Lido Leader Bob Garvin

Editors note:  The following article was first posted in January of 2012.  We repost it today in fond memory following the loss on Tuesday of our dear friend and neighbor extraordinaire Bob Garvin.  Bob died this week after a battle with cancer.  We will miss you, sir.

 To say Bob Garvin is a talented guy would be like saying Al Pacino is a pretty good actor. Or Tom Brady is an OK quarterback. Or Itzhak Perlman is a decent fiddle player. Understatements all. Let's start over. Bob Garvin is a most gifted individual who leads an extraordinary life, one that may or may not surprise you as he tells his story. I asked Bob several months ago if I might join him over coffee to put together a story about him. After all, he's spun dozens of yarns about his neighbors over the years—time for a little pay-back. But Bob said he had a better idea, and sent what follows. It's his life story so far, in his own words, in third-person. Like Bob, it's straight ahead, honest, detailed, introspective, wryly humorous and most importantly, human. I feel I know Bob a little better now. After reading, I hope you will too. ~ BT

Bob at home in Lido Shores

Robert Victor Garvin, formerly of Cincinnati, Ohio, is a retired GE executive who worked for many years on international manufacturing and marketing of aircraft jet engines. Garvin had joined the aircraft engine division of General Electric Company in March 1950, soon after graduation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and worked for GE for more than 42-years in various assignments—engineering, manufacturing, project management, negotiating and administering international license agreements, and finally in international marketing—work that he loved. At his retirement in 1992 he was vice president and general manager of the Aircraft Engine Overseas Operation, with offices in a number of countries.

1991: Bob riding a bactrian camel in Chinhuangdao, China

Garvin was responsible for developing markets for GE Aircraft Engines, a GE division with annual sales of more than $10 billion, in many countries such as Iran before the 1979 revolution, Turkey and Greece, Taiwan and South Korea, and Israel. The biggest challenge lay in two countries with which the United States had been at odds during the Cold War, the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union. There the competition came not only from American and European firms, but also from local industry, using Soviet technology in a protected monopoly. Garvin set up GE Aircraft Engines’ first office in Beijing in 1979; in the ensuing thirteen years GE went from a zero share of the Chinese commercial engine market to more than fifty percent.

In 1976 there had been approaches from the Soviet Union about buying American commercial engines, but at the time that was not politically acceptable to the U.S. Congress. After perestroika in 1989, such discussions were resumed and culminated in the purchase by Aeroflot of five Airbus airliners with GE engines, soon followed by other purchases and leases of airliners with engines from other western manufacturers. After GE’s chairman John F. Welch Jr. met with Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, Garvin organized a program to train Russian aviation executives in GE’s management school in Crotonville, N.Y. Of course they became advocates for GE. There is no question that Garvin enjoyed his travels to strange places, hobnobbing with top government and industry officials, being treated by them with the respect due the representative of a large American company that they hoped would shower modern technology and riches on their country. Sometimes it did work out that way.

Like many of his generation and background, Garvin is a bit of a polyglot, and could speak fluent German and French, as well as Spanish, Italian, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese well enough for taxis and restaurants; for business he used English. Garvin was the chairman of the International Council of the Aerospace Industries Association, served on the Defense Policy Advisory Committee on Trade, and as vice-chairman of the Greater Cincinnati Council on World Affairs.

1940: Evelyn, cousin Jaga, Father, Mother, Stefan and Bob

After retiring from GE, Garvin taught courses on international issues in the Institute for Lifetime Learning of the University of Cincinnati, and at the Education Center in Longboat Key, Florida. He has published an authoritative book about the confluence of technology, money, and politics in the aircraft engine industry, and intended to play himself if it were ever to be made into a movie. Later, he claims he was conned by his brother into writing a second book, about the founding of the MIT rugby football club. He regretted that some of his more creative ideas, for example an instant translation software (e.g. from Arabic or Urdu into English) built into digital hearing aids, never saw the light of day.

When the Nazis arrived in March 1938, his parents put him on a train to Brussels with a small German-English dictionary in his pocket, and from Brussels he went to England to a boarding school attended by his older brother. His parents and sister were able to flee from Austria into Poland. Although relatives there pleaded with them to stay, saying that there had always been anti-Semitism and that the Hitler crisis would blow over like all others, his father did not like the way things were developing and that autumn took the family to England. There they lived through the war, including the Blitz, and finally came to the United States in February 1945. Garvin, who had attended King’s College School in London, graduated from MIT in January 1950 after serving in the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Service in Germany.

1930: sister Evelyn, brother Stefan and Bob

Robert Garvin was born in Vienna in 1927. His father had emigrated to Mexico in 1906, and brought his wife there to join him in 1920. After a successful career in the oil industry, he returned to Europe in 1924, establishing the family in Vienna and buying a share in a small oil refinery in Poland. Garvin attended primary school in Vienna. His mother believed that all civilized people should be able to speak French, and his lessons started when he was five years old; later he had one year of English lessons. 

Garvin moved to Cincinnati in 1951 to work at the headquarters of GE Aircraft Engines; later in his marketing capacity he traveled constantly. His wife Rita Tobe Katz, a Cincinnatian, died in 1999; they had been married 43 years. At their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary she joked that married life had not been very difficult—“Bob’s only been home twelve years and a half.”

Thanks to his constant business travel he became a member of the clubs of many airlines, among them such historic relics as the Pan American World Airways Clipper Club and the TWA Ambassador Club. Neither airline exists today. In the same vein, on October 17, 1994 he was commissioned a Kentucky Colonel.

1998: Siblings Evelyn, Stefan and Bob

Garvin retired from GE in 1992 and he and Rita moved to Sarasota, Florida, where they soon bought an architecturally remarkable house, the former Phillip Hiss Library. Historic by Florida standards, it had been built in 1953 and attracts a never-ending stream of architect gawkers and frequent house tours. After doing some consulting for the United Nations on aviation ventures in Russia (the head winds from the local industry are strong;) for the World Bank in Romania (close down the airplane factory—it has no market;) and for an airliner joint venture between Russia and India (buying an existing European design is more economical, even if it doesn’t gratify local engineers;) he kept himself busy as the president of Gloria Musicae, a chamber choral group, on the board of the Sarasota Architectural Foundation, and as president of LSPOA, his neighborhood association. Bob says he wrote, edited, and published the association newsletter as a way of getting even with his neighbors.

2011: The Garvin men - Tony, Joshua, Fletcher Henderson, Andy and Bob

His extended family was of course greatly affected by the destruction of World War II, leaving only his younger sister Evelyn McCabe of Indianapolis and Cape Cod, and an aged cousin in Toronto. He has two sons, Andrew J. Garvin of Newton, Massachusetts and Anthony F. Garvin of Mahwah, New Jersey, as well as a grandson, Joshua. Bob has lived since 2001 with Julie Greenleaf Magenheim, his faithful friend, lover, and companion.

Garvin’s secretary once told him how much she admired his demeanor. Hunting for the right word, she said “You always look so pompous.” She quickly corrected that to “dignified,” but he always assumed she meant exactly what she had said the first time. Years later, an elegant elderly Englishwoman (are there others?) said of him, “An absolute poseur…just like my late husband.” The word is French for “phony”. Bob really prefers to be remembered, not for his poses, but for his sons and grandson.

If you want music, Garvin likes Sidney Bechet’s recording of “Waste No Tears.” There’s a Bechet 78 rpm album or perhaps 33-1/3 rpm LP somewhere in the library cabinet on the east side. ~ RVG