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 off a bridge at Wapama Falls, swollen by near-record ice melt. Meyer was trying to save Fox, who'd lost his footing, said wife Paula Meyer, who was with them on a backpacking trip.
The Meyer family lost a rancher, gourmet cook, driver of a battered '69 green pickup truck, tree grower, pie baker, wine connoisseur, ice cream maker and a man whose trademark under pressure was being the calmest man in the ER.
His parents, Annetta and Chuck, an 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 an optometrist in Merced.
Between bouts of grief and tears, they laughed as they told stories about a man who touched those around him with a special sense of "grace and elegance," which is how he defined a "great" practitioner of emergency medicine. He worked at Presbyterian Intercommunity Hospital in Whittier, near Los Angeles.
His parents thought 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 told him to pay him in full when he sold Cheyenne, the bull. "He had 130 head of cattle when he went to college," his mom remembered.
He blended a high-profile career in medicine with a down-home love of the ranch. In recent years, the couple had begun splitting their time between Whittier and Merced, at a 17-acre ranch off Yosemite Avenue.
"We had a charmed and beautiful life," Paula Meyer said. "I've never met anybody who had a happier childhood."
Among his interests was wine. He proposed to Paula at Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, which is by the waterfall where he died, after telling her to look at "variegated stones" in the water, one of which was a bottle of wine.
Last week, he reproposed to her, using the same ploy and the same wine, asking if she would make the same choice again.
"Oh, yes," she told him. "I had no doubts in how much I was loved."
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 body hasn't been recovered. Memorial services are planned in mid-August in Merced and Whittier.
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