In Memory

Mike Grogan

Mike Grogan succumbed to colon cancer in August 2018 at his home in Winthrop, Washington, with his wife of 52 years, Robin Jeffers, by his side. After graduation, Mike attended the University of Washington, and later worked on his Math PhD and taught at UCLA, before leaving to pursue his non-academic job as an LA taxicab owner/operator. He and Robin moved back to Seattle in 1991, where Mike went into software engineering, up until his retirement from Sun Microsystems in 2009. Along the way he had become a runner, a cross-country skier, and a gourmet cook, and Mike and Robin moved to the Methow Valley to make it all fulltime. All of us who knew Mike in high school know that he was the keystone of Highline's varsity debate team. He and Robin met at a debate tournament in Tacoma in their senior year, and forever after they addressed all their disputes as debaters, and whoever was more logical won. She'd pointed out that she worked the same hours as he but did all the housework; that's how he became the cook. Information provided by Ric Johnston



 
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05/26/19 09:01 PM #1    

Greg Fuller (Fuller)

Thanks for letting us know about Mike Ric.  Hard to forget Mike running around the track at Highline in our white PE shorts and tee shirts.  I tried high jumping of all things, but Mike easily bested my record with his long legs etc.  I do remember that even as a kid he was refreshingly direct, thoughful, and outspoken.  Found him not to have changed that much in our brief visit with him and Robin the Summer of 2016 in his beautiful home in the pines of the Methow, not that far from that ranch Mr. Tice used to have.  Will always regret not hooking up again with them before now. Life just kept getting in the way.  Robin graciously shared a super picture of her dear hubby who I think all of us who knew him would have recognized had we seen him walking down any street. He was one of a kind and will be greatly missed.

Regards, Greg

 


05/27/19 06:54 PM #2    

Ric Johnston (Class Of 66)

Thanks for the picture, Greg.  It’s how I remember Mike, as I last saw him, when we were relatively young, with long hair without a hint of gray.  I didn’t know him as particularly athletic (he used to unleash a withering glare when people -- adults, most often -- looked as his height and asked him if he played basketball), mostly because I met him in debate class when he was a junior and I was a sophomore and when Brent Collette was the most awesome debater around.  The following year the debate topic was nuclear weapons and Mike had become the awesome one.  Once an opponent used the Sword of Damocles argument -- that everybody was all screwed up because they lived under an existential threat -- and Mike opened his cross-examination with, “You grew up in the nuclear age; what would you say your chief personality defects are?”  We formed a three-man team, with Bob Kearns and myself, and Mike devised a trick play -- you didn’t think you could do that in debate, did you? -- that almost always won for us.  We tied for the SPSL state tournament slot and won a tie-breaking debate with a hapless Franklin Pierce duo, but we finished out of the money at the state tournament at WSU, thrashed in the second round by an Ephrata team that I think had God on their side.

Mike drove a green Mercury of about 1951 vintage (now it’s a classic); not all the windows actually closed (perhaps there was no glass in a couple of them), and it was generally just a bit more disreputable than it looked. I remember one time he was driving us all up to a tournament at Seattle Pacific; it was snowing that Saturday morning and as he drove up my dad looked at Mike’s car, looked at the six inches of snow on the ground, and pulled me aside, saying, “Call me if you make it.”

Aside from being perhaps the smartest person that most of us will ever meet, Mike was really the happiest person ever, approaching every phase of his life with plain relish and enthusiasm, from Highline, to debate, to Pizza Pete, to the University, to UCLA, (and, later, after he and I had lost touch), to cab driving, to computers, to retirement in Winthrop.  That enthusiasm was infectious and it brought us all into his orbit; he was the best, and he left too soon.

 


06/01/19 12:16 PM #3    

Bob Kearns

I met Michael Paul Grogan on the shores of Angle Lake in the Summer of ’62. We were 15 and had recently graduated junior high. Grogan was introduced to me by Mike Dolan, one of his Sylvester Jr. High alumni. Dolan and I met at a Scouting Jamboree in South King County months before and were pleasantly surprised to run into each other at the lake. Grogan and I hit it off immediately, and we ended up gabbing away that afternoon on the beach. After learning we both would be taking debate class, we were excited to reconnect in the Fall at Highline. Turns out we shared four classes together our first sophomore quarter at Highline and ultimately became debate partners and besties through high school and beyond.

