Gary Shaw Eulogy
I need to preface this: In grief, I extend my most heart-felt love and condolences to Jeanne, Heather, Jillian, Robin, and all Gary’s family. And friends.
But I am not going to talk about grief now. And I am not going give a spoken obituary. I’m going to talk about Gary the way I knew him.
Gary and I met as teenage freshmen at CCNY. I’d just moved to the Bronx. He was 18, about 3 months older than me. I wasn’t legal yet. We had a lot in common, but we also had some complementary strengths and weaknesses.
We hung out. A lot. At my place, at work at Louis Harris Associates, at his place in Berkeley or mine in San Francisco, at his apartment with Nancy and Heather in the Bronx or mine in Manhattan or Queens.
That easy hang – that is essential Gary. All the things he was back then, in the final teenage years, aged well. Over time, they were built on, expanded, or honed: I hate to use the cliché, but Gary was an old soul.
Maya Angelou said,
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about how Gary made people feel.
Shortly after we met, we began spending a lot of time together – a true bromance, although nobody back then had a clue what that meant.
It is 1968. I got Gary a job working with me at Louis Harris and Associates, a market research company synonymous with political polling at the time. We worked together there for a bunch of months, 9 hours a day, side-by-side. For what it’s worth, that was Gary’s entrance into the market research business. You’re welcome.
Here’s an ‘easy hang’ image from then:
Louis Harris’ offices were at the top two floors of 80 Rockefeller Plaza. We discovered unused stairs that led up to the machine room above the skyscraper’s elevators.
There was an old desk and a few broken-but-usable office chairs, and floor-to-ceiling windows offering a billion-dollar view of Manhattan. We began taking lunch and breaks there. It was our private club, where we could talk, smoke and eat in complete privacy.
We took full advantage. There, more than anyplace else, we got to know each other, amidst constant laughter. Because I don’t think anybody ever had a conversation with Gary that didn’t include laughter.
And that’s the image I want you to see: Gary with his feet up on a desk, a cigarette in his hand, talking and laughing, with that incredible panorama behind him.
Those conversations about plans, philosophies, life-strategies, news, friends, music - we tested and challenged each other, and we laughed a lot. Nothing was serious enough to not crack up over.
I grew to respect and admire Gary’s intelligence and insight, always informed by his well-developed sense of whimsy and unerring grasp of absurdity. I felt like it was the best of times.
I wish I could say those conversations were indelible. But I can’t remember a single word. Nor anything specific that we did – we ate, conversed, smoked, laughed, my memories are pretty generic. But I remember how I felt. I clearly remember how I felt.
Those of you who have had the remarkable luck to spend time talking with Gary will know what I felt: Better for having spent the time with him. Lighter and happier for the humor. A little bit smarter - the information Gary seemed to always have on hand to support his opinions was never dispensed condescendingly or pedantically. More optimistic, because Gary made you feel there was always hope. You feel a little happier with humanity after Gary talks with you.
Gary brought his humor, intelligence and charm, his integrity and honesty, and his love to every person he met.
Listeners in the cheap seats got it. Even the people who opposed his position got it.
Gary left Harris for California, and I followed a few months later. When I came back to New York first, we stayed in touch, writing letters, a thing people did back then. I had to work hard to make my letters almost as entertaining as Gary’s.
Gary came back to the City to start a family, and we remained constantly in each other’s lives.
When my music career blew up in the mid-seventies, and I decided to change directions, I turned to Gary for help. Of all the people I knew and was close to, his smarts and savvy, his perspective and grittiness, and how much he knew about me made him my go-to person when I needed to figure things out.
That’s another thing about him – he was trustworthy. No small thing then, and more so now. His attitude of, ‘we got this’ was exactly what I needed.
I needed to get unemployment insurance in order to get into a job training program. Gary got me a temporary job at Feldman Research, which ended up causing him considerable grief, which he endured willingly in the name of our friendship. The good news was that this was around the time Jeanne entered the picture.
The main thing for me was that, at that time, he was my counsel. He got me through that bad time. His emotional support carried me through.
When I didn’t recognize my own self-worth, he made me feel valued.
One thing led to another, I moved upstate to be a cog in the corporate machine. There didn’t seem to be much common ground between my former flower-child days and my uniformed, punch-the-clock tech worker days, and I began seeing less and less of Gary.
When I started a family of my own (only 15 years after Gary came back to NYC to start his), and moved to North Carolina, I lost touch with almost everybody from those times. Eventually, I lost touch with who I’d been.
Around thirty years after we first met, at home in North Carolina, I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. The caller asked, “Is this Ken Kellerman, from Queens?”
I recognized the voice immediately and answered, “You know, I was born in Manhattan, Gary. But it’s wonderful to hear your voice.”
He was inviting me to a reunion of our old friends from the CCNY days.
After decades out of touch, Gary had looked for me, and found me.
I hadn’t realized I was lost, and hadn’t considered I’d been missed. If you’ve never been ‘found’ you don’t know the amazing feeling of it. That someone I hadn’t spoken with for more than a decade, maybe two, would search for me.
I’m not sure I have the words for that feeling. It was profound.
So: The night before the reunion I met up with Gary and Jeanne and another close mutual friend from those days for dinner. I confessed I was nervous…
Gary asked why, and I told him it was about seeing those old friends again after so much time. Gary asked, “So, what?”
I told them I was so clueless about what I was doing back then. How I felt I’d done a lot of dumb things, with no idea of how anybody else was affected, or how I was perceived, or if my best memories of those days had a shred of accuracy.
“In short,” I said, “I’m afraid I was an asshole back then.”
Gary looked me in the eyes and said, “No, man, we love you. Really.” Then he laughed and added, “It doesn’t mean you weren’t an asshole, but we love you.”
There’s Gary: Intelligence and Compassion. And, I realized, in my new maturity, humanity. All served up with a dose of laughter.
How did Gary make people feel?
Respected. Appreciated. And, especially, loved.
One last anecdote. My birthday and retirement happened the same Friday, three-and-a-half years ago. I threw a big party, over 250 people came. I invited Gary and Jeanne, acknowledging that nobody ever wants to come to Syracuse in late January, and they declined.
But they showed up to surprise me, wearing the Anonymous/Guy Fawkes masks. I recognized Gary and Jeanne immediately, masks and all. But here’s the thing: They were also remembered by many of the people they encountered at the party, even briefly, including the waitress and manager of the restaurant they stopped into before the party (friends of mine, who told me what great people Gary, Jeanne and company were).
That’s Gary… and Jeanne and the Shaws.
While I am lucky enough to have known him for a long time, Gary’s intelligence and insight, his caring and loving nature extended beyond personal relationships to his tireless activism to protect the environment. He was a leader and an educator, a lecturer and protester. He was a passionate fighter for human and humane values, and all those who stood with him, or heard him, got those same feelings from their encounters:
They were smarter, and happier, felt included and appreciated. Gary was a great communicator.
Gary and I were brothers by choice, not natural selection. I loved him, and people who knew him loved him. And respected him.
Gary applied intelligence, creativity, caring, grace and humor to make the people around him feel smart, respected, cared for. Loved. Part of the family.
We who knew him all felt it, and so we felt this way about him. We loved him back.
While we mourn our loss, that he no longer has a material presence in our lives, there is this: We will never forget how he made us feel. The impact he made on our lives didn’t end when he moved on.
We will always remember how Gary Shaw made us feel, and we’ll return it. Paul McCartney wrote, “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”
So Gary is taking a lot of love with him.
One last song lyric, from Buddy Holly:
“Love is real, not fade away.
Not fade away.”
Peacefulness always, Dear Friend.
