Groover Labs co-founder Curt Gridley was ‘what a liberal arts person should be like’
The value of a liberal arts education may be in question by some these days, but Curt Gridley’s liberal arts education had a lot to do with the way he lived his especially successful life.
“This is a man who understood the value of learning,” said Jim Rhatigan, Wichita State University’s former dean of students.
“He knew that learning could unleash potential.”
Gridley, 65, died March 16 after a short battle with pancreatic cancer.
He and his wife, Tracy Hoover, were best known in Wichita for starting Groover Labs — a combination of their names — downtown in 2019. The initial more-than-$5 million venture is a tech-focused community space that has event and co-working spaces and focuses on early-stage product development.
Gridley also was known as a scholar, graduating magna cum laude from WSU with degrees in philosophy and math and a minor in Spanish followed by a master’s in math from Dartmouth College.
Hoover said her husband’s birth in Meade and formative years in Beloit prepared him for a lifetime of curiosity and learning.
“Those early years out in the dusty plains really impacted him.”
There were no other children around, and he had to entertain himself, she said, and it “just gave him some sort of heartiness and personal resources . . . to draw from.”
The big sky country along with a man who would pay Gridley a nickel for jobs around his shop made a “big impact on his imagination and ability to solve problems,” Hoover said.
Gridley’s upbringing never left him. When he went to New England for school and stayed to work in the computer industry, he’d joke every time he saw a tank full of lobsters at a restaurant.
In Kansas, he’d say, “You look out the back window and pick your cow out of the pasture for your steak.”
Hoover described her husband as incredibly bright and pretty funny, too.
“He never took himself too seriously, and I think he helped me stop taking myself too seriously.”
Others said Gridley could be both a peacemaker and a contrarian.
Former Wichita State University Foundation and Alumni Engagement president and CEO Elizabeth King knew Gridley in part through his service on the foundation’s investment committee and board of directors.
“He was not one that just because we had always done something a certain way did we need to continue to do so.”
When Gridley offered differing opinions, King said, “It was to challenge everybody, and that’s what makes better organizations.”
Gridley also had a knack for diffusing situations that got a little too divisive, such as on the homeowners board at his downtown condo.
“He could always keep things lighthearted,” said friend and neighbor Cindy Claycomb. “It was just his personality. He would say things that would lessen the tension.”
She said Gridley — and Hoover still — truly cared about Wichita, which was evident with the research they put into Groover Labs.
Claycomb said they were thinking about how it would help the community, not themselves.
“That kind of explains who he was, because I think he really did care about other people and our community and how we could grow.”
While working for a computer firm in Massachusetts, Gridley taught himself hardware design and engineering. Hoover said he figured that without formal training, no one would hire him for a hardware job, so he started Amber Wave Systems in 1994.
Two years later, after he developed a low-cost ethernet switch, he sold the business and was able to be at home as he and Hoover raised their children, Henry and Fiona.
His children joke about how their father drove them crazy when they asked him questions, and he’d give long, thoughtful responses when all they wanted were quick replies.
For instance, Henry Gridley said when he’d ask for math help, “It was always, ‘Let’s go back and fully understand all of the things.’ ”
It’s something he and his sister said they appreciate today.
“He was always encouraging us to . . . explore any possible interest we had,” Fiona Gridley said.
Around the time they were in middle school, their father insisted on taking them out of school for a half-year family trip to Europe.
Hoover said it’s not something she ever would have thought to do.
“He has a big mind and broad view,” she said. “He didn’t ever feel like he needed to be bound by somebody else’s rules.”
Fiona Gridley said her “sense of wonder about the world” is in large part due to her father.
The family, which had established the Gridley Family Foundation after the Amber Wave sale, moved to Wichita in 2005.
Their first significant donation was to WSU’s Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences when they established the Curtis D. Gridley Professorship in the History and Philosophy of Science.
Rhatigan said it was unique both because it was the first fully endowed gift directly to Fairmount College and because it’s an esoteric and unusual professorship for a school this size.
“He made many other gifts, but to me that one sort of epitomizes what he saw in the value of a liberal arts education.”
Rhatigan said that’s the education of appreciation, meaning you don’t have to be an expert in everything, but you see value in learning for learning’s sake.
Sharing is part of that, too, he said.
“Some people have . . . what I would call a generous spirit even before they have money,” Rhatigan said.
He said that was Gridley.
“He was never a cocky know-it-all. He was a gentle, forthcoming and very giving person. He is what a liberal arts person should be like.”
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