Spring 2005
Carrying the Family Ball
Photo by Leo Kim
They may watch football from the stands, but in their lives and careers, Susan and Bert Gross have crossed the goal line many
times over.
When Bert Gross (economics’50) and his wife Susan Hill Gross (interdepartmental ’56) attended the homecoming game at the Metrodome in October 2004, they couldn’t help thinking of another football game played 80 years earlier. It was in the fall of 1924, before either of them was born. Memorial Stadium, built with funds raised by faculty, students and alumni, had just been dedicated. It was the inaugural game.
As they did in 2004, the Gophers faced the University of Illinois. Happily, then as now, fortune favored Minnesota. Although the “mighty Illini” took the field with the legendary halfback Harold “Red” Grange, Minnesota won—and did so again in 2004.
There was, to be sure, one notable difference between 1924 and 2004. This time, the Gross family watched from the stands.
Bert’s father, Louis Gross, played varsity football for the U in the twenties. Louis, who was on the field for the entire 1924 homecoming game, went on to win the conference medal as the outstanding athlete/scholar of 1925. A few years later, he became an assistant football coach for the U during the memorable 1929 season, when football legend Bronko Nagurski was fullback.
However the family tradition of achievement and service got started, the Gross family has been a maroon-and-gold family, dedicated to supporting the U, ever since that day in 1924. Louis Gross earned his law degree in 1925, the same year that his future wife, Bert’s mother Beatrice, graduated at 17 from the College of Education.
Phil Gross, Bert’s uncle, who played varsity football for the U, recently endowed the Gross Family Professorship of Nonprofit Management in the Humphrey Institute and the Gross Family Board Room in the McNamara Center.
Bert insists that he’s “no athlete,” but that didn’t stop him from making his mark in other ways. An accomplished student, he was a candidate in 1950 for the highest academic honors the University could confer on an undergraduate. But to graduate summa cum laude, Bert recalls, he had to face a three-man committee of his professors and pass an oral exam. After the orals, two of the three committee members voted to award him the honors.
Casting the only dissenting vote was Walter Heller, later chairman of President John Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisors. Fifty-five years later, Bert recalls with a certain bemusement Heller’s claim that he wasn’t “rounded enough in the arts.”
Into the end zone
That may have been the very last time anyone failed to give Bert Gross a nod of approval. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1953, he returned to Minnesota to pursue a career in corporate law. Until his retirement in 2004, he was General Counsel of the Minneapolis-based Regis Corporation.
This generation’s University connection doesn’t stop with Bert. Sisters Luella Gross Goldberg and Linda Gross Cohen, identical twins, both studied at the U. Luella, who is married to Stanley Goldberg, a colorectal surgeon who graduated from the U’s Medical School, was the first woman to serve as chair of the University of Minnesota Foundation. Linda, who earned a doctoral degree in psychology from the U, serves on the Humphrey Institute Advisory Council.
“The University of Minnesota is the most important institution in the state,” says Bert. “So many graduates of the U stay here and enrich the whole community.”
Family by marriage
Considering this family network of University connections, perhaps it was only natural that Bert Gross would marry Susan Hill, one of three sisters who graduated from CLA. Now married for 28 years, Bert and Susan share a St. Louis Park home with their dog, Poco.
Like their sister Susan, Rachel Hill Earp and Mary Hill Rojas have ties to the U that take in several generations. Their grandfather, Hibbert Winslow Hill, taught in the School of Public Health and also served as Minnesota’s first state epidemiologist. Both their parents were also alumni.
Their father, Hibbert M. Hill, returned to teach engineering after he graduated in 1923. During his undergraduate years, he and his two brothers, Jim and Sam, were members of the U varsity swimming team. He served as president of the University Alumni Association the year Susan graduated and received the University of Minnesota’s Outstanding Achievement Award in 1956.
When their mother, Rachel Louise Hanna, received her English degree in 1929, she led the Cap & Gown Day Parade. “It was a high point of her life,” says daughter Susan.
Like Bert, Susan has made her mark on the world. After graduate work at William & Mary, she went on to found the Upper Midwest Women’s History Center and to coauthor a series of books on women in other cultures. She now directs a nonprofit organization, The Clio Project: Worldwide Women’s History on the Web, and serves on the Advisory Board of the Center for Leadership of Nonprofits, Philanthropy and Public Affairs.
The family tradition has continued into the next generation. Susan’s and Bert’s sons from earlier marriages both have degrees from the U. And with at least two young Minnesota- based grandchildren, Susan says there ’s always a possibility that the U may see yet another generation of the family rooting for the Gophers.