Martin Robert Yarvis ’52
Martin Robert Yarvis ’52, M.D., of Harbour Ridge in Palm City, Florida, died on August 14, surrounded by his family. Marty was born on May 2, 1931, and came from a long line of physicians on his mother’s and father’s sides. He grew up playing stick ball and volleyball at P.S. 244 in Brooklyn and felt a calling to the medical profession from working in his father’s office as a boy. He attended Tilden High School, Cheshire Academy, and Dartmouth for two years, graduating from Hobart College and SUNY Downstate College of Medicine. Marty was a skilled, “old-school” physician who instituted programs in quality control and medical ethics at Long Beach Hospital on Long Island, where he was on the medical staff and served as president of the board and acting chief of medicine in the years leading up to his retirement. One of the first physicians to respond to the AIDS crisis, he was able to comfort patients with his gentle, empathic manner and mischievous sense of humor. An accomplished sportsman with a love of sailing and golfing, he enjoyed traveling to exotic places with his wife of 64 years, Louise, who survives him. He is also survived by daughter Lisa and her husband, Richard; daughter Lori ’82 and her husband, Ty Burr ’82; daughter Jacqueline and her husband, Jeffrey; and grandchildren Rachel, Robert, Andrew, Eliza, Natalie, Samantha, Jonathan, and Erin.
