April 22, 2015

Dr. Burt Einspruch

Burt Einspruch was born in 1935 in New York City and grew up in the Bronx, in a neighborhood he described as largely Jewish and peaceful, living near a park and across from the strict, immigrant-filled public school PS 61. His father, born in what he called Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, came from a family that had run a bakery for generations. The elder Einspruch served in the Austrian army in World War One, where he was stationed at Auschwitz as a railroad junction, and later served in the anti-Semitic Polish army during the Russo-Polish war. Emigrating to the United States, he worked as a baker and became a labor organizer, drawing on his fluency in Polish, Yiddish, German, and other languages. Burt's mother arrived in 1929, around the time of the stock market crash.

When Burt was eleven, his family moved to Dallas, following relatives who had prospered there and seeking relief from the union battles of the era. His brother had come earlier to start Highland Park High School. Burt found the transition easy and quickly discovered he was academically ahead of his classmates. He recalled an idyllic childhood of play, radio, and occasional Yankees games in New York, and he graduated from Highland Park at sixteen. He went on to Southern Methodist University, graduating with honors and departmental distinction in comparative literature, and married Barbara in October 1960. He then attended UT Southwestern Medical School, which he remembered as an unhappy period marked by harassment from bitter professors.

Commissioned in 1956, Einspruch served in the Navy Reserve and later on active duty during the Vietnam era, teaching and building training programs rather than serving overseas. Drawn to the study of the brain, he pursued psychiatry, doing research as a young medical student under William Kemp Clark, studying neurology in England, and working with Anna Freud, with support from his chairman Bob Stubblefield. He witnessed major changes in psychiatry, including safer tranquilizers that replaced lobotomies and insulin therapy. Raised in a family more devoted to the labor movement than religious ceremony, he later became active in Dallas Jewish life and spent some twenty-five years reviving and leading the Holocaust program at UT Dallas, determined to preserve that history. He and Barbara have three children and six grandchildren.

He and Barbara have three children and six grandchildren, and he offered advice to raise people with a light hand, to lead rather than manage, to prize stamina and fitness, and always to be kind.

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