News

By Emily J. Minor

    GULF STREAM — As a young doctor, Gerald Fisk Dederick Jr. worked long hours — seeing patients in the office, making hospital rounds at least twice a day and eventually heading up the surgical department at a leading hospital in New Jersey.
    “Honestly, he was hardly ever home,” says his widow, Mary Elizabeth, to whom he’d been married for 73 years. “That’s how it was in those days.”
    And still, despite his thriving career and his off-duty love for playing sports — everything from tennis to handball to golf — the man called “Doc” by patients, friends, even family, was revered as a kind, gentle soul who was gracious with his time, said his wife. “He was just so friendly,” his wife said. “It’s hard to put into words.”
    Doc Dederick had been in failing health in recent months and died June 17. He was 97, and had lived in Gulf Stream with his wife, nicknamed “Mep,” since he retired from medicine in 1989.
    As a boy, Dr. Dederick attended school in Oradell, N.J., a small town in Bergen County that even today has fewer than 8,000 residents. Dr. Dederick was a natural athlete and after attending Roanoke College was later inducted into both the high school and college Athletic Halls of Fame, said his family.
    It was at a 1937 college dance that a young Mrs. Dederick met her husband-to-be. She was in high school; he was in college. She says now she wasn’t all that taken with him at first. “It took me six months to give him a date,” she said.
    They were married June 14, 1941.
    They were the war years, and after Dr. Dederick graduated from the Medical School of Virginia in 1942, he enlisted in the Medical Corps of the U.S. Navy. His wife began having children, eventually two girls and a boy, and the family followed their beloved patriarch as he served on the USS Dover and at several naval hospitals.
Upon his discharge, Dr. Dederick began a four-year surgical fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Eventually, he became director of surgery at Pascack Valley Hospital in Westwood, N.J.
    And then came his love affair with golf, said his wife.
    While Dr. Dederick was great at almost anything that was physically competitive, it was golf that really stole his heart, she said.
    “We had next-door neighbors who were members of the Country Club of Florida and they asked us to come down and visit,” she said. “We loved it and joined.”
    It was a passion he enjoyed for a quarter of a century. Indeed, Dr. Dederick played the Par 3 course at St. Andrews about six months before his death, his wife said.
    A private funeral was held, but memorials can be made to the Country Club of Florida Scholarship Foundation, 22 Country Road, Village of Golf, FL 33436.
    Survivors include his wife; two daughters, Susan Dederick and Barbara Cherry, both from Connecticut; one son, Gerald F. Dederick III, from Louisiana; four grandchildren and two great-grand children — all of whom called him “Doc.”