Obituary of Robert Keene Kanter

Dr. Robert Keene Kanter died as he lived, with dignity and grace, on March 29, 2016 after a heroic two-year adventure with pancreatic cancer. Bob was born in New York City on March 15, 1949, received his undergraduate degree from University of Pennsylvania in 1971, and graduated from University of Pennsylvania Medical School in 1976. He completed his pediatric residency at Upstate Medical Center under the esteemed mentorship of Dr. Frank Oski (who taught him many things but failed to teach him how to bet on the horses), including a one year tenure as Chief Resident. In 1980, Bob completed a fellowship in Pediatric Critical Care at Children’s Hospital National Medical Center in Washington, DC, where he met and shamelessly flirted with a beautiful nurse, thus initiating a historic love affair with Deborah, the torrid details of which are not fit for an obituary. At Dr. Oski’s request he returned to Syracuse to open the first pediatric intensive care unit in the region. Among his many accomplishments, he served as Division Director of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine at Upstate, Professor of Pediatrics at Upstate, Adjunct Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, and Vice Chair of the Emergency Medical Services for Children Advisory Committee in the NYS Department of Health. In 2014, Bob accepted with great pleasure a position as Professor of Pediatrics at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine in Roanoke, Virginia, but much to his disappointment was unable to join his new friends and colleagues there due to his illness. Bob was revered for his compassionate patient care, the high standard to which he held himself, his colleagues and his students, his brilliant clinical problem solving skills, his use of a slide rule long after the invention of the calculator, and his long gray ponytail. He imparted many lessons to his children that he culled from his careful study of the mysteries of the universe, including the teachings of Bob Dylan, baseball, Moby Dick, Patti Smith, Wolf Kahn, William Faulkner, Miles Davis, Blade Runner, Romare Bearden, and Ray Bradbury. Two of his most common directives were to “keep your eye on the ball” and “read the book” (often issued during epic chemistry homework sessions with his children). Bob loved Syracuse and its people deeply and spent 20 years cataloguing the resilience of the city by painting watercolor portraits of the characters he encountered on the streets. Bob will live on through the lives of his wife and children, their partners, his baby grandson, his extended family, his devoted friends and colleagues, his paintings, the generations of doctors he taught and mentored, the many children he cared for in the Pediatric ICU, his public health and disaster research, and the countless stacks of annotated index cards he left scattered around the house and tucked into every shirt pocket. Please join us for a memorial celebration on Saturday April 9th, 2016 at the Assumption Church, 808 North Salina Street in Syracuse. Services will begin at 11:30 am, followed by a reception at 12:30 pm. In recent years Bob became good friends with the wonderful people providing primary health care at the Poverello Health Center at Assumption Church; contributions can be made in his name to the health center, or to the Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.