The Great Neck Choral Society

PROFILE Hermine Plotnick: Schizophrenia is her second language 5-28-05

Family aside, Hermine Plotnick has had, and continues to have, two overwhelming interests in life. "Music is my passion," she says. "Occupational therapy (OT) is my passion and my job."

That doesn't quite sum up her life. Also important is the fact that she has met more schizophrenics than most of us have.

Hermine was halfway through her junior year in the ceramic design curriculum at Alfred University when she thought one more time about a field that had captivated her when she read about it in elementary school. This time she acted. She dropped out of Alfred's fine arts program and began taking the science courses that she would need to enter an occupational therapy program. She moved to New York City, took the rest of her OT prerequisites at Columbia University's School of General Studies, and was accepted into Columbia's OT program.

That was the beginning of what turned into 56 years of dedication, still ongoing, to occupational therapy. Those years include many dedicated to clinical work with patients, especially psychiatric patients. But there have also been many years of management and teaching. Today, at 77, Hermine is doing what she can to pass along her knowledge and enthusiasm, serving as Chair of the Occupational Therapy Dept. at New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury.

As for music, it started very early. At about the age of two she started taking piano lessons from her mother who, largely self-taught, was good enough to have played for silent movies in Cincinnati where she and Hermine's father grew up. And, in a household devoid of television, with a piano-playing mother, there were almost-nightly gatherings around the piano where the entire family sang together.

By age 11, Hermine had turned to the violin and was taking lessons at Mannes Music School in Manhattan. She played violin in her high school orchestra in Jamaica, Queens, but she also sang in the high school chorus. By her junior year she had quit her violin studies, and by her senior year she had dropped out of the orchestra. "I have perfect pitch," explains Hermine, "and that's not a good thing to have in a high school orchestra."

Bouncing around the country

During all of those years, her family had been moving around the country. Hermine was born in Solvay, NY, near Syracuse, where her father, a chemical engineer, worked at a large chemical plant. She was not yet six when her father's job took the family, which included an older brother and a youger sister, to Lake Charles, La.. She was eight when they moved to Saltville in the southwest corner of Virginia, and 11 when they moved to Hollis, Queens. In her junior year they moved to Rye in Westchester County.

"Saltville is where I really grew up," says Hermine. But she also has fond memories of her Louisiana sojourn, where she lived with an aunt in New Orleans. Her aunt, a social worker, became director of a highly regarded Jewish children's home. "In those days it was very unusual to have a woman in charge of anything," says Hermine, and it was an example that stuck with her.

When it was time to think about a career, "I really wanted to sing," Hermine recalls. But her family persuaded her that music "is a great avocation" and not a reliable way to make a living. Growing up without television, Hermine had been taught all the homemaking arts by her mother, plus such crafts as bead work, clay molding, painting, and sculpture. Her father had taught her woodworking and other shop skills. There had also been a sculpture course at Pratt Institute. Somehow all this fused when she saw a catalog from Alfred University describing its ceramic design course.

While Hermine changed her academic goal at Alfred, she stuck fast to her other program there. "They had a wonderful chorus," she says. For the first time she sang such works as Bach cantatas and the Brahms Requiem. Before that, she says, she had been singing what her younger sister called "choral sheet music."

In Manhattan, where she lived in an apartment on East 87th Street while attending Columbia, there was a plethora of opportunities for choral singing. Hermine joined the Dessoff Singers, the Robert Shaw Collegiate Chorale and the Cantata Singers--simultaneously. Later on she was to add the Bach Aria Group to her list. "As long as they rehearsed on different nights, there was no problem," she says. "I couldn't get enough of choral singing."

During this period, she also went back to studying piano. It was a rich, busy time--"studying OT, singing, studying piano--and looking for a husband." At one point she was offered a full summer scholarship to Tanglewood Summer Music Festival. Reluctant to interrupt her OT studies, she declined. "I've often wondered what would have happened in my life if I had made a different decision then," she says.

'I loved working with patients'

Upon graduation from Columbia, Hermine took an apartment on West 90th St. where she barely found room for her Steinway grand piano, a graduation present. She went to work at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, a private hospital that was part of the Cornell University medical complex. "I loved working with patients," she says. But she left after one year, in large part because "I had little patience with their Freudian approach," she says. "I knew then that schizophrenia was a brain disease, caused by chemical imbalance." And the psychiatrists had little respect for OT. "It was a place to park patients between therapy sessions," she says.

