A family lost more than a husband, father, son and brother when Dr. Greg Meyer of Merced died last week while trying to rescue a friend and colleague in Yosemite National Park.
Meyer, 53, and physician assistant Richard Fox, 53, were swept to their deaths while trying to cross a bridge at Wapama Falls, swollen by near-record ice melt. Meyer was trying to save Fox, who'd lost his footing, says his wife, Paula Meyer, who was with them on their backpacking trip.
The Meyer family lost a rancher, a gourmet cook, the driver of a battered '69 green pickup, a tree grower, a pie baker, a wine connoisseur, an ice cream maker and a man whose trademark under pressure was being the calmest man in the ER.
His parents, Annetta and Chuck, a prominent insurance agent, sat in their Merced home on the Fourth of July with Paula; her twin daughters Emily and Kate, who will turn 3 on Friday; and her brother Jim Spofford from Texas. Greg's sister, Kellee Meyer, is a well-known optometrist in Merced.
Between bouts of grief and tears, they laughed as they told stories about a man who touched all those around him with a special sense of "grace and elegance," which is how he defined a "great" practitioner of emergency medicine. Which is what he did at Presbyterian Intercommunity Hospital in Whittier.
That's where the Merced High graduate met Paula in 1997, when he was a doctor and she was a physician assistant. It wasn't love at first sight -- "we bonded over cooking," she recalls -- but after they were married in 2006, they became inseparable. She took fertility drugs before they had the twins, and he thanked her every day, she remembers, "for taking the medicine that makes you feel so bad."
His parents think back to a boy who borrowed $140 from his dad at age 8 to buy a Hereford bull. He saved nickels from his allowance to pay back the loan, with 1 percent interest, until his dad finally told him he could pay him in full when he sold Cheyenne, the bull. "He had 130 head of cattle when he went to college," his mom remembers.
And Paula, Texas-born but Southern California-bred, had no clue that the guy who took her to lunch at the Bel Air Hotel in L.A. for their first date was more comfortable riding in the "Green Beast" pickup, wearing an old straw hat or Stetson and his boots.
"Bet you never thought when you met me you'd get cow bleep on your shoes," he told her after one of their trips back to Merced. It was also on a visit to Merced that he took her to the Branding Iron and they dined under his own brand.
He blended a high-profile career in medicine with a down-home love of the ranch. Paula used to surprise and thrill friends at the ER with photos of the two of them in Merced, hauling compost.
In recent years, they'd begun to spend two weeks in Whittier and two weeks in Merced, at the 17-acre ranch off Yosemite Avenue where he planted oak, peach, almond, cherry and plum trees. He built a road around the perimeter, and on their visits they'd put the girls in a golf cart and drive around the property.
"He was living his dream," his mom says.
Adds Paula: "We had a charmed and beautiful life. I've never met anybody who had a happier childhood."
Greg donated to the Merced Theatre restoration project, read the Sun-Star online and even contributed to Mercy Medical Center Merced, his dad says, although his own medical partnership was in Southern California.
He learned to cook and loved it. Their babies' first solid food was fresh steamed broccoli and rutabagas he'd grown. With good food came good wine, and although he wasn't a snob, he liked to pick wines he liked. He proposed to Paula at Hetch Hetchy after telling her to come look at some "variegated stones" in the water -- and the ruby one was a bottle of Peter Michael wine.
Last week, he reproposed to her, using the same ploy and the same wine, while asking if she knew everything she knew now back when he first asked her to marry him, would she have done it?
"Oh yes," she told him. "I had no doubts in how much I was loved."
Even as a teenager, he baked pies and impressed many a girl's mom when he'd take over a homemade apple or pecan pie when invited to supper. In recent years at family gatherings, he made gallons of ice cream, e-mailing everybody asking what flavor they wanted and using homegrown mint to make chocolate mint.
Joe Brucia, a neighbor in Merced, wrote in an e-mail that when Greg's friend Fox tripped on the bridge in Yosemite, "Greg did what he was trained to do. He acted fast and reached for his friend. Greg was all-Merced through and through, a career lifesaver and a hero to many."
His brother-in-law says that although there were 13 doctors in the Whittier partnership, Greg was the "influential de facto leader. He had this ability to get in there and work with all the partners." One of them, on a 10-day religious retreat in England, broke off his trip after two days and flew back to California when he heard Greg had died.
His body hasn't been recovered. Paula plans memorial services in mid-August in Merced and Whittier.
"He died a happy man," says Annetta.
"Greg always told me I was a tough girl," says Paula, "but I don't know if getting through this is going to be with any 'grace or elegance.' I'm very thankful for that pure and honest love Greg gave me."
Executive Editor Mike Tharp can be reached at mtharp@mercedsunstar.com or (209) 385-2456.
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