Headline: FELLOW COLUMNIST WAS HONORABLE, HOPEFUL AND WITHOUT PRETENSE
Reporter: By Bill McClellan

Publication: ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Last Printed:  Wed., Jan. 1, 2003
Section: NEWS, Page: A1, Edition: FIVE STAR LIFT

REMEMBERING GREG

The desk next to me is empty now, but the photographs are still in place. The most prominent is that of a thoughtful young man. His name is Will Freeman, and in the photo, he is wearing a bemused expression and dreadlocks. He grew those dreadlocks during his first year at college, and when he returned home in the summer of 2000, his father wasn't quite sure what to make of the new hairstyle.
    
So the father wrote about his son's hair. Rather, he wrote about his own reaction.
    
"So far, I've remained pretty calm about it, which is less than my mother did when I was in college and grew a big Afro. I look back now at some of the pictures of myself during that time and laugh. Maybe a time will come when Will will do the same. Meanwhile, I'll just have to grin and bear it."
    
He ended that column this way: "The future is in the hands of people like my son. I must say that those are pretty good hands."

That was, as readers of this newspaper know, quintessential Greg Freeman. Always keeping things in perspective, always ending on a hopeful note. To Greg, the world was a pretty nice place.

It is a little less so right now for the rest of us. Greg died Tuesday.

He was a most unusual person.
     I sat next to him, and chatted with him on a regular basis, and I never heard him say a mean word about anybody. I mean that literally. Never a mean word. That would be remarkable for a person with a normal job, but for a newspaper columnist, it's unbelievable. In our business, it is understood that a story flies better if it has a villain for a wing, and most of us are guilty, at one time or another, of trying to squeeze somebody into the villain's suit even if the fit isn't quite right. But not Greg. He went the other way. He always gave people the benefit of the doubt.
    
What an honorable way to do this job.

But that was Greg. Honorable, gentlemanly and without pretension.
     That, too, is most unusual for a newspaper columnist. Most of us like to affect an air of detachment. It seems, somehow, intellectual.
    
Not Greg. I remember a couple of years ago when he wrote about his 25th high school reunion. He wrote that his wife, Elizabeth, didn't go to her high school reunions, and had, in fact, put high school behind her, while he not only went to his Beaumont High School reunions, he helped plan them. He was, after all, the former senior class president.
    
It was easy to see, even years later, why the class had elected him.

Readers of this newspaper have known for a while that Greg has had health problems. In the fall of 2000, he was hit with two awful bits of news. First, he was told that he had a form of muscular dystrophy. Less than a month later, he was told that his kidneys were failing. He eventually wrote about both of those things, and we readers were even allowed into the operating room with him 13 months ago when he received a kidney from his sister, Cheryl McKinney.

Here's a strange thing, though. He wrote about those things, and he did so almost reverently, but he did not talk about them. He did not complain.
    
Exactly two weeks before Christmas, he spoke at a fund-raiser for the St. Louis Society. He was, by then, confined to a wheelchair. He sat in front of the audience, and he talked about how he had tried to hide his disability from his friends. He put off using a cane for as long as possible. He even resisted the idea of a special license plate. But things worked out, he said. By the time he could no longer hide the fact that his muscles were failing, he had concluded that he was not going to be hindered by this so-called disability, anyway. He could still host a radio show on KWMU. He could still write his newspaper column.

Those columns will be missed. They reflected their author. Kind and cheerful and always hopeful. But not in a naive way.
     Greg had a deep appreciation for the fragility of life. His father, Frederic Freeman, was a postal clerk who was killed in an accident at work when Greg was 14.
    
Last year, a friend's father died, and Greg wrote about what it's like to lose your father.
    
"I suppose that if there was never any love between my father and me, his death wouldn't have been very painful. He would have simply been a person who had left my life. But because there was so much love, the pain has been greater. In my case, and in the case of my friend, the pain probably never goes away. But neither, fortunately, does the love."

That's a message of hope for the young man whose photograph sits on the desk next to mine. The love never goes away.

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Memorial ...
   
A memorial service for Gregory B. Freeman ... [was] at 1 p.m. Saturday in Graham Chapel on the campus of Washington University, followed by a reception in the Holmes Lounge on campus.
     
In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to any one of three charities: Mid-America Transplant Association, the Muscular Dystrophy Association, or Paraquad.

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