Roswell Eldridge, M.D.

Roswell Eldridge

— Photo from Ann Malone
Roswell Eldridge at home with a goat from Kuhar Family Farm that stopped by.

RENSSELAERVILLE — Roswell Eldridge, M.D., was a Renaissance man who left deep impressions both in and beyond the Hilltowns. His knowledge drew from the fields of art, medicine, nature, automobiles, and more. Dr. Eldridge died peacefully at his home on Thursday, June 3, 2021, five days before his 53rd wedding anniversary. He was 87. 

Dr. Eldridge was born on New Year’s Day 1934, the son of Lewis Angevine Jr. and Ruth Williamson Eldridge. His early childhood was spent on a vast estate in Great Neck, Long Island, before his parents decided that the “urban estate life wasn’t for them,” Dr. Eldridge’s daughter, Ann Eldridge Malone, said, and the family relocated to Conkling Farm, in Rensselaerville. Dr. Eldridge was a student at the Greenville Central School District, where he played baseball, one of his early passions. 

He went on to study medicine at Albany Medical School, and became a neurogeneticist for the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke, part of the National Institutes of Health system.

“He specialized in Tay-Sachs disease, dystonia, neurofibromatosis, Parkinson’s, and he collaborated very closely with research clinicians,” Ms. Malone said, “[and] other neurogeneticists in Scandinavia because Denmark had the world’s oldest twin registry. That allowed a research database to follow individuals and better understand the genetic component of a disorder.”

“One thing he strongly encouraged,” Dr. Eldridge’s second wife, Juanita Eldridge, said, “was the formation of groups of like individuals including the family. They would get information, support, and a better understanding for the progression of the disorder by talking to those who had the experiences.”

Dr. Eldridge also made significant strides in medical research.

In 1983, he co-authored a study published in The Lancet proposing that a rare variation of epilepsy known as Baltic myoclonus epilepsy was aggravated by the standard anticonvulsant drug given to epileptic patients.

And in 1980, Dr. Eldridge co-authored a study that distinguished two closely related forms of neurofibromatosis. The year before, he had helped establish the first neurofibromatosis support group in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States.

Having a talent for clinical work, Dr. Eldridge eventually retrained as a general practitioner and ran the Westerlo clinic once managed by the similarly esteemed Dr. Anna Perkins, Ms. Malone said. 

“Sometimes in the winter, when there were bad snow storms, he would cross-country ski to do home visits to people who, maybe, were newly diagnosed with diabetes and needed assistance in learning how to manage their illness,” Ms. Malone said, “or were post-discharge from the hospital after surgery.” 

 

— Photo from Ann Malone
Roswell Eldridge and his wife, Juanita, with their grandchild, Sophia Eldridge.


 

— Photo from Ann Malone
Roswell Eldridge and his grandson, Ryan, stands in front of the Rensselaerville home Dr. Eldridge grew up in. He's holding his Cavalier King Charles dog, Ember Louise, and is joined by his cat, TurnUp, and his dog Frannie.


 

Mrs. Eldridge said that her late husband was “one of the best diagnosticians I have ever met. Several times he was able to diagnose a person’s malady by hearing the symptoms without seeing the patient, when other doctors had failed or, in a couple of cases, the patient had been misdiagnosed.”

But Dr. Eldridge’s gifts ran well beyond the realm of medicine.

After retiring from healthcare, Dr. Eldridge farmed garlic, chatting up a network of farmers to learn new breeding methods and selling his yield to farmers’ markets and the Medusa General Store, when it was in operation. 

“He introduced me to life outside the walls of the boarding school where I was reared,” Mrs. Eldridge said. “I knew nothing of the classics, books, music, religion. He introduced me to all of that plus mushrooms, escargot, foods of different countries. Because of him, I now tell people I travel on my stomach. I go for the culture but also for the food. I was extremely shy; he brought me out of my shell. I didn’t come willingly. He was a patient man.”

Mrs. Eldridge explained that the two met while Dr. Eldridge was in residency following his graduation from medical school. At the time, Mrs. Eldridge was a diagnostic chemist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Maryland, and Mr. Eldridge had come into her lab with specimens for testing — and then found various excuses to return, Mrs. Eldridge said.

