Josephine Kerr Hodara

Josephine Kerr Hodara — mother of four, grandmother of five, great-grandmother of three, and physician to thousands of children over her 40-year career in the New York City public hospital system — died Sunday at her Manhattan home. She was 98.

Josephine was known for her intelligence, humor, and passionate commitment to young people, both as a parent and as a doctor. For more than a dozen years she served as head of adolescent medicine at Harlem Hospital, where she fought the epidemics of teenage pregnancy and drug addiction. She also worked at Bellevue, Elmhurst, and Cumberland Hospitals, all public hospitals in the five boroughs.

Her devotion to the underserved reached well beyond those wards. As a college student, she volunteered with Quaker organizations serving the poor in Mexico; later she practiced aboard The Floating Hospital, a shipboard clinic for underprivileged families in New York, and worked with organizations assisting refugees seeking asylum in the United States.

Josephine was born in New York City in 1928 to Charles and Kate Miller, both physicians practicing in the Corona section of Queens. She had one sibling, Robert, who would grow up to be a plastic surgeon.

As a child, Josephine spent five days a week in Corona and weekends at a small farm Charles had bought in Ronkonkoma, on Long Island. Cared for by a succession of German nannies, she spoke German before she spoke English.

Despite Josephine’s secure childhood in the 1930s, she at times detected signs of the storm clouds gathering in the world outside.

In the summer of 1936, a nanny took Josephine to a day camp in Yaphank, Long Island, where the girl later recalled seeing Nazi flags flying. It was Camp Siegfried, run by the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization whose summer retreats featured participants marching in Nazi uniforms and children indoctrinated through Hitler Youth-style courses. The nanny never informed the camp that her charge was Jewish and, presumably, Josephine's parents never learned where they had been.

Josephine attended Forest Hills High School and entered Cornell University at age 16 before going on to New York University Medical School in Manhattan.

In her first-year anatomy lab, she met Eugene Kerr, a World War II Army veteran who worked alongside her on a cadaver they named Sam. By the time Sam had been whittled down, Josephine and Eugene were a couple. They married in 1950.

She did her residency in pediatrics at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and, in 1955, gave birth to her first son, Andrew. In a highly unorthodox move for a mother in the 1950s, she returned to work six weeks later. A second son, Peter, followed in 1956, and in 1959 the family moved to a large house in Flushing.

The marriage ended in divorce in 1964. Two years later, Josephine married Morris Hodara, a medical physicist and hospital union organizer. Morris, a widower, had two children — Fred, 10, and Miriam, 8. Josephine made room for all of them in the Flushing house and adopted the two children.

Raising four children while pursuing a medical career, Josephine became a master at economizing. Through trial and error, she learned that most foods on sale could be frozen in one of her cavernous basement freezers and defrosted months or even years later. Unable to resist a deal, she once bought and froze half a cow, which fed the family well into the next decade.

Another year, she served a stuffed goose for Christmas dinner. The following year, at Christmas dinner, her children noticed that some of the same goose stuffing had returned, this time in a deep-dish apple pie.

At home, she was famous for a rapier wit — quick, incisive, and sometimes off-color. Of Jane Brody, the New York Times health columnist, she once observed: "She is the most balanced reporter at the paper. One day she writes about constipation. The next day she writes about diarrhea."

Josephine is survived by her four children, Andrew Kerr, Fred Hodara, Peter Kerr, and Miriam Hodara; her grandchildren, Alex Hodara, Ellie Hodara Mroz, Charles Kerr, James Kerr, and Isabel Kerr; and her three great-grandchildren, Liam Mroz, Jack Mroz, and Jonas Hodara.

In lieu of any flowers, the family asks that you kindly make a donation to The Floating Hospital at https://www.thefloatinghospital.org/support-us