Dr. Michael S. Gregory

GREGORY, Dr. Michael S. - A memorial will be held this spring on the campus of San Francisco State University for Dr. Michael S. Gregory, long-time professor of English and founder of NEXA, a groundbreaking program seeking convergence between the sciences and humanities. Dr. Gregory died at his Mill Valley home on February 22, 2005. A fifth-generation Californian, Dr. Gregory was born October 6, 1929 in Oakland, to Alexine Mitchell and Walter Lubowski, who changed the family name to Gregory when Michael was a teen. Michael's life was heavily influenced by family lore, from the role played by his step-grandfather, Major Charles Lee Tilden, in the creation of the East Bay Regional Park system to the story of maternal grandfather Capt. Josiah A. Mitchell who survived 43 days in an open longboat after the clipper ship Hornet burned at sea. Mark Twain's story about this adventure, Longboat to Hawaii, catapulted Twain to literary fame. Dr. Gregory earned his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from UC Berkeley after doing fieldwork in Hong Kong. He lived in Hong Kong with his wife and three young daughters in 1966, having sailed from San Francisco aboard the Norwegian freighter, Martha Bakke-surviving a perilous storm at sea during which the freighter was forced to eject its deck cargo of cast iron pipe. From 1959 to 2002 Dr. Gregory was professor of English at San Francisco State University. He was a founding member of the National Endowment for the Humanities' national board of consultants and, in 1974, received what was then the largest grant in the university's history to found the NEXA program, which became his life's focus and his greatest source of pride. Decades of students (along with his friends and family) benefited from Dr. Gregory's voracious intellect, his commitment to learning and his passion for big ideas. Dr. Gregory was a unique and challenging personality. As he wrote in a paper presented at the Lawrence Hall of Science, 1975, "in the history of ideas, it is easy to forget that the minds through which these ideas flow from generation to generation are not disembodied thought machines; these minds belong to human beings, each with his genius and his shortcomings, his strengths and his quiddities, his peculiar lucidity and his peculiar blindness." Dr. Gregory was a talented photographer, a follower of his own star, a devotee of Mt. Lassen, the ocean and Joseph Conrad, and a lover of horses and dogs, of which he had many. He is the author of a number of articles dealing with China, sociobiology, strategies of teaching, and the place of humanities in a scientific world. Dr. Gregory is survived by his daughters Erika, Tanya and Alexa, their mothers Jan Gregory and Ora Cipolla, and his grandchildren Hannah, Jeremy and Jack. Contributions in his memory may be made to the Milo Foundation, a domestic animal sanctuary, PO Box 500, Willits, CA 95490 www.milofoundation. org/donate or to: The NEXA Program, SF State University College of Humanities 1600 Holloway Ave. SF, CA 94132.