“He asked me out about two weeks later, but when he came to pick me up, I cancelled the date,” she said. “He was driving a station wagon. In my naive, unsophisticated mind, only door-to-door salesmen and married men drove station wagons. I later learned he was separated with three children. 

“On our first date, we went out for dinner,” Mrs. Eldridge continued. “He ordered one lobster. He gave me the meat. He ate the shell. I had grown up in a boarding school in the South. I knew nothing about fine dining or how to eat lobster, so I thought eating the shell was the right way to go.”

The two dated for three years before Dr. Eldridge proposed — in his way — on a road trip with his daughters from his previous marriage to Mary Neely Eldridge, Ms. Malone’s mother.

“He asked me to get a map out of the glovebox,” Mrs. Eldridge recounted. “There was a small box inside. He never really asked me, he just said, ‘That box is yours.’ It was my engagement ring.”

 

 

— Photo from Ann Malone
Members of the Eldridge family playing Boggle at Edith and Bob Lansing's Bell's Hotel in Rensselaerville.


 

Together, the couple spent time bicycling across Maryland, and they enjoyed classical concerts, theater, books, travel, lectures, and tennis, Mrs. Eldridge said, in addition to bonding over their shared professional field. 

“He would make up games to help me expand my horizons,” Mrs. Eldridge said. “Like, make meals for a week that have no more than seven grams of fat per day. It’s not easy but it can be done. 

“He also introduced me to politics,” she said. “We would go to rallies and protests. After I moved to South Carolina for my job, we would listen to the WAMC morning podcast. Later during our daily phone call we would hash over the makeup of the panel and the topics discussed. He really liked [broadcasters] Joe Donahue and Alan Chartock.”

The Eldridges had two sons together — Roswell “RJ” Eldridge V and William Huyck Eldridge — bringing Dr. Eldridge’s total number of children to five.

“He loved to read to the boys when they were younger,” Mrs. Eldridge said. “He coached their soccer matches. He made their breakfast every weekday. They hated it. He also took each child on a trip. One to Germany, one to Israel, one to Denmark, one to England and France, and one down the Colorado River. 

“He was not really a hands-on dad,” she said, “but he was always there for them. RJ once said, ‘If I want something fixed like plumbing, a carburetor, et cetera, I’ll go to Mom. If I want a question answered, I’ll go to Dad.’”

 

 

— Photo from Ann Malone
Roswell Eldridge drives his 1940 Buick in a local parade in Sept. 1987.


 

Dr. Eldridge also imparted his love of cars to some of his children. Ms. Malone recalled a time when her father and a friend of his were driving along somewhere between Rensselaerville and Maryland and came across a “hulking forest-green Buick in a ditch,” which appeared to be from the 1930s.

“And they pull over and talk to the owner and buy it, and then they came back with a trailer hitch,” Ms. Malone said. “I think I was in the car. I might have even rode in the Buick for a little bit.”

Dr. Eldridge ultimately restored the vehicle and answered a casting call from producers of a movie about Franklin Delano Roosevelt for people with cars from that era, Ms. Malone said.

“My father got dressed up as a chauffeur with a little cap, his vest, and he drove his car [in the film],” she said.

In addition to the Buick, Dr. Eldridge had a mid-century turquoise Cadillac and some Mercedes convertibles, Ms. Malone said, among others. 

“My first car — he wanted his kids to be safe drivers and for us to be protected if we hit something — so I had either a 1964 or ’65 forest-green Chrysler New Yorker sedan,” Ms. Malone said, laughing. “In the streets of Boston. Imagine that.”

“It was sort of fun to have that B-52s song ‘Love Shack’ on, with the line ‘I got a new Chrysler, it’s as big as a whale, ready to set sail,’” she added. “I remember going to Cape Cod with some friends and the suspension wasn’t too good, and so we would go over rises in the road and the whole car — you feel like you’re on the swell of a boat. So we had that interest in vintage cars that he shared with us.”

His son, RJ, took to the hobby most firmly, learning how to fix “basically any engine,” Ms. Malone said.

