Bob Greene From All Angles: An Online Memorial

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Photo by Chris Lonardo, School of Journalism

Bob Greene, our teacher, died on April 10. Below, writers from the School of Journalism volunteered their memories.

By Irene Virag, School of Journalism Faculty

Bob Greene hired me. As I remember, he stopped my tryout at Newsday after three days and offered me a job. “Where did you learn to write news like that?” he asked.

I thought he was making fun of me. I was just a feature writer from Austin, Texas, who wrote about things like Willie Nelson’s second wife and the color purple – the color, not the book, which hadn’t even been written yet. “I want to go home, kick off my boots and think about it for awhile,” I said.

He looked at me as if I were crazy. “Don’t think about it too long.”

I didn’t. I took off my cowboy boots for good and came to Newsday. I can’t say I never regretted it but Bob Greene sure kept me busy. He nicknamed me “Little One” and gave me his own town of Smithtown to cover. He insisted I come by his house my first day on the beat – at 7:30 on a Monday morning for the grand tour. I was living in Manhattan and I was too afraid to tell him Mondays were my day off.

To say the day was a grand tour would be an understatement. I met the town supervisor, the town attorney, the town historian and the guy who emptied the garbage cans in Town Hall. My new boss explained the nuances of covering a beat Bob Greene style – donuts for the cops, a beat book filled with the home phone numbers and birthdays of any and everyone I ever spoke to in town. And most important, I should only drink wine spritzers at lunch so I’d be cleared-headed enough to write when I got back to the office.

He liked to tell people that on the day he interviewed me, he asked me what I wanted to do. And that I answered, “Cover the news.” I don’t quite remember it the same way. But I worked for the news desk for more than a dozen years until I became a garden columnist.

Bob’s many accomplishments include the little known fact that he was a terrific tomato grower. I’m proud to say that he was always one of my faithful readers. And of course, he gave me gardening advice, too.

Alex Berkman, Junior

I did not have the opportunity to know Bob for a long time. Not more than a year or so. But in that time he changed my life profoundly. I took a class on the history of the press with him. From the very beginning, you could tell he was passionate about being a reporter and he was great at it. He also had the uncanny ability to understand people immediately. He knew I enjoyed a good argument and used that to keep the class lively.

Sitting in the Social and Behavioral Sciences building for three hours each early Monday morning, students would inevitably fall asleep. And like clockwork, each week he would say something to get me fired up. We would go back and forth, discussing different topics – all along he was grinning. He would inevitably chuckle and call me a “conspiracy theorist,” and go back to discussing the greatness of Hearst and Pulitzer.

I feel that some of my enthusiasm in journalism was from being taught by Bob. He took the integrity of journalism with him wherever he went, and it seemed like he was always ready to fight for it. I know that his enthusiasm rubbed off on me, but I hope that his convictions did as well.

I will miss him immensely and will always remember the wisdom he bestowed on his students, including myself. This is a field of ethics, integrity and conviction, and we, the journalists, must always stand up for it.

Rachel Young, Junior

One of the first times Bob Greene spoke to me, he made me stammer.

"Do you always smile when you walk into a room?" he asked me at the beginning of class, his large hands clasped on top of the desk. His icy blue eyes bore into mine as he waited for my response.

"Well – y-yeah, I guess so," I told him. "I'm - I'm always smiling." My face got hot.

He grinned reassuringly at me. "You should always smile when you walk into a room."

I used to smile for no reason when I walked into Bob's classroom.

After that day, I smiled because I was walking into a room Bob was in.

Michelle Trauring, Sophmore

Never before had I encountered a professor who could teach a three-hour history class at 8:30 on a Monday morning without losing my undivided attention. That is, until Bob Greene.

Stubbornly seated in his chair at the front of the room, his opening lines on our first day were, “I’m old, I’m fat, and I don’t move much.” Though eloquence was not always his forte, his bluntness worked well for him. He commanded attention and radiated knowledge, drawing others into his lifelong passion.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize the impact this man had on the world of journalism. I’d say it clicked toward the end of the semester when he mentioned that he was in our textbook – nestled in the “Investigative Journalism” chapter that he did not assign.

