Suffering from dementia, Bruce Gelker revels in a celebration of a lifetime at a game at the Coliseum, letting his family know “he’s here, with us, today.”
Bruce Gelker can’t remember most things. But he always remembered George Tirebiter., but the 100-year-old Gelker would tell it to his grandsons Garrett and Garth as such: While a football player at USC in the 1940s, he’d see this random mutt that showed up on campus, hunting cars down the street and gnawing at their tires. Known, hereafter, asThe level of detail he was able to recall – down to knowing ol’ George liked to scratch his right ear and not his left – always stunned Garrett and Garth.
Tens of thousands rose to their feet, applauding, as a misty-eyed Gelker lifted a mottled hand in a thumbs-up. A blissful smile spread on his face. To Lisa, Gelker was the charmer who won her heart three decades ago after meeting on a flight to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. To Gelker’s grandsons, he was the father figure who taught them to start every morning by tucking in their bedsheets so tight you could bounce a quarter off the mattress.
A generation later, at Silverado, that personality still lives, assistant Mayte Carranza said. Even as Gelker’s health has declined from a fall a couple of years back, he’s still social. Charming his nurses with old-timey catchphrases:But even as the personality has remained, Gelker lives in a sort of alternate reality warped by the past, his memory in recent decades blinking in and out.
“So this is what you did for the 90th – what are you going to do for the 100th?” Gelker quipped, as Lisa remembered.So after hearing about USC’s “Hero of the Game” program, and with Gelker stable at Silverado, Lisa called and emailed members of USC’s marketing department every day for two months. When Gelker’s appearance at the Trojans’ Sept.
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