COURTESY PHOTO
Lowell Gray leaves behind a wife, brother, and three daughters.
Lowell Gray, an entrepreneur, technology executive, restaurateur and real estate developer who turned in the last few years to the land and the life of a small farmer, died in the early hours of Memorial Day. He was 57.
Born in New Rochelle, New York, he graduated from Harvard University in 1982, spent a summer working as a computer programmer and saving some money before heading to Asia with his friend, Mike Fee. They spent time in Hong Kong, Bangkok, and the Malay Peninsula before splitting up in Singapore. Lowell went to Java and Bali, while mike headed to Sumatra. Lowell returned to Singapore and worked as a programmer to make some money. Feeling flush, he bought a grey market Rolex and couple of bespoke suits before hitting the road again, this time to New Delhi and eventually to Europe.
Mike picked him up in an old VW bug and the two made it across the south of France, Spain and Portugal before the car finally died on the Basque frontier. They then hitchhiked to Paris where Lowell hocked his watch for a final blow-out before heading home. At Kennedy Airport they were pulled out of the security line. The combination of Lowell’s long hair, his custom suit and flip-flops, and a passport stamped from India and Thailand apparently arousing suspicion.
Back in the U.S. Lowell settled into a career, actually several careers, in technology including stints at Cap Gemini, Bell Laboratories and Price Waterhouse before starting his own software company, Eco Software, with dreams of being the next Lotus. He was drawn, however, to online services and founded an internet service provider initially called North Shore Access, which later became Shore.Net.
Attempting to borrow money to finance his growing business and after rejection by several banks, he turned to the city of Lynn for help. The Lynn/EDIC responded with $ 25,000 initially, a sum that grew to include a building, help with a $ 500,000 federal loan and assistance with tax breaks and leverage for bank financing. Shore.net became an internet powerhouse, serving small businesses and major university clients, including the web sites of Stanford and Johns Hopkins. At one point, they had 31 T-3 lines and a direct link on a transAtlantic cable.
The company’s Lynn ribbon cutting was attended by Lynn Mayor Pat McManus, Congressman John Tierney and Senator John Kerry.
In the meantime, Mr. Gray had met Elizabeth Shaw in 1987 and they married in 1989, moving to Silicon Valley for a short time before moving back to Massachusetts. By the mid-1990s, Elizabeth was taking care of their three young daughters while Lowell was busy working. Realizing the need for a better work/life balance, Mr. Gray turned to his rabbi and the Jewish community at Temple Emanu-El in Marblehead. There he studied Torah, learned Hebrew and got an adult B’nai Mitzvah. He helped to raise money and awareness for Lynn’s public schools.
In 1999, he decided that it was time to sell Shore.Net move on. With the help of his CFO and friend, Jeff Bingenheimer, he hired an investment bank and put together an offering package. They closed the sale on March 31st, 2000, one week before the NASDAQ hit its peak and the dot-com bubble crashed. He stayed on with the new owners for a time but grew tired corporate management. A year after the sale, Mr. Bingenheimer, who Mr. Gray called “the best executive I have ever had the privilege to work with”, died of pancreatic cancer.
Wanting to take a break, and with his fourth daughter born on his birthday in 2001, he decided to build a new home and found a spectacular property on the tip of Nahant with panoramic views of Boston Harbor and with its own private island. On the site was a decaying old mansion that he spent two years and an imprudent amount of money renovating.
He was on the construction site with several workers when the twin towers were hit, catching the second plane strike on a small portable TV. Everything stopped, they were all stunned. From their perch overlooking the harbor they saw the airspace over Boston shut down and fighter jets roaring across the sky. In the ensuing months, Mr. Gray experienced a strange personal connection: they had purchased the Nahant property from the estate of Abdul Majid Zabuli, the founder of Afghanistan’s banking system.
After the sale of Shore.Net and his brief post-sale tenure, Mr. Gray found himself idle. He tried to engage in new pursuits including angel investing, fund-raising, board memberships and a research position at Northeastern University’s Marine Science Center where he participated in the lobster robot project and explored the underwater possibilities of the Internet of Things. He became president of his temple. In the meantime, his marriage fell apart.
He turned his attention to real estate development, turning a old rooming house next to Shore.Net headquarters into residential condominiums. When the old run-down bar next door became available, he bought that as well and started another career as the owner of the award-winning Oxford Street Grill making the transition from bits to bites.
His friend, architect Glenn Morris recalled: “Lowell believed in Lynn. He started Shore.Net there and it was headquartered on Oxford Street. He also started a restaurant on Oxford Street, The Oxford Street Grill, that he originally envisioned as a Kosher steakhouse. That restaurant is now the Blue Ox. We fought about the facade, which was very expensive for a start-up restaurant in an unproven location, but he let me win. In the end he was proud of it, if a little bit poorer.”
After a few years, he realized that he was not the one who should run the restaurant and he sold it. He once said that he was right about the vision, but his timing was too early and it needed another leader.
Other entrepreneurial opportunities came up, including a restart in the old Shore.Net building, which he still owned, as a cloud computing purveyor. There were also few other potential IT start-ups that never worked out.
After his divorce in 2010, he married his wife, Lina Hristova. Together, they bought an old farm in Woodstock, Vermont. Deciding he had had enough of the IT world, he moved to the farm in 2015 and started working there full-time.
In his class report for his 35th Reunion, he noted, “I have found that my priorities are not complicated: take care of myself and Lina, take care of my kids, love and help the people around me and take care of the land. We need to repair our divided world, trust one another and cooperate. I still believe that we can work together in peace and the world will restore itself.”
Mr. Gray was a member of the Woodstock, Vermont Volunteer Fire Department and a planning commissioner for the Town of Woodstock. He had been a member of Common Angels, a trustee of North Shore Community College and a trustee of the Salem State Enterprise Center. He was the 1999 Business Person of the Year of the Lynn Area Chamber of Commerce, the United States Small Business Administration’s 2000 Small Businessperson of the Year – Massachusetts, as well as numerous other business awards. His Oxford Street Grill was named “Best of the New”, by the Boston Sunday Globe in 2005 and “Best of Boston- New Restaurant North of Boston” by Boston Magazine in 2006.
He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by Salem State College in 2000.
Besides his wife, Lina, he leaves his daughters: Rebecca, Samantha, Josephine and Alexandra. He also leaves a brother, Adam Gray. He was predeceased by his father, Stephen; his mother, Jessica; and his ex-wife, Elizabeth.
Funeral details are pending,
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