Julian Martinez, 14, waited quietly to speak. When he reached the chapel lectern, the student at ALBA Community Day School in North Park could barely contain his tears.
He recalled the school’s dean, Alice Kay Gross, whom he had known for only six months.
“Miss Gross was always there for me,” Martinez told a somber audience Wednesday at a memorial service for Gross. “Just glad I got to meet her.”
About 90 people attended what retired Pastor Annie Watson called a “home-going” for Gross, a longtime San Diego educator who died Feb. 28 at 68 — only five months shy of retirement.
“In the last week of February, she went to Kaiser Foundation Hospital complaining of shortness of breath,” the printed program said. She died after a short illness.
Gross spent a decade at ALBA after working at several district schools, including Taft Junior High School and Hoover High School. She taught drug and sex education as well.
Tannor Henderson, 17, bearing a white cast on his hand, was another student at Anderson-Ragsdale Mortuary. He hid a broken heart as he recalled how Gross would say: “Come here, Grandson,” because his name was her maiden name. (Ignoring his being white and she black.)
“She really did turn my life around,” he said.
A girl cried as she called Gross “so precious. … She’d give you money to go to the taco shop. No one can ever replace her. She had a beautiful soul.”
ALBA stands for Alternative Learning for Behavior and Attitude, part of the San Diego Unified School District — a school one of the mourners depicted as helping “the underserved and the underloved.”
Former ALBA Principal Wendell Bass said: “What a joy it was to have her in my life. … God strategically placed her at that school,” and recalled watching her turn lives around.
She helped staff as well as students as “our mother and grandmother,” he said, recalling her mantra of being kind, kind and kind.
An ALBA counselor said: “She was the most beautiful, kindest, classiest woman I ever met.”
Someone said: “When she smiled at you, you were well-lit.”
Greg Gross, her journalist husband of 42 years, sat in the front pew near her stately wooden casket — his mother’s hand frequently on his back for comfort.
They had no children, he would say. But the students were her children.
“So much I wish I could tell you about Kay,” said her husband, a former Union-Tribune reporter who covered Tijuana among other beats, as about 20 of his former colleagues looked on. “You never left her presence without feeling better afterward.”
He listened as school friends, family members and in-laws read poetry and recalled trading jokes and making daily phone calls to the 18-year breast cancer survivor.
“She made the Golden Rule golden,” said Gross, who now operates a travel website — an avocation sparked by his wife’s urging to take a 10-day trip across Asia four decades ago. (The Grosses eventually would visit 21 countries on four continents.)
The Rev. Watson, formerly with Bethel AME Church in San Diego, concluded the service with a eulogy, telling the audience with a smile that “I’d just be repeating what you said,” but making the moment teachable.
The Book of Life had closed for Gross, Watson said — lived as a life of purpose.
“But each one of us — our books are open,” she said. “What is going to be written in your book?”
Cremation was planned, with a portion of her ashes to be scattered in Africa, which Alice Gross had planned this year to visit for the first time.
