Friends of English and Comparative Literature at SDSU
This is the worst part of my job as I write to share that the Department of English & Comparative Literature is in mourning. It brings me great sadness to send word that Professor Emeritus George C. Gross passed away last night, February 1, 2009. I would be in your debt if any of you who knew and worked with Dr. Gross might send me a brief dispatch chronicling your memories of his time here on Montezuma Mesa at SDSU. As recently as January 19, 2009, Professor Gross was actively blogging on the internet; you can see his moving post
here.
Yours,
Dr. William Anthony Nericcio
Chair, English and Comparative Literature
San Diego State University
George C. Gross Memorial FundFrom: Dr. William A. SDSU Colleagues, Students, and Friends,
I have more news regarding the untimely February 1, 2009 passing of George C. Gross, Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature. I have been notified by the College of Arts and Letters (CAL) that George's sons, Tim and John, have initiated the George C. Gross Memorial Fund benefiting the Department of English and Comparative Literature and Holocaust Studies, in the Department of History.
For those interested in donating a memorial gift, checks can be made out to The Campanile Foundation. Please note that donors should designate one of these options:
1) Designate the Department of English and Comparative Literature
2) Designate Holocaust Studies in the Department of History
3) Designate the "Memorial Fund" (60% English / 40% Holocaust Studies)
Checks can be mailed to:
SDSU, College of Arts & Letters
c/o Trina Hester
George C. Gross Memorial Fund
Arts and Letters, room 600
5500 Campanile Drive
San Diego, CA 92182-6060
You can also drop them off with staff in the Dean's Development office, Arts and Letters 600. If someone wishes to use their credit card, please call Trina Hester at 619.594.1562.
More information and a memorial page with tributes from Professor Gross's students and colleagues can be found
here below. Please send any reminiscences you would like to add to that page directly to me via email and I will see to it that it is posted.
A Compendium of Notes on the late, great Professor George C. Gross:
Professor Nericcio, I just found your message. Thanks for letting everyone know. If we can supply any information about Dad and his association with SDSU, please let us know. Dad loved the University. He experienced in almost every role that an individual can: undergraduate student, graduate student, instructor, tenured faculty, and administrator. He was active in the Honors Council until he could no longer negotiate the campus well enough to get to meetings (although I was hoping we could get his strength built up to the point he could go again). He felt that his years in administration were important, but his happiest hours were spent in classrooms showing students some insight into the poetry of Keats or Byron, or introducing another class to the fundamental beauty of Shakespeare. Thanks, His sons,
Tim and John Gross
George Gross was always a class act and he looked the part. He was the best dressed professor in the English Dept. when I arrived in 1968 and he continued to hold the title until the last time I saw him (around 2005). Above all, however, he acted and WAS the gentleman-scholar--friendly, erudite and considerate. May he rest in peace!
Minas Savvas, Professor Emeritus
English and Comparative Literature, SDSU
George Gross at Dan McCleod's retirement party, 1993
(with Joe Butler and Elsie Adams in the background).
Picture courtesy of Professor Emerita Carey Wall
Regarding George Gross, sad news indeed; I'll try to remember stuff from way back. I was in a pre-freshman comp class George taught in 1948 (I think). I was released from high school in the 11th grade to take college courses at then San Diego State College. I was into math and science back then, but with George's encouragement and the example of his class, I developed an interest in the English business. His was the first class I'd ever had where there was a teacher with a sense of humor and whimsy, and I loved it. He taught me how much fun it could be to write. Someone in the department once said, "You could take George out of the high school but you couldn't take the high school out of George." It was an insult by a Prof. who was a notoriously bad teacher. I thought at the time that it was true because high school teachers usually cared about their students and had to communicate well or their classes would get chaotic. College students, on the other hand, would put up with anything we dished out, but his students would raise hell if they were bored. George was a genuinely fine teacher. And he was one of the best students the department turned out as well. A lovely guy--I miss him already.
