After 20 Years, He Lives On in the Hearts He Touched

Bob Wieder was a warm, wise and altogether wonderful young writer who died of leukemia just over 20 years ago at 26. He was one of my dearest friends, and I still miss him. In fact, so many of Bob’s friends still miss him so much that we recently gathered near his beloved hometown of Chicago to share memories of his short but rich life.

Bob somehow managed to be both a guy’s guy and a sensitive soul whom women admired and trusted.

He loved sports. You know how some ballplayers shine despite lacking great physical gifts? Bob took it a step further.

His thumbs, both deformed, were surgically removed when he was 5 years old. Later in his boyhood, Bob suffered for several years from painful hip problems that forced him to use crutches. All the same, he sparkled in Little League, in touch football and in pickup basketball. How someone with just eight fingers managed to have a decent shooting touch was beyond me.

Bob was the center of three circles of close friends. One was the network of people he grew up with in Chicago’s North Shore suburbs. There also was his ensemble from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Bob was in an alternative, residential-college program called Unit One that was a magnet for creative students. Finally, there were several of us who clustered around Bob in a graduate journalism program at Northwestern University.

These three circles often intersected. Bob adored his friends, and nothing made him happier than bringing together people from different parts of his life.

About 25 of us gathered once more--the first time that we all had gotten together since Bob’s death--on an overcast Sunday afternoon. The meeting spot was a friend’s home a few blocks from the campus of Northwestern in suburban Evanston. It was mostly a Chicago-area crowd, but some of us came from as far away as Washington, D.C.; Tulsa, Okla.; New Orleans and Los Angeles. Other friends, from both coasts, sent eloquent letters that were read aloud.

We talked about how Bob was a compact teddy bear of a guy with radiant, kinky red hair and beard, as well as sweet, mischievous eyes. We talked about his enormous writing gifts, gifts that never had the chance to reach their full potential.

In a larger sense, our recollections reflected how Bob’s life was testimony to the power that each of us has--when we are bighearted, full of hope, open-minded and fun-loving, the way Bob was--to lift other people’s lives. Bob was, as he put it in one of his college poems, “the secret ingredient in an old family recipe,” the essential element that made the world around him work better.

One of my favorite memories is the friendship Bob developed with an elderly street vendor. It began when Bob spotted the man struggling with a heavy crate; Bob went over to provide a helping hand.

Others remember how Bob remained cheerful and focused on the family and friends he loved even as his medical prognosis grew dimmer. High school buddy Jim Schroll recalled how Bob stood up for him at his wedding in Virginia despite a round of chemotherapy that had left him bald and fatigued. Bob wore the best red wig he could find--it was an awful imitation of his real hair--to avoid drawing attention to himself and detracting from the wedding.

Bob also had a way of drawing the best out of people. That even applied to his supposedly hard-nosed boss at Chicago’s City News Bureau, where Bob had his first, and last, full-time job as a reporter, covering police and other breaking news.

City News, the inspiration for the comedy “The Front Page,” was a streetwise operation notorious for being a cheapskate employer. But Bob’s editor also had a heart. He kept sending Bob his lousy $160-a-week paycheck even when Bob was gone for weeks or months for chemotherapy.

Bob was an “outside the box” thinker decades before that term came into vogue. Back in the early going at the Northwestern journalism program, when we were assigned to write a feature on a major institution, most of us began by calling our assigned institution’s public relations department. Not Bob. He got started on his story on the Chicago Board of Trade by hanging out at a bar near the exchange. He interviewed traders who stopped there for drinks after getting off work. Guess who got the best story?

The quality of Bob’s that I struggle to bring into my own life is the way he refused to jump to mean-spirited judgments about ideas, things or, especially, people. Bob never got hung up on a rough edge in someone’s personality. What he cared about was the generosity of a person’s heart.

I’m not sure that any of this fully explains what was so compelling about Bob that, 20 years after his death, he had the power to bring his friends together from across the country. My hunch is that part of the answer lies in the mystery of the forever young, people whose tragically short lives make us wonder what might have been. But more important, our memories of Bob make us realize how we would like to be remembered someday--and how we can be remembered, if we live as Bob did.

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Stuart Silverstein is a reporter for the Business section. His e-mail address is stuart.silverstein@latimes.com.