Julius Greb wraps up nearly six decades at St. Joseph

Caretaker watched center transform from orphanage to day care to multi-use facility

Published: June 30, 2014

By Dwain Hebda
Associate Editor

Dwain Hebda

Julius Greb stands in front of St. Joseph Center in North Little Rock, where he will retire July 1 after 58 years.

Dwain Hebda

Julius Greb stands in front of St. Joseph Center in North Little Rock, where he will retire July 1 after 58 years.

At St. Joseph Center stands a pair of pin oak trees, grown to match all but the uppermost reaches of the three-story main building while a canopy of lower branches creates shade circles a couple dozen feet in diameter against the fierce Arkansas afternoon sun.

Caretaker Julius Greb helped plant those trees — watered, pruned and mowed around them, too. At 84, he doesn’t tower over his surroundings like the oaks do, but in the history of St. Joseph Center, formerly St. Joseph Orphanage, he dwarfs virtually everybody save Bishop John B. Morris who founded the place. And even the bishop only lived to see 36 years of the orphanage, Greb lays claim to 58.

His decades of service, which will come to an end July 1, were a buttress against time for the old building and grounds to the benefit of the orphaned, rescued, and quite often forgotten children and elderly who lived there for many of those years.

“Every day was a little different,” he said. He should know. He never missed a day of work for illness or injury, showing up reliably as the sun and as familiar as the hallways he’s walked, painted and patched for so long.

“I’ve had a better life than a lot of people. I’ve been able to do what I wanted to do for a living,” he said. “I don’t think I did more than anyone else would have done. I just did my job.”

Born to northwest Arkansas farmers, Greb grew up in Barling and Ratcliff. He attended St. Anne School in Fort Smith and after graduating high school was drafted into the Army, from 1951 to 1953.

“I spent two years overseas in Germany,” he grinned. “I stayed over there long enough to find me a wife and I brought her back with me so I had something to remember Germany by. And we’re still together yet, 61 years.”

Greb took the last job he would ever hold in 1956 by signing on with the orphanage’s farm operations, then located at Prothro Junction. Tending to cattle, chickens and hogs suited him but within a decade, the state of Arkansas stabbed Interstate 40 through the guts of the property and Greb came to work at the North Little Rock orphanage as a handyman and caretaker. It wasn’t a move without adjustments.

“Sister Charlene (Lindeman, OSB), I tell you what, she worked like a man,” he said. “I hated to move furniture with her because she was stronger than I was. But she was like a mother hen to me, she was always taking care of me.”

Sit with him a bit and memories quickly bubble to the surface. There’s the one about a bull that rubbed a tension wire on a light pole so hard it caused the power lines to come in contact and explode, the resultant crack and sparks scattering the herd in all directions.

The Christmastime sausage supper put on by the Knights of Columbus was an annual highlight. Several hogs off the farm — Durocs, descended from Subiaco Abbey litters — were butchered to make the sausage for the event.

The pigs weren’t the only authentically Catholic animals on the place. Greb cackled as he recalled the year the dairy cows took an interest in a Good Friday observance.

“When the Latinos had their Stations of the Cross it wound up the road towards the barn, up around the pasture,” he said. “The people would move from one station to the next station and those cows would move right with them. That was so funny, they made the Stations of the Cross with them!

“You couldn’t keep from laughing. Those cows were always curious and as tame as they could be. They wouldn’t bawl, they were just lookin’, curious as to what’s going on. Listen, when they say ‘holy cows’, that’s what we had was holy cows.”

Other memories are more poignant: Thoughts of Elsie and he and the five Greb kids, his brood running loose on the grounds, playing with the orphans as if they were all one big family. Not surprisingly, a young boy once wandered over to him — the only grown man in sight — and simply asked, “Are you my dad?”

In spirit, a lot of other residents felt the same way. Which is why so many caught their breath 15 years ago when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

“They told me you can live with it or you can die from it. I chose to live with it,” he said.

Predictably, cancer didn’t cost him a single day of work, but retirement might. He and Elsie like to travel and their kids and grandkids are all within 10 miles of the caretaker’s house just up the road where they’ll still live. But he expects as well to be on premises, if not on the clock.

“The job’s not going to change much, for me,” he said. “I call it retired, but I’m still going to be up here.”