Nicknames captured his intensity and very good will. To a fellow health practitioner, he was “the Last Offended Man” to a longtime affected person, he was “the Guardian Angel of Avenue D” and to the cartoonist Stan Mack, who depicted Dr. Kramer a number of periods in Genuine Daily life Funnies, his weekly comedian column for The Village Voice, he was “Dr. Quixote.”
Joseph Isaac Kramer was born on Dec. 7, 1924. His parents, Selig and Frieda (Reiner) Kramer, ran Kramer’s Bake Store in Williamsburg. Joe would pitch in as a cashier — resentfully. Sent out to operate the occasional errand, he took breaks to do what he really required — enjoy stickball.
He earned a diploma at Boys Superior Faculty in Brooklyn, graduated with a Bachelor of Science diploma in 1949 from the College of Kentucky, then remaining for Europe to find an cost-effective professional medical faculty that would take Jews. He graduated from the University of Mainz, in Germany, all-around 1960. In 1963, he married Joan Glassman shortly right after they had been released by good friends.
Dr. Kramer’s Reduce East Side follow lacked a nurse, leaving him to dedicate several hours every working day, and each and every weekend, to filling out varieties. In one occasion, he asked for $19 from Medicaid just after shelling out 10 several hours helping a suicidal young affected individual and acquired only $11. Regularly enraged by what he observed as the stinginess and inaccessibility of the American medical process, he created critical hypertension.
He give up the practice in 1996, occasioning a ultimate wave of awareness from the information media. “It wasn’t the rise of AIDS, the unfold of TB, the resurgence of measles,” The Involved Push wrote in describing his departure. “It was not his 71 a long time, and it was not the dollars. It was the paperwork.”
In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife a son, Adam and two grandchildren.
Just about every August, Dr. Kramer attended a reunion of Reduce East Aspect outdated-timers at East River Park. In a phone job interview, Tamara Smith, a affected individual of his when she was a very little lady, recalled hundreds of folks swarming all-around Dr. Kramer as he entered the park for 1 such collecting — confirmation of his legacy as a “country doctor” who experienced treated generations of households.
“He could not even get off the ramp to get into the park,” Ms. Smith said. “He was every single youngster in the ’hood’s health practitioner. I really don’t know how he managed that, but he observed each a person of us.”
