Deceased August 1, 1999
View alumni profile (log in required)
Read The Inquirer article
Read Daily News article
In Memory
Bob Gawthrop died in early August, only weeks after leading the singing at our 35th Reunion.
The cancer that had plagued him since his early thirties took its final toll. A prominent federal judge and beloved baritone with Philadelphia’s light opera companies, he was sung to rest in his hometown of West Chester, PA, at a memorial service at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church attended by 600 people.
A big, ruggedly handsome guy, Bob played defense in hockey and tackle on the freshman football team but was most famous on the third floor of Morrow for his operatic commentary during the endless games of hearts. With Gawthrop you were never far from a song. He had perfect diction—sometimes a little too perfect—and spoke fluent French. Like everyone else he struggled with freshman physics and sweated over English 1-2 compositions but finally settled down as an economics major.
Sophomore year, Gawthrop, Chris Court ‘64, and I roomed together in Pratt. (For some reason, we always called each other by our last names. Only now does it seem strange.) Court was even bigger than Gawthrop. At six feet and 180 pounds, I was the runt of the group. It was not always fun. Every time I brought back a date from Smith or Holyoke, there was big blond, devastatingly handsome Gawthrop waiting to greet us. One Saturday in early fall we all three went to mixer night at Smith. Somehow we got separated, but when we got back, each had a story to tell about a wonderful redheaded girl we had met at Albright House. It didn’t take us long to realize it was the same girl! I still have a picture of her sitting glumly between us at a football game a few weeks later.
Junior and senior years Gawthrop moved up to Deke, which gave him a whole new repertoire: A band of brothers in D-K-E we march along tonight, two by two with arms locked firm and tight.
By then he had settled down with Rosemary, a beautiful blond girl from Smith who was his match in every way. From an affluent suburb on Long Island, she was every bit his equal in wit, looks, and temperament. They were the perfect couple. Everyone confidently expected them to marry.
Yet somehow it didn’t happen. There were pressures on Gawthrop at home. His grandfather had been a federal judge and his father a prominent trial attorney. (His father’s favorite trick, Gawthrop related, was to sit smoking a cigar while the opposing attorney made his closing arguments. Secretly he would insert a thin wire into his cigar so the ash wouldn’t fall. As the ash grew longer and longer, the jury would sit mesmerized, waiting for it to drop, completely oblivious to his opponent’s dazzling logic.)
As the eldest and only son (he had two younger sisters), Bob was expected to follow in his sire’s footsteps. In truth, he hadn’t done that well at Amherst. Gawthrop had a lazy streak and didn’t really enjoy economics that much. When it came time to go to law school, he didn’t make Penn, his father’s alma mater. That was a disappointment to his parents. He didn’t marry Rosemary either. I never understood why, although somebody at the funeral mentioned that the parents didn’t like it that she was Catholic. Instead, Bob joined the army, where he distinguished himself, rising to first lieutenant with an artillery unit and serving in Korea. When he came back in 1967, he immediately enrolled at Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law in Carlisle.
He was thirty-one and just out of law school when the cancer struck. It began in his testicles. The first doctor misdiagnosed it, and by the time other doctors caught the malignancy, it had spread to his lungs. That gave him only a ten percent chance of survival right there.
“He never should have lived,” said his sister Emily (whose Spanish guitar I once accidentally broke on a visit to their house). “He would have these operations where they would take out all his internal organs and lay them on the operating table so they wouldn’t get in the way. Then they’d sew him back up. Six hours later he would sneak out of the hospital with us to have a few drinks and eat a big dinner. He was incredibly strong and hated everything about being sick. He just wanted to live.”
Incredibly, he made it. After several operations and more than a year of chemotherapy, he was pronounced clean. But he had been touched by mortality. “You lose all illusion that you’re going to live forever,” he told me later at a reunion. “You don’t want to squander your time anymore.”
Bob returned to practice, dividing his time between the family law firm and the Chester County district attorney’s office. He became a prominent local figure and in 1978 was elected to the court of common pleas. Then in 1987 President Reagan appointed him a federal judge in the eastern Pennsylvania district—where he took a seat alongside his old freshman football teammate Jim Giles ’64, who had been appointed earlier by President Carter.
