Anyway, I spent those three years in Washington, D.C., and met and married my wife and had my first child who was born at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. 

AM:  And was she a D.C.-area native? 

BG:  No, she was from Norfolk, Virginia, as a matter of fact, and her family had moved to Washington and then had moved back.  She moved into a young woman’s hotel there and then I met her.  I had met her roommates before I met her and they – but they knew who she was and they said I should meet her and I met her – I was at the Bolling Air Force base officers club on a Sunday afternoon with my brother, as a matter of fact, and we were just having – somebody said that’s her, so I went over and introduced myself to her and we met.  I had a difficult time getting dates with her.  I think I ended up going – seeing her on Tuesday nights.  (Laughs.)  That was all she was available for.  

AM:  Yeah. Why was she so busy? 

BG:  Well, she was a very popular young woman. 

AM:  So she was busy with other dates. 

BG:  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.

AM:  OK.  (Laughs.)

BG:  You’re right.  Yeah.  Or on the other hand, I think initially she was telling me that she was busy on those other nights because she was doing her hair.  (Laughs.)  

AM:  OK. Yeah.  The classic. 

BG:  I’ve been told that before.  Right?

AM:  Yeah.  Right. Yeah.

BG:  (Laughs.)   Anyway, that ended up with my tour of — my active duty and I —

AM:  Yeah. So by this point, when you met your future wife, were you both in your early 20s? 

BG:  We dated for a year and a half.  I think I had brought her home to dinner at Christmas the year before, back to Detroit, and then we dated and married during the next year.  But we were certainly going together all during that period.  Yeah, so we were 23.  Well, she was 21 and I was 24.   

AM:  And what kind of courtship was it?  Are you a romantic type?

BG:  Yeah, I am a romantic type.  But we fought a lot.  We fought a lot.

AM:  Prior to getting married as well.

BG:  Over a lot of things.  Politics. Religion.  She was not a Catholic and at that time I was very religious. She surprised me, though; she started taking instructions – I didn’t even know she was doing it.  And then so when we married, why, she had converted to Catholicism.

AM:  Had she been a Protestant or had she not been –

BG:  Her mother was a Southern Baptist. But she had – her mother was in her second married and she was married to a Catholic, a former Navy pilot, as a matter of fact.  So she had no problem with Catholics, but you start digging into it, what’s this pope all about and all that good stuff.  Right?  And I was a very serious Catholic.  But nevertheless, that’s what happened.  

AM:  So you proposed to her and — 

BG:  Yeah, and we were married for 46 years or something like that.  

AM:  And did you – at the time that you proposed, were you in uniform?  Were you still — 

BG:  Oh, yeah.  Absolutely, yeah.  For the last year – I was married there at the Navy chapel in Washington and our reception was at the officers club in my white uniform. 

AM:  So you were both in white.

BG:  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  That’s right. It was nice. 

AM: Where did you end up settling then after you got married and you were no longer detailed to D.C.?

BG:  OK.  And then I got out of the Navy.  I mean, my time was up and I took a job with General Motors up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, building guidance systems.  It was a great program.  It was a nine-month complete management training program.  It was a real opportunity.  

AM:  So that wasn’t training that you had received in the Navy; this was training that you got fresh. 

BG:  I had a bachelor of science degree in industrial management and that’s what they hired. 

AM:  Yeah.

BG:  Well, they liked that I was an officer. Anyway, we got to Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  I was there for two years.  It just didn’t work out.  I hated Milwaukee, to begin with.   I thought that from that wonderful southern Washington, D.C., that you could get along in a raincoat from November to March and then it’s cherry blossom time – it was wonderful!  I loved living – I always wanted to go south.  For 40 years I tried to get to go South and it never happened. 

AM:  Yeah.  I lived in D.C. for about as many years as you did.  

BG:  Oh, then you know what I mean.  It’s hot in the summertime but it’s just a wonderful place –

AM: It is. It is.

BG: — and more to do in Washington than in New York.  There’s so many nice things going on there.

AM:  Especially during the daytime.  There’s just endless museums to explore —

BG: Yep. All of it. Yeah.

AM: — and landmarks and great biking and nature nearby.

BG:  Yeah.  And it was fun being a bachelor there too.  I mean, there were a lot of girls there working for the Navy, as was Marlene, so.  It was great –

AM:  Did Milwaukee suit her at all or was it pretty mutual?

BG:  Neither one of us liked it.  She knew nobody there and I was gone all the time and it wasn’t fun.

Anyway – and she got pregnant again and lost the child there. 

AM:  You said again.  So she had already –

BG:  No, she had subsequently lost some children. 

AM: Oh, I see.

BG: You’re right.  That was the first one that we lost, yeah.  

