Neil ‘Dr. D’ Gretsky could be an intimidating person on first meeting.
“He was a math professor who surfed, played volleyball, was a second degree black belt and wrote about jazz for Easy Reader under the name Dr. D. We always wondered why he agreed to take us on surf trips. He called us his degenerate friends and we called him Dr. Demento,” recalled Pete Bowman.
The two lived next door to one another, a block from the beach, on 14th Street after Gretsky moved to Hermosa Beach in 1967, the year he earned a doctorate in math from Carnegie-Tech University.
Gretsky died last month, at age 74, of complications related to dementia. The cause of his death could not be more ironic, friends have noted.
Bowman credits Gretsky with inspiring him to become a teacher. He also credits Gretsky with convincing him and his best friend Bobby Uzzo to skip classes at Mira Costa High School one day for a surf trip to Rincon.
“We got to Rincon at the crack of dawn and it was perfect six- to eight-foot with only a few guys out. This was before surf forecasts. Some locals came up to us and said, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are. It’s been flat for months.’ I said, ‘We’re not lucky, we’ve got Dr. D. He predicted the swell.’”
Gretsky’s early display of brilliance earned him admission to the prestigious Boston Latin High School and a four year Merit Scholarship to the California Institute of Technology.
During his four decades teaching math at the University of California at Riverside, he became one of the campus’s most respected professors.
“Even though he often seems ruthless and is intimidating, his homework solutions are so thorough that it makes even the hardest proofs easy to grasp,” wrote one student on RateMyProfessor.com.
“He wasn’t just teaching the course materials. He also taught us practical problem-solving skills. I am still using what he taught me today,” another student wrote.
One week, Gretsky might be testifying as a math expert on a Washington D.C. panel headed by Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and the next week his helping mathematically challenged friends.
When 16th street neighbor Norm Rosen, a professor of primatology at Cal State University Fullerton, needed help on his paper “Will Nigeria and Cameroon Chimpanzees go extinct?” Gretsky provided the statistical modeling.
“I knew chimps and he knew statistics. We shared authorship,” Rosen said.
When the City of San Diego banned Redondo Fun Factory owner Steve Shoemaker’s invention Wedges and Ledges because they said it was a gambling game. Gretsky testified as a court expert that the game was a game of skill and the ban was lifted.
He developed a formula for Easy Reader that demonstrated how profitability could be increased by lowering display advertising rates as display volume increased.
Gretsky didn’t limit his advice to people who asked for his advice. Bowman recalled Gretsky confronting a Hermosa Beach policeman for driving illegally on The Strand and routinely confronting people he saw littering on the beach.
“One day June Triplet, the old, Pall Mall smoking cocktail waitress at the Mermaid, pulled out of the Mermaid parking lot onto The Strand, which was illegal. Neil stood in front of her car until the cops made him let her pass. But the next day Boots (Mermaid owner Boots Thelen), built a curb between his parking lot and The Strand,” Uzzo said.
Uzzo recalled another occasion when Gretsky stopped traffic, this time at the exit to a state park parking lot at a surf spot down south.
“After surfing, Neil, Peter and I got back to my VW van and found our clothes were stolen. Neil stormed off to the exit and stood there with his big afro, big mustache and wetsuit rolled down exposing his big hairy chest and made everyone get out of their cars and open their trunks before he’d let them out. But he never found who stole our stuff.”
One day in Either/Or Bookstore, he ran into an old friend who told him she was moving out of town. “Don’t do that or I’ll be the last intellectual left in Hermosa,” Gretsky said. When another friend standing nearby piped up, “I’m not leaving,” Gretsky shot back, “That doesn’t change things.”
Gretsky was as generous as he was frank. In 1970, he struck up a friendship with Los Angeles City lifeguard Alvin Smith. The two met at breakfast at the Surfboarder and subsequently became roommates. When the two were forced to move Gretsky put up the down payment so they could buy a house together. Gretsky earned the downpayment playing blackjack in Las Vegas, according to his sister Nancy (nee Gretsky) Bassel.
“Some years later, when he was buying a duplex, he went back to Vegas. But by then the casinos were on to card counters at the blackjack tables and wouldn’t let him play,” his sister said.
“Whenever Neil told about his blackjack days he always credited his stepdaughter Cindy, whom he taught to deal so he could practice counting cards,” his second wife Terry (nee Maushake) said.
When the two married in 1986, Gretsky allowed Smith to assume ownership of the house.
“I’ll be forever indebted to Neil for helping me to remain in Hermosa,” Smith said.
Smith remained a lifelong friend and may have been the only person who could have convinced the headstrong Gretsky, who thought he knew more than his doctors, to seek medical help when his health began to seriously fail.
Smith and Uzzo were visiting Gretsky one day and noticed he had trouble with his balance and holding a thought.
“I told him, ‘Neil, you need to call 911. I’m not going to do it for you, but we’re not leaving until you do it. I think it was the hardest phone call he ever made. Afterwards, he moved to an assisted living facility,” Smith said.
Uzzo said Gretsky did have a wealth of medical knowledge, which Gretsky attributed to his martial arts studies.
“One day I tweaked my back surfing and was barely able to walk up the beach to 16th Street, where I ran into Neil. He said, ‘This is going to hurt and you’ll probably pass out, so I’ll hold on to you. Then he did something to my arm. It felt like thunderbolt passed through me. But when I regained consciousness, my back was fine.”
After marrying Terry, Gretsky turned his focus to the raising of sons Aaron and Miles. He involved them in Junior Lifeguards, martial arts, the Lanakila Outrigger Club and, in their teen years, in music and high school wrestling and rugby.
In addition to Terry and sons Aaron and Miles, Gretsky is survived by step-daughter Cindy Adams and her husband Marshall Adams, sister Nancy Gretsky-Bassel and her husband Howard Bassel, nephews Noah Bassel and Timothy Reade, first wife Patricia Hogan and step-grandchildren Taylor and Carolyn Adams.
A paddleout in celebration of Gretsky’s life will be held on the north side of the Hermosa Beach pier this summer, on June 26. ER