As a federal judge, Gawthrop became famous for his acidly embellished courtroom style. “A tall, imposing man with a commanding baritone and impeccable diction, Judge Gawthrop rarely drew mixed reviews,” wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer in his obituary. “Lawyers were often put off by Judge Gawthrop’s use of humor and literary allusions during court proceedings, and those who were unprepared or less than competent learned that his comments could draw blood.”
Basically he was the same old Gawthrop but with a captive—often cowering—audience. A former assistant federal prosecutor I met at the funeral said his department often had difficulty persuading staff attorneys to enter Judge Gawthrop’s courtroom. During his twelve-year reign, Bob presided over many famous trials, including the firing of an AIDS-afflicted lawyer that became the basis for the movie Philadelphia. Oddly, Hollywood missed its opportunity to turn the singing judge into a memorable minor character. No matter—Gawthrop had his own dramatic career. He played Billy Bigelow in the Philadelphia Bar Association’s production of Carousel and eventually performed all fourteen Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, both in Philadelphia and in England. He made a marvelous pirate king in The Pirates of Penzance.
Yet Gawthrop had his flaws. The major one was his habit of making serial proposals of marriage to female members of the Philadelphia bar. Almost every woman in the city’s legal community seems to have been courted at one time or another. An emotional visit to his grandfather’s grave was part of the ritual. A few weeks later Gawthrop would back out. It was as if he had perfected some fantastic line at a Smith mixer and then never wanted to give it up.
The campus windows are lifted high as we go marching by. Our torches shine in every lady’s eye.
I met one of these women a few years back while working on a theater project in Philly. She had been his date at our 20th Reunion. Long since married to someone else, she had ended up feeling pity for him. “As he grew older, it got sadder and sadder,” she said. “Everyone knew what was going on.” Was it because he couldn’t have children? “I don’t think so,” she said. “I told him it made no difference to me. He just could never make that final commitment.”
At the table where I sat at the funeral luncheon all three women had received proposals from Gawthrop. There seem to be few women in Philadelphia legal circles who hadn’t. As Jim Giles ’64 confided, “They’re all here today. That’s why it’s so crowded.”
Nor did Rosemary ever entirely disappear from the picture. Chris Court ’64 worked for Henry Kissinger in the 1970s, and Rosemary ended up working for him as well. (It’s really a very small world we inhabit.) She had just left a bad marriage, and Court put them back in touch. Sure enough, at our 30th Reunion, there were Bob and Rosemary dancing cheek-to-cheek. Gawthrop confided they would probably be married in a few months—but somehow that never came off either. As The Inquirer said in its obituary, the judge was “a self-described confirmed bachelor.”
And so that’s where things stood last Christmas when the cancer struck again. Bob thought he had beaten it, and this time he was devastated. Once again he underwent chemotherapy, lost all his hair, struggled onto the federal bench every morning wearing a woolen cap. Yet how many times could he fight it off? He came to our 35th Reunion in June where he, Ric Hyland ‘64, and I did a Friday afternoon panel together on crime. That evening—as anyone could have predicted—Gawthrop led the singing of old College songs.
Paige’s horse is in a snow bank. Paige’s sleigh is upside down.
But by Saturday afternoon he was gone. The pain and fatigue had obviously proved too much. My wife saw him in the bookstore early Saturday leafing through an old copy of the 1964 yearbook. He showed her some pictures. She couldn’t believe how handsome he was then.
Back in his Philadelphia townhouse, his condition worsened. Finally on the last weekend in August, he checked himself into the hospital. Right to the end he told friends he was suffering a bad back, but people who visited knew better. He died quietly Sunday night.
At college I must admit I eventually grew tired of Gawthrop’s singing. I think everybody did. Yet as college memories fade into myth, it is his voice, more than any other, which echoes back to me:
So merrily sing we all to D-K-E
The mother of jollity
Whose children are gay and free.
After the memorial service, the luncheon reception at the Radner Hunt Club turned into a pretty jolly affair itself. By the end, the entire Philadelphia Gilbert and Sullivan Company gathered around the piano belting out “The Pirates of Penzance.”
“My brother would have loved this funeral,” said Emily as we stood by trying to imagine Bob’s voice among them. “In fact he planned the whole thing himself.”
Bill Tucker ’64