BRUSH WITH FAME
Genteel Gregory Peck
From before 1950 until her death in 1967, my grandmother Myrtle Gruber lived on a farm east of Elkhart, Indiana. Bordering her property was a heavily traveled section of highway called Toledo Road. It had a sharp curve that was the site of many accidents.
One night in the early 1960s, a car missed the unmarked curve and overturned in the field. Word filtered out that one of Gregory Peck’s sons was involved in the crash, and that he and a friend had been taken to Goshen Hospital— farther away than the larger Elkhart General. We assumed the legendary actor’s press agent managed a news blackout, and guessed that after being released from the hospital, the men were whisked to the airport in South Bend, or even Chicago.
We visited Gramma soon after the crash, and, she casually said, “A very nice man named Peck called me from California and thanked me for helping his boy last week.”
Stunned, one of us blurted, “Do you mean Gregory Peck?” Gramma, who used phrases like “Heavenly days!” and “For land sakes!” and always answered with an upward lilt to her voice, said, “Well, yes?”
And did she know who that was? Gramma probably hadn’t been to a motion picture since World War I. She rarely watched TV or read anything but local news.
She related that two young men had knocked and asked to use her telephone because they’d had an accident. The boys were “well brought up,” reversing the phone charges to their folks. She helped them locate an ambulance service and gave them a snack. A couple of days later the “nice Mister
Peck” called, thanking her, in that deep voice known to millions, for assisting his son and a friend.
To which Gramma replied,
“Well, land sakes, I only did what any mother would have done.”