Bobby G.: A Life Worth Celebrating

By Stan Friedland

He was only five feet, seven inches at his very tallest. So how did he star on his high school football, basketball, and baseball teams, winning the award as the best athlete in his graduating class? Better yet, at the University of North Carolina, one of the best sports schools in the country, how did he win the very same award at graduation after playing basketball and baseball for all four years? Better yet, how did he help to found one of the very best junior colleges in the entire country? Better still, how did he spend ninety-one years as a central figure responsible for developing one of the countrys best summer camps, one that significantly impacted the lives of over twenty-thousand young people?

Theres still more to his incredible rsum, so come join us for the inspirational life of Bobby G, a life worth celebrating! Some of it is bound to rub off on you!

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546238737

Stan Friedland

Dr. Stan Friedland has had a varied and illustrious career in education, featuring stints as a teacher, guidance counselor, high school principal, college professor and CEO of his own educational consulting firm. He holds a doctoral degree from Columbia University, has written extensively in the field of education, has presented hundreds of workshops and seminars all over the country and, for ten years, has hosted radio and television shows, all dealing with education. This is his fifth non-education book.

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Bobby G.

A LIFE WORTH CELEBRATING

Stan Friedland

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© 2018 Stan Friedland. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 05/04/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-3872-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-3873-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018904719

CONTENTS

Author’s Foreword

Guest Foreword

Chapter 1 Just Who Is Bobby G?

Chapter 2 He Came Out Running!

Chapter 3 Brant Lake Camp, The Early Years

Chapter 4 His Blood Became Blue At North Carolina U

Chapter 5 Carolina Blue Deepens

Chapter 6 Brant Lake Camp – Its Formative Years

Chapter 7 You’re A UNC Senior Only Once!

Chapter 8 Into The Real World

Chapter 9 The Prodigal Son Returns

Chapter 10 My Home Base Is Long Beach.

Chapter 11 Bobby G, The Parent

Chapter 12 Brant Lake Camp: Its Middle Years

Chapter 13 A College Is Born

Chapter 14 Professor G, Meet Board President Gersten.

Chapter 15 Libbie Gersten: The Velvet Glove

Chapter 16 UNC Walk For Health

Chapter 17 Dream Of Old And New Brant Lake

Acknowledgements

DEDICATION

To My Late Wife, Frances

And

To Her Legacy To Me -

Our Fabulous Family!

AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

W hen it became known that I was writing a biography about the life of Bobby Gersten, a number of people asked me why I was doing it.

Good question. Why spend about a year and a half of my life during my golden age years putting hundreds of hours into such a project? Is it worth it?

There’s a short answer and a longer one. The longer one is more informative, so let’s just get to it right away.

My first encounter with Bobby G

In 1947, I was a sixteen-year old kid living in the Pride of Judea Children’s Home, located in Brooklyn, New York. A wealthy benefactor had given our orphanage his mansion in Long Beach, N.Y. – just a block from the Atlantic Ocean - to be used as a summer home and it was just great! It had its own outdoor basketball court, which was our passion and we reveled in our good times there. Our supervisor learned that the City of Long Beach’s Municipal Pool had a great basketball court, lit by good lights, and it hosted a popular summer basketball league. Though we’d be much younger than the other teams in the league, he entered us in it, cautioning us to just have fun without any real expectations of winning, since we’d be the youngest team in the league by far. We had some tall, brawny, big kids on our team and we already had played in an adult league and had won about half of our games, which had been a surprising and pleasant result to us. I was our team’s high scorer and was more than a bit on the cocky side. So we entered the Pool League’and surprisingly won our first two games. Hey, we thought, this is going to be easy breezy stuff! Then, sometime in early June, we played the local team from Long Beach, starring guess who? Bobby G!

He had graduated from the University of North Carolina, five years previously, where he had played varsity basketball and baseball and had been voted The Best Athlete in his Graduating Class. He had played and coached both sports for three more years in the United States Air Force. Now, at 27, he still was at the top of his game. But when we first played his team, we knew none of this, and, as I painfully recall, he cleaned our clocks, without even really trying! Not only did he score at will, he guarded me, my team’s high scorer, and held me to maybe five points! They killed us!

But, here’s the most important part of this entire episode. After the game, I was quite upset. I was not a good loser and I must have shown it loudly and clearly. I liked our supervisor and coach, Harry Koval, very much, but even he couldn’t placate me. With my face in a towel and clearly distraught, I suddenly felt a different hand on my shoulder and heard a different voice.

