by Jeffrey Stanley
“Gurney Takes Foul Shooting Championship,” read the headline in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on March 4, 1936. “I was a senior and the contest was at the McBurney School—I remember that name well,” said Robert Gurney ’36, giving the play by play of his legendary feat in the Private School Athletic Association’s annual event that attracted boys from 16 schools in the five boroughs. “That was the first time I’d participated in a foul shooting contest. Of course I’d shot fouls in basketball games, but this was different.”
Bob, one of the school’s star athletes, had a slight build and was not a favored contender at the time. “In fact I had lied bout my weight in football. I said I weighed 117. I weighed 105.” The foul contest came down to a shoot-off between Bob and Fordham Prep student John McGurk. “I remember my coach, Alan Hughes, taking me aside and saying ‘This guy’s really good.’ I said to my coach, ‘Watch what I do to him this time.’ I went out there and I won it, 19 out of 20 shots.”
Still proud of his victory and now living in a retirement community in North Carolina, Bob thanked his father Wilson for the win, as he does most of his athletic successes. “He said give it all you have. My father died when I was ten but I remembered what he said. He said the other guy’s just as tired as you are so you’ve got to be a little stronger. I did what he told me, I didn’t eat candy, I didn’t eat between meals. I was very fit. He told me not to drink “belly wash,” that’s what he called Coke.” So his son didn’t. And at 88 he still doesn’t. “I’m glad I followed all of his instructions.”
The foul-shooting star’s father wasn’t an armchair quarterback or former athlete himself though. He was an artist. “Some of his paintings were in the New Yorker. He worked at home so I spent a lot of time with him.” In a family dynamic unusual for its day Bob’s mother was the one with the day job. “She wanted to work. She never cooked; my father cooked.” Mrs. Gurney took the DeKalb Avenue trolley to A&S department store where she was a book buyer. Later she worked for Gimbel’s in Manhattan. “She loved that, and she was very well-known in the book world,” recalled Bob. “And she was very small, I guess that’s where I got it,” referring to his own diminutive size. “My father and I called her Tiny. He spelled it with an e and it became her middle name: Lillian Tine Gurney.” Bob and his mother became so reliant on his father’s cooking that when he died they never ate another meal at home, choosing instead to have breakfast and dinner every day with relatives down the street.
He ate his lunches at Brooklyn Friends School where he attended from first through twelfth grades. “They were some of the best years of my life. I was never late and I never missed a day except when my father died.” Alan Hughes, the school’s coach, owned a summer camp, Camp Minnewawa, in Raymond, Maine. Many of the school’s athletes and a lot of the other kids went there for nine weeks every summer. “They let me go two years for free after my father died,” Bob recalled. At the camp he became friends with George Onken ’32 who was four years ahead of him and a counselor at the camp. George was a Brooklyn Friends football legend. “He was my idol. He taught me how to cut back and score a touchdown.” Overall Brooklyn Friends “sort of saved me,” said Bob.
After graduation he went on to Colgate University where he played a little freshman basketball and then varsity soccer for three years but mainly he concentrated on his major, English literature. “Writing and reading and that stuff. I wasn’t any good at the sciences.” In his senior year he found out that Colgate also held an annual foul shooting contest so he jumped at the chance and signed up. “I won that one, too. I got 47 out of 50.”
At his mother’s urging he then began pursuing a master’s degree so he could become a teacher but he confessed that his heart just wasn’t in it. “I dropped out and got a job at Eastern Airlines in Manhattan across from Grand Central.” He worked there for two years before being drafted into what became the Air Force in 1942.
That same year he also married fellow Brooklynite Virginia Fowler, a Berkeley girl and Skidmore College graduate. “It was a blind date. A lady friend of mine from Berkeley introduced us. We went together for four years before getting married.” He was stationed at an air base in Florida, and Virginia moved there with him for the duration of the war. They never returned to Brooklyn.
In 1945 Bob did return to the New York City though, for a job as a sales manager for Harper & Brothers Publishers. “I wanted to get into the book business, and they knew me through my mother.” As a sales manager he went on the road calling on bookstores to pitch Harper & Brothers’ titles. “I liked that, people were nice, and most of them knew my mother. I did it in the New York area at first, then in the South.” Finally he was transferred to Chicago where he and Virginia planted roots. “We had two boys by then. The older boy is 60 now—I can’t believe that. The younger boy is 55.”
The favorite part of his years in the Chicago publishing scene was meeting the celebrities whose books Harper’s published. They included actress Tallulah Bankhead, heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey and presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. He recalled that once while having a drink with Bankhead after a show, he commented that he was a big fan of her friend Ethel Barrymore. Bankhead immediately sought out a phone, called Barrymore and handed the phone to a stunned Bob. At a loss for words, he told Barrymore he was excited that Harper would soon be publishing her biography and that he was sure it would sell like hotcakes. At that, Bankhead chimed in from behind him, “Not better than mine, darling!”
He also got to show author and fellow Brooklynite Betty Smith around Chicago when her novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was published. Recounting that fact got Bob thinking about his own childhood here. Although he hasn’t been to Brooklyn in nearly 65 years he remembers much about his old neighborhood. He grew up on Washington Park and his home faced Fort Greene Park. “I loved the park,” he said. “I thought it was one of the best places. It was easy to navigate from there. Brownstone houses, nice movie theaters: the Albee, the Cumberland.”
Bob retired from Harper in 1984 and moved with Virginia to North Carolina. They have one grandchild who is about to graduate college, which seemed to surprise Bob as soon as he mentioned it. “I can’t believe I’m that old.” He said that if he could he’d tell the current crop of Brooklyn Friends School students to enjoy every minute of their time here. “Because they’re going to remember it their whole lives.”