Category: Flashback

Michael Anthony Groteke 02/08/1992

It’s that time of year again for me to tip my virtual hat to my friend Mike. Over the past few years (2004, 2005) I’ve written an entry in my blog recalling some stories of our, sadly short, time together as friends.

Who reads this? – I wrote my original entries in this blog about Mike so that friends from Antioch would read them and perhaps respond with stories of their own. I was VERY surprised to get ‘thank you’ e-mails from Michael’s family a few months later. However I didn’t really think this whole ‘who might read this’ thing through all the way and thus some of my more flippant and casual remarks hurt at least one persons feelings and for that I am very sorry and thus;

Apologies – I need to start this entry off with an apology to Staci Brown, Mike’s wife. In my entry from last year I made some remarks about her that weren’t very nice and she called me this past fall regarding them. I have since edited that entry and I regret what I originally wrote. To be honest I never really knew Staci very well, I was just a geeky guy who lived down the hall from her and Michael and she and I, except for our common link to Mike, traveled in different social circles. As I believe I mentioned in earlier posts, I was somewhat jealous of her ‘taking Mike away’ though it really had nothing to do with her directly and more just me dealing with getting older and having friends in permanent relationships, not something I had had to deal with much up until that point in my life. I guess my remarks last year reflected this jealousy and the fact that I didn’t know her very well, so I guess it was easy for me to say things without taking into consideration her feelings or the fact that I really didn’t know her and thus had no right to say anything. Really stupid on my part. So to be clear, I never doubted that Stacey was a good person and worthy of Mike, I trusted his judgement in character and he loved her. Nuff said. So Staci, thank you again for calling me and talking to me directly, I know that was hard and I appreciate you showing me that much respect ever after I hadn’t shown that to you in my posts here. As I said on the phone, I am very sorry that I didn’t show you the respect you deserve, and I’m also sorry I didn’t get to know you well. Any friend of Mike’s is a friend of mine and you were certainly his best friend. I hope you find the emotional strength to post some Mike stories here someday, you knew him better than anyone else and I’m sure you’ve got some good ones.


Mike & Staci. Thanks for Mark Groteke for sending me a copy of this photo.

One final ‘disclaimer’ – These are my memories of Mike from 1987 – 1992 while we were at college together. I don’t want to ‘censor’ my memories because his brother, father, mother, wife, nephew or niece might read this. While nothing I am writing here is risque’ or inappropriate it’s also not all completely flattering. Mike was a great friend, and a tremendously generous, caring and fun guy and I to this date consider him one of the closest friends I have ever had, but he was also human and not-perfect.

Photos – I’ve included thumbnails of the photos I have handy of Michael. One is from the Antioch yearbook from 1992 and didn’t scan well. The other, as I mentioned above, was provided to me via e-mail from Mike’s brother Mark a year or so ago. If anyone reading this has other photos of Mike they can send me please do, I’ll add them to the gallery I set up.

Stories – As far as my yearly dishing of Mike stories I have to say I’m running kinda low of good ones, I really played my hand in my previous entries doing a complete mental dump of anything noteworthy. So I’m going to shake the old memory box once more this evening but I doubt what I have here is as interesting as what I wrote before. We’ll see. If nothing else perhaps this will give Mike’s friends and family who happen across this page another glimpse of the Michael of the late 80’s / early 90’s which they may not have known as well as I did.