It was Bobby Gersten. He had come over to console me and he was as gracious and genuinely pleasant like no other opponent I ever had encountered. He said something to the point that I shouldn’t feel awful because he had played varsity basketball in college and had so much more experience than me, and that I had played so well. He asked me my age and when I told him I was 16, he made a big deal of it, saying he was eleven years my senior, with more experience and coaching and training, etc. After his five-minute pep talk, I actually felt better, even though he had taken me to the cleaners in every basketball way.

On the way home in our bus, Harry Koval said to me, That’s a rare person who would do that. He really wanted to make you feel better. That’s a quality individual.

We played his team again toward the very end of the summer, and even though we gave it our best effort, they still beat us by a large margin. He made it a point to not only shake hands with me, but to put his arm around my shoulder and walk me to my bench, saying encouraging things. He stopped to talk with our coach, Harry Koval, who had been a track star at the University of Illinois and was just a little bit older than Bobby.

What kind of guy does that? Frankly, he was the very first athlete to whom I ever had lost, who was so very gracious in victory and also so attentive to my feelings. That’s probably why I remember both of these games and Bobby so well after all these years.

At that time in my life, my frail ego was firmly attached to winning or losing basketball games. I was a sore-loser and certainly not a gracious or caring winner. Yet, here was a guy who was a terrific player, who had clearly outplayed everyone on the court, and then chose to spend time with my team and with me, reassuring us that we had played a good game and that we had nothing to be ashamed of. Well, he certainly made an indelible impression on me, even if I never expected to see him again. Most fortunately for me, I did see him again and those games would be the start of a valued, life-long friendship.

Fourteen years later, in1961, I met up with Bobby again, accidentally of course. By then, I had two college degrees, was happily married with two small children and was a high school guidance counselor in one of the better school districts on Long Island, New York. I was attending an orientation program for a brand new community college that would be open to high school graduates in Nassau County, Long Island. I actually didn’t recognize Bobby right away, but as soon as I heard the voice, I had immediate recall and there he was, the Dean of Students for this fledgling junior college. How did he get here?

I made sure to meet up with him immediately after the program and, of course he had no recognition of me until I told him I was that 16 year old sore-losing brat from some 14 years ago. We shared a good laugh and a good catch-up chat. When he gave me his card, he said, Be sure to call me if I ever can be of help to any of your students. And when I did need that help for one student a short time later, he came through with flying colors.

Ten years later, our paths crossed again. I was about to move into high school administration and had secured the position of Vice-Principal of Long Beach High School, in the attractive sea-side city, of the same name. Long Beach just happened to be Bobby Gersten’s long-time hometown, but I had no reason to remember that until I received a congratulatory phone call from him. We laughed once again at our resumed contact and seeming good fate. When our mutual love of tennis came up, he invited me to join him in his weekly game at William Levitt’s estate on the North Shore of Long Island, at the latter’s new tennis complex. The invite was for a single date, but after the first session, Bill Levitt and Bobby immediately extended an invitation to me to play regularly in their weekly games, which I happily did for the next nine years. During that time, I had much social contact with Bobby and Libbie that solidified our enjoyable friendship. He even invited me up to his Brant Lake Camp for the recreational week following the camp season. I did that in two separate years, both times with my wife and youngest son. As experienced camp people ourselves, my wife and I were very impressed with the camp and readily understood why it long had maintained its reputation as one of the best camps in the entire country.

In 1980, Bobby and Libbie moved away from Long Island to Florida and once again we lost contact with each other. So, we skip ahead some 36 years to 2016, when my wife and I moved to The Cedars of Chapel Hill, an outstanding Life Care Community in North Carolina, a move we made because of my wife’s intensifying health problems. This beautiful community has eleven four story buildings and thirty plus homes totaling over four hundred residents and spread over considerable acreage. Who do you think lives in my new building just two floors below me? YEP, none other than Bobby G! Fate? Luck? Serendipity? How about all three!

Yes, we happily resumed our warm friendship, he now 96 and me, a mere 85, both of us no longer spring chickens for sure. But, like the improbable movie scenario it had become, it also gave me a truer, longitudinal picture of Bobby’s entire life, dating from when I first had met him in that fateful 1947-basketball game. Still, the book probably would not have happened if not for Mr. William Thorpe, who recently had come into Bobby’s life and peripherally into mine. William, who you’ll meet in his own foreword, was the catalyst for this book! When you read his foreword just ahead, you’ll see why his unique impressions of Bobby, to which I fully agreed, helped motivate me to write this book.

