Curt Bluefeld Jr. dies; longtime Miller Place doctor was 93

Dr. Curt Bluefeld Jr. made house calls part of his practice, volunteered to treat migrant farm workers and championed heart health, helping establish the first cardiac intensive-care unit at Port Jefferson’s John T. Mather Memorial Hospital.

The former Miller Place resident died Feb. 25 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, after suffering a stroke about a month earlier, his family said. He was 93.

Bluefeld specialized in cardiology at his longtime Port Jefferson practice and served on the school board for the Miller Place school district. His self-taught hobby was building wooden boats from scratch and cruising the waters of Long Island Sound and beyond, the family said.

“He was a really bright guy. I wish I had his brains,” said a son, Frederick Bluefeld, 62, of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

Curt Bluefeld encouraged his children to go to college and instilled the value of hard work.

“He let me know that I need to go the extra mile simply because I was a woman, and that I was as qualified as a man,” said a daughter, Gretchen Granbery, 59, of Guilford, Connecticut.

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Bluefeld enrolled at Duke University at 16. After three years, he went on to New York University College of Medicine, earning his medical degree in 1945.

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That year he also served as a doctor on the USS Orca in the Pacific. He was part of a Navy medical team in the Marshall Islands that assessed the health of Bikini Atoll residents before the United States began a series of nuclear weapons tests there in 1946.

Bluefeld met his wife, Frances, a Navy nurse, when he was stationed in Oakland, California. They married in 1950 and later moved to Miller Place.

One of a few doctors in the area initially, he sometimes accepted potatoes as payments from farmers, said another son, Curt “Skip” Bluefeld, 65, of Fairfax, Virginia.

The elder Bluefeld served as Mather Memorial’s medical board chairman three times: in 1965-66, 1973-74 and 1982. He was also the hospital’s director of internal medicine for many years until 1987, the family said.

Bluefeld served on the Miller Place school board for six years beginning in 1965, including one year as vice president. His family said he was involved in efforts to build Miller Place’s first high school, which was built in 1974.

A charter member of the Mount Sinai Yacht Club, he passed his love of boating on to his four children. When he turned 85, his children and their families raced full-sized wooden boats they had built with him in his shop in Mollusk, Virginia, where he lived after retiring in 1988.

In his will, Bluefeld asked that his ashes be scattered in Long Island Sound.

He was preceded in death by his wife and a daughter, Hedwig Fitz of Barrington, Rhode Island. Additional survivors include four grandchildren.