But up until that point, I subconsciously knew that he was deeply a part of the history that he taught. While retelling his many adventures as his wife looked on, a few desks away, he’d fondly glance at her while she nodded and smiled, sometimes muffling a girlish giggle as she reminisced alongside her husband. They were dizzying stories swirling around crime, drugs and corruption, landing Pulitzers upon his mantel, though he failed to mention his vast accomplishments in class.

Nathan Shapiro, Senior

Bob Greene loved America and he loved its quintessential profession, journalism. And perhaps nobody embodied the journalist better than him.

Greene taught Stony Brook's course on the history of the press akin to a grandfather imparting pieces of wisdom to the next generations. Through powerful story telling, he weaved the history of America into the origins of the free press and showed them to be inseparably intertwined.

He made its history vivid and meaningful. Like a journalist should, he distilled the stories down to their core and impressed upon the class their impact. He made us understand how without the Zenger Libel Trial, an often-unknown colonial event, freedom of the press might have been extinguished in America.

Too many journalists see their profession as a medium for activism, giving them a chance to rewrite America's DNA, but not Bob Greene. He sought a journalism that served as a pillar of our national republic, not just an adversary. Throughout his life, he exposed corruption and fought injustice to perfect the American way, not tear it down.

His face lit up every time he spoke about early America's role shaping the free press and he could never hide his love of the country that developed the First Amendment. That love was the heart of his philosophy on journalism.

I'll never forget the comment he wrote atop my final paper on early American press and Thomas Jefferson. Even though he never saw any of my work as a journalist, he told to me I'd make a great journalist nonetheless. I think he gleaned from my paper's topic that I shared his patriotic love of a free press and all it had done and all it could do for our society.

One month from now, I will be graduating with a major in journalism. Why? Because when Bob Greene tells you to be a good journalist, you do it.

Will James, Junior

Bob Greene was teaching at Stony Brook when Lois Lowry’s The Giver was published in 1993. The novel describes a sterile, utopian future where it is the charge of an old man to keep all the memories of a society alive. The old man is the Giver, and the story chronicles him passing his knowledge on to a young man. I read it when I was 10, and I remember thinking what an important job that was, to carry all that history in your head. And how much less a person you would be to be unplugged from all that.

Bob Greene taught the history of the press at Stony Brook after Howie Schneider, the dean of the School of Journalism, lured him out of retirement in 2006. Every Monday at 8:30 in the morning, he propped himself on a desk and spoke for three hours straight – no props or projectors. For his students, it was a weekly pit stop in the manic multimedia tour-de-force our education had become.

Professor Greene and his stories were all that stood between us and blissful sleep. He recalled his days roaming the American South in a ten-gallon hat, infiltrating the KKK during the civil rights movement. Or at least that’s how I imagined it. These autobiographical snippets lent a mythic quality to a profession we were trying to understand.

As the semester progressed, it began to feel like the history of journalism was also the history of Bob Greene. He told us about the revolutionary press and the history of the right to free speech. He lectured with a sense of personal pride that entertained the notion that he carried the torch for the whole history of the profession and was imploring us to take it, to hold it in our undeserving, gawkish hands.

When he started to have trouble walking, his wife, Kathleen, came to class with him. At his wake, she reminded me that during the intermissions of those marathon lectures, kids would forgo a 10-minute break just to talk to him. And how, even after three hours, some would approach his desk and chat with him as he walked out. I had garnered the impression that, back in the day, his reporters were motivated by fear – fear of disappointing him, of not living up to his standards. He was, after all, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner – a larger than life legend. But, looking back on those classes, it seemed like he commanded some other power – a sheer presence, a largesse that made people want to please him, to be seen by him. It was a lesson in being great.

Howie told me that great editors are often great teachers, and it takes a special person to do either. Bob Greene was certainly both. But I imagine he had an extra duty to this school. He was the grounding agent – he was the Giver. If our education was supposed to electrify our minds, he was in charge of plugging us in, of putting us in context. He set out to counter all this nitty-gritty by filling our heads with stories and reminding us we were becoming part of something bigger, older than ourselves. Maybe something noble.

