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Photograph by Tom Shillea. Copyright 1969
| The summer of our discontent...Washington, D.C.- 1969 |
| This is a message from Ray Hathaway, a member of the Sarcoidosis World Wide Support Group who met and became a friend of Greg's over the internet... |
...I never met him personally. I knew very little about Greg, the man. And yet I will always consider Greg a friend in every sense of the word. He shared himself with me, he comforted and informed me when I was in doubt, and he cheered me up in moments of self-pity and uncertainty. He gave me the ability to find out about myself. That's what friends do.
After hearing the from-the-heart stories and anecdotes about Greg at his memorial service I truly feel that had I the opportunity to have met him we would have been friends. It appears that we were contemporaries and no doubt shared many of the experiences, good and bad, of growing up in the 60's. One of the photos I saw at the church showed what looked like the anti-war protest in Washington, D.C., which I participated in. "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"
Sex and drugs and rock-n-roll. And seemingly so unavoidable at the time. All real, yet so dreamlike-I kind of miss the fire that burned in the belly. Dylan and the Beatles, a "music culture" that changed the world. Hair down to my shoulder blades.The feel I got today was that of a Bohemian lifestyle, and one that always appealed to my artistic leanings.
And oh that sense of humor-weird and warped and on the edge. A gentle prankster who knew the boundaries of civility. Slightly misunderstood by everyone except those who truly knew him. Anyway, maybe my perceptions are wrong here, but I'm sure that we would have gotten along famously.
What if?
