Bernard Jortner

BERNARD JORTNER

 January 9, 1934 - September 28, 2024

Personal History of Bernie Jortner

I was born in Brooklyn, New York in Kings County Hospital on January 9, 1934. My parents, Max and Freda Jortner, married about a year earlier. They and their families were immigrants from eastern Europe. My mother’s family, the Katz family, emigrated from the city of Wlodowa, which is now in eastern Poland (it was part of the Russian empire then). There were battles in the town during early World War I, and my mother recalled shooting and dead bodies in the town during the war. These battles involved German and Russian forces, with the Germans eventually driving the Russians eastward, away from Wlodowa. The town has a long history of a Jewish settlement, and was over 70% Jewish, of a population of about 9,200, at the onset of World War II. Fortunately for the Katz family, they immigrated to the United States well before the Germen destruction of the Jewish community in WW II. My grandfather, Joshua (Sam) Katz (Zayde) left for the US in around 1913-14, before the war started. The outbreak of the war stranded my grandmother Sarah (Bubby) in Wlodowa with five children, Minnie, Rose, Freda (my mother, who was age 4 when the war began), Minda and Max. My mother didn’t speak much about that experience, but on occasion mentioned going into the fields with the family to dig up frozen potatoes to eat. Clearly it must have been a difficult time. 

Sometime after the end of the war, Zayde was able to arrange passage for his family to New York. The reunited family settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts for a period of time before moving to Brooklyn, where they lived for many years. I don’t know much about my mother’s growing up in Brooklyn, but said she often helped Zayde in his profession of house painting. 

My father’s family has a somewhat similar history. His family came from Jaslo, now in southern Poland, but before WW I was in Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian empire. His family was in the lumber business. This was a large family, with my grandfather Nathan and grandmother Mary (my mother later indicated she didn’t get along with her.) Their children were Jack, Louie, Abraham, Max (my father, born in 1903), Regina, Sam, Charlotte and Lieba (not in age sequence). My father remembered singing an anthem to the Kaiser of Austria-Hungary, Franz Joseph, in school. There are similarities to the Katz family, in that one member, Louie, who immigrated to the US before World War 1 broke out in 1914, trapping the rest of the family in Jaslo. This was a major front in the war, with fighting between Russian forces against those of Austria-Hungary and Germany (the Central Powers). The Russians initially occupied Jaslo, which I suspect was not good news for the local Jews. While there was anti-semitism in the eastern European countries, it was marked in the Russian pale of settlement, and I suspect during the Russian occupation. My father didn’t say much about those years under the Russians. In 1915 an Austro-Hungarian and German offensive drove the Russians out of Jaslo, I think until the end of the war. After the end of the war, Jaslo was incorporated into Poland, one of the most southern cities in the newly reconstructed country. In 1920, the rest of the family migrated to the US to join Louie. They went from Trieste on the ship President Grant, arriving in New York, where they settled in Brooklyn.

I don’t know too much about their lives in Brooklyn after emigration, but there was development of retail businesses. My father had a female underwear store (bras, girdles etc.), which failed. He then joined with his brothers Sam and Louie to open a successful grocery store at Franklin Avenue and Union Street, near Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn in the 1930s. I remember this store (we lived in an apartment at 990 President Street, a block and a half from †he store). The store was a small precursor of today’s supermarkets. Shoppers could access canned and package foods from aisles, but dairy products and appetizers (smoked fish) were directly prepared for sale by someone (uncle Louie ran the dairy counter). Eventually there was a separation of the brothers in business. My father, Max, remained in the store. Brother Sam opened a similar store near Fordham Road in The Bronx. Louie also opened a smaller store in Brooklyn. Older brother Abe already had a grocery-appetizers store on Kings Road in Brooklyn. We remained in Brooklyn until my father and Uncle Max (my mother’s brother) decided to make a significant change and bought a poultry farm near Lakewood NJ in 1944. I was enthused about this and read the only book on poultry husbandry in the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Before that I recall we lived close to PS241 in Brooklyn, which I attended through fourth grade. The neighborhood was largely Jewish, and I remember walking about 10 blocks to attend Hebrew school in the afternoons. 

When I was eight-years-old, I read the entire junior edition of the encyclopedia. My parents were hard workers and they had to work to make money, but they weren’t interested in academics. I was. I was thankful for my parents’ hard work because we were one of the only families with the entire set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica (Junior.)

