Rob / Louise
Rob (circled) with the freshman lightweight third boat crew team, and some hardware.
Rob in his dorm room.
Senior year roomies: front L to R: Duke Sequiti, Rob Greenly, Matt Epstein; back L to R: Peter Carfagna, Tom Gorman.
21st century Rob.
Louise in the original Facebook.
Planning HR75 programming.
Louise with husband Marty Larson ‘76 enjoying Maine in 2023.
08-03-2025
Rob Greenly has become one of the best-known members of the class of 1975. How did that come to be? Louise Gessel investigates.
“I was just a Jew from Beaufort, South Carolina,” Rob tells Louise, “…population 8,000… one of two Jews in my graduating high school class.”
“So why did you choose to come to Harvard?” she asks.
“Because I wanted to get the hell out of Beaufort,” he says with a whoop.
If you were lucky enough to attend the 50th Reunion, or even thought of it, you know Rob Greenly—from his informative emails to the class, or from his inviting presence on all the stages of the gathering. Some of us, especially those whose memories are wobbly, have wondered: Did we always know this guy? Was he always a famous fixture of this class?
He will tell you: No. Harvard may have gotten Rob out of South Carolina, but it wasn’t a perfect fit.
Jump to our 45th reunion. It’s COVID. Word spreads that reunions are a no go. Excuse me? says Rob. By now he is a leadership coach; he has a master’s from the Yale School of Management. He speaks fluent Zoom. We can have a reunion, he tells the traditional organizers. It can be staged online. And they say (not wholly convinced), Well, give it a shot.
So Rob Greenly invents the Virtual Harvard Reunion, and it is a surprisingly great success.
At this moment, Greenly’s second Harvard chapter is born. What is not mentioned in this delightful telling is that this is also the moment when PasstheMic75 was born.
More than 50 podcasts later, we are folding our tent, with love and gratitude. This is our final PasstheMic75. How perfect that we get to end at the beginning.
Thank you all.