Dan McLeod
Professor Emeritus
English and Comparative Literature, SDSU
I was genuinely sorry to hear about George Gross; fortunately, he had a long and productive life. I was a sophomore at SDSC (as it was in 1968) when I took a course from Prof. Gross. It was an honors course numbered Humanities 66, an undergraduate seminar he taught in tandem with Prof. Janssen of Political Science and Prof. Rader of History. The timely topic was war and literature, and among other texts we read and discussed Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik and Heller’s Catch-22. I had not yet decided to major in English, and it was an office talk with George Gross at the end of my sophomore year that made up my mind. Not only did I go on to a doctorate and my academic career, I published two books on Joseph Heller, one just on Catch-22.
Steve Potts
Lecturer
English and Comparative Literature, SDSU
I was very sorry to hear of Professor Gross’s death. It was my good fortune to have George as an office mate for several years. He was always cheerful, considerate, encouraging, and interesting—the best of colleagues. His stories about World War II were especially moving in light of his being one of the youngest tank commanders in the European theater. Tanks were a favorite target, so mortality was high in the tank corps, and dangerous promotions all too frequent. If you consult this website you can see a photo of Sgt. George and his buddy when they liberated the train with its 2500 Jews on its way to a death camp. The story George tells reveals his exceptional character.
Less well-known is George’s place among proto-feminist Shakespeare scholars. In 1980 a landmark anthology was published, The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (U of Illinois P). The Woman’s Part ushered in what is now a major critical movement. On page 317 of its valuable bibliography is an entry for George C. Gross: “Mary Cowden Clarke, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines and the Sex Education of Victorian Women,” Victorian Studies 16 (1972): 37-58.
Dorothea Kehler
Professor Emerita
English and Comparative Literature, SDSU
[click to enlarge]
George Gross was just of the opposite of the self-involved, arrogant professor stereotype. He cared deeply about his subject, poetry of the English Romantic period, about his students, and about his colleagues. I have never met anyone more selfless—his life was one of giving, giving of his time and energy to others. He was on the committee that hired me, and even though our interests were quite different, he became my good friend. He was not interested in doing scholarly publication (although he had written some articles), but constantly supported me in my research and writing, recommending me for several awards by the university. His genial personality, his sense of humor, and his unbounded kindness made it a pleasure to be in his company. He made me laugh, he made me think, and he made me wonder if I could ever be such a good man. I had not seen him for many months when a year ago I passed his house, while walking our dogs. He was on his porch, and when he saw me, he shuffled, very slowly, step by step out across his lawn to the low fence near the sidewalk. He raised his trembling hand and held it out to me. We shook hands and he smiled.
Jack Benson
Professor Emeritus
English and Comparative Literature, SDSU
George Gross was a gentleman's gentleman...pure and simple. A good, decent guy, who didn't start putting on suits when he became an administrator; he always wore them, even as a teacher. And though George spent a great many years in administration, he remained a classroom teacher at heart. When I went back to teaching after chairing the English Department for four years, I remember him saying to me. "Good decision. That's where the action is, isn't it." He loved Romantic poetry and when I developed a high tech presentation on the Poetry of John Keats he was excited to see Keats' work brought into a 21st century context. I always respected him and I'm very sorry to hear of his passing.
Fred Moramarco
Professor Emeritus
English and Comparative Literature, SDSU
[From the San Diego Union Tribune]
OBITUARY
George C. Gross; literature scholar helped liberate Holocaust camps; 86
By Blanca Gonzalez
Union-Tribune Staff Writer
2:00 a.m. February 18, 2009
George C. Gross was known locally as a scholar who inspired high school and college students to care about Chaucer, Keats and other academic pursuits.
Throughout the world, others knew him as a symbol of American liberators who played a role in the lives of Holocaust camp survivors. Dr. Gross died of anemia Feb. 1 at his home in Spring Valley. He was 86.