The move to the farm in Howell Township (near Lakewood) put us in a very different environment. For some reason there was a migration of Jews who purchased poultry farms in central New Jersey, producing eggs for the New York market. This was an area that had a long standing local indigenous population, and there were a few anti-Semitic incidents I experienced, but given the migration of Jews, relatively few. My sister Marcia and I had a long school bus ride to go to Howell Township school, which I attended for grades 5 and 6. I recall getting into an argument in which a schoolmate challenged my religion. (He was a shmuck—perhaps called Martin. He was white and tall and not one of my pals.) In contrast to Brooklyn, friends were far apart in Howell, and I remember walking to Murray Wolf’s house, about a mile away. I enjoyed working with the chickens, but I’m sure I wasn’t as much help as my father wanted. My grandparents Bubby and Zayde Katz sometimes visited the farm. I remember working with Bubby to set up a vegetable garden, and Zayde walking 3 miles to go to shul in Lakewood on Saturday. 

My father and Uncle Max decided to sell the farm after about two years. They opened a luncheonette in Brooklyn, in a store at the street level of Bubby and Zayde’s house (Uncle Max eventually left the partnership and my father ran the store). In 1946 -47, while my mother, sister and I lived in an apartment in Lakewood for a year (my father came most weekends), I attended grade 7 and Marcia attended Clifton Avenue school, where she later taught. I prepared for my bar mitzvah, which was held in Bubby and Zayde’s synagogue in Brooklyn. We moved back to Brooklyn, reuniting the family in 1947. We lived in a two floor apartment in a brownstone house on Willoughby Avenue, about 3 blocks from my father’s luncheonette. The latter was quite successful, since it was across the street from a large commercial laundry, and many workers came for sandwiches and soda during their lunch hour. I worked in the store during the rush hour in the summer and sometimes after school, and my father had me wash and wax the floor on Sundays when it was closed. I attended Mark Hopkins junior high, which was about 10 blocks (I walked) from where we lived, for the eighth and ninth grades. The area, and my class, was mixed with Black, Hispanic, Italian, Chinese and Jewish students. We got along pretty well, but the school classes were stratified from “R” and then 1 through 8. I was in the 1 class, so the academic level was relatively high. During the ninth grade I took and passed the competitive examination, which was a city-wide exam. It was between three schools and the top students were selected to go to Stuyvesant high school, one of New York’s elite schools. I was one of them. I took the subway to attend, beginning 10th grade. I felt intimidated (academically) because everyone was so smart there. But we soon moved back to an another poultry farm in Howell NJ, where I attended Lakewood high school (the “Piners”). I made good friends there, some of which I kept contact with for some years past high school. These included Jerry Silverstein, and Herby Pardes and Howie Grossman whom I roomed with in our first year of college. I enjoyed living and working (not always to the level my father expected) on the farm and had an interest in chicken farming. I made some statements about doing this as a career. This rightly alarmed my parents. They didn’t want me to be a chicken farmer because it wasn’t a prestigious career and they had higher hopes for me. (They wanted me to be a doctor.) So they got one of our chicken feed salesman to speak to me. (Mr. Sobel) He was the first to mention veterinary medicine as a career, and I eventually took his advice. 

I enjoyed being in Lakewood High School. Since we lived about 7 miles from town, there was a long school bus ride to get to school. For a small high school (about 140 in the graduating class), it was intellectually challenging, but I was a B student. I unsuccessfully tried out for the basketball team, not unexpected given my athletic ability. I was on the track team since nobody was cut from it. I graduated, and after an ill-fated attempt to enter the naval ROTC at Cornell University, I went to Rutgers (the state university of New Jersey) as a poultry science major, entering in 1952.

I found I was able to be more successful academically in college than in high school. The first year courses for a poultry science major were similar to that of other biological science majors, and included chemistry, biology, English etc. Except for a course in the College of Agriculture (located on the other side of New Brunswick from the main Rutgers campus), the remainder of the first year curriculum matched that of pre-medicine majors. At that time all male students in a state college had to participate in the ROTC (reserve officers training course) during the first two years of college. I knew I would be subject to the draft after college, so my participation was necessary if I were to join the armed forces as an officer. I took Air Force ROTC, and found the initial course in political geography interesting. I did well in my course work at Rutgers, except for mathematics. In my first semester I got all A’s except for D in college algebra (which was well deserved). I was interested in athletics and tried out for the freshman soccer team. Although I was pretty bad, I was kept on the team as a “scrub”, and only got into one game. As noted above, I roomed with Howie Grossman and Herby Pardes, friends from high school, the first year and with Howie the second, I did well in the subsequent courses, and pledged the Tau Delta Phi fraternity in the second semester of my freshman year. 

