MARTIN GELMAN

Martin Gelman, 96, a Philadelphia native and World War II veteran who was a prominent center city psychologist for 35 years starting in the early 1960s, and who taught students for nearly a half century at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, died of natural causes at a skilled nursing facility in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. He was 96.

Born to Jacob and Pearl (Hersh) Gelman in 1921 and raised in the Logan section of Philadelphia, Gelman's father owned a print shop on Cherry Street in Philadelphia. Gelman Sign and Printing was a family affair, co-founded by Jacob and his two brothers, with family members performing all of the tasks needed to run and operate the business.

From a young age, Gelman paid close attention to world events. Like many American Jews, in the 1930's he followed the political rise and growing power of Hitler with great trepidation. When the United States entered World War II following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Gelman knew that the world had changed and duty called. Gelman enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force in 1942 and went off to boot camp in Texas.

As a First Lieutenant, he was stationed in Italy and served as lead navigator in the 15th Air Force, 450th Bombardment Group, which flew B-24 Liberators. Now considered a member of the Greatest Generation, he later scoffed at such a notion. "Each day I awoke with terror of not wondering�if�I would die, but�how�I would die," he said during an interview in the fall of 2007. "Each day that passed was just a postponement of tomorrow's execution."

Gelman survived 50 missions over enemy occupied Europe, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross, among other medals and honors. His crew survived three forced landings in the mountains of Corsica, but in the end, he was the only one that made it back unscathed. His last mission, the 50th, was aborted three times before his crew was granted a three-day reprieve in Bari, off the coast of the Adriatic Sea. But Gelman was by then impatient and ready to go home, so he volunteered for another mission, with a different crew. "I caught a break," he recalled years later. "It was a milk run. There was no flak, there were no fighters." With 50 missions completed, he could now go home. His return was bittersweet, however, because on the next mission flown by Marty's assigned crew, the plane was shot down. The crew members who survived became prisoners of war. As his surviving wife, Gertrude, later recalled, "Marty's bewilderment at the bizarre manipulation of fate . . . left him numb."

Three days after Gelman returned home on a one-month furlough, on August 9, 1944, he married his high school sweetheart, Gertrude Golden. After a brief honeymoon in New York City, Gelman was assigned to military bases in Monroe, Louisiana, and later Pasadena, Texas. At Ellington Field in Pasadena, Gelman conducted research and development for the remainder of his service time.

After the war, Marty and Gertrude Gelman moved back to Philadelphia, where Gelman worked a variety of jobs until his father died in 1952, when Gelman and his brother Sol set up an advertising firm above Gelman Sign and Printing. While working full-time, Gelman attended LaSalle University at night, earning a B.S. in Chemistry in 1956. He later earned two doctoral degrees, a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965, and a second Ph.D. in Psychology from Temple University in 1973. Gelman's dissertation at Temple broke new ground in the area of creativity research by helping to demonstrate that people could be trained to be more creative.

In 1962, Gelman began a successful clinical psychology practice at 18th and Walnut Streets (and, later, Broad and Locust Streets). His center city practice lasted for 35 years and included as clients many prominent Philadelphia lawyers, doctors, and public figures. He also taught courses at the University of Delaware, Temple University, and the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. In 1964, Gelman was among the first professors hired at the newly established Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. A Professor of Psychology and Anthropology, Gelman taught full course loads for the next 45 years, retiring at the age of 89 in 2011. A popular professor, his classes were filled to capacity, and he received the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award in 1999. In 2016, Montco established an Excellence in Psychology Award bearing his name.

Never having forgotten the unheralded protection that the Tuskegee Airmen had provided his B-24 crew during the war, and sensitive to the slights caused by discrimination and prejudice, Professor Gelman, as the longest-tenured Dean of the college's Social Sciences Department, was instrumental in hiring Montco's first African American professor. Gelman also mentored and supported the African American Student League, for which he was given special recognition at a�2008 Martin Luther King Day celebration. In addition to his support for civil rights, Gelman was an early supporter of the rights of women and gays long before those causes became fashionable.

In looking back on his time at war, on the death and destruction that was a part of everyday life for young men in their late teens and early twenties, Gelman has recalled that it took more than 30 years before he could confront the pain and heartache he experienced in combat. It is a pain, he said, that "has made it difficult for me to cry about loss or to fully face life head on." He dismissed the notion that war makes a man out of you. "War makes a man out of no one," he insisted. "The best it does is rip away the filter of illusion and scald you with the reality of the baseness of human existence. It's a waste."

Through the years, Gelman often looked at humanity with a healthy dose of humor. "We are a rotten species," he often joked to family and friends. But his love of America was unrivaled, matched perhaps only by his love of family, education, books, and good conversation. For most of his adult life, he was frequently sought after for advice and counsel.

Gelman is survived by his wife Gertrude, to whom he was married for 73 years, and by his three children, Andrea Foulkes (and husband Mark Ehlers) of Jenkintown, Pennsylvania; Karen Strouse (and husband Art) of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida; and Paul Gelman (and wife Angela) of Medford, New Jersey; and four grandchildren, Doug, Drew, Jillian, and Dori. For the last 49 years of his life, Gelman lived with Gertrude in Wyncote, Pennsylvania.

Funeral services will be held at Goldsteins' Rosenberg's Raphael-Sacks, 6410 N. Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Thursday, September 28, 2017, at 1:00 p.m. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Montgomery County Community College in honor of Dr. Martin Gelman.