Avron J. Maletzky ’59

In the great Class of 1959 there are classmates who are smart, talented, and friendly, with brilliant careers, but who are not well known to many others. One of those classmates was Av, who died Jan. 21, 2021, in Seattle.

Av was a music major and, with his musical talents (mainly on the violin), was concertmaster of the Savoyard, Triangle Club, and Princeton University Symphony orchestras. He ate at Wilson Lodge. 

Upon graduation from Princeton, Av went into medicine and stayed there. In 1963 he obtained a medical degree from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, served a pediatric internship at Duke, and then a pediatric residency at Babies Hospital (Presbyterian Hospital, Columbia University). Av served two years in the U.S. Communicable Disease Center’s Epidemic Intelligence Service in Atlanta before moving to Seattle, where he took up residence and engaged in the practice of pediatrics, which he loved to the end. 

When not engaged in pediatrics, he hiked, climbed, and snowshoed in the Northwest’s Cascade Range, and he played his violin in Orchestra Seattle and several other orchestras in the Seattle area. 

Although he was labeled at times a loner, his closest friends were the children he treated and their families — they were his life’s work. We have found no known next-of-kin.