I applied to and was accepted to the veterinary school at the University of Pennsylvania (in Philadelphia) as an alternate in 1954. Luckily, I got in. I fit in pretty well at Penn, doing well (in the top 1/3 of the class), and enjoyed the classes. The approach to student happiness differed in those days from what it is today. The veterinary school had a policy that students needed to maintain a C average or better to be promoted. Failure to do this or to pass every course would lead to having a student repeat the entire year or to be expelled from the school. This led to me being concerned with achieving promotion, such that I was overly nervous before any examination. I sometimes couldn’t sleep the night before an examination without taking phenobarbital. Despite this anxiety, I did pretty well academically at Penn. As graduation approached I was able to get a job with a small animal practitioner in Asbury Park, near my home in Lakewood. I still had the military draft to deal with, and was told by my draft board the, “they had been waiting for me.” Due to impending military service commitment, I lost the job in Asbury Park, but was lucky enough to get a summer 1958 position in the clinic of the Animal Medical Center, a large humane society hospital in New York City. In those years the Army and Air Force offered commissions as first lieutenant to graduating veterinarians (physicians went in as captains). I applied and was granted such a commission from the Air Force, which I entered in October 1958.

My military service was interesting, and opened up a new view of veterinary medicine, one focused on public health. On entering the Air Force I had 8 weeks of training at Gunter Air Force base in Montgomery, Alabama. The first 4 weeks were with other newly commissioned medical workers (nurses, physicians, dentists, optometrists, veterinarians, etc.) and involved learning the culture and practices of military life. The last 4 weeks were spent with other entering veterinarians, learning the basis of how we fit into health system of the Air Force. Given we were all recent graduates from veterinary school, this was different from our prior experience, with a strong focus on our role in public health in the military. 

After graduating from the Gunter program I was assigned to the base veterinarian’s office at Ramstein Air Force base in Kaiserslauten Germany. This was a time when the Cold War was at its height, with Germany divided into East and West sections, the East part of the Communist block of eastern European countries and the Soviet Union, and the West being part of the western nations opposing them (NATO). These included West Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy. Belgium, Netherlands, Norway and Greece. There were large Soviet forces in the eastern bloc, and a threat of active war permeated military thinking. Fortunately not much happened during my 1958-1960 tour in Germany. 

Ramstein was a large base, and I served under two experienced military veterinarians (captains). My stay there was brief, after a few weeks I was ordered to be the base veterinarian at Spangdahlem Air force base in the Eifel part of Germany, a largely rustic section of Germany north of the Moselle River, between Trier and Koblenz. Here I was replacing a more experienced veterinary officer who had to leave for medical reasons. This was an example of how the military dealt with assignments. Although I was inexperienced, I had the right military occupation specialty (veterinary officer, general) and had been trained. Thus it was assumed I would do the job. Fortunately I had several non-commissioned officers under my command that knew the regulations and how to adapt to these. This was very helpful, and I learned to lean upon them. The job of base veterinarian largely dealt with environmental issues affecting military readiness, such as food service sanitation, noise, radiation effects, insect and rodent control and others (I can’t recall). I also provided medical care for about 30 sentry dogs and ran a part time clinic for pets of military personnel. For these I was assigned to the 10th Tactical Hospital on the base. The 18 months I spent in Europe provided many opportunities to travel, and I visited Germany, France, Spain (during Franco’s regime), Netherlands, Belgium, England and Denmark. I also acted as a courier carrying classified material on one flight from West Germany to West Berlin. As my tour came to an end, I was promoted to Captain, and considered making a career of the military. But I wanted to study pathology. I had a great pathology teacher, John (Jack) McPhraff, and I was inspired by him. The military had an excellent program in the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda, MD. I was told I would need to serve a three-year tour a base veterinarian in the United States before I could apply to the AFIP. I didn’t want to wait that long, and left active duty in October 1958.