I leave it to others to comment on Grogan’s indisputable towering intellect, except to say that we played a lot of chess and I didn’t win very often; and those paltry victories were likely of the mercy variety. Instead, I hope to offer some insight into the warmer parts of his personality, including humor, love, music…and food.

Mike and I loved a good laugh and we would often engage in one-upmanship to see who could get the better laugh from the other. One of our comic duels took place in Ms. Halvorson’s sophomore English class. On an otherwise ordinary day, Ms. Halvorson had to leave the classroom for a brief period. It was long enough for Mike and me to tie up a desk chair and hang it out the window, much to the amusement of the rest of the class. Unfortunately, the window faced the western driveway and the hapless hanging chair was observed by Mr. Wiggins upon his return from a meeting off campus. It wasn’t long before Ms. Halvorson was summoned to the office. Of course, she still had no clue as to what had been perpetrated by two of her ‘honor’ students and we bravely kept our silence as she left the classroom. Bad move, and one which no doubt contributed to our failing grades that quarter. Despite the high price, we were still laughing hysterically about that stunt years later.

In our time, most boys of high school age were somewhat less than confident in pursuit of the girl of their dreams. That is why I was a little taken aback when Grogan announced to me during a break at a debate tournament in Tacoma that he was totally smitten by a girl named Robin Jeffers, who was there with one of the high school teams in competition. When I met Robin, two things were clear: Mike was indeed smitten and it was easy to understand why. Robin was a very bright and good-natured lovely young woman who was also very much in love with “this tall brilliant guy from Highline.” The fact that they stayed together from that time until his passing is a testament to the powerful light of their love.

Grogan and I shared a passion for music along with Robb Hunt, another good Highline friend. Robb, Mike and I were in the lounge of the Lewis and Clark Theater waiting for a Sunday movie to start when the Beatles appeared on the console television. Along with the rest of the viewing audience of the Ed Sullivan Show, we were transfixed by the music and the boys’ magnetic personalities. As a birthday surprise the following February, Mike and Robb personally delivered to me at home a fresh 45 RPM single with “She Loves You” on one side and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on the other. Pretty sure Robin’s influence was in full bloom at that point in 1964. Later that summer, Grogan and I won a radio station contest and we were given free tickets to see the Beatles perform at the Seattle Center. Although it was difficult to make out a single lyric through all the screaming for the entire show, that concert remains one of my life’s top tier moments and will always be one of the best memories of life with Mike.

I was greatly saddened by the news of Mike’s passing. Until the moment I heard about it from Ric Johnston, I had been planning a follow-up trip after Greg Fuller’s visit in 2016. I was thinking this summer would be a great time for Marcie and me to do the Winthrop Rhythm & Blues Festival with him and Robin. Although that was not meant to be, I was heartened a bit with recent knowledge that Mike had become quite the gourmet cook, the charming result of his and Robin’s early debate experience. Learning something new and humanly basic about him put me in touch with Mike Grogan, the living man, once again after all the years in between.

BK


06/03/19 09:54 AM #4    

Ric Johnston (Class Of 66)

I am skeptical about those "off-campus meetings" Vice-Principal Lowell Wiggins was always coming back from.  Mike lived with his mom across the street from school, in a little complex of a half-dozen single-story brick apartments (I believe it's still there, sandwiched between two giant complexes), and we -- Bob, too -- used to sneak over there for a cigarette at lunch time (this is where I learned you could light a smoke off an electric stove), and almost every time we were running interference from Mr. Wiggins.  English teacher Kenn Myers called him the Principal of Vice and I think at that point in his very long career (he was at Highline when my grandmother was there in the school's first year of existence) he was a roving guard stationed outside, looking for escapees (at the 1965 earthquake I was the first person outside the building and Mr. Wiggins was already there).


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