A Man of Dignity in a World Gone Mad
Jeffrey Neal Glazer, 1951-2023, The Love of My Life and The Hole in My Heart
He was born just after Memorial Day in the 20th Century, and died days after Father’s Day in the 21st. In between were 72 years of triumph and tragedy, laughter and loss.
A native of Bethesda MD and a resident of Delray Beach, FL, Jeffrey Neal 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 created — he made his body breath again. Four months later, having regained function throughout his body except for a stubborn right leg below the knee that 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 on his handsome face, head-on. He had endured one of the most calamitous injuries that could befall anyone, a wrenching disability. But he was never bitter, never a victim. He saw life’s glass not as half empty but half full.
He was born at Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1951. 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 neighborhood where he grew up in Chevy Chase was teeming with Baby Boom energy, and, to his delight, the promise of daily pick-up games. Kids sometimes used his dog Missy as first base in baseball games and almost everyone came to his house once his dad Jerome put up a basketball hoop for him. He also cherished memories of how he used to pick up Margie Pearson at her house around the corner and walk with her to North Chevy Chase Elementary. Jeffrey was first lieutenant of the patrols, and Margie was his second, and she assisted as he raised the American flag each morning. He kind of had a crush on her until one day after when she cut off her pigtails.
Always ravenous for sport and food, he loved the Mighty Moe’s and hot fudge sundaes of the Hot Shoppes at the corner of Wisconsin & East-West Highway. At home, for breakfast he sometimes ate a whole pound cake or a dozen eggs and a liter of orange juice. As an adult, he was devoted to the Tastee Diner, an iconic Bethesda institution that was a throwback to the greasy spoons of the 1950s. His mother Kay was fiercely protective, his father often working, so 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. They all agree that if there had been a BLT sandwich eating competition back in the 1970's, Jeff 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, but for more than 40 years, out of respect, Jeffrey called their father Mr. Shofnos.
He triumphed in basketball, challenging black 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 kicked ass 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 and a friend, at 9, once took the bus to RFK Stadium to see the Washington Senators play. And when the Washington Redskins won their first Superbowl, he joined the throngs in the streets, marveling that athletic feats of greatness had the power to bridge the divide between people — politicians and janitors, black and white, young and old.
He made lifelong friends at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School — Bob Goss & Steve Nichols, Danny Rice & Doug Chinn. Later in life he attended some Friday night games, not because he knew anyone who was playing, but just to support the Barons. As he entered the school he would have walked by plaques filled with the names of players who had excelled in sports, including his own.
He also made friends for life at Shepherd College, now University, in West Virginia, where the antics were memorable and the academics minimal. At 6’2” and 180 pounds, with kind eyes and a willing smile, Jeffrey was a portrait in handsome masculinity. One of his favorite assignments at Shepherd was posing as a model for the art teacher, who gave him $5 out of his pocket. Afterwards Jeffrey went to the local pizza place and got dinner and a six-pack of beer for his frat brothers. Once someone asked Jeffrey how many students went to the school. The actual count was under 2000. His answer: five. The rest, in his mind, were like him, athletes or slackers. For his part, he majored in physical education, and joined the swim team.
One summer during college he worked on a kibbutz in Israel. He picked watermelons and harvested at such a fast rate in such a hot sun that his skin darkened and they asked him to stay. After college he took a special PanAm trip around the world for $1000. On both occasions he came home to Bethesda. He tried on different career paths after college — teaching children with disabilities and even trying out as a walk-on as a 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, from a small office he rented downtown, charming secretaries in business offices and convincing lawyers and newspapers to hire him. He soon landed accounts with FedEx and the Capitol Gazette’s. He offered 24/7 service, so hospitals and blood banks started using his company too.
By the time he met Jeri Margolis, Overland Courier Company was thriving and he sold it before the couple moved back a townhouse in Montrose Forrest in Rockville. Soon they married and produced two children, Bari & Jay, who were the joy of his life. He was proud of them for leaping over challenges, for pursuing dreams and for being happy people. 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 at a room he rented at the Days Inn.
In 1980, he purchased a defunct company called Right-Way Furnace Cleaning Co. in Hyattsville, more than doubling the number of residential customers and creating a commercial division. After seven years, he sold 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 his friend Leonard Muellar often did out-of-town jobs together. Once Jeffrey drove up to Canada solo to do a job for the Glass Ball Company. On the bridge back into the USA he called Leonard and told him he had been deported — for not having a Canadian work permit. Leonard flew up to do the job. It was for MRI that Jeffrey was on a manlift that fateful July day in 1998.
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 for families at military bases, at Walter Reed, Ft. Dedrick and Navy Yards in Washington D.C. 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’s courier madness. They had little in common — she was a journalist, he was a dirty-jobs construction guy. She wrote books, he rarely read them. Neither was shopping for a mate — her divorce from her first marriage had been lengthy and unpleasant, his equally traumatic. Johanna recalls that when she saw his face, and looked into his smiling eyes, she knew she would love him forever. They had their first date the next day, and after that, they were one. They wowed only this: to empower each other in whatever they wanted to do, and to keep the gaga alive.
After they moved to Delray Beach, FL in 2014, he embraced his new town with the same zest he had shown for his childhood haunts. Like Bethesda, Delray Beach is a town where shopkeepers knew him by name and the Seagate Coffee Shop had his coffee 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 theWashington 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 so weak he had to go inside early. The next day he was in his doctor’s office and by November 4 he got the diagnosis: Myelo Dysplastic Syndrome (MDS), a form of leukemia.
There followed a four month period of chemo — and 11 blood transfusions whenever his hemoglobin fell below 7. He did well but the chemo option offered little freedom from disease — it was two weeks of chemo on weekdays followed by two weeks off in which his body recovered to finish the month on the high of a few normal days.
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.
Friends who remembered his fierce competitive nature and his Herculean recovery from spinal cord injury still figured he would beat the odds again. And he did too — the family brought him home, and he was eager to begin the work of rehabilitation, planning out in his mind the PT sessions he would need to make his body whole again. After the gift of two days at home — during which he expressed love for Johanna and his children and their spouses, during which he marveled at the beauty of his home and neighborhood — he died in his sleep. Even at the end, one friend, Leonard said, “Don’t give up on him! He fooled us once before.”
Taking inspiration from sports, Jeffrey drew many life lessons. “Don’t celebrate on the five-yard line,” was a reference to a defensive player who intercepted a pass and ran for a touchdown, except he raised his hands in celebration too early and an opposing player knocked the ball out of his hands. 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 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 won the World Series in 2019 after beating the mighty LA Dodgers, 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 beautiful face that seemed to delight children. But if you crossed his code of life, if you swore or acted out violently or hurt others, he would turn his back and walk away.
Jeffrey is predeceased 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 & Alex Sinoyannis, and Mirieli & Jay Glazer — his grandchildren — George & Kodi Sinoyannis — his sister Shirley Glazer and his aunt Ruthie and Uncle Rodger Sedjo.
They will all miss him deeply, comforted only by knowing how lucky they were to have been loved by him.
Jeffrey requested that he be cremated, his ashes scattered in the Potomac River, whose shores, beauty and history nurtured him. And that they will do for him.
I don’t know if my first message got through.
Johanna that was just a beautiful tribute. I was moved to tears.
May Jeff rest in peace.
My deepest condolences on the loss of your beloved husband. What an amazing man! May your beautiful memories bring you comfort & peace.