I was offered and accepted the Winley Fellowship in Comparative Pathology through my earlier contacts at the Animal Medical Center early in 1961. The funds for this were donated by a couple from New York. It was not well organized at the start, with some loose arrangement for me to study human autopsy pathology at the Bronx (New York) Veterans Administration Hospital, where animal Medical Center administrators had contacts. The arrangement was for me to perform human autopsies under supervision of an MD pathologist for most of the week, and to go downtown to the Animal Medical Center two afternoons a week to perform animal necropsies. The Animal Medical Center had a well-known clinical pathologist as head of the pathology program, but he soon left after an administrative battle, and I was left on my own when I needed some guidance for veterinarians. 

I met Carol at the VA, as she was a secretary in the surgery department, and we started dating. I got an apartment in the Bronx, near where she was living with her parents (on Decatur Avenue). I stayed at the VA/AMC until mid 1962, and performed over 80 human autopsies in that time. Since an intent of the Winley Fellowship was to provide training in veterinary as well as human pathology, I returned to the veterinary school at the University of Pennsylvania to work as an assistant instructor in the pathology department, under Dr. John (Jack) McGrath, a wonderful man. I was put on the necropsy rotation, and performed many such examinations, along with teaching subject to the fourth year veterinary students. I loved being at Penn, but funding ran out after two years and I had to leave. These years were eventful, in that I married Carol in 1963. There was much opposition to this from my parents, especially my mother, since Carol wasn’t Jewish. It took a long time for her to come around and be of accepting of the marriage, which has now lasted for 61 years (as of now—2024). We lived in an apartment in west Philadelphia near the university. I also passed the board examination of the American College of Veterinary Pathologists in 1963, which was a difficult, but major accomplishment. 

We left Philadelphia in 1964 and went to Storrs Connecticut, where I was a replacement for a poultry pathologist who was on a sabbatical leave. I did the poultry pathology for a year and spent the following year working on a masters degree, studying bacterial endocarditis in chickens. In 1966 I accepted a position in the neuropathology at the Yale Medical School in New Haven CT. This was a relatively unique approach to training in neuropathology. I would participate in the autopsy examination of human brains, working with several MD neuropathologists. One of these was Gil Solitare, with who I maintained a friendship even after leaving New Haven. In addition to studying human neuropathology, I did some research in experimental neuropathology at Yale. The major one was a collaboration with the Yale arbovirus unit, resulting in publication of a paper on California virus encephalitis. The first 3 years at Yale were funded by a fellowship from the National Institutes of Health, and for the next 2 years by Yale. My daughter Susan was born in 1968, while we were in New Haven, which delighted both Carol and me. We bought our first house in Hamden, a New Haven suburb. It was a little stressful, but turned out fine. We easily sold it when we made our next move. 

In 1971 I was offered a position as associate professor of pathology in the New Jersey Medical School in Newark NJ. Dr. Bob Hutter, a pathologist at Yale, was a newly installed department head in Newark, and it was largely through him that I was offered the job. Newark had been the site of severe race riots in the late 1960s, which left large parts of the city damaged. To help address this, the State of New Jersey moved its medical school from Jersey City. The school was housed in temporary buildings until the permanent building were completed some years in the future. I spent 10 years on the faculty at Newark, largely involved in teaching medical students and in collaboration with MD neuropathologist Lucy Cho, providing examining the brains providing this service to the human autopsy program. 

I now realize that these were years in which I should have developed my research program, but I was too involved in teaching and service work. This was a real misstep in my professional career, as I gave up prime research years with developing a research program. I decided to develop my knowledge of neuropathology by writing a paper on all the areas of neuropathology (infections, trauma, metabolic disease, toxic states etc.) except neoplasia. This worked out well, but as noted, it showed my failure in the development of a specific focused research program. We purchased a house in Short Hills NJ from where I could commute to the medical school. Our sons David (1971) and Adam (1975) were born in this period, and both Carol’s and my father died. We settled down to suburban lifestyle. Carol attended classes at Kean College to help complete her bachelors degree, something she completed in our subsequent move to Virginia.

I spent some 10 years at the medical school in Newark, during which the school slowly evolved to become a strong unit. This was an experiment to see if a scientifically based medical school could grow and thrive in what had been a section of the black ghetto in Newark. Admittedly there were some bumps in the road, but the state/federal funding and medical expertise eventually showed the benefits such an academic/medical thrust would have in benefitting the surrounding community. During my tenure in Newark the medical school completed and occupied a newly constructed modern facility on the campus. The main teaching hospital was and continued to be Martland Hospital across the street from the medical school.

