Norwich
Tom Gray, a writer, environmentalist and singing bass who lived in Norwich, is perhaps best known for reviving a foundering wind energy trade group and leading it to prosperity in the 1980s, at a time when harnessing the breeze seemed a utopian dream.
But it was through the decades of tireless, methodical advocacy that followed that Gray proved that he could seize on an implausible idea and make it real.
“He figured out what was helpful and what worked, and then he did it — and he did that in everything,” his wife, Linda Gray, said.
Gray died on Aug. 30, 2017, after an accidental fall at home. He was 72.
Gray was a man of vision, someone who could glimpse large-scale trends long before they rose to national attention, according to friends and family.
He foresaw, for instance, that climate change and the need for renewable energy sources, issues that were relegated to the margins of the national conversation in the 1970s, eventually would come to occupy its burning center.
Carrying out a promise to Gray, a few dozen family members and friends gathered one recent weekend at Georgia Mountain Community Wind, a turbine farm in Georgia, Vt. They said a few words of remembrance, and then let the wind carry away his ashes.
Gray was born on June 20, 1945, in Millersburg, Ohio, to Burley and Ruth Gray, who moved to the Detroit area when he was 13 to follow his father’s job as an auto engineer.
As a teenager, Gray studied at Cranbrook Schools, an elite prep school that Mitt Romney attended around the same time. The two did not know each other well.
Higher education, and the East Coast move it entailed, was a bit of a culture shock for Gray, and at Haverford College he “goofed off” from time to time and did not distinguish himself, his wife said.
It wasn’t until he returned home to write for a local Michigan paper, the Birmingham Eccentric, that Gray “found religion,” as Linda put it. It was there that Gray acquired the writing and editing skills that later would make him a national-scale influencer in the renewable energy field.
“He was the best writer I ever had the pleasure of working with,” said Randall Swisher, who took over for Gray as the American Wind Energy Association’s executive director in 1986. “I very rarely wrote something that I considered significant without first running it by Tom.”
Gray had left journalism in the early ‘70s to work for the Michigan Democratic Party, and in 1975 he took his skills to Washington, D.C., after serving on the winning congressional campaign of James Blanchard, a Democrat who later served as Michigan governor and U.S. ambassador to Canada.
There, Gray met Linda Cleek, an Arlington, Va., native who worked as a legislative aide in Blanchard’s office.
Both were young and idealistic. Both hoped to make a difference in D.C. politics. And both were ardent sci-fi fans.
As Linda Gray recalls, their first romantic outing was to see one of the Star Wars movies, which was being replayed in local theaters at the time.
Linda’s first allegiance, however, was to the more cerebral Star Trek, and she remembers Tom’s reaction when he saw her whip out a pad of paper and start taking notes during an episode.
“He was like, ‘Wow — a girl who does that? That’s great. That’s amazing,’ ” she said.
They became a team in more ways than one. As a staffer for Blanchard, Gray worked with Linda on answering constituent letters, devising a semi-automated system that spliced together pre-written introductions, arguments and conclusions — all before the advent of computers.
He also focused on climate change policy, working with other staffers and congressmen on the Wind Energy Systems Act of 1980, which provided funds for research and development on wind technology.
Soon afterward, Tom and Linda left Blanchard’s office to join the American Wind Energy Association, the trade organization for the fledgling wind industry.
Not only did they run the nonprofit, with Tom as executive director, they practically were the organization, friends recalled.
Gray went over the books and discovered that AWEA was $100,000 in debt and could count on only about $20,000 in dues from member companies in the nascent industry. Not only that, but the previous management somehow had been forgetting to pay withholding taxes on its employees’ wages, Linda said.
An Internal Revenue Service agent soon paid a visit. Gray told the man there was no money to pay the back taxes. The agent looked around the room, and saw only a few computers and a typewriter.
“I guess it’s not worth it for us to padlock you,” he said, “so we’ll work out a payment schedule.”
For the first few years, Gray took no salary and put organizational bills on his own credit card. Slowly but surely, the industry and its D.C.-based advocate grew, thanks to new federal subsidies, improving technology and, in part, Gray’s tireless advocacy.
As Swisher, the next executive director, remembers, it was Gray who first established a fund for congressional lobbying at AWEA, allowing the group to “go head-to-head with fossil fuel” on Capitol Hill.