So anyway, I had to get out so I saw some agency and I got a telegram from Whirlpool Corporation down in Ohio in a little town called Clyde, Ohio.  I almost didn’t answer – I always lived in a big town; I just couldn’t imagine living in a little town of 800 people, but fortunately there was a town about six miles away.  So I took a job there in production control, supervising the manufacture of like 3,000 washing machines a day for Sears, Roebuck, or it was Whirlpool but they sold them to Sears — Kenmore. Yeah. And I was there about three years and I had my second child by that time, and my third child, as a matter of fact. 

Anyway, they wanted to use computers to manage their production and nobody knew how to do that.  So they called all the people from Whirlpool’s headquarters to ours; who’s going to do this?  And they elected me and I knew nothing about computers, but I was certainly willing to learn.  So they sent me to a little school, to an RCA school, to learn how to do Fortran program, if you know that language or not.  But I did and I came back and worked on it to write the programming for it.  It got so complex that ultimately I couldn’t do it there, so weekly I’d go up to their headquarters up in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Then we ended up having to run the program on the University of Notre Dame’s – one of their biggest computers in the damn world, I guess, to do this, just because it was so inefficient that we were – and I didn’t know how to do it more efficiently.  But anyway, we got it done.

AM:  During the mid to late ’50s is when we’re – that’s the period we’re talking about. 

BG: Yes, we are.

AM: What would a computer have looked like at that time? 

BG:  Oh, it was as big as a room.

AM:  Enormous.

BG:  Yeah!  And you could see the tape machines going around and just the little punch cards, and there’d be a stack of them like that and I’d give it to these guys and they’d say, OK, we’ll do it tonight.  You’d give it to them and you come back in the morning and they’d say, it didn’t work.  And there were no diagnostics – I don’t know if you’re a computer guy or not – to tell you anything is wrong.  It could be a comma, a comma in there some place that you didn’t know about.  So it was really inefficient to figure out, as opposed to what we have today.  

AM:  Had you encountered computers at all in the Navy?

BG:  No.

AM:  Or was this a completely new experience for you?

BG:  Completely new.  And they had some research guys up there at Whirlpool’s headquarters that were helpful to me, but they’d answer questions and they’d say give me a – I said, go on over here; learn how to do that, and that’s the way I learned. 

AM:  So there was nothing in your background that had made them say, well, Bob’s the one for this job? (Laughs.)

BG:  No.  No.  Well, I will tell you that after college twice, while I was in the Navy, I went over to Marquette University when I was there – so that was after I got out of the Navy and took a course in calculus and I took another course while I was in the Navy at George Washington University in trigonometry, and I had no reason to do it. I just knew I was scared to take it in college.  Right?  But I had nothing to lose here so I took those two courses and I enrolled in an electronics school while I was in the Navy for three or four months, because – my head was there, and I wanted to do this, but I didn’t know how to do it.  So this was a great opportunity to wonder into that and I got it done.  I built this system. 

AM:  And did you think – at the time, did you have the thought that these big hulking computers with their punch cards and their reel to reel tape and all that, did you think this is the future? 

BG:  Oh, I knew that but I – who could have imagined iPhones?  

AM:  Or even the personal computer.  (Laughs.)

BG:  Or even the personal computer. Matter of fact, just a couple of weeks ago I found an old magazine that was written about the year 2000.  In the year 2000 — and it talked about what lied ahead of us.  It’s one of those books – think of that; in the future we’d have – there’s no mention of the Internet; there’s no mention of an iPhone.  Right?  Nothing.  I mean, it transformed us, a phone, in 10 or 15 years — right? — 10 or 15 years – just incredible what has taken place during this ongoing revolution. 

AM: So you would make these different trips.  You mentioned going to Notre Dame and whatnot.  You could think of this as where the world was going at that point.  

BG:  Yeah, and I loved doing it.  Yeah.  It was very satisfying, yeah. 

But I had no sooner – well, as a matter of fact, I was just finishing it up and Whirlpool Corporation in Benton Harbor, Michigan, was designing a new system to kind of do the same thing with all their distribution centers all the way across the country so that they – the product was being manufactured at their half a dozen factories going, being sent, and then ultimately off to their dealers and they were doing that, and I got a job opportunity at their corporate headquarters to participate in that.  OK?  And I did, and I was a project leader of this group. And Sears owned a company called Warwick Electronics.  It’s a Fortune 500 company by itself and it was based in Chicago – near Niles.  Anyway, Sears wanted to get out of the manufacturing business – smart of them.  Whirlpool wanted to build televisions, gave them not only the white goods — the laundry, and refrigeration — but now they’ve got the electronics, so it was an easy sell.  So they bought it and I went over with about six people from Whirlpool to manage this company and my job was to control the production in all these factories. And I’d go down and see the Sears buyers and they would tell me what they wanted, models and when they needed it, and I would come back and figure out how we were going to build it.  So that’s what happened. 

