Gregory Wojtanowicz

Greg Wojtanowicz awoke to his final Bozeman sunrise on October 16th. Not a sunrise so much as a late morning, as was his wont. He’d recently celebrated his eightieth natal day, fiftieth wedding anniversary, and a Chicago Bears victory. His oeuvre therefore complete, he passed peacefully at home in the arms of his adoring family.

Born in La Grange, IL, in 1946, to parents Francis and Frances (!), Greg gamboled through life with a yen for learning, a sense of duty and an irreverent wit that lit his path for eight decades. Studies at Colorado University preceded a distinguished tenure as an Army intelligence officer in Vietnam, where he forged lifelong friendships, built a bedrock of self-assurance and earned a cherished censure for a moustache in violation of Army grooming standards.

It was upon meeting his life’s love, Karen Ward, on a 1971 blind date in Chicago that his course became clear. After completing his graduate schooling at the University of Southern California, lo they traveled to the home they would delight in over the next fifty-two years, Bozeman, MT. The ensuing decade rounded out Greg’s raison d'etre, as he rooted into the Gallatin Valley, marrying his gal, building and landscaping a beloved home, commencing a twenty-five-year career with the US Postal Service and fathering two sons, Todd and Kyle, who fell in love with the Rockies just as their old man had.

Evenings in his hot tub, annual holidays to Mexico, tipples at the Haufbrau, canoe trips with his dear pal Mike, and luxuriating at home with his family enriched the years to come. He welcomed a prized daughter-in-law, May Schlotzhauer, and a cherished grandson, Calvin, in his retirement years and so began his final act.

His vocabulary, idiomatic turns of phrase and knowledge of arcana were legendary, his mirth in life’s absurdities always at the fore, and his steadfast serenity a pleasure to those in his wake.

As to regrets, he had few, the greatest of which paled against his pride in his family, his friends and his home—which he left “feet-first,” as had long been his intent. And though his passing leaves holes in countless hearts, his legacy was in spinning the thread to suture them.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you don a pair of BluBlockers, crack a can of Schmidt, and toast a man who lived as he preached, always honestly, but never too seriously.