2014

Dr. Stanley Feld

Stanley Feld grew up in an urban Bronx neighborhood during World War Two, remembering wartime details such as car headlights painted black and gasoline rationing. His father manufactured women's clothing, and his mother stayed home until the children were older, later working many years in the record room at Fordham Hospital. His maternal grandparents came from Russia, likely from the Kiev area, in the early 1900s, and his father's family had come from Germany in the 1890s, with his paternal grandfather working as a furrier in New York. As a young child, a doctor discovered that Stanley, a natural lefty forced to write right-handed, had simply been doing mirror writing. He spent summers playing baseball and riding the subway to Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds, even meeting players through the Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund.

Feld attended William Howard Taft High School, where he excelled, and then Columbia College alongside his close friend Albie Padua, who became a chemistry professor. Encouraged by his father and inspired early by a childhood doctor named Schultz, he pursued medicine. Under the Berry plan he expected a deferment, but when Vietnam escalated he was drafted into the Air Force and stationed at Blytheville, Arkansas. There, guided by a chief master sergeant named Norris, he learned to be a soldier, and he and his pregnant wife Cecilia were warmly welcomed into the small but vibrant Jewish community, whose large temple served families spread across a sixty-mile radius.

After completing training at Long Island Jewish Hospital and a fellowship at Massachusetts General in Boston, Feld and Cecilia, whom he met on a blind date, chose Dallas for its demographics. Advised by a colleague to locate in Preston Center rather than at Presbyterian, he opened his practice in the Douglas Plaza building in 1970, the first clinical endocrinology practice in Dallas outside a medical school. His practice grew to include several other physicians, and he became active nationally in a new organization for clinical endocrinologists, eventually serving as president and launching the first Thyroid Awareness Month campaigns. He and Cecilia have two children, including venture capitalist Bradley, and a grandchild. He reflects that living history, from the Kennedy assassination to the moon landing to 9/11, taught him that life comes down to inches.

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