By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — Jokes somehow make death less terrifying.
I’ve had some recent encounters with this maxim.
The other day, a man at the cash register at a Denny’s Restaurant declared: “I’m so old that when I was born the Dead Sea wasn’t even sick yet.”
A few days later, Rabbi Devorah Marcus at Temple Emanu-El was talking about the Torah study class she leads. Class members discuss the weekly portion line by line, she said, but rarely get to finish the portion in the study session. Every following week, to stay current with the rest of the Jewish world, they start another portion. The rabbi’s fantasy would be to someday pick up where the class left off, and continue reading the Torah line by line.
A man in the congregation responded out loud: “We’d be dead before we’d finish!”
Everybody laughed.
On Friday, Gerry Greber, a valued friend and writer for San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage and San Diego Jewish World, died after being ill for six months. Earlier this year, we had discussed the possibility of his writing more stories for this publication, but the octogenarian became too ill to do so. He also was dead before he could finish– before he could start actually.
During graveside services at El Camino Cemetery in the Sorrento Valley section of San Diego, Rabbi Ralph Dalin, the community rabbi affiliated with the Jewish Federation of San Diego County, summarized on Monday, Dec. 23, some of the high points of Gerry’s career. He had served in the military at the end of World War II, then returned to New York where he obtained from CCNY a degree in chemistry.
Gerry’s first “wonderful” opportunity was to wash bottles at a laboratory, and his next was a job in Washington D.C. at the Bureau of Rubber Standards. Next he took a job with Pillsbury in Springfield, Illinois, the city in which he met his longtime wife Marilyn. She considered him a “fascinating older New York man.”
They married 2 1/2 years later, then moved numerous times so he could advance his career in the food industry. His late son Steven was born in Chicago, his daughter Shari in New York, and his youngest daughter Laurie in Decatur, Illinois.
Then the Grebers moved back to Chicago, where Gerry worked for General Foods and made his mark as the man who developed many popular food brands, including “Shake and Bake,” “Cook in a Bag,” “Pop Rocks,” “Good Seasons,” and “Open Pit Barbecue Sauce.”
In that he developed “Shake and Bake,” you might think he was a very wealthy man, but the patent belonged not to him, but to his employer General Foods. Gerry was paid a nice salary, but it was his employer who raked in the money.
After 24 years with General Foods, Gerry and Marilyn decided to pull up stakes and become involved with American International Development, a consulting firm that helped small companies improve their manufacturing procedures for food products. Their work took them to such places as Honduras, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Jamaica.
Gerry had a thing about food; members of his family said almost every time he opened the refrigerator he would sing.
Once Gerry retired, he started volunteering. He initially served as a docent at the Birch Aquarium in La Jolla, but when traffic between the aquarium and his home in Carlsbad became too difficult, he transferred his allegiance to the nearby Museum of Making Music. And he began writing more and more articles for San Diego Jewish Press Heritage and San Diego Jewish World, many of them about World War II veterans.
I had the privilege of being Gerry’s editor, and I don’t remember him ever complaining about my editing — at least not directly to me. But then he met Gerry Burstain, who also was on the staff of the Heritage.
When they found out that they both wrote for the Heritage, Gerry Greber exclaimed: “You know what this means don’t you? We both have the same butcher!”
What a kidder that guy was.
Besides Marilyn and his two daughters, Gerry leaves seven grandchildren.
Everyone who knew him, will miss him. May his memory be for a blessing.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com