But this is like 1971.  Now, this is exactly the time when the Japanese were coming in with Sony and Panasonic and taking over America’s electronics business; that’s exactly when it was happening. And Motorola – they were all folding.  And so did Warwick Electronics.  OK?  And I had already decided maybe six months before that – I remember when – Whirlpool would go crazy over taking two cents out of the cost of making a tub or something like that, and there wasn’t any money left in American manufacturing and I decided that I needed to go get out of manufacturing, even though that was my history at that time – and this is part of the risk-taking that I’m guilty of. So I needed to get out of the manufacturing and into the service industry.  America was going into services rather than manufacturing.  This is 1971.  Smart, huh? 

AM:  Yeah.

BG:  And I did.  I said so what does that mean to me?  I said, well, I can go into insurance; I can go into banking; I can go into real estate – or like that.  Well, I went out and I decided I was going to – when I moved there, like anybody who’s just moved into, been transferred into a town, probably the biggest job of their lives, being transferred by their company into a community, and their families are still back home and they’ve got to find out where to live, what’s available, where should I live, how much should I spend, what are the values here?  And I said, nobody’s doing that, and so I started a company called Corptran. 

Ah. I forgot the name of that, this company; last night I was trying to think, what the hell was the name of the company?  It’s Corptran!  Corporate Transferees.  

And nobody was doing this.  There was no company [to help transferred employees] when they were transferred they said, OK, sell your home and we’ll pay your fees and buy a home wherever you want.  And nobody was there to do that, except now me.  So I had gone out and I said how am I going to get paid and I said, well, with regard to the real estate, I learned that real estate people get referral fees when they refer – so I said I’ll rely on these referrals for compensation.  I can get a 20 percent referral.  So I went out and because I was a college graduate I could take a course and get a broker’s license, rather than just a salesperson’s license, so that’s what I did.  And then I was still filling this thing out and Warwick Electronics had this – a rift.  They were shutting down.  OK?  So a whole bunch of us all were let out and I was happy because I was going to be able to get unemployment compensation for the next six months.  My wife went crazy. I opened up an office right across from the city county building downtown, just a little office in there and I got some literature and started beating on the doors of all the corporations around town.  Well, six months later I was broke.  Yeah, I’ve got a family of three kids.

AM:  I was going to say, you’ve got some little ones at home in 1971.  I mean, they weren’t tiny but they were –

BG:  They were mouths to feed.  

AM:  Yeah.

BG:  So –

AM:  I was going to say, too, that at that time I don’t think that the entrepreneurial spirit animated as many Americans as it does today. 

BG:  I think that’s probably right.  I mean, with Amazon and all the other opportunities and hundreds of thousands of software companies and stuff.  I think you’re right. 

AM:  Yeah.  I mean, my point is that you were going into some uncharted territory.

BG:  Well stated.  Yeah, that’s quite true.  Nobody was doing this.  And most people – you’re right, these are the days of being transferred.  You know, IBM meant “I’ve Been Moved,” and that’s what they did.  And it was my intention when I did that, I expected that I would continue to work in the corporate world for the rest of my life, and then get my gold watch and pension at 62 or whatever and move on.  So yeah; that’s very insightful.  You’re correct.

AM:  And at this point you’re in your mid-30s.  

BG:  Yeah.  That’s exactly right.  So I left, was broke by Christmastime.

When I moved here there was Baird & Warner and Quinlan & Tyson were the key competitors in Chicago.  Q&T goes back to 1855 or something like that, ended up with 15 or 20 offices.  Anyway, I tried to find these key people [in real estate companies] in the northwest, North Shore, western suburbs, south that I could work with, these regional brokers.  And I met this guy named Dick Rutledge and he was the owner – one of the owners of Quinlan & Tyson, which, like I say, was like Baird & Warner.  We got along fine and at the end of it, he came down to visit me and I said, why don’t you buy my company?  And I could just see him saying, what am I buying?  Right?  (Laughs.)  He said, not a chance, I can’t do that.  But, he said, why don’t you come on and do that kind of stuff for us?  So I took a job as a salesman with this company in Arlington Heights, and within weeks I said god, this is great; I’m never going to do anything else again.  I love this business. 

AM:  And you were no longer broke.  (Laughs.)

BG:  Well, yeah.  Ordinarily, when somebody goes into, you’ve got to wait until something sells, and then you’ve got to wait until they close, and this is dangerous because I had nothing else.  But I was instantly – I mean, within a couple of weeks I had sold a property, and within a month I had sold two; within three or four months, I was earning more than I ever did in the corporate world. I was really, really good.  By the end of the year, I was the number one salesperson in that office.  Within two years –

AM:  What do you think made you really good at that? 

