A Special Birthday Message from Bob's Wife, Ileana Grams-Moog via Moog Music

via Moog Music

"We have the privilege to share a personal message from Bob's wife, Ileana Grams-Moog, composed for the occasion with you all in mind. We hope it brings you a smile today:

It is always a pleasure to talk or write about Bob, as it gives me the chance to revive happy memories I may not have focused on for a while. Joy, humor, and fun are especially appealing, because they were such wonderful features of Bob's character.

Bob's vitality and engagement with whatever he was doing stood out when you met him. His smile lit up his face; and his voice, very resonant and mellow, lit up as well when you asked him how he was, and he responded, "Great!" That engagement and enthusiasm was contagious, so that sharing an experience like a dinner, a show, or a trip with him made it so much more enjoyable for me. And it persisted into any conversation you had with him, as he was fully focused on you. If you said anything funny, you got to hear his wonderful hearty laugh as he enjoyed what you said and often responded in kind.

Bob loved humor. He was a lifelong reader of the New Yorker (his hometown magazine, one could say, though he came from Queens), and the cartoons were his favorite feature. On the weekend, what he most loved to do indoors was to lie down on the sofa with the latest issue, and read it from cover to cover. I could tell when he got to a cartoon that tickled him by the whole-body guffaw he would suddenly give, and I would always go over and see it so I could share it with him.

Other than Roz Chast, who is still active, I think, most of the cartoonists he loved are no longer around, and their names may be unfamiliar unless you are a fan of old cartoons. He enjoyed quirky drawing, like George Price's or Koren's, and the gentle goofiness of Koren and Barsotti, among others, though he could respond to more pointed and sarcastic wit as well. In general, though, a certain wry incongruity or insightful depiction of human oddness was most likely to touch off his delighted response. A cartoon that stands out for me was one of his favorites: A man is mowing the lawn on a mini-tractor. His wife is watching. The man's thought bubble shows him seated on a monster earth-mover; his wife's shows him as a little boy on a toy tractor. His delight in this cartoon clearly included his awareness of how he felt riding his own farm tractor when we went out to his old house. This self-awareness and gentle self-mockery was part of his character.

He was certainly a delighted responder to the humor of others—in drawing, writing, or conversation. But he was also a great teller of anecdotes, especially funny ones, and I think everyone who heard him enjoyed it. He was a very acute observer, with insight into how behavior revealed personality and motivation, and he had the rare gift of being able to apply these skills both to painful situations and to himself. So a number of his anecdotes were about situations that might not have seemed funny at the time at all, especially to him. He told me about a very difficult time in his life, when his company had been bought by an investor who insisted that he go on the road to sell shares in the company he was now a subsidiary of. He must have loathed the assignment, but he did it to the very best of his ability. He noticed that his prospects—picked out for him in advance—were men who prized power and prestige, polar opposites to him.

So, when he was sent to Chicago in the winter, although his taste in clothing ran to comfortable work pants and a work shirt, he bought himself a suede coat with a full fur lining to put over his business suit and tie. His reception, wearing this coat, was dramatically different—it was clear that he was impressing his prospects. The punchline, as he told this story to me, came as he was trying to persuade a prospect of something that wasn't going over well. So he stood up, loomed over the man, and opened his coat to show the full fur lining, at which point the man visibly shrank back and conceded the point Bob saw the resemblance to a dominance contest between animals, and it struck him as funny as well as a sad commentary about how much decision-making is done.

My retelling lacks the life-giving vividness, enthusiasm, and laughter of Bob's telling, but I hope gets across a tiny bit of the extra-ordinary person I was privileged to be married to.

- Ileana Grams-Moog"