Dentistry

Dr. Royal T. Popper, 88, formerly of Center City, an orthodontist, sculptor, and arts patron, died of complications from hip surgery Sunday, Feb. 26, at Ann's Choice, a retirement community in Warminster. For 35 years, Dr. Popper maintained an orthodontics office in Olney. He had a busy practice straightening the teeth of students at nearby Central and Girls High Schools, said a son, Howard. For several years, Dr. Popper also had an office in Delaware County and taught anatomy at the Temple University School of Dentistry.

Globus Medical Inc. , a privately held maker of spinal implants in Audubon, Montgomery County, has appointed Daniel T. Lemaitre to its board. He is president and chief executive officer of White Pine Medical, a venture-backed medical-device start-up company. Outward Bound Philadelphia, a nonprofit educational organization that provides youth programs and raises scholarship funds to enroll urban Philadelphia students in leadership-building courses, has named Richard Baron to its board.

Norman Lasker, 84, of King of Prussia, a former professor at Thomas Jefferson University who developed a dialysis machine that could be used at home, died of heart failure Tuesday, April 19, under hospice care at Bethesda Memorial Hospital in Boynton Beach, Fla., where he had a winter home. Dr. Lasker joined the Jefferson Medical College staff in 1969 as an associate professor and director of the dialysis unit. In 1970, he told The Inquirer that advances were being made to treat kidney patients with dialysis outside the hospital.

Martin N. Kravitt, 89, of Cherry Hill, a longtime dentist and founding partner of Collingswood Dental Associates, died at his home Tuesday, Nov. 30, after several strokes. Dr. Kravitt opened his Collingswood practice in the late 1950s after a two-year Army tour. By the early 1970s, it had grown so large that he added two more dentists - Roger Sheinkin and Ronald Feldberg - and Collingswood Dental Associates was created. Dr. Kravitt loved his work. He would come home and talk enthusiastically about how he had solved a particular dental problem, his family said.

BOB GALLAGHER was a dentist with a difference. Long before it became common dental practice, he emphasized prevention and good nutrition for his patients and was among the first to have hygienists on his staff. He also practiced restorative dentistry when it was not often done, and he believed in keeping himself educated on the latest developments in the field. Dr. Robert F. Gallagher, who practiced dentistry in Chestnut Hill for 60 years and was an Army Air Corps veteran of World War II, during which he flew supply planes over the "hump" in the China-Burma-India theater, died Nov. 17 of heart failure.

While Sue Compton was practicing her recipe for the Pillsbury Bake-Off contest, she tried to "vary the victims" by baking for her son, his friends, her coworkers, and her retired mother's social groups - the bridge club, the domino club, the Red Hat Society. Now they all can say they sampled a million-dollar tart. Compton, 56, a mortgage-loan processor and amateur cookie baker from Burlington County, was named the $1 million grand-prize winner of the 44th Pillsbury Bake-Off Wednesday.

Gary P. Kaplan, 68, of Cherry Hill, a longtime South Jersey dentist who became an advocate for organ donations after receiving a kidney transplant, died Sunday, April 4, of congestive heart failure at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden. Following a family tradition - his father and aunt were dentists - Dr. Kaplan started his own practice after a short stint in the Army and a residency at Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia. In 1972, he opened the doors to his Blackwood office, which he shared with another dentist for several years.

Harry Chesnick, 72, a Cherry Hill dentist known for singing to patients while he drilled, pulled, or fixed their teeth, died Sunday of leukemia and cardiac complications at Virtua-Marlton. In 1963, Dr. Chesnick, a Philadelphia native, was looking for a spacious home in South Jersey to start a family with his wife, Marilyn - one that could also accommodate a dental office. The couple found a house in the newly developed Woodcrest section of Cherry Hill. Dr. Chesnick liked the idea of having an office in a new area of town, his son Andrew said.

Manuel M. Album, 89, formerly of Jenkintown, a dentist who was a pioneer in the care of children and the handicapped, died Saturday of a blood disorder at Harborage Nursing Home in North Bergen, N.J. In the early 1950s, Dr. Album became chief of dental services at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and established the first postgraduate dental program in the United States to train students to care for the disabled. He received several research grants to study types of anesthesia for dental patients with cerebral palsy and other physical disabilities.

Even before America entered World War II, Julius Eingorn enlisted in the Army, doing so as soon as possible after graduating from Temple University School of Dentistry in 1941. And in April 1945, Maj. Eingorn was among the first wave of troops to liberate a Nazi concentration camp near the town of Ohrdruf. For years, he shared that experience with groups of schoolchildren who might have been unfamiliar with the atrocities of Nazi Germany. In the late 1990s, said his daughter-in-law, Patricia Eingorn, he was interviewed for two days at his home by Steven Spielberg's Shoah Visual History Foundation as part of its gathering of thousands of interviews about the Holocaust.