By MEGAN DOYLE - Monitor staff
Thursday, January 28, 2016
(Published in print: Friday, January 29, 2016)
Martin Gross, a three-term former mayor of Concord, a respected New Hampshire attorney and a longtime Democratic activist, has died.
Sulloway & Hollis, the Concord firm where Gross worked for more than 50 years, confirmed his death Thursday. According to friends, Gross died from a stroke earlier this week while traveling in Antarctica. He was 77.
'To me, he is the ultimate statesman,' current Mayor Jim Bouley said.
Gross's resume is a sweeping list of personal and professional accomplishments. Friends and colleagues also remembered him as a grammar aficionado, a sharp dresser and a jazz fan. More than anything, they described him as a man who was generous with his time, brilliant in his work and fair to all.
"I do not recall an incident in the last 40-plus years where Martin Gross burned a bridge," said Ray Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party. "And in today's politics, it is often too quick, too easy, to say or do something that can never be taken back. Martin Gross never had to take back."
Gross was born Oct. 22, 1938. He met his first wife, Caroline, in college and eventually moved to New Hampshire with her.
A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Gross joined Sulloway & Hollis in 1965, and was senior counsel at the time of his death. In addition to his work as an attorney and a lobbyist, Gross advised three governors, chaired the state's Legislative Ethics Committee and was twice elected to New Hampshire's Constitutional Convention. He was also the chairman of the state's Board of Bar Examiners.
Meg Nelson, the firm's managing director, met Gross when she joined the firm in 1980. "He ran what we referred to here at the firm affectionately as his 'boot camp' for legal writing, particularly for the younger lawyers," Nelson said. "He really was a very exacting teacher, helping us to craft our legal writing in the best way possible."
Jay Surdukowski has looked up to Gross since turning to him for advice on a college thesis at age 20. They later became colleagues at Sulloway. "During my legal training and clerkship, he was always my best, most practical advisor," Surdukowski said.
In recent months, the two had been advocating together for more debates in the Democratic primary process, and Gross sent him an encouraging email about their cause just this month.
"Keep punching," Gross told him.
When Gross became mayor in 1975, he favored historic preservation over demolition. During his six-year tenure, he presided over major revitalization projects for Bicentennial Square, the Firehouse Block and Eagle Square.
"They created and enforced a municipal consensus that downtown was a historic place worth saving," Milne, his friend, said of Gross's council. "That's why it looks like it is today."
When Gross was honored in the 1980s for those efforts, the Monitor published a long and quirky poem he wrote in response.
"It's not just buildings, squares and trees / they're nursing back to health - /They are making downtown live again / A City find itself," he wrote.
He also worked on significant cleanup efforts for the Merrimack River. "I and my generation can now say we left this place better than we found it," Gross said, as quoted in The Crosscurrents of Change.
Former mayors remembered their predecessor as a wealth of knowledge and a consistently fair voice.
"He really set a tone that Concord was going to be well run and well governed, and people were going to be all treated in the open, fairly," former mayor Liz Hager said, while former mayor Jim McKay called him "very much a mentor."
But Gross was always prompting others to serve as well. When Bouley was considering running for city council more than 20 years ago, Gross was the first person he asked for advice. "It always seemed like he really enjoyed everything he did," Bouley said. "I remember him sitting up there with John Swope on the planning board, and the two of them looking like they're having a ball."
And Gross voiced a radio ad for Mary Louise Hancock, a longtime doyenne of Democratic politics in New Hampshire, when she ran her first campaign for the Legislature.
"He was the first to call me and ask me to run for the senate," Hancock, now in her 90s, said. "It had never occurred to me."
A public life
While Gross was an active Democrat, his wife Caroline was a prominent Republican and the first female majority leader in the New Hampshire House of Representatives. In their cavernous Victorian home on Rumford Street, they hosted presidential candidates and political fundraisers - for both parties.
"They separately had receptions at their house, and one of them would sort of sit on the stairs and watch the members of the other party wheeling and dealing," said Concord resident John Milne, a longtime friend.
Caroline Gross died from cancer in 1993. Her husband established a fellowship in her name, which still allows an individual in the public sector to attend an annual three-week summer seminar at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Last year, Gross nominated Steve Shurtleff, a Democratic state representative and Concord city councilor.
"When Marty spoke, everybody listened," Shurtleff said.
Gross remarried in 2000, to New London architect Deirdre Sheerr-Gross. He sold the house on Rumford Street in 2009 to Arnie Arnesen, a Democrat who ran for governor and Congress in the 1990s. Arnesen remembered she couldn't offer much for the house, and she wrote a three-page letter apologizing for her low bid and asking for his approval.
"I promise you, Mr. Gross, that this house will always be open and available to presidents in waiting," she wrote.
He accepted her offer.
"I think he knew that I understood what this house had been for them," Arnesen said. "It had been a place where you met Bill Clinton, it was a place where you met Al Gore, it was a place where Jimmy Carter slept. I think he knew I would continue that public life for this private home."
Buckley recalled meeting Gross while working on Carter's primary campaign as a teenager. In 1978, Carter invited a group of New Hampshire volunteers to the White House. At just 18, Buckley couldn't afford the trip. But the Gross's bought his ticket, and when he was anxious about his first plane ride ever, Caroline and Marty sat on either side of him and chatted the whole way.
"He took the extra effort to mentor people, to be supportive of people, to allow them to participate," Buckley said.
While Gross was politically active, he was not overtly partisan.
"Whether you agreed with him or not, everybody respected him," said Donna Sytek, a friend and former Republican state representative.
Beyond politics, Gross was instrumental in the creation of New Hampshire Public Radio, the Capitol Center for the Arts and the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies. He served on numerous boards and committees, including the state Board of Prison Trustees and New Hampshire Charitable Foundation.
In his last interview with the Monitor in November, Gross reflected on the role of the mayor - and that characteristic fairness, which he tried to instill in the Concord City Council years ago.
"What you get are fact-based decisions, rather than decisions based on name calling." Gross said. "You don't get a kind of personal antagonism or rivalry that you get some place else. Politically, compared to other cities in New Hampshire, Concord is a very civilized place."
But he hadn't been to a council meeting in some time, he said. "I just have to assume they are still behaving," he quipped.
(Ray Duckler and Allie Morris contributed to this report. Megan Doyle can be reached 369-3321, mdoyle@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @megan_e_doyle.)
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