Her next stop was Brooklyn State Hospital. It was the beginning of a a 37-year relationship--interrupted only by five years of maternity leave--with the New York State Civil Service system. There, too, she loved the work. "If you do anything for those patients, they're grateful." In Civil Service, the way you get ahead is by scoring well on tests, says Hermine, "and I'm a great test taker." She was soon a senior occupational therapist.

In the evenings, Hermine taught art to staff members and friends, and it was through these classes that she met Samuel Plotnick, the man who would become her husband. Samuel was a dentist, who later moved into administration and eventually became Assistant Commissioner of Health for Dental Programs in Nassau County. Samuel did not share Hermine's penchant for making music, describing himself, she says, as a "well-tempered listener."

The Plotnicks moved to a Queens apartment and then to a house in New Hyde Park, where the second of her two sons was born. Hermine meanwhile had moved to Manhattan State Hospital on Wards Island. During her maternity leave she took a master's degree in OT at New York University, and then, also at NYU, did all the work for a doctorate in human relations, though she did not complete the dissertation.

At the end of her leave, in 1964, she went to Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital in Queens as a senior occupational therapist. Over the next 14 years, her performance on competitive exams led to one promotion after another, and eventually to Chief of Service, in charge of Creedmoor's geographic unit for northeast Queens.

In 1970, the Plotnicks moved to their present home on Parkside Drive in Great Neck, and in 1971 Hermine joined GNCS. They picked the house, in part, because it had a living room that could accommodate not only Hermine's Steinway but also a Baldwin grand, a gift to her from her mother. In GNCS, Hermine met Phyllis Hirsch--"a pro with perfect pitch"--and for five years they met on Saturday mornings to play two-piano music in their living rooms.

A 'top mop' at Creedmoor

In 1978, Susan Sheehan, a writer for the New Yorker, showed up at Creedmoor to do an in-depth report on the treatment of schizophrenia, using as a case study a disturbed woman confined to Hermine's unit. The study lasted three years, during which time the patient moved in and out of Creedmoor. Ms. Sheehan wrote a series of four articles for the magazine, then turned them into a book, "Is There No Place on Earth for Me?", which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983. Hermine was prominently featured in the book.

The articles, dispassionately written, were nonetheless highly critical of Creedmoor, and the author noted that "Mrs. Plotnick was as harshly critical of Creedmoor as the visitors to her unit and the patients." She quoted Hermine as saying, "Creedmoor should be so much better than it is, but it's a relatively safe place to be crazy." After her three-year study, Ms. Sheehan concluded that Hermine was a "good manager." Hermine's son David, then in his twenties, put it differently. Noting that his mother was constantly called in when things got in a mess, he referred to her as "top mop."

Hermine sees close parallels between management and OT. Both, she says, require you to assess problems, assess capabilities, teach, and, in particular, match tasks to individual capabilities. It's not a big stretch, she says, "to say that management is occupational therapy."

While at Creedmoor, Hermine, who had earlier taught courses at Columbia and SUNY-Farmingdale, put one foot solidly into academia. She was asked, in her spare time, to design OT programs for York College and LaGuardia Community College. She designed the programs and got them accredited.

There came a time at Creedmoor that Hermine felt she had "been there, done that," and she left to seek a new experience. Leaving Creedmoor, she says, "was one of the hardest things I've ever done." But she did have time off, and one thing she did was embark on adult bat mitzvah studies at Temple Israel in Great Neck. Her parents were Jewish, she explains, but, even though her father's father was a rabbi, they ran a secular household. "I was eight years old before I knew I was Jewish," she says. She celebrated her Bat Mitzvah in 1991.

After a two-year respite from work, she took an OT job at the Glen Cove unit of North Shore University Hospital. After almost four decades of trying to help mental patients, she was now asked to learn how to work with the physically disabled--"phys dis," as it is known in the profession.

She spent nearly five years at the hospital, but then finally opted for academia. She accepted an offer from the New York Institute of Technology to set up an OT program there. While teaching part time, she designed the curriculum, hired the faculty, and got the program accredited by the state. In 1996 she became the full-time director, and the program has now graduated 102 students. Hermine herself teaches the courses in management, gerontology, and rehabilitation technology. Sadly, she has also become primary care-giver for her husband, who is suffering from advanced Parkinson's Disease.

Now in her 34th year in GNCS, Hermine is a stalwart member of the tenor section. Females as tenors are controversial in music circles, but many choruses rely on them to compensate for the shortage of male tenors. As good a musician as she is, Hermine confesses that the tenor part, written on the treble clef but sung an octave lower, can be confusing to someone trained to sing the higher parts. But she's glad, she says, to do whatever helps the chorus. And finally she has the company of a second female tenor, Joan Baum, who joined the chorus in 2005.