Gary D. Respers
McCormick & Co. career warehouseman and inveterate Orioles and Ravens fan was ‘always willing to help you out’
Gary D. Respers, a jovial McCormick & Co. career warehouse worker and an inveterate Orioles and Ravens fan, died Feb. 18 of complications of COVID-19 at Northwest Hospital in Randallstown. The Gwyn Oak resident was 69.
“I’ve known Gary for more than 25 years,” said Tom Lewis. “We worked together at McCormick, and a bunch of us became like family and we had fun. We worked, but we had lots of fun. He was a fun guy, but serious about life.”
Angie Ray and her husband, Tony, have lived next door to the Respers family for more than 20 years, settling there as newlyweds. “We were just not neighbors — we were family,” she said.
“If there is one word to describe Mr. Gary, it’s welcoming,” Ms. Ray said. “When you came into his atmosphere, he made you feel that way, too. He was definitely warm-spirited and always had a smile for you.”
Gary Delanore Respers, son of Ernest Respers and Evelyn Respers, was born in Baltimore and raised on Brighton Street in West Baltimore. Family members said that the “sense of community was so strong that the families would all get their children the same Christmas gifts each year, be it bikes or football uniforms.”
As a student at Northwest High School, Mr. Respers excelled at lacrosse and football. After graduating from high school in 1969, he attended the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
When he was a junior in high school, he met through a mutual friend Patricia Williams, who was a freshman at UMBC He indulged in a little deception and failed to tell her that he was “only a high school junior,” said a daughter, Lisa Respers France of Atlanta, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who is now a senior writer for CNN.
The couple fell in love and married in 1971.
After working in construction and restaurants, Mr. Respers went to work in 1973 as a warehouseman for McCormick & Co., which was then located on Light Street in the Inner Harbor. He later worked in Hunt Valley after McCormick sold its downtown building to the Rouse Co. in 1989 and transferred its operations to Baltimore County.
Mr. Respers was a popular figure among his colleagues, who bestowed upon him the nickname “Storeroom Gary,” family members said.
“Gary was very friendly when the young kids came in. He guided them, and when they did something wrong, he didn’t scold them, but showed them how McCormick liked it to be done,” said Mr. Lewis, a Randallstown resident. “He was just an all-around nice guy who was always willing to help you out.”
“I know one time we were broken down on the side of the road and here comes Mr. Gary and his son to help us out,” Ms. Ray said. “The whole family is always there for you. If Miss Pat couldn’t do it, then she’d send Mr. Gary.”
Mr. Respers retired in 2011 but maintained connections with his work friends at McCormick.
“Five of us would go to breakfast and I’d pick up Gary. We went to different places but mostly to IHOP and Bob Evans,” Mr. Lewis said. “We’d sit there and talk and laugh and Gary has this big hearty laugh.”
Mr. Respers’ family was at the center of his life, and he took great pride in being family-oriented.
“They were a strong family unit and they poured that into me and my husband Tony,” Ms. Ray said. “Some people you meet in life leave an imprint, and they certainly left an imprint on the Ray family’s lives. In fact, they are my son’s godparents.”
Ms. Ray recalled backyard barbecues with Mr. and Mrs. Respers. “They’d always invite us over and included our extended family,” she said.
When Mr. Respers was younger, he indulged his passion for running, weightlifting and attending sporting events, and was an avid Orioles and Ravens fan. It became a family tradition every Christmas to have some Ravens gear or Orioles paraphernalia under the tree for one of their greatest fans.
In recent years, Mr. Respers suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and was a dialysis patient.
“My mother was his caregiver for so many years, and we all worked hard to keep COVID out of the house. He had to have dialysis three times a week to live,” Ms. France said.
On Feb. 10, Mr. Respers was taken to the dialysis center, the last time his wife would see him alive.
At the center, he fainted when his blood pressure fell precipitously, and an ambulance took him to Northwest Hospital.
Two days later, Mr. Respers was diagnosed with COVID-19, and his wife several days later.
“I got a phone call on Sunday, Feb. 14, and they told me he was very fragile and it was going to be an uphill battle,” Ms. France recalled. “The phone rang on Feb. 18 and they told me he had passed at 11 a.m.”
It fell to Ms. France to inform her mother that her husband had been lost to the pandemic.
Mrs. Respers is on the road to recovery and is only dealing with a lingering cough, her daughter said.
Ms. France said they are grateful for family and friends who have showered them with food cards, sympathy, support and love.
Plans for a gathering are incomplete because of the pandemic.
In addition to his wife and daughter, Mr. Respers is survived by two sons, Gary D. Respers Jr. of Gwyn Oak and Kyle Respers of Hampton, Virginia; another daughter, Danielle Respers of Baltimore; five grandchildren; and several cousins.