BG:  I had a lot of people in real estate – they didn’t work that hard; they weren’t that good, to be honest with you.  And so, by comparison, I was good.  And I remember saying to myself – this is kind of important – I said, how am I going to get somebody to give me their business when they know so much more than I do?  There’s so much more experience.  And I remember saying I have to be better prepared; I have to do a better job.  This is honest to goodness truth, Andy.  OK?  And so I did.  I started – knowing when I went out on a listing, a call, I knew exactly what I was looking at and I did my homework, showed them what they were competing with, and they knew I was prepared. And I think I also was a very believable person and –

AM:  In terms of sincerity?

BG:  Yeah.  Yeah.  I coined this little thing, which I could never use because it’s so tacky; it was the ICE Man:  Integrity Competent Effective.  OK?  But I was really good.  And at the end of the year, the first year, I was getting a lot of business from my own neighborhood, but sometimes people would call the office; they wouldn’t remember me; they would just call the office, and I said, I’ve got to do something about that.  So I developed a marketing plan.  I bought big calendars and that sort of thing and sent it out, and I dominated the business.  I had 70 percent of the people calling me in the following couple of years, and by the end of the second or third year, I was the top salesperson in the whole multiple listing service.  And at that time I thought I’d like to manage.  I found a location up in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, and told my bosses about it and they said good idea, and they went out and rented it and then said, well, we’re considering you.  I said, what do you mean you’re considering me?  I found the damn place.  Right?  But anyway, I took it and I found out from that Dick Rutledge who owned the company a few years ago – maybe five years ago — that they expected, when they opened up an office, to lose for two years and I was profitable in six months. 

AM:  You really were good.

BG:  I was good.  I really was.  And people were coming to me – one day in that first year four people came to me, and I had had – in my first year I had had business – I had listings and they came and sold them.  And four of them came to me from one office and said we want to work for you.  I was good.  (Laughs.)

AM:  Yeah.  You were becoming known.  

BG:  Yeah.  Yeah.  That’s right.  And so now I was a manager and then two years later they made me the regional manager, and by this time we’ve got seven offices out in the northwest suburbs, and then a couple years later the company ran into trouble in Evanston – the home office was in Evanston, on Sherman Avenue.  And I became the vice president of operations by that time, and then they sold it to Merrill Lynch, and then I left.  To be honest with you, I wasn’t really that happy with myself in the corporate environment.  It’s not really the best place for me, as I had just learned.  There was – you know, you get into that – you have a great idea and you go to the corporation; they say, oh, interesting; we’ll look at that next year if the bond yield is this or that, and they don’t move as rapidly as maybe I do. 

AM:  Yeah, because it sounds like when you first got into real estate you hit the ground running and you were just able to do these things with your own initiative and your own – 

BG:  Yeah.  I didn’t have to look to to anybody because it’s kind of a do-it-yourself kind of a business.  And so that’s what happened.  So I left there – and I had developed some copyrighted reports that I let Quinlan & Tyson use, all of which has to do with showing the buyer – or the seller what they’re really competing with on a case-by-case basis, and it was a little more complex.  But they were copyrighted and I allowed them – so I said, I’m going to start a company and I’m going to sell this and I’m going to be a millionaire in a year, selling it across the country.  Well, that didn’t happen.  (Laughs.)

AM:  OK. When is this? 

BG: This is ’84.  I struggled with it in my basement on my pool table for a year and then a friend of mine convinced me that I needed to have my own space; he said, you’ll be amazed what happens.  And my son was just graduating college so I brought him in and I didn’t make any money, but at least I saw some future.  But it was a one-product company; that’s hard to make it.  And I had sold it to Re/Max when they were quite young.  OK? They had considered buying the whole thing from me, but they elected not to so I simply supplied the product to them and it wasn’t enough to keep it going so I started expanding my inventory and I started doing stationery and the little cards that you get at your door, say, hey, I just sold this house; can I sell yours and can I be your realtor?  And then I started business cards and I ended up being their number two supplier by the time we got done.  I built it up to almost a $3 million company.

Yeah, I was doing fine and continued to do fine.  But during that time, just before I left that, you said I had become known, and I was, and I was offered the presidency of two companies; one of them was a company called [name deleted] and I knew the owner and I didn’t like him.  And I said, I may be the president, but he’s the chairman and he’s the guy that would be coming down on me.  I said, I can’t work with a guy like that.  I just don’t like him.  He even had an airplane he was going to offer me to – his airplane to use, but I said no, not a chance.  But two years later, I had another offer, and I knew the management and I liked them.  And they offered me the presidency too, and, Andy, I’ve got to tell you, I had a meeting with them and then they called to set up a second meeting and I said, I don’t think this is what I want to do.  And it’s bothered me – no, it didn’t bother me for 35 years, but about two or three years ago it started eating at me.  My Peggy says I’ve been carping about it for longer than that, maybe 10 years, but I’ve regretted that. 

