Joe Greenberg - longtime Little Traveler employee, fan of Geneva - dies at 95
This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Joana Gorby's name.
If you saw a tie-dye-clad Santa Claus on South Third Street in Geneva, that was Joe Greenberg.
Or if you shopped and dined at The Little Traveler.
Or if you attended the biennial “Follies” put on by the Elgin Junior Service Board, in which he danced for 50 years.
Greenberg died Thursday, at age 95, according to a post on The Little Traveler's Facebook page.
In a 2014 Daily Herald profile of Greenberg, former longtime Geneva Chamber of Commerce director Jean Gaines called Greenberg “a Geneva institution,” even though he lived in St. Charles.
“He's probably the youngest person I know in spirit,” The Little Traveler owner Mike Simon said at that time.
Greenberg grew up in Elgin, the son of a Russian immigrant who helped found Congregation Kneseth Israel. Watching his mother work, he said, he learned “women can do anything a man can do, and sometimes better.”
That was important when he was running the Merra-Lee Shop and other Fashion Walk stores in Geneva for the Simon family. He continued to work until last month. He was the first person in each morning, turning on all 156 light switches at The Little Traveler, and the last one out at night.
“Anything that needs to be done, that I can do,” is how Greenberg described his job. Still yearning to be productive while in failing health, Mike Simon said, Greenberg's final position in 52 years with The Little Traveler was sampling the candy shop's triple-dipped chocolate malted milk balls.
“We never sold as many as when he was sampling them,” said Simon, noting that several years ago Greenberg was Grand Marshal of Geneva's Swedish Days festival.
“He lived and breathed the people that work at The Little Traveler, everything about the business community in Geneva, and he cared deeply about everything he encountered. He had the unique ability to connect with everybody, to find the good in everybody, and anyone who he encountered quickly realized that,” Simon said.
“If you go into a room of people who know him and say, how many of you consider Joe to be among your best friends, there's no doubt in my mind everybody's hands would go up in the air.”
As a high school student, Kurt Wehrmeister, the retired Geneva journalist and a Geneva High School Athletics Hall of Fame inductee now living in Santa Rosa, California, worked summers doing odd jobs with the Simon family's shops. It was there he encountered Joe Greenberg, who took to calling the aspiring journalist “Clark Kent.”
“If you thought you had a reason on any given day to complain or be depressed about anything, Joe would snap you out of it,” Wehrmeister said. “He was just an upbeat person who gave more than he took.”
Dancing was a big part of Greenberg's life. He came to it via his time in the Navy during World War II, stationed on the East Coast. He met a woman at a club who offered to teach him to dance. He said he was doubtful, but after two weeks, he was hooked.
Besides the Elgin charity shows, he danced in “The Nutcracker” for State Street Studios, playing the role of the grandfather. He was in the first “Dancing With the Geneva Stars” fundraiser. And after he was divorced, “likes to dance” was one of his criteria for potential romantic partners.
“He was so good that whenever he would be on the dance floor one of two things would happen,” Simon recalled. “Either the floor would clear because he was such a good dancer or there was a line of young women who were waiting to dance with him. His longtime partner (Joana Gorby) was an equally good dancer, so their idea of a good time was to cut loose on the dance floor.”
In the 2014 article, Gaines called Greenberg her hero for an incident in which she had parked her car at the post office but forgot to put it in park. As it rolled back into the street, Greenberg sprinted out of a shop, hopped into the car and hit the brakes. But he hit his head. One of his workers offered something to stop the bleeding, and the next thing he knew, Greenberg was holding a menstrual pad to his head.
“If you have dignity, you can't do that kind of thing” or walk around as a leprechaun handing out golden candy coins, or as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Greenberg said. “I just hang out with people.”
Simon noted the variety of work the “Renaissance man” did before arriving at The Little Traveler - his parents' grocery store in Elgin, as a land surveyor, a teacher at the Illinois Youth Center in St. Charles, a Batavia High School art teacher; working at The Free Pickle restaurant in Elgin, serving as factory foreman for the old Village Inn Rice Company in Geneva.
One of Greenberg's great sources of pride, Simon said, was having an uncle, Arthur Goldberg, who served as a United States Supreme Court Justice.
Greenberg is survived by Gorby; his son, Gary; and his daughter, Nyla. The family will have a celebration of his life in the future when it is a “safer time,” according to a Facebook post.
Dave Oberhelman contributed to this report