Lost to COVID-19: Friends, family mourn loss of retired dentist and veteran who contributed to polio vaccine research
Published in the Akron Beacon Journal, April 6, 2021 (Click here to view on news site).
Family and friends continue to reflect on the lessons they learned from Dr. Ernest Stewart, whom they affectionately called “Papa Peter" and "Ernie."
They mourn the loss of a man they say was a fierce advocate of those around him, constantly working to lift others as he climbed. He had impeccable style and was passionate about education and service, yet he remained largely quiet about his extraordinary achievements and contributions.
The retired Akron dentist who opened the first Black-owned business on Copley Road died April 22 in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. He was 90.
“I’m blessed that he was in my life. He is a special person. And I’m glad I got to know him,” friend John Trecaso said.
He visited his longtime friend through a window he pushed open at Rockynol the night before Stewart died. At the time, visitors weren't allowed inside.
Born in the Jim Crow South, in Newport News, Virginia, on May 9, 1929, Stewart became the first in his family to complete high school. He was one of four children; his brother Donald and sister Orcilla died before him. His sister Jean Ezell of Cleveland adored him growing up.
“I know he was a good person, because for the longest time I thought he was my boyfriend," Ezell said, laughing. "And people kept telling me that he couldn’t be your boyfriend because he’s your brother, and I couldn’t understand that to save my life because I really loved him."
A gifted student-athlete, Stewart’s decision to play quarterback at Virginia State College caused a temporary rift between him and his father, Ernest, who worked the shipyards. His father wanted Stewart to work, not study, after high school. But with the blessing of his mother, Martha, who handed him a bag of food and $50, Stewart headed to Virginia State, where he majored in biology and became a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity Inc.
In college, he met his future wife, Dr. Patricia Stewart, in a physiology class. Patricia, a Massillon native who had moved to the South to study, was drawn to the quarterback’s pride in his blackness and his commitment to community. As a member of Omega Psi Phi, Stewart participated in grassroots voter registration efforts during his undergraduate years.
He and Patricia knocked on doors as students, encouraging people to register to vote, but they did so with “great subtlety and great subterfuge,” owing to the life-threatening dangers Black people faced when they attempted to exercise their constitutional right.
“Those were the kinds of things that we lived with and for, as being in a community and with responsibilities to remember that community was about ‘we’ and ‘us,’ it wasn’t about ‘I’ and ‘me.’ [There] couldn’t be ‘I and me’ if we didn’t have ‘we’,” Patricia said from her home in Savannah. (The couple were divorced.)
After college, Patricia gave birth to their first son, Ernest, while Stewart served for two years in the Korean War. He joined a segregated African-American unit based in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, working in the artillery branch and was eventually deployed to Korea. But like other veterans of his generation who came of age during a time when conversations around post-traumatic stress disorder had not yet entered public discourse, Stewart did not talk about the physical and mental trauma of having endured cannon blasts and combat.
Stewart later attended the Meharry Medical College School of Dentistry in Nashville. While there, Patricia gave birth to their second son, Mark. In 1961, the family relocated to Akron, where Stewart opened his first dental practice on Wooster Avenue. In 1962, he moved his practice to Copley Road, opening the first Black-owned business there. The Stewart family also was the first Black family to live on Copley Road.
Stewart took great pride in his craft and had high standards. Ensuring that all people, regardless of their socioeconomic status, had access to the highest standard of dental care was his North Star. For years, Stewart provided dental care to inmates at the Summit County Jail and orphaned children at Akron Children’s Home.
“He just made a very purposeful life out of making sure that ... his primary way of giving back to people [was] in such a way that it didn't matter about what your economic status is, what matters is your humanity and … I want you to look your very best and feel good when you leave,” Patricia recalled.
“He was a really great model for the professional medical, dental life for his sons, and they followed that model in ways they lived their own professional lives,” Patricia said.
Before he died in 1994 from HIV/AIDS, their son Ernest served as director of the AIDS Clinic at the Metropolitan Hospital Center in New York City, and worked for years in jails and prisons, including at Rikers Island. Ernest authored the first protocol for public health care in New York City prisons. Mark, too, has served incarcerated people in Ohio and Georgia.
One of Stewart’s greatest contributions was his role in the creation of the polio vaccine. For two years, in 1953 and 1954, he worked as a lab technician under Dr. Frederick C. Robbins at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where he carried out tissue culture research for polio. Robbins won a Nobel Prize for the tissue culture technique he and his team developed — a technique that scientists around the world continue to rely on and used this year to analyze and identify the novel coronavirus. Stewart also spent a summer supporting Dr. Albert Sabin at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C., in the 1950s.