So, to conclude this lengthy answer to the question, Why did I choose to write this biography of my good friend, Robert S. Gersten, known to everyone as BobbyG?

Because I strongly believe that Bobby’s lifetime of achievements and accomplishments are quite distinctive and notable, both individually and collectively.

Because there is conclusive evidence that he has made significant contributions to the lives of thousands of young people.

Because William Thorpe, a mutual friend of Bobby’s and mine, first suggested the book idea, which would not have happened had I not stepped up to write it and I was pleased to do so.

Because I’d like people, who only have met Bobby recently, to get a more complete picture of his entire life in order to appreciate him more accurately.

Because, viewed in its entirety, I believe that his life story is quite inspirational and will be of real value to every reader because his has been a life worth celebrating!

But, YOU the reader are the jury. I invite you to judge for yourself!

Sincerely,

Stan Friedland

March, 2018

GUEST FOREWORD

I am a comparative newcomer in the life of Bobby Gersten, helping him to start and develop a new initiative, called the UNC WALK FOR HEALTH.

This program, begun in 2015, is based on the simple premise that all people, of all ages, can improve their health by simply walking regularly!

I first met Bobby in 2015 and by repeated contacts and conversations with him, it became perfectly clear to me that he has spent his entire life in perpetual physical and athletic movement that has promoted his own life’s motto: Good health through active movement!

With his effervescent and gregarious personality, Bobby has been the perfect ambassador to spread our core message of healthy, active living as the key to life longevity. He turned 97 in 2017 and realized, more than ever, that walking was the safest and easiest activity for people of all ages to develop and maintain their good health. He and I also realized that Bobby, having been a star player for the University of North Carolina’s basketball and baseball teams, going as far back as the late ’30s and early ’40s, would be the ideal poster boy to promote the concept of walking for health, especially in Chapel Hill, the very home of UNC!

We also realized that Bobby is the oldest living player who started and starred for any UNC basketball and baseball teams, justifying my new nickname for him, which is, The Great-GrandDaddy of UNC Athletics! Consequently, the UNC Walk for Health program revolves about him. Our events serve as an inspiration and stimulus to people of all ages, from the very young to the very old, that it’s never too late to sneaker-up and walk to improve your health.

But, this concept and this program just open the doors, wider and wider on Bobby’s entire life, to reveal an impressive array of achievements and accomplishments that make him, not only an exceptional athlete, but an exceptional founder and leader and educator throughout his entire life-span.

He has been a remarkable teacher, coach,, college dean, recruiter, educator, board of education member, camp director, and an all-around dynamic leader, who has impacted the lives of many, many people.

There is no better way to tell his complete story, which has so many facets, so many layers, all of which can enrich the lives of its readers in many profound ways, than to devote a whole book to him.

I think you will benefit from the full array of his remarkable life’s activities and the invaluable life-lessons contained in his biography. The healthy, long life and tremendous legacy of the legendary Bobby G. is truly worth celebrating.

This is, in every sense, a book for all ages!

William Thorpe,

January 17, 2018

CHAPTER ONE

JUST WHO IS BOBBY G?

P eripatetic is the very best adjective to describe Bob Gersten, affectionately known to family, friends and acquaintances as Bobby G.

He is always on the move, always on the go, always doing something that has movement, motion, fitness, athletics, family, students, campers and friends in his sights. He has been this way all his life, from his childhood, right on through to his present, where he is 97 years young. And I do mean young!

Then, there is his voice. It’s stentorian. While it doesn’t always precede him, once he appears, it defines him to all who are there. Bobby G. is in the house. Indeed, given his life’s major activities, his voice has been a strong asset. It’s a singular voice, a solid baritone of professional quality and he enjoys using it. Since he always has been a man of good humor, his audiences find him easy to listen to, especially because he usually has something that’s interesting or funny or significant to say.

Bobby has been a leader from his very beginning because he has the gift of inspiring trust and belief from those around him. He has been elected, selected, or self-selected to many positions of leadership in his long life and rarely has he let the people in his respective groups down.

So, where do we find the peripatetic Bobby G. as we first look in on him? Let’s take a brief journey to some of the venues that have defined his life.

First up is one of the most important places to him, the epicenter of basketball at the University of North Carolina, UNC, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Formally called The Dean Smith Basketball Center, it is known affectionately as The Dean-Dome, in honor of its legendary coach, Dean Smith.

The date is February 12th, 2010, and UNC is staging a giant birthday party, entitled, Carolina Basketball, Celebration Of A Century.

