Jeffrey Neal Glazer

glazer

JEFFREY NEAL glazer

Jeffrey Neal Glazer died Tuesday June 20, 2023, of complications from a bone marrow transplant.

A native of Bethesda, MD and a resident of Delray Beach, FL, Jeffrey Glazer was a profile in courage to all who knew him. In 1998 he fell 40 feet on a construction job, when a manlift he was operating rolled over a curb and hurled him to the ground. Paralyzed from the neck down, with a C6/7 spinal cord injury, he vowed to walk again. A supremely talented athlete — who could play, and did, every sport— he made his body breath again. Four months later, having regained function throughout his body except for a right leg below the knee that stubbornly dragged behind him, he left National Rehab Hospital on a walker, to the applause and tears of the staff.

For the next 25 years, he walked, as he said, "a bit funny," but he walked, mostly on a cane, facing life with a smile, head-on. He had endured one of the most calamitous injuries that could befall anyone. But he was never bitter, never a victim. He saw life's glass not as half empty but half full.

In every way he was a child of Bethesda, appreciating the beauty and birds of the nearby Audubon Society HQ and the sports and history available in DC. Later, even amid snowstorms, he liked to say, "It's always sunny in Bethesda." He meant it was a happy place, a charmed childhood.

The Chevy Chase neighborhood where he grew up was teeming with Baby Boom energy, and the promise of daily pick-up games. He took pride in walking Margie Pearson to North Chevy Chase Elementary. Jeffrey was first lieutenant of the patrols, Margie was his second, and she watched as he raised the American flag each morning. He had a crush on her until she cut off her pigtails.

Ever ravenous for sport and food, he loved the Mighty Moes and hot fudge sundaes of the Hot Shoppes at the corner of Wisconsin and East-West Highway. As an adult, he was devoted to the Tastee Diner. He gravitated to the Shofnos family four doors down — Murray and Lillian and their three boys — Charles, Gary and Ricky. They treated him as a fourth son, and always offered food whenever he arrived. If there had been a BLT sandwich eating competition back then, they all agree he would have won, often eating 7 or 8 in one sitting. As Ricky recalled, "He could have eaten more but we ran out of bacon." They were family.

He triumphed in basketball, challenging players at the nearby courts in Candy Cane City — he later claimed that the NBA stole his "Famous Glazer Fade-away Jump Shot" — and he excelled in the swimming pool. He looked like the captain of the football team, good hair and chiseled, but he never acted like it, ever a team player, sometimes to the detriment of his own record. As childhood friend Mike Tebeleff recalled, "he was a pure soul," who loved sports as played by the rules — everyone offered a chance, no one left on the bench. And he loved cheering local teams.

He made lifelong friends at B-CC High School — Bob Goss and Steve Nichols, Danny Rice and Doug Chinn and Brian Raff. After graduation from Shepherd College, now University, in West Virginia, he tried on different career paths — teaching children with disabilities and trying out as a walk-on kicker for the Washington Redskins, making it to the Final Cut. So close.

Soon he settled on a career as an independent businessman. Moving to Annapolis, he began the city's first courier company. He landed accounts with FedEx and the Capitol Gazette, hospitals and blood banks who welcomed 24/7 service. In 1980, he purchased Right-Way Furnace Cleaning Co. in Hyattsville, more than doubling the number of residential customers, selling the company at a 700% profit. For the next ten years he ran MRI, Material Restoration Inc. in Gaithersburg, specializing in exterior restoration and cleaning of government-owned, historic and major commercial buildings.

He and Jeri Margolis married and produced two children, Bari and Jay, who were the joy of his life. When he fell 40 feet from the sky and was placed in a helicopter for evacuation to Baltimore Shock Trauma, paralyzed, he kept saying their names over and over, Bari/Jay, Bari/Jay. And after the marriage ended and Jeri moved to California, he got on his walker and visited them once a year.

After the accident a friend gave him a job at Zoom Courier in Bethesda, allowing him to work his way back to the familiar. After a few years he decided to resume his business and formed Jaarico, named for his children, winning contracts to clean housing units at military bases at Walter Reed, Ft. Dedrick and Navy Yards in Washington, DC. Ever loyal to his community, to his neighborhood.

He met Johanna Neuman one spring day in front of Black's Restaurant, leaning against a pole, on a break from Zoom. They had little in common — she was a journalist; he was a dirty-jobs construction guy. She wrote books, he rarely read any. They had their first date the next day, and after that, they were partners in love, vowing to empower each other, and to keep the gaga alive.

After they moved to Delray Beach, FL in 2014, he embraced his new town. Like Bethesda, Delray Beach became a place where shopkeepers knew him by name and his favorite coffee shop had his drink ready as soon as he walked in. He soon took a job at the Ball Park of the Palm Beaches, greeter at the media room for journalists and scouts watching spring games of the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros. Once John Henry, visiting owner of the Boston Red Sox, approached. His name was not on the list of comp meals so Jeffrey asked him for $10. The owner reached in his pocket for a $100 bill when an aide waved to Jeffrey not to charge him.

Last year on Halloween — his favorite holiday in his Delray Beach neighborhood, where the event is celebrated like a block party — he felt weak. The next day he was in his doctor's office and by November 4 he got the diagnosis: Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS), a form of leukemia.

Jeffrey was always a long-ball guy. So he opted for a bone marrow transplant — a dangerous, brutal procedure during which his own cells would be killed off by chemo, to be replaced by the bone marrow of a donor. Doctors at Sylvester Cancer Center in Miami found an excellent match — an anonymous 31-year-old donor who matched 10 of 10 blood markers. And he succeeded. His transplant numbers were phenomenal, the best on the transplant floor — hemoglobin above 9, white blood cells above 11. But the toxic anti-rejection medicines designed to keep his body from rejecting the donor's bone marrow riddled him with side effects that in the end felled him.

He came home for two days of treasured time – expressing his love for family, his home, his planned path to health. Friends who remembered his fierce competitive nature and his Herculean recovery from spinal cord injury still figured he would beat the odds. "Don't give up on him," said Leonard Mullar. "He fooled us once before." This time, he was overwhelmed by medicine's poisons.

Taking inspiration from sports, Jeffrey drew many life lessons. He once told his son Jay that he preferred college to professional football, because in college they played for the name on the front of the jersey and in professional sports they played for the name on the back. He said sports taught him never to celebrate on the five-yard line, and to never give up, because even a team down at halftime by 76-0 could still win. He led one such comeback himself. When the Washington Nationals upset the mighty LA Dodgers to advance in the 2019 World Series, he was ecstatic.

In life as in sports, he had a strong moral compass about right and wrong. He was a gentleman, tolerant and kind, with a face that delighted children. But if you crossed his code of life, if you swore or acted out violently, he would turn his back and walk away.

Jeffrey is pre-deceased by his parents and his brother Paul. He is survived by his partner of 20 years, Johanna Neuman, his children and their spouses — Bari Leigh and Alex Sinoyannis, and Mirieli and Jay Glazer — his grandchildren — George and Kodi Sinoyannis — his sister Shirley Glazer and his aunt Ruthie and Uncle Rodger Sedjo, his nephew Cory Glazer and niece Niki Glazer, and his in-laws, Hildie and Bill Lyddan, their four children and six grandchildren.

A celebration of Jeffrey Glazer's life will be held in the DC area later this summer.