Glen was a big guy, but a gentle giant. He would never hurt anyone’s feelings.
I first met him in 1976 in an ED CI grad class of three students. The prof was lazy at hell and had a reputation for ripping off student work. We were a little nervous when we developed a whole original approach and program for teaching senior high non-academic students and quickly nixed the idea of sharing our work with him, a published author.
Instead, we went to Methuen, a smaller T.O. publisher who was starting to develop a reputation for serving non-academics. They were too cheap and wanted us to pay the permissions. We then tried Gage, a big publisher, and the famous Connections series was born and published in 1980.
Glen and I then went on to publish some 40+ textbooks and teacher’s guides, a partnership which tailed off around 1995 on when he became ill with a variety of illnesses, which weren’t helped by his runaway drinking and gambling. By 2000, we basically ended writing and editing together when several new books were just getting going. My generous contribution to him was that his name is on books he did next-to-nothing for, and he got equal royalties for some of these for years afterward. His writing and level of work, by this time, was like that of Charley Gordon in “Flowers for Algernon”. Numerous errors.
But we kept our connection and friendship through poetry readings and I said nothing when he restaged 60 Minutes Live from Loon River, using some material and characters I had originally created and gave me zero credit for. It was a moment in the sun for him in the media what with his well-advertised health problems and I stood by and said nothing. I believe, by this point, he had honestly forgotten how much I had done originally, as we remained olde friends.
Then, he had problems walking and would fall down hurting himself, no doubt increasing his decline. He would go out unshaven, looking rough, and tried to generate some projects on his own which contained errors since he was in charge.
Dean and I read with him one last time in 2003. I had to help him get to the venue; his own wrecked, leased car was long gone and he no longer drove for safety reasons.
We had been very close/tight in the early years, doing teachers’ conventions and travelling to present on our books. I still remember the first night we were in a hotel and he later admitted he’d only slept one hour, which was apparently not unusual for him. Later in the 2000s, I found out he had been sexually abused within his own family and those events likely had eventually led to his drinking problem.
Glen had a great sense of humor and we enjoyed each other’s jokes. He was also, I might add, very well-liked in his own school district, and he became their ELA supervisor. But by the time, I got to his office in 1999 for a meeting with a publisher’s rep, he was falling asleep on a dime from sleep apnea (something which eventually led to him running his car onto a median when he dropped off while driving). The rep looked at me when he fell asleep, shocked; she had known us/him in the beginning. “How long has he been this way?” she asked.
I owe a lot to Glen. He gave me confidence to become a better public speaker and a presenter in my own right. He also helped me to understand free verse and to publish my first good poems. As I’ve said, we read together a lot over the years, and always had a good time. He was a devoted friend, and so it was that I was asked to give a eulogy at his funeral service after he succumbed to one of many cancers. I got through it, after breaking down a few times. Such mixed feelings.
Anger that he, who had triumphed in so many ways, even in his time separate from me, who recovered periodically, once declaring himself proudly as “cancer-free”, would become an alcoholic and a reckless gambler, losing most of his royalties savings and in trouble with CRA. When he started forgetting and withholding important publishing info from me in 1995, things started to unwind for us.
My own deep feeling is that, despite his abused past, he had conquered it until 1995 and was a very impressive guy, my closest friend. Often I thought he could have made better choices after 1995 to get his mojo back. Most of all, I suppose that I felt betrayed on a number of things and that things very obviously would never be the same. I had to end the working relationship; he would have destroyed my credibility with publishers if we hadn’t split.
And so the last time I saw him was at Norwood Auxilliary, where I, ironically had worked for one day in 1969, when I considered leaving university. Being a nursery orderly, lifting heavy bodies would have killed me then; I weighed less than 150 lbs.
Glen looked comfortable; all the nurses knew and liked him. He had a room to himself, which was well-decorated. We had our last big talk and we both knew it would be the last time we’d see each other. Again, he started to drift off and I went with the flow, leaving him asleep. He was at peace–no pain, having lost weight, no longer the giant of his former gentle giant self. It was a good finale, and so, for me, it would later be hard to get through his December funeral, but I was determined to have the crowd know him as I once did, as he once was–strong, witty, eloquent, kind, dedicated, and incredibly intelligent.