Sunday, January 21, 2018

My Rabbi of Rock (and Voice of Reason).

My pal Bill Gronroos died sometime over the past week. We're not sure of the exact date, but I suspect it happened last Saturday.

I normally hear from Bill every couple of days. So it was unusual for four days to pass without so much as a brief e-note from him. And—as with so many modern US citizens—this is how I stayed in touch with him. When I hadn’t heard from him I asked if any other people had spoken to or visited him and this cascaded into a request from a relative for the police to visit his house and they found that he had died.

Bill was not a shut-in by any means, but he did live alone. He was a gregarious sort who enjoyed the company of other people, but he lived by himself as he had since his family had died one by one. He had an on-again off-again relationship with a girlfriend who finally left him some years ago and broke his heart. But that was a while back. Since then he had the company of various friends and cousins, an aunt, and a host of local pals. His adopted dog, Nicky, died not many weeks ago and I wonder if this small tragedy may have played a bit of havoc on his already precarious health.

My pal had all sorts of health problems, mainly resulting from his chronic obesity that had beset him as a kid and with which he dealt the rest of his life. At times he would shed a vast amount of fat, but of course it created a strain on his system. As a clerk for the United States Postal Service he got a viral infection which settled in his heart, thus ending his career there, after which he lived on disability.

There were many health scares over the years since that viral infection—some of them severe—but he always recovered. But apparently the weak ticker finally took him down.

I used to refer to Bill as “my rabbi of rock”. He had an almost supernatural knowledge of rock and pop music. Personalities, dates, writers, producers, agents, earnings, chart positions, tour dates—you name it. Whenever I had a question about any kind of 20th Century pop music, Bill could answer it. Last week I asked him the title of a Statler Brothers song giving him only vague hints and he reminded me that the tune was “This Haunted Old House”.

I met Bill through a shared love of comic books when I moved to Brunswick Georgia in 1975 after graduating high school. He came into my dad’s shop to sell some old comics that he had from his childhood. From there we struck up a friendship that lasted to his death.

When I met Bill he was a DJ on a local radio station in town. His love of rock music had dictated that he would be a musician and he was an exceptionally talented guitarist. I only saw him perform once at an oldies show in town and was amazed at his proficiency, nailing Bill Haley tunes perfectly. But his career as a musician could never earn him a living, even though he did have a regional comedy hit some years back that did make him some money for a while until the royalty checks dried up and people mainly forgot his song “You Don’t Steal Hogs in McIntosh County”. Bill thought that pigs were an exceptionally funny topic and from a local news item he turned the event into a humorous song that enough southerners liked to make it a small hit.

Never happy with the radio business, Bill also fell into another career path that dropped into his lap. Millions of people heard Bill’s golden voice and never knew his name. During the last ten years or so of the F.W. Woolworth Company’s existence, Bill was the official voice of Woolworth’s. If you walked into one of their stores and heard the recorded ad on their P.A. system, that was Bill. A Woolworth’s executive while driving down the Interstate had tuned in and heard Bill on the radio. Impressed with his vocals, he took the exit, found out where the radio station was and asked Bill if he’d be interested in the job as Woolworth’s voice. The company eventually even offered Bill an executive position in New York City, but after a visit to the offices there he decided against it, figuring he’d reached his high point as the in-store pitch man for the company.

Over the years, Bill had many opportunities to leave the horrible town of Brunswick, Georgia behind, but he never took any of them. For some reason that I could never fathom, he was hooked permanently into the polluted dust of that trash village and would not leave it, except for brief excursions. Now and again Carole and I would invite him to visit us, to join us on camping trips, or to take him canoeing and tubing down clear crystal rivers in Florida. We enjoyed his company. Easily, far and away, he was one of the funniest people I ever knew.

That’s the way it is with people like Bill. Life had not often been good to him, not even in his childhood. Battered, bruised, all but broken by the world, guys like Bill can turn one of two ways—bitter and angry, or sadly sweet and funny. Bill’s demeanor led him down the latter path. And I am glad for that, and happy for the company he provided over the years.


We’ll miss him terribly.

My pal, Bill Gronroos.


Ironically, this was the last pop tune Bill helped me recall. A bit of sad nostalgia for which the Statler Brothers are famous.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

So sad to read this. I got to know Bill thru you and he was very kind and helpful in finding his long lost Jimmy Ellis interview he had promised me. Simple a great guy and I will miss seing his post on Facebook (where we communicated). Rest inn peace, Bill.
- Kenneth (Norway)

James Robert Smith said...

Bill is probably the sweetest person I ever knew. He was as kind as a person could be. In later years when he would come up to North Carolina to visit I would take him to see his old neighborhood in Greensboro NC. That was where he was a child and which seemed to be the source of his happiest memories. The last time I took him to see the house where he lived as a boy he walked over to a nearby home, knocked on the door, and was very pleased to see that the family who had lived there when he was a child was still there (not good odds, considering how many decades had elapsed). He spoke to them and the experience made him very happy, indeed.

I have to repeat that I will miss Bill very much. He knew more about pop music than any person I have ever met. Everything from turn-of-the-century through the 1990s. He was a walking encyclopedia. When I lived in Brunswick we would sit in his house and he would dig through vast boxes and stacks of all kinds of amazing records to play me music that I had never heard and will likely never hear again.

And he was so funny. He could always make me smile and laugh with his humor.

I knew that he would do his best to find that interview with Ellis for you. You need to know that it couldn't have been easy for him because his house was packed with so much stuff--tapes, cassettes, records, books, magazines, etc. At one time he had one of the best record collections I have ever seen, but one part of it was destroyed in a storm when the roof of his previous house partially collapsed in a storm, and most of his rare bootlegs were stolen by a crook that he trusted. But he never let that kind of thing drag him down too much. He would just shrug and pass it off as part of the cost of being alive.

I was hoping to see him this year on a trip to Georgia...but that is the way of life and death.

L. Roy Aiken said...

Sorry to hear this, Bob. I don't know if you remember coming down to stay at Steven Mock's house before we left for Japan in 1994, and Aaron Bittner and Owen DuBose were there. Steven got some weird infection out of nowhere right after Halloween and it shut down his major organs one by one. Thanksgiving and Christmas were shaded and sharpened by his passage. We realize now we're more in the kill-zone than ever. The days are shortening. Take care. What else can you do? Bill Gronroos, RIP.

James Robert Smith said...

As I get older I know that more and more friends are going to die, and that I'll be shrugging off this mortal coil, too. But Bill was easily among the sweetest, most compassionate people I ever knew. I realized that he had a bad heart and would likely die before I did, but I hoped to be able to spend some time in his company before that happened.

As with Steven Mock, you never know when, or where, or why. Life is fleeting. Enjoy it as much as possible without hurting anyone--that's what Bill did.

Steve said...

James, I never met Bill but would comment with him on Facebook about Superman or the Beatles or other pop references. Sorry for your loss and I will miss his wit and humor. Take care.

Steve Baratta

James Robert Smith said...

I'm glad you at least got to know him via Internet communication. Bill was definitely a very funny man.