A typically irreverent Glenn Eure.Glenn Eure, A Life Well-Lived
We meet very few truly memorable people in our lives. Glenn Eure was one of them.
Anyone meeting him felt immediately as though he would be a friend for life. Glenn was funny, outgoing, irreverent and a remarkably complex man.
He passed away this past week, and for the Outer Banks and hundreds if not thousands of visitors that met him there is a void that will be hard to fill.
Operating from his Nags Head Ghost Fleet Gallery, Glenn touched lives with his belief that art was something that would make the world better.
Perhaps that is why he was one of the original members of the Dare County Arts Council. Maybe that belief was why he sponsored so many young artists, helping them to understand what it means to be a professional artist. Every year, he and his wife Pat, would turn the gallery over to the art students of Dare County Schools to put the works of kindergarten through 12th grade on display—and that was for all schools.
He could be incorrigible—every woman was beautiful—but that was said with such innocence that it would be difficult to take it seriously. He told bad jokes, and he would repeat his bad jokes. Some of them we can repeat. "What's a pirate's favorite letter. Rrrr." Some of them...well, they could be a bit off color.
And then there was the other side to him—the side that many people never saw.
In 2010 he finished what may be his greatest work of art. The Via Crucis, the Stations of the Cross. Fourteen hand-carved life-sized depictions of the final journey of Christ that he created for Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in Kitty Hawk.
It is an exquisitely beautiful testament to one man's faith.
He never discussed where that faith came from. Perhaps he learned it growing up in Hawaii. It may have come to him serving in the US Army. He was an artillery man, and served combat duty in Korea and Viet Nam, retiring as a Major.
Glenn touched lives—it's what he did. Whether it was through his art, his bad jokes or just who he was, he had an impact on those he met. It was a life well-lived and we are all better for having known him.