AM:  But why do you think it took you, you know, a couple decades for –

BG:  Well, I got off and my other companies – you know, I just forgot about it.  I just forgot about it.  And I was doing fine with the other and now I’m not doing anything so it’s eating at me, I suppose.

AM:  Yeah.  Now you have the time to think about it.  Yeah.  (Laughs.)

BG:  (Laughs.)  Yeah.  Yeah.  I think there may be some truth to that. 

So anyway, the company fell into hard times during the 2008, 9, 10, 2011 – 

AM:  Which was a tough time for a lot of real estate, yeah.

BG:  Yeah.  And anyway, the business is going down.  By that time, I’m spending most of my time in Florida and it was time to sell, so the only person in the world who was interested was a competitor because it would really strengthen his business, so I did, sold it to him.

While I was in training here in Chicago, during that time that I was with Warwick Electronics and then into real estate, we were drilling several different places, at Great Lakes and also here at Northwestern University, and it was during that time that the antiwar element was so strong that they had removed all the rifles and that sort of thing from the armories and we were asked not to wear our uniforms during this period.  It’s an awful period, when you think about it, what happened in this country, not necessarily all the fault of the young people; they certainly had a voice to say.  And anyway, as you know, the nation was in upheaval.  The second command I had was – and it was towards the – it was very towards the end of my 20 years in the Navy – I was a commanding officer of Cruiser Destroyer Division 9-5, I think.  At that time I had my four years of training while I was in college as an enlisted man, three years on active duty, and then, what, 13 years as an officer and came out as a three-striper [full commander]. 

AM: During those years of, you know, your reserve duties, how often would you be called to do the training and that sort of thing? 

BG:  OK, yeah.  It’s a good question.  I would drill every week for 48 weeks and then go on two-weeks training duty, and those two weeks training duty included – I was always on 24-hour recall, all during those years.  When the Berlin crisis came and when the Cuban crisis was there and it seems to me there was a third one, I remember sitting in my car at lunchtime wondering whether I was going to be called.  But we weren’t.  They relied on their other forces to fill those needs.  

AM:  What might that have involved, being mobilized to like –

BG:  Oh, my active duty – and it changed over the years, along with my rank — OK? — but I told you that my command was cruiser-destroyer group, but I would have been activated and put aboard an aircraft carrier, and I did serve about USS Wasp, I think it was.  And I’ve also served on an oiler. I’ve been to the Naval War College. I’ve been to an antisubmarine warfare tour down in Florida.  I’ve been aboard 150-foot PCF, which was kind of fun.  

AM:  And then when did you basically retire from –

BG:  As soon as I had 20 good years, so that took me from 1953 as a young 18-year-old till I was 39, so I retired at 39 years old as a commander.  And then I got to wait 30 years and then they started paying me a pension when I turned 60.  (Laughs.)

AM:  OK. And you still have a hand in it because you’ve been active in trying to —

BG:  You’re talking about Veteran Salute.  Not too many years ago, I don’t think it was any more than 10, 12 – I don’t know, like a dozen years ago or so.  I’ve always been a proud veteran.  I think most men are.  Many of us just simply put it behind, say that was something I did during my life and they think no more about it.  I think they should be prouder of that and exhibit it more frequently.  And I think the people want them to as well.  Anyway, I learned about a dozen years ago or thereabouts that during George Bush’s – W. Bush, I think – during his administration, he had passed a law as part of the defense bill that for the first time recognized the veterans’ right to render a right-hand military hand salute at the appropriate occasions.  And I knew that nobody knew about this and I decided to get involved.  The only person I knew that was doing anything about it was the astronaut Buzz [Aldrin], it seems to me, and he did something about it but not much.  OK?  And I got involved and over the course of several years my goal was that they would take six seconds at the Super Bowl and say veterans are invited to render their hand salute as provided by the United States Congress.  I never got that done.  OK?  But from a state of virtual zero knowledge, I think when I got done we were up to 30 or maybe 40 percent of the people I met recognized that they had the right to do it.  I still haven’t seen them doing it that much, but as I’ve talked to people, they either said, no, I never heard about it; thank you telling me that, or they did it.  OK?

AM:  So Bush signed this into law but the awareness didn’t exist. 

BG:  There was no promotion of it whatsoever. 

AM:  Yeah.  So you took that on yourself. 