Bob Greene captured our imaginations, I think, by proving that the life we were seeking as journalists – perhaps a life of adventure, principles and courage – was achievable and real. He was convincing then, and he still is. He set an example with his life, an example we could see and interact with and laugh with as he shuffled down the hall at the end of a long morning. After all, how many physics teachers can say they’ve walked on the moon?

George Agathos, Senior

It's funny when you mingle with greatness without even realizing it. I was in Bob Greene's first history class of the new journalism major at Stony Brook, but I had almost no idea who he was. As the semester unfolded my classmates began to uncover his past with stories from the internet.

"We're pretty lucky," I thought, to even be breathing the same air as this guy. A year later he would figuratively stand toe-to-toe with Bob Woodward, a more mainstream Bob in the business, when he visited campus. I think that was the last time I saw him.

In high school I attended some journalism field trip at Hofstra. A satire writer at the time, I attended a panel on investigative reporting on a whim. Bob Greene wasn't there physically, but the anecdotes of some of the speakers that day (Newsday reporters, I think) would come back in Professor Greene's lectures years later. The stories of catching corrupt officials thrilled me at the time, tickling journalism bones that I wasn't quite yet aware of and wouldn't make sense until years later in college.

Those bones would come back in his class with a vengeance, where I was tickled for three hours a week. I might forget it's there, sometimes, but thanks in part to him I'll always be excitedly giggling on the inside when there's a story at hand.

Adrian Carrasquillo, Junior

The first three times I had Professor Greene’s class I fell asleep. I’m talking head against the wall, knocked out, in another world. The 8:30 thing killed me and the three hour part made it less fun. But something started to happen besides finding him staring at me when I woke up each time. When I was awake I was moved by how much he cared about what he was teaching. Not the particular lesson of the day, about the frontier or yellow journalism, but about how it all came together as a whole. He was laying the foundation—literally schooling us on how to be journalists. So maybe it was by showing us the salacious headlines of the times or by highlighting the racism that was so prevalent throughout our country’s history, but it was his way of making us better—making us more like him.

I talked to him six weeks before he passed away and he seemed the same as I remembered him. Sure, he talked about his aches and pains and he had a walker and his wife was now permanently posted by his side, but his mind was as sharp as ever. I sat down to ask him questions. I was in charge, after all. I was the journalist and he was my subject. But then before I knew it, he had effortlessly wrestled control from me. He was in charge. He would answer my question by traveling through different stories, taking circuitous routes to where the answer resided. It was not an illustration of how his mind had slowed—it served to show how sharp he still was. I couldn’t keep up. He would go into a tangent and I would forget my question and saddle up for the ride. After all, Professor Greene’s stories were good theater.

I read something in Newsday and it all made sense. His son found all of his awards and trophies in a trunk in the garage and decorated the house with them. When Greene came in he said that his son should put them all back where he found them because the house was not going to be a shrine to him. When I interviewed him, I told him that he was a big deal, he had tussled with Senator Joseph McCarthy, he was on President Nixon’s enemy list, he went toe-to-toe with mobsters and lived to tell about it…

That’s not how it went, though. Because when he heard me say that he was a big deal he stopped me in my tracks, rerouting the conversation to somewhere he was more comfortable, somewhere he could teach me a thing or two. That was Professor Greene. Always teaching.

Harvey Aronson, School of Journalism Faculty

Irene and I saw Bob in the hospital a week before he died. We’d been at school and visiting hours would end in 15 minutes.

“Can we stay a little later?” we asked the nurse at the desk.

She winked. “Don’t worry.”

“He probably charmed her,” I told Irene.

Bob was lying on his back and he seemed to be asleep with his eyes open. The respirator overrode the silence. We didn’t say anything and then he turned and looked at us. Irene caressed his fingers and I touched his arm.

“We just wanted to see you,” I said.

He looked at us. He touched his heart and then he motioned at each of us.

“We love you, too,” Irene said.

Even in silence, I thought, he’s eloquent. He’s Bob Greene.

I still talk about him in the present tense.

Compiled by Will James