John Pelham Curtis

MILLERTON — John Pelham Curtis, 1938-2019, a beloved retired physician who had moved to northeastern Dutchess County in 1971 to practice internal medicine, died peacefully Saturday, Aug. 17, 2019, at the family home on Sharon Station Road after a long illness. He was 81.

Let it be said up front that John was a self-effacing fellow and that going on at any length about him in his earshot would have been excruciating. These remarks proceed in cheerful defiance of his modesty. 

Dr. Curtis was a rural internist for 25 years at the end of an era when doctors took care of the whole person. Even though he trained as a specialist in pulmonology, “Dr. John” was presented with every complaint from poison ivy to congestive heart failure. Patients had little hesitation about phoning him at home. He even made house calls, long after it was considered too inefficient to do so. His children recall being taken along to cheer up an ill or elderly patient. 

John loved being a doctor. He felt deeply the privilege and honor of taking care of people, whom he always treated with dignity and respect. He truly listened to patients, a rare but critical trait for a physician. At the same time, he loved the intellectual puzzle a patient presented, having to triangulate between the patient’s words, science and his clinical intuition to find a solution.    

John was born June 27, 1938, in New York City to Helen Kingsbury Curtis and Herbert Pelham Curtis, the third of four children, and was raised in New Canaan, Conn. Growing up, he gravitated to animals and athletics of all kinds, and he pursued both passions throughout his life. For years in Millerton his family kept three horses, and the house was never without several dogs in residence. 

John was a hard-working, steady student. He attended the local country day school and the Pomfret School, graduated from Yale College in 1960, and followed his elder brother into medicine. He graduated from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine — a school renowned for combining the science and art of medicine, for “a tremendous depth of caring for and dedication to the healing of humanity.” John embodied this ethic his entire professional life.

It’s not something he spoke of often, but John served as a captain in U.S. Army. Drafted into the service under the Berry Plan during the Vietnam War, he served for two years at the U.S. Military Hospital, Camp Zama, Japan, near Tokyo, between his first and second residencies. 

In 1971, John settled with his young family in Millbrook and opened offices there and in Dover Plains as an internist and pulmonologist.

John maintained admitting privileges at Sharon Hospital, a short drive from home. His daily routine involved checking on his patients every morning and evening, Sundays excepted. He welcomed all patients without favor. By training and inclination, as his daughter Ellen put it, “He cared for and about his patients.”  One patient showed up at John’s home with an armful of freshly picked vegetables, which the family cheerfully accepted with compliments despite its own abundant harvest from the household garden. 

He practiced medicine for 25 years, from 1971 to 1996.

Among John’s nonprofessional enthusiasms were outdoor athletic activities, chief among them downhill skiing, which he performed with natural grace and fluidity. His fine sense of balance drew him naturally to the windsurfer. He was among the first on the East Coast to master the sport. A stiff summer breeze would often prompt him to pull on his wet suit, load the board and sail onto the roof of the station wagon,  and drive to Twin Lakes — large enough for long, fast reaches and far enough away from hills and trees that the wind was steady.  

Fondly remembered was his penchant — some might say proclivity — for thrift. John rarely saw a bargain that didn’t thrill him. He was an early adopter of bulk purchasing, as a century’s supply of industrial-scale plastic wrap attests. His ball caps and winter gloves were harvested gleefully from the roadside. His favorite shopping expedition was to the Sharon Hospital Auxiliary’s Bargain Barn in Sharon, where he bought many of his clothes, including an extensive collection of bow ties. What was a brightly colored, over-the-top castoff to many was to John the perfect evening wear for a dinner party. On winter ski vacations the family never lunched in the lodge — they’d bring their own pb&j’s, following John’s firmly held sense of honest parsimony and scorn for material display. At his interment, in a coffin more lavish than his standards would have endured, it was said he would rather have busied himself in the basement, emerging with an enclosure of cardboard and duct tape that would have sufficed.

He is survived by his wife of 53 years, Ellen “Wendy” (Chinn) Curtis, whom he married in 1966. He and Wendy had three children, Ellen Boiselle and her husband, Phillip, of Boston and Florida, Sarah Curtis and her husband, John Petrini, of Brooklyn, and Jeptha Curtis and his wife, JoAnn Hong, of New Haven. His sisters, Anne Curtis and Francis Hardie, live in New Haven and Pittsburgh, respectively. His brother, Frederick Kingsbury Curtis of Bainbridge Island, Wash., died in 2016. 

John leaves four grandchildren, Ella, Theo, Garretson and Natalie;  two step-grandchildren, Ramona and Joe; and numerous nieces and nephews, whom he loved without reservation and who loved him.  

The Millerton house and property he bought not long after moving to the area — bought because he was struck by an immediate connection to the land — became his abiding home. The view south across Round Pond busy with clouds and geese and wind-ruffled trees, the pasture that funneled down to the water, the sweep of his tidy hillside hayfield that bordered a crown of forest — these nourished him and gave him joy until the very end. 

John was a fine and warmly remembered doctor; a kind and loyal friend; an indulgent and much-loved father, grandfather and uncle; and a devoted, adored and adoring husband.

A memorial service will be held Oct. 26, at 2:30 p.m. at the Flagler Memorial Chapel at the Millbrook School. 

In lieu of flowers, donations in John’s name may be made to the Hudson Valley Hospice in Poughkeepsie at www.hvhospice.org/foundation/donate.