How They Met: Beth and Bob Gross
(L to r): Bob Gross, Beth Gross, Eva Sturm-Gross, Abby Gross, Mira Gross-Keck, Rachel Gross, Charlotte Sturm, Reuben Gross-Keck, James Sturm, and Tim Keck. The photographer was Rebecca Warren, our friend and neighbor down the road in Hartland, Vermont, where this shot was taken en plein air. Becca was driving past us as we took a postprandial family walk and stopped to chat, then asked if we wanted her to take a photo of us. Tim, pictured in the trees (photoshopped in by our son-in-law James Sturm), had left the day before to return to Seattle. Summers are the only opportunity all year for the 10 of us to be in the same place at the same time.
Once upon a time, before computers, Tinder, and Coffee Meets Bagel, young people met romantic partners by chance, or else through blind dates or family. Beth and Bob Gross met via the last two.
In 1962, Isabeth Rosenberg of Great Neck, New York, was en route to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to enroll in the one-year Harvard-Radcliffe Program in Business Administration (aka HR-PBA). In those pre-feminist days, the program was the only avenue for women to enter the Harvard Business School for an MBA. Beth had “honoured” in philosophy at McGill University as an undergrad. Why she was committing to a year or more of studying business is a story for another time.
Beth spent that year in a charming brick women’s dorm that housed many of Harvard’s female graduate students. Ten blocks away, Robert Gross of Philadelphia, a recent 1962 graduate of Swarthmore College, had found digs in an apartment in a triple-decker clapboard house with two college buddies.
Bob was in Cambridge to get a Master’s in Education at Harvard’s School of Education. Although he had honored in English at Swarthmore, he had been turned off to graduate studies after attending a campus lecture on the joys of English scholarship by a visiting luminary in the field. Instead, he decided to become a high school English teacher.
Unbeknownst to Beth, her second cousin Stanley had given her name to Bob. Stanley, also of Philadelphia, was a close friend and classmate of Bob’s at Swarthmore. Despite his having seen Beth only at random family bar mitzvahs and Cousins Clubs through his childhood and teens, Stanley told Bob that Beth was his “favorite cousin.”
A few weeks into the semester, Bob called Beth to invite her to a Rosh Hashanah dinner at his apartment with some of his friends. When he arrived to pick her up at her dorm, he was wearing a sports jacket, blue work shirt, Rooster tie, and black jeans. His lush, black curly hair matched his dark eyes, a coloring unlike her blue-eyed brothers and father. Clean-shaven, Bob sported a cleft in his chin and a dimple in his left cheek that flashed when he smiled. She liked what she saw.
Beth and Bob Gross, circa 1966.
At his apartment, she tasted tsimmes for the first time (yummy) and found the mostly Swarthmore College crew of 10 or so people to be witty, clever, and close-knit. The friends spoke of parties in the Crum (which Beth mentally spelled with a “b” until 16 years later). What she failed to appreciate that night was that Bob had cooked the entire meal. (She could make edible French toast, but that was the extent of her culinary skill.)
Bob found her smart and attractive. He can’t remember what she wore, although he does remember the menu (matzo ball soup, chopped liver, roast chicken, and of course, tsimmes). He was smitten, and the often critical crew of Swatties agreed she was terrific.
They dated for the rest of the year and moved to NYC after that summer. In Cambridge, Beth knew after five days of classes that she had no desire to apply for the MBA. She finished the year with a certificate and a nasty case of mono, and Bob earned his master’s. In New York, he started teaching at Mineola High School on Long Island. Beth had enrolled at Columbia to take the requisite science courses to apply to med school. She was still dragging around by the end of the summer and decided instead to get a master’s in teaching at Columbia.
Living in Manhattan nearly 60 blocks apart, Beth and Bob remained a couple. The next year she taught fourth grade at a school in East Harlem. Bob continued commuting to Long Island for his teaching job. After the next year, their apartment leases were up. Her roommates were moving on, and she and Bob decided to marry and share an apartment in Gramercy Park. That lasted for a year, because Bob was eager to go back to Harvard for a doctorate in educational administration.
For the next few years, they would move frequently: to Cambridge and Brookline, Massachusetts; Setauket and Stony Brook, New York; and then, in 1977, Swarthmore.
During the New England years, Beth taught in Wayland, Massachusetts, Bob worked in the dean’s office at Harvard’s School of Ed, they had two daughters — Abby in 1968, and Rachel in 1970 — and bought acreage in Vermont with Beth’s saved teaching salary.
Their moves were to increasingly smaller locations, Swarthmore being the tiniest. Beth nearly wept when she saw its one-square mile entirety. But they both thrived. Bob taught in the education program (now department) at Swarthmore College, became head of the Upper School at Friends Select, and returned to Swarthmore as Dean of Students.
With three others, Beth started Sidetracks, a small restaurant in the Swarthmore train station. After five years, she bought the Swarthmorean newspaper with her neighbor, Don Delson, and four months later, when the editor fled, became its de facto editor.
Now retirees, Beth and Bob spend their days doing New York Times crossword puzzles, playing word games, painting (Bob), still trying to learn Spanish, avidly watching MSNBC (Beth), and visiting their daughters — Abby, a family doctor in Seattle, and Rachel, a printmaker and college instructor in Hartland, Vermont. Their four grandchildren range in age from 11 to 20. This summer, Beth and Bob will celebrate 55 years of marriage. The gift for that number? An emerald, says Google, because it is as rare as the number of couples who stay together that long (and still laugh at each other’s bon mots).
— Beth and Bob Gross
