Albert Lion Schechterman

Albert Lion Schechterman has taken his final celestial Land Rover ride to a very clean, always vacuumed, seaside house in the sky. Giving external expression to his internal need to always be neat and tidy, he took said ride on August 14, the same day he arrived (not by Land Rover) 78 years earlier.

Al, or “Schec” to some from the old days, was born and raised in Elizabeth, NJ by Mathew and Regina Schecterman. His beloved sister Leah took him under her wing from the get-go and never stopped being his biggest supporter, loudest fan, and most exasperated critic. Together with his mother and sister, Al developed a life-long obsession with cooking and food, as long as said food never got too fancy or expensive. You knew you had been accepted into Al’s heart once he made and served you his “special” meatballs and sauce.

Deeply affected by the early loss of his father, Albert found healing and love, and not a little bit of mischief, among friends from the neighborhood and Rutgers University. Al, and his TKE fraternity brothers somehow managed to graduate in the late 1960s with no significant impairments except a an enduring love of music, an unbreakable affection for one another, and a penchant for non-conventional decision making.

For Al, that decision making took him down many roads, literally and figuratively. Together with his dear friend Jerry, Al drove trucks for many years, before an apparent rift in the cosmic fabric resulted in Al shaping young minds as a middle school teacher. Recognizing the long-lasting damage that could do to America’s youth, Al switched careers and teamed up again with Jerry to build houses within their own small construction company. After swinging hammers got to be bit much, Al brought his Jewish New Jersey sensibilities to the University of South Carolina nursing school, where hilarity inevitably ensured. There, he found a whole new group of friends, new food to obsesses about (grits chief among them) and a new career as a nurse anesthetist.

Over the next 30 years, Al leveraged his nursing skills to satisfy his wanderlust and inner need to always expand his circle of friends and new experiences. Using his beloved home on Martha’s Vineyard as a base, Al spent time helping patients, making friends, and acquiring Land Rovers, all up and down the East Coast with notable stops in Cape Cod, Virgina, West Virgina, and South Carolina.

While his address changed often, some things remained constant - chiefly, Al’s pursuit of fun, search for love, and drive for friendship. For some reason that remain unclear to this day, Al’s unique mix of humor, enthusiasm, and curmudgeonly approach to life, attracted the most fun, diverse and wonderful set of friends. While he loved his direct family deeply, Al never stopped building a bigger family of friends, always collecting new relationships right up to the very end. While Al never stopped espousing points of view large and small with the iron certitude of the lightly informed, somehow that made him more loveable not less. And through it all, he loved to tinker with his Land Rovers. green ones, yellow ones, big ones and small ones - it didn’t matter as long as he could always find something “broken” that needed fixing.

As Al takes his leave of us and joins his beloved sister Leah in that celestial seaside house, we are thankful for the unique paradox that he was. A guy that loved food but was terrified of going to new restaurants. A guy that loved louning at the beach for hours (ok days), but had a lifelong commitment to physical fitness and health. A guy that made insensitive jokes and comments but welcomed EVERYONE into his life regardless of background and lifestyle as long as they were kind and fun. A guy that loved to get dirty in the garage but vacuumed the garage when he was done. A guy with huge enthusiasm for new experiences but didn’t like the hassle of travel. A guy who loved making new friends but never forgot the old ones. A guy that had 10 of the same damn t-shirt to avoid taking risks but also learned to Tango in his seventies.

A traditional Jewish funeral will be held at the Bloomfiled Cooper funeral parlor in Ocean NJ on August 15 in accordance with Albert’s wishes. A celebration of Al’s life with be held in September at his house in accordance with our need to laugh, love, and remember Al.