But not all of Dr. Eldridge’s interests were so warmly received, at least as far as his children were concerned. “He did the best according to his abilities to expose us to and involve us in things he thought were important,” Ms. Malone said. But for his daughters, because they lived with their mother, “he had to condense it into weekends and summer vacations, so it was an intense time,” she said.

A fan of classical music, Dr. Eldridge was keen to bring his kids on board, but, as Ms. Malone intimated with some humor, “I think a lot — maybe all of us — have gone the other way on that.”

One of Dr. Eldridge’s strongest passions was that for nature, an all-but-inevitable development since his father was a naturalist and he was a scion of the Huyck family on his mother’s side, which lent its name and land to the Edmund Niles Huyck Preserve in Rensselaerville, which in turn contains a research center named after the Eldridge family for its contributions. 

Dr. Eldridge himself had facilitated the placement of a conservation easement over 218 acres of his own land. 

Established by the Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy for the purposes of creating a Helderberg Conservation Corridor, the easement prevents development on that land, which lies across from 300 acres of land that had already been conserved — the Conkling Farm property where Dr. Eldridge grew up.

“It’s a family tradition,” Dr. Eldridge told The Enterprise when the newspaper reported on the conservation agreement.

 

 

— Photo from Ann Malone
Roswell Eldridge at President Barack Obama's inauguration in 2008, wearing his signature "neck pants."


 

In the early 2000s, Dr. Eldridge — a strong admirer of the ornithologist and painter John James Audubon — sought out a documentarian and contributed funding to a film about the famed 19th-Century bird-watcher who had traveled North America to document all the continent’s avian species in vivid, hand-colored portraits, as well as in writing. 

Audubon’s resulting opus, “The Birds of America,” has become a rarity since its publication, with only 120 complete sets known to exist as of 2012. 

Dr. Eldridge was originally exposed to Audubon’s work through his father, who owned one of the full volumes, known as Octavos, which he had purchased as a boarding school student in Massachusetts from the Harvard University bookstore, along with a larger edition known as the Double Elephant Folio.

“They’re leather-bound, beautiful volumes,” Ms. Malone said. “And so my father grew up looking through them and hearing his dad talk about the importance of understanding nature and protecting the natural world. 

“So when my father had some time in his life for a new pursuit,” Ms. Malone continued, “he latched onto John James Audubon’s life and work and he had a massive amount of high-quality, digitized prints made of the Octavo artistic renderings because he was very disturbed to find out that most people that own these sets were … cannibalizing them, ripping the pages out, having dealers buy them to then only take the pages out and sell them as framed works of art to get a lot more money than by keeping the book intact.

“My father was disturbed by that in part because the writing that accompanied each artistic creation wasn’t acknowledged and appreciated and sold along with the framed piece,” Ms. Malone said.

Toward the end of his life, Dr. Eldridge, whose roots were deep into the Hilltown community, spent a lot of time driving around with Ms. Malone and one of her sons, regaling them with stories about “the history of the community and his mother’s life growing up and how hard things were for the farmers, trying to farm on hilly land,” Ms. Malone said.

Of Dr. Eldridge’s life in the Helderbergs, Ms. Malone said, “He was just immensely thankful for the community spirit and the community life.”

****

Roswell Eldridge, M.D. is survived by his wife, Juanita Eldridge; his daughter Cathy Eldridge Suter, and Cathy’s former husband, David Suter; his daughter Ann Eldridge Malone, and Ann’s husband, Michael; his son Roswell “RJ” Eldridge, and Roswell’s wife, Jennifer; his son William Huyck Eldridge, and William’s wife, Abbie; 11 grandchildren and a great-grandson; his former wife, Mary Neely Eldridge; his sister-in-law, Diane Eldridge; his nieces and nephews and their children; and many more relatives.

Dr. Eldridge’s parents; his brother Lewis Eldridge III; and his daughter, Laura Williamson Eldridge, died before him. 

A memorial service will take place Saturday,  Sept. 4, 2021, at 3 p.m. at the Rensselaerville Presbyterian Church, which will be followed immediately by a reception next door at Conkling Hall. 

Memorial contributions may be made to the Rensselaerville Public Library at rensselaervillelibrary.org or by mail to Post Office Box 188, Rensselaerville, NY 12147.

— Noah Zweifel

 

 

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