Greg Hesse

Happy birthday! Let me know how it feels to be 70. I wouldn't know.

Hi Greg, Welcome to the 50 year union web site for South Gate High School class of 1964. I would like to thank you for your service to our country. Enjoy using the web site to reconnect with old friends. Hope you will join us for the reunion. Martha Egdorf Pegueros and Frank Pegueros

After SGHS, Steve went to USC, then taught math at Crenshaw HS in LA. He visited me in Wisconsin in the late 70's with his first wife, Judy (DeAngelo?) while on his summer break. After that marriage broke up, he started coming to WI for at least part of every summer. I think he liked the fact that people here drink a lot of beer. He eventually relocated here with a woman from Sonora who would become his second wife, and also become his second ex-wife, in the mid-80's. He took another teaching job at Watertown, WI, high school, retiring in, I think, 2006. About that same time, he was diagnosed with malignant melanoma -- not skin cancer, but an aggressive form of cancer that acts a bit like the "whack a mole" game in which it can be defeated at one point and then pop up elsewhere in the body. In Steve's case if first appeared as a skin blemish near his eye and was subsequently found in his stomach, lungs and brain. His brain tumor was removed, only to return with fatal results in 2008. He never had childrern but was very fond of and kind to Jack and Sarah, our two. His older sister, Beverly, lives in Missouri. He was the first person with whom I made friends when moving to SG in mid-7th grade. We grew apart in the turbulent 60's, but reconnected and were friends until the day he died. He loved camping, any music recorded before 1970  (with the exception of Warren Zevon), reading mystery novels (especially those of Rex Stout and Agatha Christie), working crossword puzzles (he edited the LA Times crossword, written by his friend Barry), baseball (he did volunteer work, mainly looking for mistakes in the record books, for the Society of American Baseball Research), listening to Public Radio (especially old radio drama), and yes, beer -- particularly cheap beer. He spent many a summer day sitting at his picnic table with a case of Blatz, a crossword puzzle, and a radio tuned to a baseball game. He was easily the most intelligent person I've ever known. He had no tolerance for ignorance or deceit or (don't be offended) right-wing politics. He was my friend for 50 years. There is hardly a day goes by that I don't think of him. He passed away about 8 months before I, too, retired and I feel robbed of the times we could have shared together. My wife Connie and I feel blessed to have had him as a friend.