By Lew Finfer
Special to the Reporter

Harry Gottschalk
Harry Gottschalk died two weeks ago at age 92. He had lived for decades in Dorchester on Armandine Street and Talbot Avenue with Ruth, his wife of over 70 years who died in 2011. He was a ‘Renaissance Man,’a classical reference to someone who is talented in many fields.

And Harry was surely that. He was, in his lifetime, a farmer, a contractor, a painter of pictures, a teacher of college students, a key staff person at the Boston Housing Court, a home inspector, an author, and an activist on issues, among other pursuits.

Harry and Ruth had an early romance in Illinois where he grew up. Her mother tried to keep Harry away by putting her in a convent boarding school. But then she felt guilty and smuggled Harry in to visit Ruth by hiding him under a blanket in her car.

They came to Massachusetts and Dorchester in the 1960s and Ruth worked for many decades as a legal secretary at Greater Boston Legal Services, which had an office in Fields Corner where she mothered and mentored many of the lawyers and para-legals who came to work there.
Harry and Ruth experienced their tragedies as a couple, a singular one being the death of their son Billy in the war in Vietnam while he was serving as a Marine lieutenant and helicopter pilot. For her part, Ruth was active in the anti-war movement for years as a member of Gold Star Mothers for Peace.

Harry, who always kept himself busy, was one of the first employees of the Boston Housing Court, which was organized in 1972 with the appointment of Paul Garrity as its first justice. The court’s mandate was to specialize on housing issues – evictions, rent increases, code violations – in a setting apart from the district courts with their priority necessarily the criminal cases before them. Harry was a housing specialist. He took cases from the judge to investigate and either made recommendations to the bench for whatever actions seemed appropriate or else worked with landlords and tenants to come to common-sense solutions for disputes between landlords and tenants.

Harry later took on the difficult job of court-appointed receiver to work with the judge in cases where, for instance, an absentee landlord repeatedly failed to fix code violations and the judge had removed control of the property from the owners. The receiver would then be responsible for things like collecting rents and getting repairs made.

This work involved building trust with frustrated tenants and their landlords who had differing views on what had to be done to satisfy the court.

To Harry, this was also a matter of saving buildings in Dorchester from being unsafe or sliding into abandonment.

Harry also engaged with Boston College students who were participating in the university’s PULSE program of partnerships with municipal agencies by teaching a Philosophy Department class entitled “Housing and Reality,” fitting Harry’s wry view of life. He was always warning those who would listen or not about the housing bubble and an impending stock market crash before both happened.

A talented painter of landscape, portraits, symbolic scenes, and copies of Impressionist masters, Harry, a tall man with a graying beard, had the look of an Old Testament prophet, but one who smiled a lot and had a big laugh. I remember many times driving down Dorchester Avenue at Ashmont and seeing him striding to and from the Store 24 in jeans with suspenders and carrying an armful of newspapers home to read as part of his day.

Former Dorchester resident Susan Haar described Harry and Ruth this way: “Caring, nurturing people who were always available to listen, to provide wise advice and safe harbor for friends and for others.”
We remember them with appreciation and affection.

Lew Finfer is a Dorchester resident.