Lasting Memories

Gretl Meier
Feb. 13, 1929-Dec. 13, 2012
Stanford, California

Gretl Meier, a Stanford resident of fifty years, wife of the late Gerald M. Meier, a longtime professor of development economics at Stanford University, died, at age 83, on Dec. 13, at home.

Author of a pioneering study of job sharing in America, and founder of Quest Rare Books, Gretl was the mother of four sons and a grandmother of six.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Oscar and Sallie Slote, Gretl graduated magna cum laude from Mount Holyoke College (B.A., Political Science) in 1950, where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 1951, she studied at L'Institute d'Etudes Politiques of the University of Paris, and in 1954 earned an M.A. in American History at Radcliffe College of Harvard University. That fall, she married Meier.

The couple lived first in Middletown, Connecticut, where her husband taught at Wesleyan University. In 1962, with three children, they moved to California, when Gerald Meier was invited to join the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford.

After college, Gretl served on the staff of the first Mayor's Commission on Puerto Rican Affairs in New York City. In the 1970s, she returned to work. She became co-director of New Ways to Work, a Palo Alto nonprofit employment resource agency founded in 1972 to develop alternative work schedules for women and single parents reentering the workforce. In 1976, Meier testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Poverty, and Migratory Labor on the need for alternative work patterns.

Meier?s research led to a widely cited book, JOB SHARING: A New Pattern For Quality of Work and Life, published by the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in 1978. That year, under a grant from the German Marshall Fund, she represented New Ways to Work at meetings with European colleagues to explore these issues. In 1983, she followed the study with a policy paper, also published by the Upjohn Institute, ?Worker Learning and Worktime Flexibility.? In addition, Meier was the lead author of a study of a pilot job sharing program: Job Sharing in the Schools: A Study of Nine Bay Area Districts (New Ways to Work, 1976), and a contributor to New Work Schedules in Practice: Managing Time in a Changing Society (Stanley D. Nollen, 1983). Accompanying her husband on frequent overseas teaching posts, Gretl would canvas local labor practices, touring factories and plants from Japan to Jamaica. In addition, she worked as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a consultant to the New Haven Unified School District in Union City, California.

In 1987, with the last of her sons graduated from college, Gretl opened a new career. She founded Quest Rare Books, a dealership specializing in rare and out-of-print books on gardens and gardening. For years, as she built her collection, and hunted treasures for clients, Gretl scoured bookshops from Wales to London to Moscow. Within a decade, she had assembled a collection of antiquarian books almost without rival on the West Coast. In 1998, Garden Design magazine featured Quest Rare Books, calling it ?one of the country's top dealers in this small but burgeoning field.?

Gretl Meier was passionate about politics, languages, fine art, modern dance, classical piano, and literary thrillers. But her garden, especially in her last decades, remained her sanctuary. A longtime supporter of Filoli and the Strybing Arboretum and Botanical Gardens, she was an untiring gardener. Yet Meier was keenly aware of the limits of even the most generous garden. ?Children and books,? she once told an interviewer, ?don't wilt in quite the same way as plants.?

Gretl Meier, author, rare book dealer, and mother of four, was born February 13, 1929, in New York City. She died on December 13, 2012, in Stanford, California. She is survived by her sons, David, Daniel, Jeremy, and Andrew, daughters-in-law, Shelagh Meier, Hazelle Fortich, Jacqueline Mia Foster, six grandchildren, and a brother, Alfred Slote.