“Tom had a vision,” Swisher said — “the vision that wind technology would become one of the standard utility technologies responsible for meeting the needs of a major part of our electric power needs. It wasn’t some marginal resource that would never amount to anything. In the 1980s, that required some vision because it was very hard to see in that current reality.”
Those expectations have been borne out today. From a marginal resource, wind power has grown to provide roughly 6 percent of the nation’s electricity, according to Swisher.
Tom and Linda were married in 1982. Four years later, feeling a yen for nature and fatigue from the bustle along the Potomac, they moved to Vermont.
Colleagues at the American Wind Energy Association kept calling the Wind Wizard throughout the late ‘80s, seeking his advice and encyclopedic knowledge, and it wasn’t long before Swisher persuaded Gray to come back, in 1989, as a full-time employee handling communications.
“The opportunity to do good work on the cause was really all the luring he needed,” Swisher said.
In 1997, Gray was on hand when an old colleague from the Michigan Democratic Party, Morley Winograd, needed some policy help.
“If you had the ability to write the federal government policy on wind energy, what would you write?” Winograd, who was helping Vice President Al Gore prepare his presidential campaign platform, recalls asking his friend.
Gore ended up adopting many of Gray’s suggestions, Winograd said, including proposed increases in wind energy subsidies and assurances that federal incentives would continue long enough for investments to pay off.
Looking back through the years, Winograd pointed to another way in which Gray had been prescient: through his views on the Democratic Party’s relationship with blue-collar voters.
After the 1972 national elections, where Richard Nixon won 60 percent of the vote and 49 states, Democrats were engaging in a bit of soul-searching that might look familiar today.
Fresh off the racial turmoil of the Civil Rights era, Nixon had won election through his “Southern Strategy,” flipping blue states red and promising to return “law and order” to the land — just as President Donald Trump did last year.
Gray, for his part, came from a family like many others in Michigan, one that migrated north in search of manufacturing jobs.
As Winograd remembered it, Gray used to say, “You have to keep in mind the hillbilly vote.”
“We had to formulate a way of talking about jobs and the economy that didn’t increase racial tension if we were going to have a successful Democratic Party,” Winograd said, noting that the same divisions are wracking the party in the wake of Trump’s nativist campaign.
As wind turbines spread to New England from their initial strongholds in California, Texas and the Great Plains, Gray also contended with local opposition to the installations, which some opponents see as unsightly and potentially damaging to surrounding ecosystems.
“It didn’t bug him,” Linda Gray said of her husband, who had taken a philosophical approach to regional wind resistance.
Gray recognized that installations that drew fervent opposition in Vermont would barely be noticed in, say, Iowa, which allowed him to absorb setbacks, she said.
He was careful to be as honest as possible about the drawbacks of wind — not to deny, for instance, that turbines can kill bats and birds, but rather “to put it in context,” she said.
Singing was another major aspect of Gray’s life. A powerful bass, he was for many years a member of the Handel Society of Dartmouth College, and accompanied the group on musical trips through Germany, Austria and Italy.
Carol Magenau, a Handel Society colleague who also gave Gray voice lessons, once heard a theory about personalities from a choir director: The voice echoes its bearer.
Based on that, she said, “I would describe Tom as reliable, straightforward, deep — his voice certainly was deep. He had a lot of character.”
Whether it was to sort a congressman’s letters, master the intricacies of grammar and usage, or hone his singing voice, Gray was always methodical as he learned a new skill, and rarely needed to be told something twice, those who knew him said.
In later years, he brought the same approach to his environmental advocacy on Twitter, tracking closely what strategies worked, what didn’t, and how many follows, likes and retweets it brought him.
In January, consultants for the climate advocacy website Carbon Brief published a statistical analysis of the biggest environmental influencers on Twitter. At No. 11, just behind Bernie Sanders: Tom Gray.
A few days before Gray had his fatal fall, he used his influence to take a jab at the president, himself.
“Going to a Cabinet Meeting (tele-conference) at 11:00 A.M. on #Harvey,” President Donald Trump told his Twitter followers on Aug. 27, referring to the hurricane that swept through Texas in late summer. “Even experts have said they’ve never seen one like this!”
“It’s true!” Gray responded the next day, through his handle “climatehawk1.” “And just wait. You’re going to bring us future storms the likes of which the world has never seen.”
Twenty replies. Two hundred twenty-two likes. One hundred sixty-one retweets.
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or at 603-727-3242.