Stewart taught his sons and grandchildren that they were as good as anybody and to never look down on others.
He loved his grandchildren.
“His greatest pride and joy was Taylor and Sydney. ... That was where his heart was, in his grandkids,” Mark said.
“He was always very supportive. He was always very concerned about how we were doing in school,” Taylor said.
Sydney remembers his grandfather as a selfless, patient and caring person who taught him that, with hard work and persistence, anything is attainable.
“I think one of the main reasons why I’m in nursing school is because of him. … I am at the point of my life where I’ve never worked so hard for something, and … he was definitely right. If you’re determined, you can literally accomplish anything," Sydney said.
His grandfather showed Sydney care in other ways, too. When Sydney came out as transgender five years ago, Stewart accepted him fully. All Stewart cared about was that Sydney was healthy and felt safe.
“I remember almost immediately off the rip, when he would send me a letter… [he would write] ‘to the birthday boy’ or ‘to my grandson.’ In the very early days when people wouldn’t still necessarily get my pronouns right, my 80-something-year-old grandpa — he knew, and he knew how to accept it. … I think all he knew was love,” Sydney said.
“That’s something I’ll definitely always remember about him,” Sydney said.
“There’s not a day I don't think about him," said Larry Jasper, son of Judge Mabel Jasper of Cleveland, Stewart's longtime girlfriend. The couple had been together about 30 years. Larry Jasper described Stewart as “one of the finest human beings I ever met."
“Doc was a gentleman's gentleman. He had a quiet humor. He didn’t do a lot of talking but his deeds spoke volumes. The way he loved my mom was something to behold. I just never saw anything like that,” Jasper said.
"We took it very, very hard, and especially Mom. She’s still reeling and mourning," Jasper said.
Living in Georgia for the past 26 years, Patricia said, has given her a deeper understanding of the forces that shaped Stewart, and the sense of community and collective will to survive that emerge from navigating life in the South as a Black family, as a Black man.
“Living everyday, through all the ups and downs, and the discord, and drama, and disconnection, the connecting piece with me for him will always be that he was a son of the South. He truly was a son of the South, and that meant he was going to carry with him the pride of manhood and manliness as being his special way to show up as being somebody as a Black man. For never having gone to school anywhere with anybody white, that is a remarkable way to sustain the worthiness of your own perspective… He had his own sense of worthiness of who I am and what I can contribute,” she said.
John Trecaso began to understand Stewart’s legacy, little by little, over the years.
“He’s close to the vest. He has big walls. He doesn’t tell you much,” Trecaso remembered. But the love and respect that Akronites, particularly those in the Black community, had for Stewart was on display everywhere when the men were out together.
Trecaso remembers taking Stewart to a bank in Highland Square, and the teller and manager both beaming with enthusiasm in the dentist's presence. “Do you know who this is?” a woman at the bank excitedly asked Trecaso.
“I didn’t know the family history. I didn’t know the heritage of Copley Road,” he said. “It was like I had a superstar with me.
“I wish there could have been a funeral because I could imagine it would be packed."
Mark often thinks about the countless other Americans who have died from the coronavirus, separated from their loved ones in their final moments. He thinks of those who have spent the better part of the last year in long-term care facilities. Compounding the intense isolation they must be feeling, Mark surmised, is that the few people who are in their presence — caregivers, nurses — are covered in gowns, masks, gloves and other personal protective equipment.
He thinks about the psychological toll that not feeling another person’s touch and not seeing another human being’s face must take on a person, and he thinks about his own father at Rockynol in the early months of the pandemic, and how he wished he could have been closer to his family.
Mark and Stewart's grandchildren live in Georgia, and Stewart's longtime partner, Judge Mabel Jasper, resides in Cleveland.
Mark and his children said their final goodbyes to Stewart via FaceTime. A Cleveland pastor joined the call, and together they prayed.
“I thanked him for everything he taught me. I said, ‘Even right now, you’re teaching me things.’ I said, ‘Dad, we learned well from you. ... You don’t need to worry about us, you can rest,” Mark said.
He finds comfort in the thought that Stewart was not alone.
“He got to see somebody he knew and loved,” Mark said, reflecting on the night that Trecaso showed up at his father’s window, without a mask concealing his face, to say goodbye to his friend.
“That put my heart in a lot of ease,” Mark said.