BG:  I did it by myself and I contacted every congressman and senator that ever wore the uniform. I got acknowledgments from the Veterans Administration. I’ve written to Colin Powell. I’ve written to everybody there is and I’ve contacted the NBA, Major League Baseball, the NFL, the hockey league.  I contacted everybody and looking for their support.  And they all say, yes, that’s somebody else’s job and it didn’t get far.  I know there’s a team out in St. Charles, Illinois, a small minor league thing, and they do it every year, and I have no idea.  I can’t know how far it went.  But I did a yeoman’s job on it.  I spent a lot of time and a lot of attention in my website, veteransalute.org, I think it was.  I don’t think it’s up there anymore.  But I finally gave up on it three or four years ago and I wandered off into one of my other things. 

AM:  But there were some notable successes along the way.

BG:  I know – because there was no other – other than Buzz, and he didn’t do that much.  I did a lot more than he did.  So if it’s known out there, it was me. 

AM:  Yeah.  I think you got written up in The Daily Herald?

BG:  Oh, yeah.  Yeah.  It was not only here but it was down in Naples, Florida.  I was getting on my elevator in my condominium building with my neighbor and I just picked up a paper and looked – I looked at it; it was my face on the front page of this newspaper down there and I had no awareness of it.  And anyway, that was the fun part of it.  I had a lot of press coverage because I had done a lot for it, but then it’s time was gone, so.

AM:  So when you kind of stepped down from doing that you didn’t pass the baton to someone else who was going to –

BG:  No.  I just let it go.  It just fell by the wayside and yeah.  And sometimes those things happen.  I had several other things that I did — telephone greeting cards, and it was a great idea, but, you know what?  I have to admit that I can crank out the ideas but I’m probably not the world’s best marketing person.  I should be.  I would think that I would be.  But I’m not.  And that was a great program.  It essentially allows you to pick up the phone and call this number and leave a happy birthday message, a congratulations message, and it had an inventory of songs that would be appropriate – love songs, Valentine’s Day, military songs for those people in the service, college songs that they can send to all their friends on football mornings and it played “Hail to the Victors” or whatever.  You know, for all the songs from here to California and down to Texas, and leave a personal message with them.  And if I had done it right, it would be so simple.  I think I was charging 50 cents and I should have been giving it to them for free and rely on – as a matter of fact, I even trademarked the name “Coke Call”; I was going to sell it to Coca-Cola and let them begin the message with, “This message to you comes from Coke” — Coke Call.  I’m going to make a Coke Call. 

AM:  Yeah.  When were you doing that?  When was this?

BG:  I’d say 10, 12 years ago.  

AM:  OK. So it would have been during the era of the smartphone? 

BG:  Yes, it was during that time because I was done expecting people would use their computers and they were talking about new software, using – that would be applicable to mobile phones, and I didn’t have it converted to that, so, you know, maybe I got tired of it or something like — but it was a great – it still is a great idea. 

AM: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

BG: You find someone who wants to buy – I’ll work a deal.  (Laughs.) 

And then comes Park on a Dime.   Park on a Dime is alive and running right now.  You can get it on Amazon for $29.  It was born about four or five years ago when my Peggy was getting out of the garage; she was shopping and she was squeezed because I had parked a little bit too close to the other car and she couldn’t get out, or she had to squeeze to get out of it.  I [said] like the ordinary entrepreneur says, there’s got to be a better way, and there was.  So it took me maybe two years and I developed Park on a Dime and it’s a laser beam will [guide] your car front, back and sideways within one inch.  Yeah. That’s what it does.  You can find it.  It’s on – parkonadime.com, through Amazon. 

AM:  So a real update on the hanging tennis ball in the garage. 

BG:  Oh, yeah. The hanging tennis ball is a technology that’s 90 years old.  In 1926 they had the first one, but it has nothing to do with sideward motion.  Right?  This is the best things that’s on the market. And its sales linger; one gets sold every day or something like that.  

AM:  OK.  Yeah.

BG:  I’m just now turning it over to my son.  He can take care of the whole thing.

AM:  So you set up the manufacturing in China or something?

BG:  Yeah, [I designed it and had it] made in China.  And yeah, we’re working on that inventory.  The whole thing is mine.  As a matter of fact, it’s copyrighted and patented.  There’s an application that can be used using that same patent on driverless cars.  Yeah.  And it works [with] the same [principle].  When you put it near the garage, you simply flip it on and that technology, it would park the car perfectly, better than a GPS.  GPS only takes you within about 30 feet; this, one inch.  