Academics –

  • Comp Sci – Mike and I were both computer geeks at Antioch College. We were rare birds since Antioch was not (in the late 80’s & 90’s) particularly well known for it’s science department, and certainly even less well known, if at all, for it’s computer science department. I think there were maybe 6 or 7 comp sci majors at Antioch in my time there. Mike’s FWSP job on a number of different terms was to be the Computer Lab operator which basically meant he got credit for being in the computer lab he was going to be in anyways.. and he got root privs and a set of keys too. Rough. 🙂
  • Chem 1 – At several quarters at Antioch we specifically organized our class schedules to take some of the same classes together. I convinced him to take Chemistry 1 with me and be my lab partner, which turned out to be both a good and bad move since that class was exponentially harder than either of us expected it to be. Stan Bernstein, the professor of that class, was, at least that term, a real jerk. I don’t say this lightly, but he really pulled a few fast ones on us. I’ll spare you the details, this post isn’t about Stan, but suffice to say this class completely shook my sense of fairness and trust in Antioch faculty. I’m not complaining about the academics of the class but more about setting reasonable expectations and fair communication. I’m a pretty reasonable mellow guy, and so was Mike, but wow did Stan get us going. While Stan pissed me off, he enraged Mike. I had to talk him down from dropping the class more than once and while neither of us ever did anything we did often talk about evil plots on stealing Stan’s bike and returning the pieces of it in his campus mailbox with notes saying ‘Be nice to your students or you’ll never see your bike again’. I think both of us only stayed in that class because we didn’t want to give Stan the satisfaction of ‘beating’ us. Since I’m telling stories and trying to record who Mike was, at least from my admittedly somewhat fogged memory, I will mention that he wasn’t the best lab partner. He was often late, and/or not very present at the labs. This wasn’t so much because he didn’t get them, he could pick up on things faster than I could, but (and note this was circa 1988/89, before Stacey moved to Yellow Springs), there were some pretty cute women in the lab with us and Mike’s attention and energy were focused on them more than on the labs. (see flirting section below).
  • Homework – He was also a bad influence on my homework patterns. I’ll state up front I am lazy and really despised homework in the first place, so it didn’t take much to distract me from it, so when my best friend who was in many of my same classes wasn’t doing homework and was asking me to go to Young’s Dairy with him, well then why should I do my homework? On the flipside I suspect I was a ‘good’ influence on him academically since I would guilt him into finishing a lab or doing homework (or in the case of Chem 1, taking a class (and thus going for a BS degree instead of a BA) that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to take). However, there were some times where he’d show up to class with a completed homework assignment that he stayed up until 4 AM working on when I didn’t have mine done at all, so he could pull ‘random acts’ of academic greatness like that. He would also often do well on tests, which I think confused Stan since he (Stan) had made some assumptions about Mike. Another friend of mine I met years later, John Winters, also a gamer, mentioned the idea/concept of ‘victory conditions’ in a game and applying that concept to life philosophy. “What are the victory conditions here?” he would ask about different situations. I think Mike, perhaps unknowingly, applied that concept to his academics. He knew where the line was regarding what was ‘too much’ slack and what would get him in trouble, and he ‘walked the line’. He knew what he had to do, the victory conditions, to pass a class and get a not-horrible evaluation.

Computers – I have a photo of his taken of him at his house in Yellow Springs lying on the floor of his bedroom playing on his computer. I don’t know who took this photo, perhaps Karmynn Kimble, but it seemed a very appropriate way to remember him … who needs furniture, just find an outlet and your all set. Got to have your priorities straight. 🙂 I imagine Stacey in the house at the same time, unpacking their belongings or sitting on their bed or in a chair looking over at Mike stretched out on the floor and giggling at him for his stubbornness/laziness. “Mike you know, you could set up a desk” “Nah.. later.. I’m busy right now, I’ll do that later”.

Mac – Mike had a Mac SE or maybe it was just a Mac Plus. I wasn’t into Macs back then and thus they all seemed the same to me, though shortly after Mike’s death I started drifting rapidly in that direction to the point where I worked as a full time Mac support person for several years and still use a Mac a good 10 – 15 hours a day on some days. I don’t recall Mike doing much programming on it though I’m pretty sure he did do some C coding on it at least one term when he lived on Willet hall with me. I think his mac was primarily used for tetris 🙂

Flirting – It’s hard for me to summarize Mike’s social/flirting since, while I had my own geeky ‘style’, he really ‘played’ on a whole other level than I did. He was a shameless flirt. I don’t mean to imply he was a ‘womanizer’, I never heard him make a sexist or degrading remark about women, he just, well, really liked them 🙂 He would go to the bi-weekly dances and meet women way outside of the geeky circles I traveled in. He had a ‘sporty’ car which I believe made him extra appealing to women who wanted to get off campus to go see a movie/out to eat. He had ‘leopard spot’ thong underwear which I got to see him wearing way more than I ever wanted to, especially at 8 AM on a Sunday morning when I was just waking up and heading down the hall to the showers (“Must poke out minds eye!”). Worse this pair of underwear would often be draped somewhere visible in his room like on a lampshade or the door to his closet when we were in there trying to do homework. To be honest I pretty much intentionally turned a blind eye to most of his flirting since, while I was flirting with a number of women myself, it’s not something guys really talk about that much, at least guys like Mike & I.

Games – Mike was a gamer, primarily a ‘strategy’ gamer, whether that was the board game Risk! or, more often, computer games.

