Eric K. Gratz
Marriage and family therapist at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital was a ‘total gentleman’
Eric K. Gratz, a marriage and family therapist who was director of admissions and chief social worker in the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital’s Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, died Feb. 20 of congestive heart failure at the Edenwald Retirement Community in Towson. The former Mount Washington resident was 87.
“I knew Eric both at Edenwald and as a former patient,” said Debra Furchgott. “He was very gentle and a nonconfrontational person, and his office manner was his everyday manner. When you were dealing with Eric, you were dealing with a very nice person who had very high standards, and he met them.”
Eric Kay Gratz, son of Oliver Gratz, an educator and principal, and his wife, Mary Gratz, a schoolteacher, was born and raised in Celina, Ohio, where he graduated from high school.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1956 in sociology from Ohio State University and a master’s degree three years later from Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington. In 1963 he obtained a graduate certificate in marriage counseling from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in clinical social work followed in 1966 from Washington’s Howard University.
Mr. Gratz’s professional career spanned 1956 to 2019, when he retired. During the first seven years, he worked as an ordained United Methodist Church minister.
“He never used the title reverend,” said his wife of 53 years, the former Jacqueline Long, an educator who retired in 2017 from Towson University, where she was director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.
From 1963 to 1969, Mr. Gratz was a marriage counselor at Maryland Children’s Aid and Family Services, and from 1969 to 1981 director of admissions and chief social worker in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Sheppard-Pratt in Towson.
After leaving Sheppard-Pratt in 1981, he established a full-time private practice in individual and marital psychotherapy. In conjunction with his own work, he taught part time in the Towson University Department of Psychology.
He also lectured widely on the subject of marital conflict and the therapeutic process of couples treatment. In 1999, he became a charter member of the Auburn Society, the Learning in Retirement program at the university. He regularly presented a film series each semester, focusing on the psychological aspects of the characters and the film story, “believing that films can be both educationally and therapeutically beneficial,” Mr. Gratz wrote in an autobiographical profile.
Mr. Gratz, a serious movie buff, enjoyed films of all genres, his favorite being “Harvey,” the 1950 film starring Jimmy Stewart, who with Johnny Depp was among his favorite actors.
“He conducted a film series for Osher, and that was simply fabulous,” said Ms. Furchgott, who also lives in Edenwald. “It just wasn’t about going to see the movie — it was the work that came afterward. They were always very thought-provoking films, and the work was about what we had just seen. Eric made us think a lot about the characters and he was very good at it.”
He was also a fan of Ian Fleming’s books and the character of 007.
Mr. Gratz was an immaculate dresser who always wore a coat and tie.
“Eric was the total gentleman, and he dressed like a gentleman with his suits and ties, unlike most people these days who dress like they came out of the rag bin,” Ms. Furchgott said. “He dressed like he was always ready for business.”
Mr. Gratz eschewed traditional haberdashery establishments.
“Eric didn’t go to Brooks Brothers and didn’t want any of that expensive stuff,” Ms. Gratz said. “He bought his coats at secondhand stores, his shirts from Sam’s Club, and his ties from the Junior League’s Wise Penny, which is next door to the Senator Theatre. He’d drop in there before or after a movie. He just knew how to put it all together.”
Mr. Gratz had wide-ranging musical tastes and savored good wine and food, family members said, and enjoyed going to restaurants.
While living in Mount Washington, he and his wife enjoyed working in their garden and enjoying al fresco dinners on their front porch, which overlooked their garden, where they also enjoyed hosting parties for family and friends.
Favorite vacation destinations were Mount Desert island in Maine, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Cape May Point, New Jersey.
In his autobiographical notes, Mr. Gratz said that philosophically he considered himself a “scientific, existential, secular humanist.”
Plans for a memorial service to be held at a later date are incomplete.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Gratz is survived by a son, Douglas Gratz of Columbia; a granddaughter; and a great-granddaughter.
It’s closing in on six years since Gov. Larry Hogan killed the Red Line, Baltimore’s $2.9 billion east-west light rail project, so some details about it might now be a bit fuzzy for him. Even so, it was pretty remarkable to hear Maryland’s governor, in testimony to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee last Wednesday, suggest that Baltimore may one day get a light rail line like the Purple Line if it provided a “system” and if it were made “attractive to the private sector.” The Purple Line is, of course, the $5.6 billion, 16-mile light rail line connecting suburbs just north of the District of Columbia that has been delayed by a contract dispute for which Maryland had to fork over an extra quarter-billion-dollars in December. As a transit project, the Red Line was not terribly different other than it represented an investment in communities more burdened by concentrated poverty and joblessness and less well-served by transit options than Purple Line stops in Prince George’s and Montgomery counties.
Governor Hogan’s first mistake was to perceive the Purple Line as attractive to the private sector and the Red Line as not. The Purple Line is a P3 — a public-private partnership. That allows a private company or group of companies to build and operate a transit system that would still be owned by the government but for which the private company receives revenue. In highway P3 projects, the revenue comes from tolls. In transit, it means fares plus some minimum guaranteed amount courtesy of the taxpayers. The Red Line was devised as a P3, too. Aside from the downtown tunnel (which would have been directly funded by government because of the risk involved), the rest would have been as P3. The private sector was never unfriendly toward the Red Line. Why would it be? The winning company would have been guaranteed what’s known as “availability payments.” Same as with the Purple Line.
The claim is a variation on the notion that the Red Line was a “boondoggle” and the Purple Line made far greater sense financially. In reality, the two lines received the same rating by federal authorities. Indeed, there’s a lot of history here.
The only reason the Red Line came so close to fruition in the first place (with an estimated $300 million spent on planning, design and land acquisition prior to it being axed) was that it was paired with the Purple Line when the General Assembly approved a major increase in transportation funding under Gov. Martin O’Malley eight years ago. It was the city’s slice of that particular pie.
As for Mr. Hogan’s claim about how it was “just one line,” that’s hard to dispute. Baltimore never received the kind of investment the Washington, D.C., area got with the development of the Metrorail system, the third largest heavy rail transit system in the nation. The Red Line was meant to help make up some of that lost ground and would have allowed riders to transfer to other modes by way of West Baltimore MARC, the existing light rail at Howard Street, the Metro Subway near the Inner Harbor, and the MARC Penn Line at Johns Hopkins Bayview as well as numerous bus lines.
One of the big mistakes the state can make about transportation policy is to see it only as a response to need and not a driver of it. In reality, transportation infrastructure invites development. When the Chesapeake Bay Bridge was built in 1952, it wasn’t instantly inundated with traffic. It invited use and, over many years, jobs and economic opportunities sprang up along the U.S. 50 corridor all the way to Ocean City. If Baltimore had a higher functioning transit system, it would boost post-pandemic development in the city as well. And if Maryland is serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and “smart growth,” it would be investing more in urban rail lines and less in widening suburban highways.
If Governor Hogan is going to continue to speak out on transportation infrastructure (as he did when he headed the National Governor Association), he’s going to have to develop a better excuse for the Red Line’s cancellation. Here’s one suggestion: “I didn’t need city votes to win election in 2014 or 2018.” It’s honest. It’s to the point. And it can’t seriously be disputed. The truth is that the Red Line stands in history as a huge opportunity squandered for a city long held back by a different kind of “red lining,” the kind where low-income neighborhoods of color regularly get left behind.