On the fun side, there’s the demolition derby.  The year I turned 66 I decided – up in Walworth, Wisconsin, I had seen this for a couple years, traditional demolition derby at the county fair.  I said, I gotta do this, so I spent 200 bucks and bought a – went down to the local dealer, Ford dealer, and I bought an old Mercury, I think it was, and then had to prepare it.  You have to knock out all the windows; you’ve got to take out – you can’t use more than a half a gallon of gasoline; all the windows come out; put in a locked bar to make sure something doesn’t come through the window and decapitate you; put on a helmet and go up there with this car.  And it’s kind of interesting.  They have, I don’t know, a hundred cars and they put them out in heats of about 15 and you get in there and you just start beating the hell out of [each other]. And I was in there the first year and I think I had 45 people there, my friends, neighbors, and family, and it was such fun.  I came back for three years. I said either the car or me is going to go.  I just truly enjoyed it.  Yeah, those were fun days.

I remember to get there – well, when you signed up for this thing, there’s an application and in the application it says that if I were less than 18 years old I had to have my parents’ permission. (Laughs.) And I was there one night – you had to be there at midnight.  They treated you like dogs, at least it was for me; maybe the kids were used to it.  But a bunch of them came up to me about 5:00 in the morning; I said, oh, god, this is trouble.  And they were just wondering why an old man like me was participating in this thing.  The side of the cars – on one of them, my son-in-law said you’re 66; why don’t you add a six to it, now you become the 666, the devil thing, and then the other side said, “pick on someone your own age.”  (Laughs.)  It was just a fun thing for me.  

What else did I do?  Oh, I’ve to tell you about the parade. 

AM:  The parade, yeah.

BG:  The parade.  OK, so, Naples had – am I boring you with this?  (Laughs.)  I was in Naples and I had been down to the St. Patrick’s Day parade for 20 years; 40,000 people go to this parade.  And all the floats in there, I noticed, were from the colleges in the East Coast, and I said, where are the Midwest people. And I decided I was going to do something about it.  I mean, this is true:  Almost nothing from the Midwest.  So I went over to see the guy from – that ran the parade. I said, where are you from?  He said Massachusetts.  And I said, it figures.  OK?  But here’s the problem:  I’m from the Midwest and I think we ought to have a Midwest presentation here.  And he said, I agree with you!  And I said, Oh, OK.  He said, what do you need?  I said, well, it seems to me if you’re going to be in a parade, you’ve got to have a band; you’ve got to have somebody carrying the flags; you’ve got to have a message or something to give the people.  So he gives me a band.  Anyway, I put this all together and I said I need some money; I could afford it myself, but I said this is better if I don’t. 

So [Chicago-based] Northern Trust Bank has a private bank in Naples, Florida; that’s where I have my home.  And so I went to see them and I said, you guys ought to be doing [something in the parade], and they said, we agree with you!  So they gave me, I don’t know, a couple thousand dollars. You know the signs that you see at a political thing that says Michigan or Ohio or whatever?  I made them up for all the famous things about Chicago – Northwestern University and Miracle Mile and the Cubs, the Bears, and all of them. And I had all these signs made up.  And then I said, who’s going to carry the flag?  And I said, who likes to be in parades?  And I said cops, firemen. And so I got on my website; I just put something in there about it.  Within about two hours I get a call from a guy from the retired Chicago patrolmen’s organization; there’s 200 retired Chicago cops down in Cape Coral, and they said, ah, we’d love to be in there!  (Laughs.)  So [we] had a cordon of retired cops there. So I’ve got a float with music coming on it, and we had a sign that was as wide as the street that said “CHICAGOLAND, Heartland of [America].” And the people loved it.  It was marvelous.

This old, old friend came up to me one time and she said, “Bob, I can’t believe you did this.” She says, “But I’ve known you a long time and many of us have great ideas, but we don’t do it,” she said. “But I’ve noticed — we’ve noticed — that you just do.” And I did for a couple years and then stopped.   

Anyway, those are my stories.  

AM:  Well, speaking of stories, are there any stories that you’re particularly well known for that you love to tell and people, you know, love to listen in on? 

BG:  My father used to tell the same jokes all the time so I don’t want to be accused of that.  (Laughs.) 

I guess my favorite funny story is a quickie.  Two guys were in Hawaii and they were arguing about whether it should be pronounced “Ha-vy-ee” or “Ha-why-ee.”  Have you ever heard this story?  

AM:  No.  No.

BG:  So they saw this old man over there and he looked like a Hawaiian. They went up to him and said, “Sir, we’ve been arguing about whether it should be called ‘Ha-vy-ee’ or ‘Ha-why-ee,’” and the guy instantly said, “Ha-vy-ee.”  He said, “Thank you, sir.”  And he said, “You’re ‘velcome.’”  (Laughs.)

AM:  (Laughs.)  

BG:  Isn’t that funny? (Laughs.) Anyway, the rest of my jokes all get dirty, I guess. 

