Stephen Grand

October 29, 1943 - March 21, 2021

Much has been written about our beloved Stephen. He was an extraordinary philanthropist and businessman; those of you interested in the details of that can easily find the many articles and obituaries about him. We are so proud of what he and Nancy did to make the world a better place.

But that isn’t what these words are about. We want everyone who reads this to understand the human Stephen, the special man.

First of all, if ever a more charismatic human was placed on the face of the earth, we haven’t met him or her. People gravitated to Stephen without exception. He was the leader of every group, not because he insisted on being in charge but just because people wanted to be around him. Whether it was running a company, or playing the prankster in college, or just being with his friends, everyone would say that they were in his orbit. And no one ever said this negatively, or enviously, or in any way other than happily. A pillar of the San Francisco Jewish community, a name known to everyone, within a few weeks of meeting Stephen said “I want him to be my best friend.” That’s just how Stephen affected people.

There also never was anyone who enjoyed a joke more than Stephen. It helped that he had a perennial twinkle in his eye, and it was easy to tell when he had a new joke to tell you. He would be bursting with enthusiasm. He loved to kibitz. And, in the broader sense, he liked to “play.” He rode motorcycles, owned boats of all sorts, flew a small plane, and had an electric bicycle almost before there was such a thing. He worked on technical inventions with enthusiasm and with skills from his Master’s Degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Michigan. He went down in a cage to look at sharks. He rode mountain bikes down Mount Tam at breakneck speed and almost killed himself more than once doing it.

Family and friends were more important to Stephen than anything else, by far. Many of his best friends were from childhood and from Michigan days, and he saw them often. He valued his family; one of the reasons he came to the Bay Area from Michigan in 1998 was that his sisters Betsy and Diana were here already, cousin Corky and niece Marsea were nearby, and so were many of his friends.

In addition to Nancy, who as he often stated was the love his life, and his kids Lauren and Russell, Stephen was deeply engaged with cousins, nieces, nephews, grand-nieces, and even relatives more distant. He mentored more than one relative and supported them financially when needed. When he and Nancy learned that there was a branch of the Grand family still living in Ukraine, they went there and ended up underwriting Beit Grand, basically a JCC in Odessa.

One of his wonderful talents was finding nicknames for everyone. Rock, Duvid, Dibbs, VBro, a long list of others. You knew you had arrived when you got one. He cared deeply for people of lesser means or in need. While running the company which had been started by his father, he bought a summer camp for his employees. They could book cabins and reservations went quickly. All free to them, of course. He wanted to give his workers, who were blue collar and often from the inner city, a chance to get out in nature. And when he and Nancy, through Stephen’s illness, saw the problem of families with ill children who couldn’t afford temporary housing near the hospital and had to sleep on the hospital floor, they helped build Family House at UCSF to provide lodging for those families right on the hospital grounds. Nothing taught us more about Stephen than how he fought medical adversity. Starting with multiple myeloma in 2005, from which he very nearly died (saved by a drug called Velcade, invented at the Technion in Israel, which both he and his father Sam had supported for years), his life was a series of trials. Although he was illness free for a while, in the past 10 years he broke his neck mountain biking, contracted sepsis twice, developed pancreatic cancer which was briefly put in abeyance by the Whipple Procedure and then returned, and developed chemo-induced leukemia (AML) which in combination with metastasized pancreatic cancer finally got the best of him. But what everyone saw was his indomitable spirit. With Nancy’s constant support, truly heroic at times, his attitude was that he was going to win and live a long time. The glass was always half full. The family joke was that he was the proverbial cat with nine lives; anyone else would have been dead long ago. And when it finally became obvious that there was nothing more to be done, he was at peace and ready to go.

This was our Stephen. We miss him desperately.

His survivors include his wife, Nancy Grand; stepson Russ Maddin; stepdaughter Lauren Gaver; sisters Diana Grand (Jon Holman) and Betsy Marcus; niece Marsea Marcus-Rotman (Evan); nephews William Marcus (Pamela) and Jeremy Karp (Andrea Fineman); sister-inlaw Susan Spilker; cousins Corky Luber (Don) and Michael Patt (Luana), and three grandchildren.