  • Tetris – He was the first person I ever saw playing Tetris and wow, was he into it. I don’t recall his high scores but I never got anywhere near them. He made cameo appearances on my computer, an Amiga, just to get his name on the top of my list. MAG, his initials, seemed to be all over the high score lists of all my games, but especially Tetrsi. I’m not too shabby myself, but Mike was a whole other level beyond where I was/am. When visting his room we’d often be talking about Chemistry labs or other subjects and he’d be carrying on, telling stories, even gesturing or writing with one hand while his other hand was tied to the keyboard of his mac playing tetris.
  • Delta Tao Games – Mike was a big fan of games from the small game company Delta Tao. He introduced me to both Spaceward Ho! (http://deltatao.com/ho/) and Strategic Conquest (http://deltatao.com/stratcon/) He was exponentially better at these games than I was, which made trying to play a game against him not terribly fun. I never really got that into these games until I finally owned a mac but he had good taste, those games, and that company, are good stuff. They focus on gameplay over graphics & eye candy. They also have a warped sense of humor.
  • Risk! – Mike really liked this board game and after he moved off campus his ‘come over and visit’ line often involved an invitation to come over and play Risk! In retrospect I wish I took him up on this more often. He was all of 3 blocks off campus. This was also one of the few games I had played alot in my youth too and could hold my own in a game with him, at least sometimes 🙂
  • Blackjack/Roulette – Just a quick note, Mike had this theory about some casino games, where you bet an amount on, say, black in roulette and if you lose you bet twice as much the next time. Odds are eventually you’d win your money back plus your original bet. He demo’d this on his mac games and it worked. However when I really questioned him about this he admitted that occasionally in his ‘tests’ he was betting sums of money way more than he’d be able to afford in real life and also I remember him telling Warren Watson, one of Antioch’s computer science professors, about this who promptly mentioned that casino’s had betting limits which completely ruined this plan. Credit where it’s due though.. it’s a great way to ‘beat’ a computer casino game if they dont limit your betting amounts. See my reference to ‘victory conditions’ earlier, he had found the weakness in these computer games.

Food

  • Instant Mashed Potatoes – Mike always had a box of Instant Microwavable Mashed Potatoes in his room. When we were up late working on a Chem lab or other times he’d just randomly whip this out and pour some in a mug with some water and microwave it long enough to be edible. Always seemed rather random to me and I still think of him when I see these boxes in the supermarket.
  • Taco Bell – Mike REALLY liked Taco Bell. I have to admit before I met him I avoided Taco Bell like the plague, the place just scared me. We didn’t have them in suburban NY when I grew up and I had just made some assumptions about cheap mexican food enough to where I would have never considered eating there if left to my own accord. However since there was a Taco Bell in Xenia near Blockbuster video, a place we travelled too way too often, since it was his car we inevitably ended up there eating ‘cheesy fries’ and bean burritos etc. Turns out Southern Ohio is a ‘test market’ for Taco Bell (or at least was) and thus they had things there that weren’t in other ‘normal’ Taco Bells (like cheesy fries, since discontinued) Since I’ve become a vegetarian it turns out Taco Bell is one of the only fast food restaurants I can eat at and while there aren’t any too close by where I live now, when given a chance I still go there. So I blame him for this weakness of mine 🙂

That’s all for now. I’m sure I’ll think of something else later. If anyone reading this has a ‘Mike story’, even short silly ones, please post it in the comments if you have a moment.

Here’s to you Mike. 14 years, and I still miss you.

Michael Anthony Groteke 02/08/1992

Well it’s that day again, February 8th. Last year I wrote a nice long entry, like this one, only to have the computer maliciously clear it just before I was ready to post. I wrote a shorter one and blamed Mike’s ghost for the computer tampering. I’m braced this time, I’ve been saving regularly as I go 🙂 A few months later some of Mike’s relatives posted comments on my journal thanking me about remembering him. At first that kinda freaked me out, I had never thought about them reading it, but it turns out they are really nice folks and, of course, miss Michael dearly.

So yeah, it’s that day again. After 13 years I don’t remember the significance of the day until the afternoon or evening, though I have this feeling all day that there’s something I’m forgetting… then it hits me. 2892. Those 4 digits have been parts of my passwords and pins over the years.

13 years ago on the Dayton / Yellow Springs road Mike slid on the ice into the opposite lane and was killed when returning from renting videos (Red Dawn and something else with the word Red in the title, he always rented things in strange patterns like this) in Xenia, OH. I didn’t hear until early the next morning when his wife Staci called called me. I immediately walked down the hall to the room of another friend of Mike’s, Brian Jenkins, and woke him up to tell him. We sat for a while in stunned silence and tried to digest the suddenness. The night before Mike had called both of us asking if we had wanted to come over to his house to play Risk but we were both busy. Wow do I still regret turning him down for that.