Basketball at UNC, a culture unto itself, is now exactly 100 years old, the very first basketball game having been played on January 27th, 1910, when the UNC basketball team beat Virginia Christian College, 42 to 21. Since that historic debut, basketball has slowly, but surely, grown and indeed is so intertwined with the culture of the town and state that they are now synonymous. That same, strong reputation extends to the many other UNC varsity sports teams, and because they too do extremely well, the university enjoys a world-wide reputation as one of the best, all-around athletic programs in the entire country.

But, basketball is regarded as UNC’s flagship athletic program, and to commemorate its 100th anniversary, the school has gone all out to celebrate. It has invited back seventy of its former top basketball players, from all eras, to play a Centennial Game that will recognize and honor all of those who helped make University of North Carolina basketball so memorable.

Bobby G. is one of those players, having played all four years as a starter on the UNC Freshman and Varsity teams. So there he is, on line, waiting to run into a packed Dean-Dome, to be introduced, individually, as befitting each of these former basketball athletes. Bobby is at the very end of the line because he is the oldest one there, having graduated UNC in 1942.

Does he belong amongst this elite group?

When Bobby graduated from UNC in 1942, he won the prestigious Patterson Award, having been voted unanimously as The Best Athlete In His Graduating Class. He starred, not only in basketball, but also in baseball for each of his three eligible seasons, a rare feat of athletic versatility, not often matched by UNC athletes throughout its storied history.

He also coached basketball at UNC for a short period of time and has maintained active contact with its program by scouting potential recruits wherever he has lived, even driving some of them down to meet the coaching staff and to chaperone them around the campus.

So, there he is, ready to run onto the court, along with his UNC varsity mates from all eras. But, before that processional begins, Woody Durham, the iconic voice of North Carolina basketball broadcasts, re-states the impressive historical success of the University of North Carolina’s basketball program in its first century of existence. Here are but some of its notable achievements.

Number one in the nation, on number of victories, per season, averaging 19.9.

Number two nationally, in total victories, with 1997, overall.

90 winning seasons, 36 league titles, 41 NCAA post- season tournaments, 32 top-ten end of season rankings by the AP, 18 Final Fours, 6 NCAA titles and six-end-of season rankings as number one team in the country.

Five national coaches of the year and six coaches and three players elected to the National Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Listening to that impressive list, one can understand more readily why basketball has outgrown its normal athletic limits and has become a full blown cultural entity of its own, not only for Chapel Hill and the entire state of North Carolina, but also because of the 464 former basketball athletes, who played for UNC in its first century of basketball and who have taken their UNC experiences with them across the rest of the country. As is chanted frequently, Go Tar Heels or better yet, Go Heels!.

And now, Woody Durham, having finished that list of impressive UNC basketball records, yells out,

And here comes North Carolina basketball!

And, into the arena, as if they were about to start one of their long-ago varsity games, and running as if they were 20 years old again, comes the parade of Carolina blue and white uniformed basketball alumni, to celebrate 100 years of Carolina basketball!

They encircle the entire court, and, at the very, very end of the line, with the other oldest alumni athletes, and wearing his actual number ten jersey, is the unmistakable figure of Bobby Gersten. Flashing a big smile, he smacks hands with a number of his fellow athletes, who know of him but may never have met him before.

As each athlete’s name is called, he steps out and waves to the crowd, smiling to his healthy round of applause. The Dean-Dome seats twenty-two thousand people and it’s virtually a sell-out crowd today.

It’s a long line-up to get through, but it is essential to pay individual recognition to each former player. Finally, it’s Bobby’s turn and the PA announcer, probably relieved to get to the last person in line, makes a bigger deal of his introduction. And now, here is our oldest living UNC basketball alumnus, who played from 1938 to 1942, Bobby Gersten!

No plain wave for Bobby. He smiles broadly and starts to jog in a short square of his area, waving to an applauding crowd. One of the commentators on the DVD that was made of this event, says, If I can move around half as good at his age as he is now doing, I’d be really pleased. His partner responds, He looks really ready to play. It won’t surprise me if he even scores a basket today.

However, such was not the case. The oldest group took the floor first but were spared the physical stress of playing a full court game. They were given the healthier task of playing a three on three half-court game. This started with a center jump between the two tallest players. But, just as they lined up to do so, Bobby tapped his center somewhere on the butt and motioned that he wanted to jump center against his old friend, Nemo Neiman. At age 90, he probably stood 5’5, while Nemo had to be 6’ 4. That was about even in Bobby’s mischievous eyes.

While everyone had a good laugh, Bobby slid into position