Church remembers former pastor
Bill Grossman. He came to Marcellus the better part of 10years ago. Marcellus Presbyterian Church had recently lost a pastor who wished to live closer to her home, and in the Presbyterian tradition, a search was about to begin to find an interim pastor who would serve until a permanent pastor could be found. As luck would have it, one of our more recent members, who had called her home Dewitt years before, was aware that Bill had come out of retirement to serve her home church as an interim. That interim position was about to end, and Bill and his wife, Allene, were going to head into retirement again. An invitation was sent to him to visit Marcellus and to consider becoming our interim pastor here. The church and Bill came to an agreement, and a new friendship came to be.
Bill was one of those special people who could walk into your life and become more important to you than you could ever have imagined. He was a pastor for nearly 50 years, but that was not all. He became a Rotarian at almost the same time he was ordained. He was also a small town legislator in western NY. He was an accomplished trombonist. He owned a business dealing with computers, and although he was of an age that most people would have not mastered the computer, he embraced it and all the things that it was capable of doing. He loved jokes and stories and had a repertoire that seemed to be limitless. Maybe most of all, he had a personality that caused almost everyone to want to be near him and to talk to him. He listened and reacted with wisdom and comfort.
Bill became the interim pastor, but lived in Baldwinsville. Almost every day he made the trek from there to his office at the church. He loved his coffee, and bought a Keurig for the office. He also bought a Bunn for the church coffee hour on Sundays. He started a coffee group to meet at First Cup Café. Every Thursday morning at 10:30 he would join a group of us older guys to talk about any and all things. Bill was real in all ways.
Rotary was important to him. He hadn’t missed a meeting in over 45 years. He was a Paul Harris Rotarian multiple times. He was adamant about supporting the Rotarian movement to eradicate polio worldwide. Everyone looked forward to his weekly Marcellus Rotary newsletter. Bill and Allene could always be counted on to be there as participants whenever any event was going on.
One of my fondest memories of Bill came close to the end of his ministry, which by this time had gone way beyond the interim period. Pastor Bill always had an interesting children’s sermon. He had just had one of his knees replaced a couple of weeks prior. His first Sunday back in the pulpit he had the kids get up and dance the Hokey Pokey with him. Strange for a children’s sermon, but his point was that when you do something, you throw your whole self in and you shake it all about. That was Bill. In everything he did, he threw his whole self in and shook it all about.
Bill died in Florida a few weeks ago, two weeks after visiting us one more time. We miss him. He had become a cherished member of our Marcellus family. On Saturday, November 26th, at 2:00 in the afternoon we will have a memorial service at his beloved Marcellus First Presbyterian Church. Allene and his family will be with us, and most likely people from Dewitt, Syracuse and from all the other places that Bill lived and touched lives. We will say good-bye to our friend, but do it with Thanksgiving for having had the opportunity to have shared a few years with him.
