Stanley Mathew Kotula, a retired Southeast Baltimore dentist who served generations of sufferers at his Luzerne Avenue workplace, died of coronary heart failure on June 30 at Gilchrist Hospice Care of Towson. The former Riderwood resident was 96. Born in Baltimore and raised in Canton, he turned into the son of Thomas Kotula, a Bethlehem Steel foreman, and his spouse, Bertha, a homemaker. He attended Holy Rosary School and became a 1941 graduate of Calvert Hall College High School. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, and become a 1947 graduate of the University of Maryland Dental School.
He enlisted within the Navy and served as a lieutenant in World War II and later was called to active duty all through the Korean War. He became assigned to the Bainbridge Training Station in Cecil County. Shortly after establishing his dental exercise at 533 S. Luzerne Ave., he met his future wife, Mary Louise Paszek, who got here to him as a affected person. Joseph S. Kutola, a Towson resident, said his father borrowed cash from his father to establish his dental exercise within the neighborhood where he was born. He became one of the neighborhood’s first-class-known dentists, his son stated, and counted among his sufferer’s many participants of the Holy Rosary and St. Casimir Roman Catholic parishes, in addition to Bethlehem Steel employees.
His father desired him to go to work at Bethlehem Steel and was amazed at how fast he paid the loan off. My father changed into a hard worker and shortly had a workplace full of patients,” stated his son. “The ready room continually had humans in it, and there were instances after they spilled out the front door and onto the marble steps. The first floor of the S. Luzerne Avenue domestic turned into a -chair dental office.
He changed into a solo practitioner and frequently had each chair occupied. He installation a dental work area in the rear of the construction wherein he made bridgework on nights and weekends. The 2nd ground was the own family domestic until he and his wife and kids relocated to the Loch Raven Boulevard location and later Riderwood. He labored lengthy hours, six days every week, and served the community for greater than 50 years, his son said. “You could not meet someone in that area who did not recognize my dad.
He retired about 1997 and offered the workplace in 2001.
He remained insatiably curious approximately the career that becomes his ardor as he constantly examines up on discoveries or processes within the dental industry,” his son stated. “My dad cherished his sufferers and cared for lots of them from early life to maturity. His patents got here as some distance away as Locust Point and Dundalk, and those who moved to Essex and Parkville might come again to him. In his unfastened time, Dr. Kotula pointed out sports activities — he was an Orioles fan and a Colts and Ravens follower. He also had an appreciation for boxing.
He accrued jokes from Readers’ Digest magazines and repeated them to his patients.
It helped if you didn’t don’t forget the punch line,” his son said. “But he absolutely ought to —his reminiscence was uncanny retentive into his 90s, with the potential to recall the best info of his lifestyles, even lower back to his youth,” his son stated. Among the stories he advised become like a boy, he carried bottles of bath gin at some point of Prohibition from a lady who made it in Fells Point. He can also recall whilst Baltimore’s motors, parked on town streets, required running overnight parking mild.