Remembering Gary Byrd, 1942-1966

Gary Byrd, 1942-1966

Gary Byrd’s sudden passing in 1966 deeply saddened his friends. Some of us are still trying to understand what happened. All of us remember how much we enjoyed knowing him. 

Gary’s Younger Years, Fred Elder Gary was a gifted, bright and quiet young man.  I knew him not only as a school companion at Sunnyside, Roosevelt and East High, but also, as a walking, biking, riding companion on the way to and from school and an after-school play mate.  Actually, I knew him best in our younger years.  We did those things that young boys do, including taking different paths to and from school: occasional stops at a local store to get the two for a nickel cinnamon-flavored sweets pulled from what seemed an immense jar of those hot, sweet, delights; walks through a local cemetery, wondering what would scare us; throwing rocks at mostly nothing; ‘racing’ our bicycles; and sometimes even talking about what we were learning in school, books we had read and more.

Given the time (the early 1950’s) one subject that often arose was nuclear energy.  We lived in a time when this was on the minds of many and the topic sparked our interest in our science classes. Gary, however, was more than interested – he was fascinated.  You must remember this was the time when all things nuclear were new and when the information was more or less available, even to us plebians without any sort of clearance or ‘need to know.’

I well remember the day that Gary pulled a large manila envelope from his notebook and began to describe for me the intricacies of the nuclear reactor drawings in the envelope.  You see, he had written somewhere in Washington D.C. and requested plans for a nuclear reactor.  They sent him the plans!  Gary had gone through them thoroughly and actually knew not only the components, but the ‘workings’ of the integrated whole.  He was very excited and animated as he explained these things to me. I also found them fascinating, though I never understood it all as well as Gary.  We had several such discussions as Gary attempted to bring me up to his level of understanding, but I am afraid I never quite achieved that goal.

I always saw Gary though the prism of science and technology.  That is exactly what he was in the world that I knew as Gary and Fred.  It came as a great shock to me when I learned that his Harvard years had turned his attention to literature, philosophy, and other things generally described as liberal arts.

We stayed in touch in high school, sharing our interests in things scientific.  However, we began going more in our own respective directions near the end of high school.  That was most likely my fault as I was putting great emphasis on athletics and probably too little emphasis on people.  Ah well, we learn slowly sometimes and, in this case, that slow learning pace hurts even today.

Gary was indeed brilliant.  Rest comfortably, Gary.  You were a positive force in my life.

The Gary We Knew

Marilyn Tompkins Bellert  Brilliance, wit, and a sometimes wacky sense of humor distinguished Gary at East High. Brilliant? Yes. He won more scholarships than almost anyone else in the class and went on to graduate from Harvard. During high school he invented a bogus math process called Sigma Notation. The caption on the 1960 Yearbook photo at right says, “Sigma Notation,” stubbornly maintains Gary Byrd, ’60, “is my proof that two plus two equals zero.” At a state math conference, Gary and a friend delivered straight-faced Sigma Notation lectures. Were the math wizards fooled? Or just amazed at the bravado? Gary was known to sign his photo in yearbooks with “Who dat?” or another self-effacing comment. A few close friends knew that Gary sometimes felt very sad, a  deep-seated and frequent feeling he couldn’t explain.

Glenna Stearman Park  When Gary asked me for a date to see To Kill A Mockingbird, I was impressed. He was a legend in our class. After the movie, we had an engaging discussion that surprised me, since I had not ever thought about movies from an intellectual perspective. Gary was interested in the concept and form of the movie and its very strong political statement in the segregated 1950’s.  We were discussing movies as a literary form.  That discussion informed my teaching strategy when I taught a high school film history course many years later. I kept hoping that Gary would call for another date, but it didn’t happen. 

Gary’s Later Years, Gene Carter  Gary and I did summer school and other classes at East.  He had a rollicking laugh when something amused him intensely, but otherwise was soft-spoken, detailed, thoughtful.  Running cross-country, he remarked, helped him concentrate and think later, and freed his mind while running.  We were both baffled by girls, a precursor to life.

After East, Jim Davidson would have an annual Christmas gathering that always included Gary and Paul Lueker, among others.  We learned of each others’ lives, our worries and hopes, and in best East High tradition ridiculed and teased one another.  Jim was pre-med at Washington University and Gary was majoring in literature at Harvard.  We were all puzzled about the world, why people did what they did, feeling the world would be so much better if people did what made sense to us.  Gary and Jim took delight in laughing at anything I learned about economics and business, knowing I had to study in those areas as a condition of my scholarship, whereas they pursued what interested them.  But it was respectful good-natured joking, teasing out of subtleties of a field and a person. 

As did Gary at Harvard, I found my classmates at Northwestern to be odd.  We did not think their ability to grasp thought was different from most of our East classmates, but their worldliness and disposable funds were significantly different.  Some of us at East met Gary Zukov, elected governor of Boys State, a charismatic dynamo from Hays who also went to Harvard with Gary Byrd.  Zukov dropped out his first year, became a Green Beret, and returned to become a self-help guru and popular author.  Maybe Gary and I  should have done something like this prior to or during college, our gap years before they had a name. We would have had time to think about what we were doing. 

By fall 1965, Gary was at Wichita University, teaching English classes and doing his masters in literature; I was in a PhD program I truly hated.  We were dismayed that as we got older that we didn’t get rid of decisions, but had more of them with bigger consequences (duh).  Trivial choices turned out to be significant, and often EVENTS determined what happened to us.  At East, sociology versus chemistry might be a choice, and then college or not.  We agreed our undergrad degrees were interesting and likely expanded our options for work.  But we still didn’t see where we were going, and Gary wondered what he would do with his Harvard degree.  He knew many of his classmates seemingly waltzed into some grad school or to a business of parents or parents’ friends.  We envied that option, but failed to realize that those expectations could be a burden, too.

Gary and I discussed these issues a lot as we drove that fall of 1965 to St. Louis to visit Marilyn Tompkins and Jim Davidson.  Marilyn was teaching high school English and her husband was working on a PhD in history, while Jim was in med school, all at Washington U. We had a great morning with them, then I headed on to Pittsburgh after dropping Gary off at the bus station. It was the last time I saw him.  

Gene Carter, Jim Davidson, and Gary Byrd in St. Louis, Fall 1965

I remember Gary when all of us had minds and bodies that worked as we expected.  Those of us born between 1935 and 1945 typically ended up with better opportunities for jobs and life than almost any other demographic and period in U.S. history.  Gary, with his significant gifts, would have had a career that contributed much to the world. Our generation suffered a painful loss with his early departure.