After sunset on May 31, 1983, and before dawn the next morning, a showcase at the Louvre was broken into and two pieces of 16thcentury Italian armor were stolen in one of the most mysterious heists in the museum’s history.
Nearly 40 years later, the two items — a ceremonial helmet and a breastplate — were identified in the private collection of a family in Bordeaux, in western France.
The police are investigating how the items ended up in the family’s estate and who was responsible for the theft.
“The Louvre is delighted that these two pieces of Renaissance armor have been found thanks to the work of investigators,” the museum said in a statement.
It added that what happened on May 31, 1983, remained “an enigma,” with few details known to the general public.
The museum did not respond to requests for more information about the circumstances around the theft, the identity of the family who had the armor or what prompted the family to have their private art collection appraised.
In January, according to local news reports, the items turned up in Bordeaux. An auctioneer called on an expert in antiquities, who identified the items as the two that had been stolen from the Louvre in 1983, the French newspaper Le Figaro reported.
The two items, thought to have been made in Milan in the second half of the 16th century, will be put on display as soon as the museum reopens, the Louvre statement said. They were bequeathed to the Louvre, one of the most visited museums in the world, by the Rothschild family in 1922. The Paris museum said that the 1983 theft had “deeply troubled all the staff at the time.”
Like many of America’s institutions, art museums have largely left out the contributions of African Americans, women and other people of color, their permanent exhibits generally filled with the works of white men. The racial makeup of the executive staff and boards of these museums traditionally also has been very homogeneous and, therefore, the thinking very white centered.
Baltimore’s two largest museums are confronting and acknowledging this one-dimensional past that essentially treated whole populations as if they were invisible and made no contribution to the art world. Baltimore is a city that is more than 60% Black, but those residents couldn’t find much of themselves in its museums even today. That must change, but the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum are not just focusing on the paintings on the walls or the sculptures on the pedestals, they’re addressing how their hiring and wage practices have contributed to larger societal racial inequities, as well.
The two museums are raising their minimum wage to $15 an hour for security guards and other low-paid employees, many of whom are people of color. Fifty staffers at the BMA and 31 full-time employees at the Walters are eligible for the boost in pay. Thirteen part-time workers at the Walters will also receive an increase to $13 an hour. In total, about 30% of the employees from both museums will have a little more in their paychecks to take care of their families, with each increase paid for, in part, by donations.
Such initiative goes far beyond hosting the occasional traveling or temporary exhibits of Black artists that rotate through museums — typical token diversity initiatives — and represents a good start at the challenging task of changing the culture in the art world. It dives head first into one of the root causes of racial inequities: economic injustice that keeps African Americans in a perpetual cycle of poverty. A $15 an hour minimum wage certainly won’t make these workers rich (for a 40-hour workweek, it adds up to just $31,200 a year), but it helps. Both institutions would have been required to eventually raise the wages under state law, but the early adoption shows they get the importance of addressing the long-standing issue sooner rather than later.
The museums don’t plan to stop there, and they should not. Their permanent collections need to better represent the diversity of the country, something both museums admit. At the BMA, 96% of its 95,000 pieces of art are by men, predominantly white. (Most aren’t on display because of sensitivity to light). The Walters doesn’t have an exact accounting of the diversity of its works because, officials say, the time period of the art — which spans seven millennia, from 5000 BCE to the 21st century, and encompasses 36,000 objects from around the world — makes it difficult. Among the things they aim to do is uncover those who contributed to the art, but weren’t given credit for it, and to better determine origin in the future.
Both museums have made efforts to diversify their art collections, with more plans in the works. The Walters recently incorporated pieces from Philadelphia potter Robert Lugo, who’s of Puerto Rican descent, in its permanent collection and collaborated with other artists of color, including performance artist
Nicoletta de la Brown and interdisciplinary artist Krystal Mack. Representatives say they are also working to increase staff to put more investment in women and minority-owned firms.
The push for diversity doesn’t always come with fans, however. BMA Director Chris Bedford, in particular, has been criticized for pushing the envelope in the name of fair representation. In 2018, the BMA sold seven works by white men to pay for the acquisition of contemporary art by women and people of color, and a year later, it declared that the museum would only acquire works by women in the following year. Another effort last year to sell significant works in the BMA collection, including Andy Warhol’s “The Last Supper,” to raise funds for equity and inclusion efforts was scuttled after public backlash.
Mr. Bedford acknowledged last week that the full scope of change needed isn’t likely to occur in his lifetime. But that won’t deter him from pushing forward, he says. We applaud his efforts and those at the Walters. The rewards are worth the fight.