Friday, August 8, 2014

Ira Greifer

Here is a photo taken in the early part of the summer of 1976, at an official celebration of the then-year-old dialysis unit at Frost Valley. (The program started in '75, the summer earlier, but this was, as I recall, a belated celebration/gathering/"opening.")

Halbe Brown, Eve Gottscho and Ira Greifer were the three intense geniuses who created this first-of-a-kind program, whereby kids on hemodialysis (a very restrictive treatment) could attend a camp with healthy children and be treated like everyone else. The project was miraculous.

Ira Greifer is being inducted into the Frost Valley Hall of Fame a week from tomorrow (August 16), so I will have more to say about Ira later. Meantime, this photo. Ira is the guy looking at the camera, wearing the red (red, white and blue, actually) staff shirt. Others gathered around included members of the Gottscho Kidney Foundation board, some of the campers, and some of the counselors who had dialysis kids in their cabins.