More than half a century after World War II ended, Dr. Gross was asked to tell his story to Matthew Rozell, a Hudson Falls, N.Y., high school teacher who coordinates a World War II living history project and Web site. Rozell had heard about Dr. Gross from another veteran involved in the project. In a narrative posted on the project Web site, Dr. Gross told of being among the first U.S. servicemen to come across about 2,500 people the Nazis had stuffed into a string of boxcars. It was April 1945 and World War II was coming to an end in Europe. Dr. Gross was a sergeant commanding a light tank moving toward Magdeburg, Germany, as part of a tank battalion in the 30th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army. The battalion had just finished a grueling three weeks of fighting across Germany when it came across some emaciated Finnish soldiers who had escaped from a nearby train full of starving prisoners.
Dr. Gross and fellow sergeant Carrol Walsh accompanied the battalion major to a small train station where they discovered a mass of people, some sitting or lying outside the train and others still in the boxcars. It is believed their German guards ran away as the U.S. tanks rumbled in.
The train contained Jewish prisoners who had been taken from Bergen-Belsen and forced into the cramped boxcars. Dr. Gross, Walsh and the major greeted survivors and took pictures of them, capturing their surprise and joy.
"I was assigned to stay overnight with the train," Dr. Gross wrote years later, "to let any stray German soldiers know that it was part of the free world and not to be bothered again. I was honored to shake the hands of the large numbers (of survivors) who spontaneously lined up to introduce themselves and greet me in a ritual that seemed to satisfy their need to declare their return to honored membership in the free society of humanity.
"The heroism that day was all with the prisoners on the train," Dr. Gross wrote. "What stamina and regenerative spirit those brave people showed. I have one picture of several girls, specter-thin, hollow-cheeked, with enormous eyes that had seen much evil and terror, and yet with smiles to break one's heart."His pictures were posted on the history Web site and sparked reunions and phone calls between survivors from around the world and between Dr. Gross and Walsh, a retired judge living in Hudson Falls.
Rozell said Dr. Gross was a very humble and gracious person. "He came from a generation that didn't really trumpet their accomplishments," he said.
Local friends and colleagues lauded Dr. Gross as a gentleman and a scholar who was fascinated by the language of Keats and Chaucer and enjoyed sharing that love with students. Larry Durbin, a Grossmont High School graduate who became a close friend, said the class of 1958 made Dr. Gross an honorary classmate. "He was a pretty special guy. Chaucer's English was very difficult to read and hard to listen to ... but there he was, probably 36 or 37 years old, standing up in front of a class of 17-and 18-year-olds and getting them to be enthralled with Chaucer. At nearly every (class) reunion someone will start reciting 'The Knight's Tale' (from Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales") we learned in his class," Durbin said. "He was a sensitive, caring, warm guy and everybody liked him."
Dr. Gross, who had boxed in the Army, served as adviser of the high school's boxing club. After teaching at Grossmont for about 10 years, Dr. Gross joined the San Diego State faculty in 1961. He was associate dean for faculty and dean of faculty affairs from 1970 to 1981 before returning to the classroom. He retired in 1985 but remained active on campus with the SDSU Honors Council.
Dr. Gross is remembered on campus as one of the great chairmen of the English and Comparative Literature department, said current Chairman Bill Nericcio. "Tales of his generosity and intellect still shadow the corridors of our department. His skills as a master teacher, gifted scholar and top-shelf administrator are a hard act to follow."
George C. Gross was born May 14, 1922, in Wilmington to Ada Bachmann and Henry Gross. He graduated from Hoover High School and married his high school sweetheart, the former Marlo Mumma, in 1940. She died in 2006. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in English literature from San Diego State and received his doctorate from the University of Southern California in the early 1960s. Dr. Gross is survived by two sons, Tim of Lakeside and John of Spring Valley; a granddaughter; and two sisters, Hazel Lemmons of San Diego and Betty Desport of Texas. A memorial service will be held at 10 a.m. March 7 at SDSU Aztec Center, Casa Real. Reservations can be made with Leslie Herrman at lherrman@mail.sdsu.edu or (619) 594-6337.
Donations may be made to the Campanile Foundation for the George C. Gross Memorial Fund benefiting the Department of English and Comparative Literature and Holocaust Studies, in the Department of History or to the George Gross Memorial Scholarship at Grossmont High School.
Blanca Gonzalez: (760) 737-7576; blanca.gonzalez@uniontrib.com