I think one of the things that totally freaked me out about this was the fact that it was HIM that lost control on a snowy night. I say this because he used to be so psyched when it was snowing heavy ’cause he could get in his car and go to empty parking lots to practice skidding, doing donuts etc. If I had to pick ANYONE to be my designated driver on a snowy night it would have been him. This was a heavy dose of reality that accidents can happen to ANYONE. I think up until this point of my life I was still in my ‘immortal teenager’ stage, where I knew I wasn’t immortal but nothing had really penetrated this bubble fully until Mike was ripped from my life.

I still have dreams where he shows up in them on occasion. Earlier ones, in the first few years, he shows up to tell me he’s not really dead, that he faked his death to get out of debts from Antioch (something which I’m sure, if he could have pulled off he might have 🙂 ) and that he couldn’t contact me until the statute on limitations on somethings wore out, just to be safe (hey it’s a dream, it doesn’t have to be logical!). In the first few years I believe there were a few times I woke up and thought he was in the room. This did wonders in freaking out my wife Emily, though I explained to her that if he was there he wasn’t trying to spook us, more likely he was wondering if we wanted to play Risk 🙂

The dreams now consist more of him just hanging out somewhere, and when we talk and I say “Um.. Mike.. you’re dead, right?” He says “Yeah.. sorry about that” and then changes the subject to something else as if the fact that he’s dead isn’t really relevant to the moment.

In these dreams, over the years, he has talked to me about my cats, cars, and of course computers. I know I’ve told him all about internet stuff that really he got me excited about telling me what ‘BitNet’ was etc. back when I was still a BBS kid. At Antioch College we led mini-crusades to the business / presidents office to push for the college to get on BitNet back in 1988 – 1990, asking about grants and such. They would humor us, occasionally even taking notes or telling us to talk to a faculty member etc. After doing this over and over and over with no progress we finally gave up when we learned enough about how things worked at the college to realize that unless we walked in those offices with a wad of cash or a grant no one was going to listen to us. Mike dropped out in 1991 or so to work for some company in Cincinatti though I believe he was still on some extended coop as far as the college was concerned (or at least that’s what he told us).

Other Mike memories. Hmm. He and Staci got married on way short notice. I remember waking up on Valentines day in .. hmm.. must have been 1991, and walking down the hall to his room. He and Staci were looking up phone numbers and he said ‘Hey.. want to come to my wedding?’
“What??”
“Yeah we decided, we’re getting married.. today.. in Kentucky” (or maybe it was Cincinatti)
“Wow .. really… we’re going in two cars, it’ll be Staci & I, Christiana(?), Dawn (?) and Dave (Schinhoffen)” (I may have forgotten some others). We’re leaving soon”
I ran down the hall to my room and pulled out my old sports coat that was missing buttons and didn’t really fit, and found my darkest most formal pair of ripped blue jeans and rushed back. ‘
At some point Mike actually called his Mom to let her know. I can just imagine her on the other end of the phone “What? Today? AIGH!”.

We drove down to Cincinatti/KY and I believe we visited his brother’s house for a while, though that may have been some other trip, I don’t recall really. There was alot of calling going on trying to find the place they wanted to do this wedding, but I was on the sidelines for all this and don’t remember any specifics. Sometime in the afternoon they finally found this little house where the minister performed the service and his wife was one of the witnesses. David was Mike’s best man and ok, yeah, I was jealous. I believe there was some time spent in a bar in Cincinatti basically just waiting around, this may have been before or after the ceremony. I recall the bar owner explaining that the place was haunted and had ghosts in the basement from some dark tale of previous owners, but again, this is all a blur.. but it must have been some trip like this with Mike ’cause I don’t go to Cincinatti often and have certainly never been in a bar. I suspect this was another stop to use a payphone for a half hour to call family/minister etc.

After the ceremony we went to some chain restaurant in Cincinatti with his mother and possibly other family. It was a rather surreal day. To be honest, I was still in shock that he and Staci were even getting married, probably because I never got to know her that well. In retrospect I suspect I was probably jealous of her ‘taking’ his time away from me or something like that. His getting married was the first ‘slap’ of reality of real life, the first of ‘grown up moment’, where I had accept the fact that I, and my friends, were growing up and not just being buddies hanging out down the hall.

