Last of ‘The Fighting Grossmans’ who served during WWII

Carl “Doc” Grossman was the last of his kind.

The lone survivor of “The Fighting Grossmans” — a group of eight brothers from the Hill District who served in World War II, and the subject of an Emmy award-winning television feature, Mr. Grossman died Tuesday of dementia at his nursing home in Southfield, Mich. He was 99.

Mr. Grossman was the eighth of Samuel and Della Grossman’s 11 children, which included 10 sons before — finally — the couple had a daughter.

Times were tough for the family and the children understood from an early age the definition of “duty.”

“We were poor growing up. That was the Depression,” Mr. Grossman said in a December 2007 story about the death of his last sibling, Israel.

“We shoveled coal as kids. We sold newspapers. We survived because we wanted to survive.”

As an 11-year-old, Mr. Grossman had a stall outside of the Clark Building, Downtown, where he sold newspapers and collected autographs from celebrities passing through town.

A competitive swimmer, Mr. Grossman graduated from the former Fifth Avenue High School in 1937 before being drafted into the Army Air Corps at age 21.

Mr. Grossman was sent to Fort Meade in Maryland to train as a combat medic and the following year was voted “most popular soldier” at a base in Greenville, S.C.

But it was his brother Hyman’s good fortune that propelled the family onto the national stage, when he found himself rooming with the actor Clark Gable at an officers’ training school in Miami.

After newspapers published a letter from the veryexcited Hyman to his mother about his new roommate, the family garnered more attention, including a letter from then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt, thanking them for their patriotism.

Mr. Grossman was stationed mainly at a base in Honolulu, Hawaii, and served in combat and as a medic, evacuating wounded soldiers from battles in the Pacific, from Guadalcanal to New Guinea.

During his nearly four years in the service, Mr. Grossman fought in 19 battles, earned six battle stars and numerous other medals and survived two plane crashes.

He returned home unscathed, but for partial hearing loss in one ear and a tooth chipped during one crash landing.

His brothers also made it back, though one had a partially-paralyzed arm.

After the war, Mr. Grossman moved to Paris, where he lived with his brother Alan and worked as a hairdresser for several years, said his son Gary Grossman of Detroit.

By 1950, Mr. Grossman followed another brother, Saul, to Detroit to look for work in the burgeoning auto industry.

“That was the heyday of the car business,” said Mr. Grossman’s nephew, Jim Grossman, of the Bronx, in New York City.

The same year, Mr. Grossman attended a singles dance at a Jewish Community Center in Detroit and met Freda Friedman, who turned out to be the love of his life. The couple married in August 1951.

“He called her a blond bombshell,” Gary Grossman recalled. “He and my mother loved to dance. On Sunday mornings, they would play Robert Goulet or Perry Como records and just dance.”

Gary Grossman recalled frequent road trips to visit his father’s war buddies. “We traveled all over the country,” he said.

His father worked at Chrysler dealerships in Detroit for about 50 years, forging some very unusual friendships along the way, his son remembered.

“He sold fleets of vehicles to the Catholic Church and gave them 10 percent of his commission as a donation,” he said. “The priests loved him.”

The priests showed their appreciation by giving his father — who was Jewish — a Notre Dame jacket, Gary Grossman said, laughing at the memory.

After he retired, Mr. Grossman felt bored and decided to get a part-time job at a Wal-Mart store in Troy, Mich., his son said.

“He applied to be a greeter but they kept rejecting him because of his age,” said Gary Grossman, who said his father was passed over three times before he lied on his fourth application, saying he was 75 years old. He was actually 85.

“He was really persistent,” his son said. “They found out, but hired him anyway.”

It was during his work as a greeter that Mr. Grossman was “discovered” by NBC correspondent Bob Dotson, who overheard him exchanging war stories with a customer who also was a veteran.

Mr. Grossman was featured in a December 2009 “Today” Show segment that won an Emmy award, just a month after the 89-year-old was honored at a gathering at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.

Mr. Grossman at first declined to travel to the war museum, citing a lack of funds and concern over his job security, but Wal-Mart executives stepped in and flew he and his wife in a private jet to Louisiana for the ceremony.

“My mom and him went and he loved it,” Gary Grossman said. “He was so happy when he came home.”

His father met NBC’s Tom Brokaw and actor Tom Hanks in New Orleans and kept in touch with them in the years since, Gary Grossman said.

“He and Tom Brokaw became good friends,” he said. “Tom Hanks reached out to me yesterday and emailed me. He said, ‘I thought the world of your father.’”

Gary Grossman said he didn’t always understand his father’s motivations when he was younger.

“He was a workaholic when I was a kid, but I came to understand why — it was to put us through school without student loans,” he said. “He worked really hard and I didn’t appreciate it until I got older. I wish I could be half that man that he was.”

His father was also surprisingly sentimental, Gary Grossman said.

“When I was going through his nightstand, I found these books, ‘Live to be 100,’ and ‘How to find the Fountain of Youth,’ and all I could do was giggle,” he said, laughing.

“But I also found that he saved every birthday card he ever got from me and my brothers. It was a part of himself that he never told me about.”

Along with his son and wife, Mr. Grossman is survived by another son, Jamie Grossman, of Southfield, Mich., and one grandson.

He was preceded in death by his son, Randy Grossman; his brothers Moses, Solomon, Jacob, Irwin, Leonard, Israel, Hyman, Michael and Alan; and his sister, Lillian Blatt.

Mr. Grossman’s funeral was held on Thursday.

Memorial donations are suggested to the Michigan Humane Society, 30300 Telegraph Road, Suite 220 Bingham Farms, Mich. 48025, (248) 283-1000 or www.michiganhumane.org; or to the Alzheimer’s Association, 25200 Telegraph Road, Suite 100 Southfield, Mich. 48033, (248) 351-0280 or www.alz.org.