Lance Grenzeback honored as Winchester’s Citizen of the Year

He had no idea what was coming. Even when he was sitting at the Chamber of Commerce’s annual luncheon, Lance Grenzeback thought he was just there to speak about the Town Meeting Members Association.

“So, they finished and then they said, ‘By the way, you’re the Citizen of the Year,’” Grenzeback says, of how he found out he was the 2025 recipient. “It was a bit of a surprise. I admit I wasn’t paying too much attention so they did catch me.”

Grenzeback has been receiving a lot of calls and email from people he knows, congratulating him on the honor. He says people he meets in town have been “very pleasant” when they mention the award.

“I think you have to be an accomplished extrovert to really plunge in,” he says, of all the attention.

Grenzeback was honored during a banquet on May 27 at Wright-Locke Farm. But a week before the big day, he was coaxed into speaking about himself, his many accomplishments, his life of service to the town he grew up in and what he likes to do when he’s not chairing some organization or project.

Winchester native

The Grenzeback home on Crescent Road is light and airy, a calm oasis on a sunny morning as the town’s newest Citizen of the Year talks about the Winchester of another time.

“I remember I walked everywhere,” he says. “I remember the first elementary school I was at was the Mystic School and then I shifted to the Lincoln School. It felt like I was walking a mile. A lot about what I remember about going to school was walking and walking and walking.”

Grenzeback’s father Robert was an engineer who grew up in California, but came to Massachusetts during World War II to develop radar. Robert met Bernadette, who grew up in the Boston area, and was a lawyer. The two married, producing Grenzeback and his brother, Richard.

The 78-year-old says it was a quieter Winchester he grew up in, not so developed as it is now. The west side, he says, was largely farm area.

“There have been a lot of changes,” Grenzeback says, adding there’s a different mix of businesses now and fewer blue collar workers in the community.

Grenzeback graduated from Winchester High School in 1968 and attended Harvard University, where he originally wanted to major in astronomy.

“That field was in transition, from optical telescopes to sitting behind a computer in an office,” he recalls. “I shifted to go into planning.”

He says he’s always been fascinated by cities — their complexities, the planning aspects of some and the ad hoc nature of others. It led him to a degree in government.

Traveling the world

From college, Grenzeback wanted to see the world. He joined the Peace Corps.

“I wanted to travel, but I didn’t have a lot of money so it seemed like a good way to travel,” he says, of those Peace Corps years. “I had studied eastern and European history, not a lot in the middle. The program was teaching English in Iran.”

The Shah was in power back then. Grenzeback met him several times when he came to visit the local orphanage in the town where Grenzeback worked.

“It was an interesting culture,” he says. “This was the late ‘60s and ‘70s before the oil crisis.”

Grenzeback says it was a different political culture and you could still feel the tension, even in this small town on the Caspian coast where he was teaching.

“You’re the odd person out in the society,” he recalls. “It takes you a while to figure it out.”

He adds every situation you go into, you have little to no idea of what’s going on. He was used to growing up in a society where he knew the rules.

What did he love the most about his time in the Peace Corps?

“Getting a sense of how people lived such different lives,” he says. “The different ways people have of organizing themselves in society. It was an eye opener in how they see the world. Then I came back and it was an eye opener in how your own culture organizes itself.”

Grenzeback was in Iran for two years, but he traveled through out the region visiting Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Kuwait, among others.

“Travel is educational,” he says. “You learn a lot. Traveling to less developed parts of the world wasn’t always easy.”

Back in the USA

When he arrived back home in the mid-‘70s, Grenzeback was still interested in urban development. So it was back to school and a masters degree in city planning, public policy and economics from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Kennedy School of Government.

At the Boston firm of David A. Crane & Partners, Inc., Grenzeback dove into urban planning and development projects, including a housing program for Sadat City. The project was a new industrial city for one million people, located midway between Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt.

“It was a flat desert,” Grenzeback says, with a laugh when asked about what he found at the location when he arrived. “It was an administrative city for the ministries. It’s still there.”

Grenzeback says it would be interesting to visit the area again. But, he adds, that’s what Google Earth is for.

From there, Grenzeback drifted to transportation studies, working for the National Academy of Sciences and Engineering, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the U.S. Department of Transportation, among others.

Around this time, Grenzeback met Joan, a teacher in the Winchester schools, and the two married in 1972. In Arlington, the couple bought and rehabbed a house.

In 1986, the Grenzebacks packed up daughter Katie and son Robert and came back to Winchester.

Local politics

How did Grenzeback get into local politics? At some point, Grenzeback says, he realized the town’s master plan hadn’t been updated in 50 years. As he talked with friend Peter van Aiken, the two realized they should run for office.

“He said, ‘Let’s run for Planning Board’ and we both ran for Planning Board,” Grenzeback recalls. “We won and that’s how it got me started.”

Grenzeback’s resume in Winchester is long: three terms on the Planning Board (eight years), two terms on the Select Board (six years), Capital Planning Committee, Town Manager Selection Committee, Town Manager’s Climate Action Plan Committee, Town Meeting Communications Study Committee, Zoning Review Advisory Committee and Town Meeting (16 years to date).

Did he enjoy it?

“You enjoy it after the fact,” Grenzeback says, thoughtfully. “Between two kids and 15 years with the town.”

And then there’s work and more travel to places like Russia and China and all the rest.

“My work allowed me to tool all over the U.S. and overseas,” he says. “[Winchester] was a good counterbalance…a different set of people and issues.

“Winchester benefits from having very active participants and a lot of volunteers,” he adds.

In 2019, Grenzeback retired from town government. And he retired from his job as a consultant to enjoy life.

Back in the saddle

One of the things he didn’t leave, Grenzeback says, was Town Meeting. He has served since 2009.

But a few years ago, Grenzeback and other Town Meeting members thought it might be useful to put together an organization that could provide members with a forum to discuss issues and provide information.

The Town Meeting Members Association was born.

“The TMMA has ended up taking more time than I would have guessed,” says Grenzeback, who was elected chair and remains so.

But, he adds, the TMMA has been instrumental in getting the precincts to come together and meet to talk about issues more often and in creative ways.

Although it takes up time, Grenzeback has other things that keep him busy. Like music.

“I played French horn when I was in high school,” he says, laughing. “Many years later, I’ve picked up the recorder.”

That’s how he wound up sitting on the board of directors of the Winchester Community Music School.

But Grenzeback has other hobbies, too: sailing and repairing things around the house.

It’s quiet, the birds are chirping outside, when Grenzeback is asked if he’s written his speech for the big banquet. He laughs at that.

“It’s going to be a short one,” he says.

When told he doesn’t seem excited, Grenzeback smiles.

“It’s going to be fun,” he says. “I’ll enjoy the people. You work with people for days or years and then you don’t see them for a while. It will be fun to see what they’re doing.”