Another story – We road tripped to Jacksonville, Florida one weekend in winter 1988.. Yes, this is possible from Yellow Springs, OH provided you have enough caffeine and sheer dumb motivation. Hey we were young. We left on Friday morning/afternoon and rolled into Jacksonville the next morning. There was a YRUU conference happening there and I was going because some friends I knew were there, and Michael tagged along (and drove the whole way, mind you, I didn’t have my license back then) because I think he was a) Bored and b) Had hopes on meeting some cute Unitarian women 🙂 (Ok that was probably some of my motivation too). Now that I think about it I think Rachel McKay was on this trip with us, though I may be merging some other road trip with this in my memory. I only remember this because she got pulled over on the way back doing 88 miles an hour in a 55 zone and GOT OUT OF THE TICKET BY CRYING. (A technique that was suggested by Kate Powell, at this conference, I believe.) Michael and I teased her for years after this by just saying ’88 miles an hour. Shame on you’ Guess you had to be there (oh and yes, you can fit 3 people in his little car so long as one of them, me, squishes low in the back under blankets. TOTALLY unsafe and not recommended, especially if you have a 17 year old woman from PA driving 88 miles an hour, but that’s the way things happened.). My other memory about this trip was us stopping for gas and him looking at me and saying ‘your turn’. I had never pumped gas before, as I said above I didn’t drive at this time, and I explained I didn’t know how to pump gas. He basically said ‘Figure it out, it’s cold out there and it’s your turn.’. So I got out and figured it out.. took a while and I think Michael was giggling about this for sometime afterwards, but I think about this moment often when I am pumping gas.

For my first coop job I was a teaching assistant at a private grade school (The Jordan Glen School) in Archer, Florida. Antioch let out in mid/late March and Mike agreed to drive me down to Florida, again, since he wanted to go to Spring break in Miami and my job was on the way. We stopped in Jacksonville to stay with Kate Powell and he roommate for a few days before he drove off to Miami. Brian Jenkins also came down to visit Kate at this time, which is funny because he came to Antioch the next fall. (see my references to my secret powers in another post on this journal 🙂 ) This ended up being a rather crowded 2 bedroom apartment and since Mike’s little car was the only car available, if I recall correctly, going out to eat or doing any trips was a rather crazy event. I stayed a few more days before I caught a bus down to Archer, Florida. I still kinda wonder if I should have gone with Michael down to Spring break.. not really my scene but I never got another chance for a scene like that.. or much more time with Mike. Ah regrets…

and one last Michael memory while I’m on a roll. This one, coincedentally, also involves Brian Jenkins. We were at Young’s Jersey Dairy late one night and as we were leaving the store a teenager walked up to us, specifically Brian, and very politely asked if we wanted to fight. Now mind you, I’m 6’2 and at the time was probably 220 lbs, Brian is about the same size and Michael wasn’t small either. I just stood there in awe, was he serious? Mind you, I am also a pacifist so if it came down to it he wouldn’t be dealing with me but he didn’t know that. Michael was also rather surprised “What?”. Brian just said “No thanks” and ushered us a long. The kid nodded and went his merry way. To this day this event seems totally surreal. A) Why would he want to fight complete strangers? B) Why THREE at once? C) Do people always ask politely when picking a fight? I haven’t been in any kind of a ‘real’ fight in my life but I suspect they don’t start with polite chit chat. The three of us had a good giggle about this event while we ate our meal, keeping an eye on the weird kid just in case.

I mentioned earlier that he had rented ‘Red Dawn’ when he was in his car accident. He was ALWAYS renting this movie, which is a bit ironic since it’s a totally anti-communist, pro-gun, violent bloody action flick… not really the typical ‘Antioch’ fare. Mike was into strategy games that were semi-warlike like Strategic Conquest, Spaceward Ho on the computer and of course the aforementioned Risk, but he never struck me as the kind of person that would watch “Red Dawn” over and over and over again. WOLVERINES! Anyways, I figured I’d mention this. On an unrelated note i’ve since met a number of geeks who also liked this movie, so maybe Mike was on to something.

Once when driving back from Xenia (probably from renting movies or going to Taco Bell). When the officer asked for license and registration Mike started to do his usual maneuver (yes I was with him on at least 3 or 4 other times when he got pulled over, he had a lead foot). This procedure was this – He would hand the officer his wallet with his license and his conveniently located metal ‘Policemen’s Benevolent Association'(? I don’t remember this exactly). According to Michael this button was one that only family of officers got and since his brother was a police officer in Cincinatti he had one. Often the conversation would go like this;
“License & registration sir”
“One moment officer.. (shuffle shuffle), here’s my license, let me look for my registration…”
“Where’d you get this pin?”
“My brother is a cop”
“Where?”
“Cincinatti”
“What precint?”(or something along these lines)
Michael would then give his brothers precint etc. while handing the officer his registration. This almost always ended up in his just getting a warning, even when we were in other states than Ohio. Powerful little pins 🙂

That’s all for now. It’s been 13 years and I still miss him. So here’s a tip of my virtual hat, once again, to Mike.