(A story from Carol related to this time: Bernie was walking down the sidewalk when some mean guys came up and asked him what was in his briefcase. They might have wanted to mug him. It was very threatening. So he opened up the briefcase to show that it was filled with livers and other organs. Needless to say, they guys didn’t want it anymore.)

We stayed in New Jersey for about 10 years, when I had the opportunity to get back to veterinary pathology at the newly opening Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech in 1980. I had known a veterinarian, who was on the faculty and recommended me. I was at a stage of my career when I felt the need to return to veterinary pathology, and thought this was an opportunity to do this. Blacksburg Virginia was a marked departure from Short Hills NJ where we were living, and Virginia Tech, a large state university in a semi-rural part of southwest Virginia was also quite different from the New Jersey Medical School, but Carol was willing to give it a go. After some hesitancy, we sold our house in Short Hills and moved to a beautiful one overlooking a golf course about seven miles outside of Blacksburg VA. Carol had a difficult period of adjustment, as she had many friends in New Jersey, and lived near her mother’s place in Hartsdale NY, but eventually she came to accept and like Blacksburg. We made many friends through the Blacksburg Jewish Community Center. I had some difficulties in adjusting to the new job, since I had been away from active veterinary pathology for almost 15 years (at Yale and New Jersey Medical School). I got the job in Virginia after their first choice candidate turned it down. The College was organized in an unusual fashion, with a very strong dean and weak departments. As a new school, there were many administrative tasks for a small faculty. As faculty senator of the college, I had some conflict with the dean, who eventually stepped down (not because of me). 

(A story from Maura & Carol & Bernie: Bernie hated a particular guy. His name was Dick Talbot, and they were mortal enemies. He had been a successful dean at several schools, and they brought him to Newark. He was a devious guy. He wanted every professor at the school to teach as much as possible and even suggested that they might have to teach classes outside of their fields. Bernie wasn’t interested in that. Dick—appropriately named—was very friendly when Bernie first came to Newark but then later he wasn’t nice. For example, he called Bernie the pimple on the ass of progress. Lol, so not nice. But he died in a plane crash so . . .Then suddenly everybody loved him.) 

It took me a while to retrieve my veterinary pathology skills, but eventually this worked out. I was fortunate to work with Marion Ehrich and Sandy Hancock, two women who greatly aided our research program. It was largely through my work with them that our research program in neurotoxicology flourished. Marion was instrumental in getting our first large funding through the Environmental Protection Agency, to evaluate test systems for organophosphate toxicity. Although she largely wrote to grant, but put me as primary investigator, so I got a lot of credit. We hired Sandy on the grant, but she did a good deal of the work. We developed a reputation for careful work and were later funded to investigate neurotoxicity of depleted uranium for the Department of Defense. After expiration of grant funding, we (mainly Sandy) developed a funded program providing electron microscopy to drug companies and contract research labs. These funds were less prestigious than those from the granting federal agencies, but the university cashed the checks just the same. We developed a well regarded neurotoxicity research program over the years in Blacksburg. The other parts of my job were teaching pathology to veterinary students and residents, and contributing to the necropsy and surgical pathology services.

It took a little time, but the family adapted to living in Blacksburg, an environment quite different from New Jersey. Carol matriculated to a teachers’ educational program at Hollins College in Roanoke. She met a good friend there, Maria Catron, a friendship that continues. After graduation she got a job teaching 4th and 5th grades at Margaret Beeks Elementary. Susan, who was 12 when we moved, had some difficulty in adjusting to school, but fortunately she got hooked up with the debate team at Blacksburg High School, and over the years became a talented debater, eventually a state champion. She was bat mitzvahed in the Blacksburg Jewish Community Center (BJCC), and attended Emory University in Atlanta. David was nine when we moved attended Margaret Beeks Elementary School. He made many friends through the BJCC and middle-high school. He participated in theater and debate in high school, and then attended Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York. Adam also did well in the Montgomery County school system academically, and he participated in debate and forensics. He ended up being a national champion. Both boys were bar mitzvahed at the BJCC. He attended Brown University and the College of William and Mary. 

B. Jortner 7/15/21

Second draft- 9/1/24