Michael Grunko’s friend since junior high, Joel Silverberg, isn’t alive to marvel at the total solar eclipse Monday. But if he was, Grunko is sure the men would be watching it together.
Silverberg died more than four years ago after a battle with cancer, but Grunko promised his friend’s wife, Tish, that he would be thinking of him during the rare celestial experience. It’s possible that when the moon completely covers the face of the sun and shrouds everything in darkness for a spectacular few minutes, 77-year-old Grunko will be transported back to July 1963, when the pals were rising seniors at Bangor High School and made plans to watch the eclipse together.
Silverberg, who Grunko fondly remembers as “more of the science geek,” built an 8-inch reflector telescope, and Grunko bought cameras to fit onto the device. The boys brought their equipment to a field at the University of Maine’s Orono campus, and they were giddy as the first partial phases of the eclipse began. Just as totality approached, storm clouds obscured the sky, and a downpour began.
The boys, worried about their equipment being damaged, threw everything in the back of Grunko’s father’s pick-up truck and drove it into the field house. Despite what Grunko recalled as a positive weather forecast in Orono that day, they never saw the eclipse.
Monday afternoon, Grunko will be watching with his family from a chalet in Rangeley, which overlooks Rangeley Lake and the mountains of western Maine.
“I definitely feel that it’s a way to reconnect with his memory,” he said. “I’m not an especially spiritual sort of guy, but it was a close friendship, and it was nice to have somebody like him, who was so spectacularly smart and accomplished.”
Grunko, who grew up in Bangor, lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, and has a summer home on Chebeague Island. He is retired from running the Service Employees International Union, Local No. 509.
Silverberg, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island, was a professor at Roger Williams University. Grunko remembers him as a gifted mathematician and scientist.
They spent a portion of their childhoods growing up together, and even when they went their separate ways for college, they always stayed friends. When Silverberg fell ill and had to receive treatment, Grunko was able to visit him and be by his side, he said.
Grunko’s son, Zac, is an amateur astronomer and first dreamed about witnessing the eclipse two years ago, then booked a place in Rangeley last October. Along for the ride are Grunko’s wife, Beth; his son and daughter-in-law, plus their two daughters; his daughter, son-in-law and their daughter; and the two family dogs.
“We are prepared with a telescope, cameras and enough of those flimsy paper glasses,” he said. “The deck faces west, so we should be able to see the shadow of the sun racing across Rangeley Lake as it enters totality.”
Of course, when he tilts his head skyward, he’ll think of Silverberg.
