Lawrence Joel Rosenblum

Lawrence Joel Rosenblum M.D., 79, died in his house in Ashton, Maryland and in his wife Leslie Dopkeen’s arms, the place in the world he felt most at home. His death on June 15, 2023 came mercifully quickly, following a long and debilitating illness. He was surrounded that morning by pictures of his family and of wolves he loved like family, art he and Leslie had collected on their travels, CDs full of the Blues songs he aspired to play on his resophonic steel guitar, plants and a garden he cultivated, a collection of approximately a gazillion non-fiction books he spent his life curating, and by his dog Scooby Doo who he was suspected to have loved more than the rest of it all combined. The man knew how to fill a room– and a shelf and a wall and a conversation. Larry deplored a vacuum, making all the more stark the one his loss leaves in the lives of those who love him.

Larry was born to Leon and Gertrude (née Kantrowitz) Rosenblum on February 11, 1944, full of what he would swear to his own children decades later and right up until the time of his death was called “poisonality” in Brooklyn. As a child, Larry was known as the “vilde chaya,” or the “wild animal” in Yiddish. Gertrude had to wrap her nylon stockings around the rails of his crib to keep him from chewing through and ingesting the wooden bars. He would wriggle free from her hands on street corners in Brooklyn to jump up on the running boards of passing cars. And he turned more than one family day at Jones Beach (which he hated) into a rapid family retreat by kicking sand in the faces of what Gertrude would recall were “some very big boys.”

Despite his irreverence, or perhaps because of it, Larry was an exceptional and devoted student, always seeking knowledge and skills to substantiate the arguments he intended to spend his life making. He excelled through the Brooklyn public school system graduating at 16 and matriculating to Columbia College, where he was proud to have his Brooklyn diction judged insufficient to match his professional ambitions. While he graduated with a major in invertebrate zoology, the lessons he related most often to his children about his college experience had little to do with his pre-med curriculum. The required freshman “logic and rhetoric” course taught him how to “think and write clearly”-- two skills he was certain were necessary pre-conditions for one another. That class and his stint as a reporter for the Columbia Spectator made him into a ruthless editor in a way that still haunts the dreams of one of his daughters and informed the writing of this obituary (In the contest of “died” versus “passed away,” he whispered in his daughter’s thoughts, “why would you use two words when you can use one?”). He fondly recalled the graduate-level art history class he took with the renowned professor Meyer Shapiro, whom he admiringly called “Meyer, the Crier'' for his impassioned, near-ecstatic teaching. And Larry loved to boast to his wife, a PhD in sociology, that he had received a “D” in the subject – burnishing his own credentials, he thought, as a “real scientist.”

From Columbia, he went immediately to medical school at SUNY Upstate in Syracuse, NY, followed by an internship in Oakland, CA. He was then drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam war– a war he opposed at the very core of his being. He served two years as a Major and the base doctor at Camp Drum in Watertown, NY. Following his discharge, he returned to SUNY Upstate to begin a residency in Radiology. He subsequently practiced in Syracuse, Exeter, NH, Tuscon, AZ, and then Norwich, NY--where he spent the mainstay of his career.

Larry’s professional life as a radiologist spanned teaching and research, hospital, group and ultimately private practice. He was most proud of Central Diagnostic Imaging (CDI), a free-standing multi-modality imaging center he and Leslie built in Norwich. Despite his urban upbringing, education, and medical training, Larry loved country life and jumped at the opportunity to bring high-quality medical care to rural Central New York. CDI began as a mobile CT service to three hospitals in three small rural counties, whose residents would otherwise have had to travel an hour or more for the same level of care. Ten years later – once providing CT service became standard practice at rural hospitals – Larry with Leslie’s support transformed the mobile practice into an independent state-of-the-art imaging center, introducing sophisticated ultrasound, CT, MRI, and bone densitometry scanning to the community. He and his partner Janet Martin were passionate advocates for their patients and were accessible to them. No CDI patient who came for a mammogram or an ultrasound ever left the office without receiving the results directly from the doctors. CDI grew to a staff of 15 (who became like family) with next-to-no turnover until both doctors retired in 2011. Over the course of 26 years, Larry provided a quality of care to rural Upstate that rivaled that which could be found in any metropolitan center, and still, he never considered himself anything other than a “country doc.”

Nothing truer could be said about Larry than that family was everything to him. He learned that from growing up within a loving and cloistered extended family, the members of whom lived within a few blocks of one another in Brooklyn–celebrating, competing, eating, summering in the Catskills, yelling to be heard over one another, but always everything, altogether. For them there was family and there was “outside the family.”

Larry often said that the best decision he ever made was to marry Leslie, from Worcester, MA. From the point when Larry became a husband and father, everything he did too was to protect and provide for his family. Rather than holding his wife and two daughters apart from the world, he supported and encouraged them in figuring out how best and most meaningfully (and, of course, safely) to be in it. He was a cheerleader for his daughters, indulging their senses of whimsy with relish and nurturing their evolving passions without preconditions. He never demanded proof of their achievement or a long-term commitment to any one interest or activity; he was just happy to be in it all with them.

When Larry and Leslie retired, they moved to the DC-area to be closer to their daughters and their grandchildren. Larry delighted in spending every moment he could with his grandchildren, encouraging and cultivating their curiosity and sending them home with books ranging in topics from astronomy to zoology. He loved his grandchildren deeply and their love for their “Zayde” runs just as deep.

Larry was shy and he retained his sense of discomfort socializing “outside the family.” His conception of family though was inclusive and ever evolving. He developed a set of second, third and soon too many to count daughters and sons, brothers and sisters. Some of them were his children’s dear friends and partners, some his CDI colleagues, others neighbors and fellow congregants. They graced his table on holidays, traveled long distances to visit him in his retirement, and stood by his wife and children as Larry’s illness progressed and still now. He sent them books on topics of potential interest to them, accepted them as they were, offered medical advice, regaled them with his knowledge of military history, plowed their driveways, played them songs on his guitar, and wondered after them.

Larry always reminded us that we were born into a broken world not to fix it in its entirety but to work from our corner to repair it. Where he saw injustice he spoke out: he wrote countless letters to the editor, was prominent in a successful effort to stop high-powered transmission lines from being built through the center of Norwich, marched in protests, was a veteran of the People’s Park in Berkeley, CA, and once joined an effort to “levitate” the Pentagon. Before deciding to retire to suburban Maryland, he and Leslie had planned to reclaim their motorcycle riding days and travel across the Northwest spiking trees.

Larry is survived by Leslie, his beloved wife of nearly 54 years, his daughters Jessica L.D. Rosenblum and Lilah S. Rosenblum (Joe Brener), and his grandchildren Lev Abraham and Eve Gittel Brener (each of whom is named for Larry’s parents). He is also survived by his brother Stephen Rosenblum (Ellen) and his brother-in-law Jonathan Dopkeen (Kathleen), four nieces and nephews and their six children collectively. He was predeceased by his sister-in-law, Joyce Dopkeen. Larry will be buried on what would have been his 54th wedding anniversary at Garden of Remembrance Cemetery in Clarksburg, MD, on June 22 at 2:00 pm. There will be a chapel service followed immediately by a graveside burial. Shiva will be observed at the Dopkeen/Rosenblum home this Thursday (5:30 to 8:30 pm) and Friday (12:00- 4:00 pm); please contact the family for details. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Center for Biodiversity, Wolf Sanctuary of Pennsylvania, and Wolf Mountain Nature Center in Smyrna, NY.