July 27, 1927 – October 19, 2026
Gus Gustow was born in 1927 in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and spent his early years there before the family moved to Coney Island when he was fourteen — a step up in the world he was proud of his whole life. He grew up dancing: his mother would put records on their big old radio and tell him to come dancing, and he never had a lesson in his life, just picked it up and never really stopped.
At seventeen, with World War II underway and unable to sit still through a math exam while his cousins and friends were being drafted, Gus set out to serve however he could. He joined the Merchant Marine, training in Brooklyn before shipping out on his first vessel, the Dolly Madison, through the Panama Canal and on toward the Pacific. He was at sea on a later voyage, caught in a bad Atlantic storm, when Japan surrendered and the war ended. Afterward, at a friend’s suggestion, he enlisted in the Army — a decision that was supposed to lead to the GI Bill and a couple of easy years on a Florida beach, but turned instead into more than twenty years of service that took him and his family around the world.
It was the Army that brought Gus to Frankfurt, Germany, where he met a young Englishwoman named Margaret. By his own account, “I kind of liked her as soon as I saw her” — though at first she was more interested in the officers. They found each other again when the headquarters moved to Heidelberg, and a little matchmaking from a mutual friend did the rest. They married and started a family with their daughter Jane and son Mickey, then spent the following years moving as the Army moved them — California, New York, Southampton, England, back to Brooklyn, and finally Fort Hamilton — hauling the same hard-won living room furniture with them every single time. Gus liked to joke that after enough moves, they finally told the movers: that’s it, we’re not moving that furniture again.
After retiring from the Army, Gus went to work for TWA at Kennedy Airport, drawn as much by the travel privileges as the job itself — it meant he could finally take Margaret back to England to see her family. He later spent his last working years at LaGuardia Airport before retiring fully to take on what he always called the most important job of his life: taking care of Margaret.
Gus and Margaret’s decades together were full ones — Broadway shows, trips back to England, a memorable night seeing Patti LaBelle on stage, and plenty of home movies the family made together just for laughs. Through all of it, the people who knew Gus remember the same things: a love of dancing, a quick sense of humor, a devotion to his family, and a determination to make the most of whatever came next — eighty years in the making, as one family video called him, and getting better all the time. After Margaret passed, Gus remarried Pamela Wentling, who was by his side for the rest of his life. He lived to 99, right up to the end full of the same warmth and humor everyone who knew him remembers.