Our Man in New Hampshire.

• Author: Levin, Dan

Martin Gross was no friend of CLF -- 20 years ago. He and Doug Foy robbed "bombs" at each other, but gradually they found a common purpose. Was this the stuff of great drama, or did it just happen?

The details are lost in forgotten files, lost to the memories of giants who waged great battles, like mythic gods hurling thunderbolts. It was the early 1980s and the battleground was the Seabrook nuclear plant. The giants were Douglas Foy for CLF and Martin Gross for Seabrook, and both recall, "We lobbed bombs at each other."

Bombs, then a happy denouement for CLF.

"I admired Doug's zeal, and I gained a healthy respect for him." --Gross "It got pretty fierce at times, but I could see that Marty was a fine lawyer, and I grew to respect him, too." --Foy Martin L. Gross, a legendary public figure in New Hampshire and once CLF's arch enemy, has since 1996 been chair of our New Hampshire Advisory Board. There lies a story. Did "Marty," as we call him, emerge from darkness to light in a single epiphanic moment, did it happen gradually, or was there no drama at all? Was it Goethe who wrote, "There are masterpieces in the commonplace"?

Gross started down his winding road to CLF quite nicely, graduating from Harvard in 1960, magna cum laude in Government. He married New Hampshire's Caroline Lord, and the newlyweds immediately left for New Zealand. Martin had a one-year fellowship to study the country's compulsory labor arbitration system, but on weekends he and Caroline roamed "the gorgeous natural environment," the kind that inspired their 1961 move to New Hampshire. In 1964, Gross graduated from Harvard Law School, clerked for a year, and joined the Concord law firm of Sulloway Hollis Godfrey & Loden, now Sulloway & Hollis. He became a partner in 1969 and he's never left, not the firm, not New Hampshire, not another gorgeous natural environment he loves so well.

* The Making of an Environmentalist

Gross's law office overlooks the New Hampshire State House, and the statue of an earlier local legend -- Daniel Webster. One April morning, leaning back in his chair, he was saying, "I grew up in New York City, but as a teenager I worked several summers out west and I got a lot more exposed to nature than city boys usually do. In the '60s I was a deer hunter, but I won't kill anything larger than a mosquito these days. If you live in New Hampshire, though, and you have any brains, you get outdoors. Walking is my exercise of choice now. Yesterday, along Pleasant Lake, I saw a big hawk, three deer, and some huge moose tracks." He seemed to take great delight in reliving the experience. Gross also sails an 18-foot Catalina sloop on Lake Winnipesaukee, where he and his wife of one year, residential architect Deirdre M. Sheerr, own a cottage.

Caroline Lord Gross passed away in 1993. A Republican, she had been administrative assistant to New Hampshire governor Walter R. Peterson, Jr., and Majority Leader of the New Hampshire House of...