AM: Do you want to say anything about those years of raising your family and the kids?  I mean, I know that’s not a very specific question but.

BG:  I’ll mention that a young guy who worked for us, as a matter of fact, was just about ready to have his first child and I said, you know what?  This is going to be the happiest experience of your life.  Having a child is something that you can’t describe, and those people who – and there are many people who elect not to have children, and I said, my god, they may have their own reasons but they don’t know what they’re missing.  It is such a complete joy, my children.  Such a complete joy, from the moment they’re born and it will never end.  It’s golden.  Golden. 

AM:  And I assume that extends to grandchildren as well. 

BG:  Yeah, they – there’s a greater bond obviously with my children; I’ve known them since they were infants and I only have little pieces of my grandchildren, but they’re very, very important to me.  I’ve given each one of them a jackknife.  It’s a decorative jackknife, upon their graduation from high school.  I’ve taken each one of them out for lunch to tell them about college and how they need to get serious about it; it’s no longer casual as it was for me, and that they need to commit themselves to – and they all say, yes, yeah, OK, grandpa. 

AM:  Do you tell them about your freshman year awakening when everything changed for you?

BG:  Yes.  I think I have.  And I’ve told them – of course, I told them that when they went to high school, how wonderful it would be, but I’ve told each one of them about the joys of college life, and it is; it’s wonderful, wonderful experience for them, especially going away. 

Just another observation, and maybe you ask yourself, when the happiest days in your life were, and mine were in my very early 40s.  I was economically secure. I had a great family, a marriage, and I’m happy with everything.  Everything about life was just great.  Not that it’s so bad now, but that was – if you had to pick a time – I might earlier have said college days or something, but fulfilment – my life was full. 

About six years ago I lost my brother and a couple other friends.  I made a list.  I have 18 people on this list, people — dear friends in my life, most of whom I could share all of my dirty little secrets with.  Everybody’s got them and I could share them with many of these men. And at that time, there were nine and nine – nine dead, nine alive.  But at different stages of my – grade school, high school, college, work years, Navy – different times you have close friends.  And I think I’m a very fortunate guy to have that many people that I counted as dear friends, that I wouldn’t miss their funerals.  And now there’s only four or five of us left, so.

AM:  Have you gone to high school reunions over the years?

BG:  Oh, I went to every one of them.  

AM:  What’s the most recent?

BG:  Three years ago.

AM:  OK.

BG: They used to start — I told you it was a boys high school, OK, so it was a weekend.  We’d go over there on Fridays and play golf and Saturday and have a big beer bus, I guess you’d call it, that evening; next night, dinner/dance with a band and — a big deal, OK?  Now the last one was at a retirement home at lunch, and I guess you could buy a glass of wine at the little bar they set up but most didn’t.  And we just had lunch, talked about the old days and goodbye.  Yeah. So that’s what happens. 

AM: Yeah, I guess so.

BG: But each one of these guys has passed away; I strike their name and put them over on the other list.  It’s just life.   But I’m grateful that I have – I’m not grateful that I’ve outlived them, but I realize that when my moment comes I have already had more life than any of my friends – right? – other than four or five of us left.  So I’m OK.  Yeah.

I mean, here I am talking about — and my kids are getting all ready for me to go.  Right?  I understand that.  That used to – might have been a bother to me at one time, but it doesn’t any longer. 

AM:  Well, but, at the same time, you can’t be thrilled about it.

BG:  No!  (Laughs.) No, I’m still getting my kicks.  Yeah.  And I remember my mom towards the end, she was 92, saying what am I here for?  And that’s too bad.  But I –

AM:  How long did your dad live?

BG:  He died early.  He died at 67.  I remember – because I compute — it was like — I don’t have it exact anymore — 67 years, five months and 23 days, or something like that. And when I turned 67 years, five months, and 23 days, I had it down and I went out with my friend and got loaded — happened to be his birthday, but I was there because of that.  I said I made it, yeah, so that was — on that specific day when we had lived the same number of days in our lives. 

AM:  Well, I remember a few years ago I was listening to “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross on public radio and I forget who her guest was but it was someone who at that point was getting to be about 80, and she said, you know, I’ve reached the point in my life where my death will no longer be reported as tragic.  (Laughs.)

BG:  (Laughs.)  Yeah.  Yeah.  

AM:  Because there’s a certain age that you reach where will people will then say, well, he had a good life.  

BG:  Yeah.  Yeah.  It was just about a week ago I was reading about some guy down in Naples; I was just reading the paper.  He was a local real estate magnate, and a big article about him.  And I thought, that’s not going to be for me.  I never did that one thing that I told you that I still regret.  Yeah.  (Laughs.)

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