HOWARD GOLDSTEIN , M.D., Class of 1958

Submitted by Phyllis Goldstein March 4, 2008

Howard always maintained that he found doctoring boring, but he loved his patients, and they loved him.   I wish he could have been to his own memorial and seen how many of his patients and friends came.  

Every year he would tell me he was going to retire, but when the time came, he always changed his mind.  Four years ago he said it once too often, because I believed him.  I mentioned his forthcoming retirement to a doctor friend I ran with on Saturdays, and this doctor must have passed the word around to his friends, because the hospital threw Howard a surprise retirement party.  Now, he had to retire. 

I had no idea what he was going to do with his free time, but he knew.  He was going to write, and he was going to write historical fiction for junior high school students.  History was Howard's first love.  Our son became a junior high school history teacher and would read Howard's stories to his class.  Howard never had them published; he enjoyed reading them to his grandchildren and they enjoyed listening, because they were characters in the stories, transported by a time machine to an important date in the past.  I can't go into Howard's stories at length, but our kids were always a help to Washington when he crossed the Delaware, to Michael Angelo when he painted the Sistine Chapel, and to other famous historical figures.  Howard loved doing the research.  He had always been an avid reader, particularly of history, and once he had bought a computer, he couldn't be stopped.  The first thing he did was design a program showing the North battling the South during the civil war.  He had the southern soldiers and the northern soldiers fighting each other, and on the side he would tell the story of whatever battle he was depicting.

Howard had never played soccer, but when AYSO (American Youth Soccer Organization) came to Beverly Hills and needed coaches, Howard volunteered and went to the library, took out every book on soccer and learned the game.    The players on his first team were only five years old, but they loved the game and their coach, who always took them out for ice cream afterwards.  Howard remained a coach until his own son went to high school, played on the high school team and also coached AYSO.  His daughter played on a girls team, and I was a team mother and brought juice at half time.

I will stop here in my bragging about this man, but I want everyone to know that besides becoming Associate Chief of Gastroenterology at Wadsworth Hospital immediately after his residency, he loved his family and they loved him.