HIGH PROFILE: Dr. Larry Mendelsohn

A good name is to be more desired than great wealth,

Favor is better than silver and gold.

— Proverbs 22:1

This verse of Old Testament Scripture can be found on the bottom of Dr. Larry Mendelsohn’s 2009 Fay Boozman Award plaque, which hangs on the wall of his office.

The Arkansas Physicians Resource Council presented Mendelsohn this honor in recognition of his “exemplary life of excellence and faith in family; faith integration in medical practice; concern and action for community service and health.”

These qualities become apparent to any new patient who visits the oncologist at his offices in the year-old, expanded CARTI (formerly Central Arkansas Radiation Therapy Institute) facility, strategically located on the edge of a bluff overlooking a breathtaking blanket of west Little Rock foliage. This is the flagship facility for a statewide, nonprofit provider of comprehensive cancer treatment to more than 22,000 patients each year.

Mendelsohn transitioned to CARTI though a business merger with Little Rock Hematology/Oncology, a practice he co-founded. He was a senior partner at his former practice and serves as medical director at CARTI.

A pamphlet from the former Little Rock Hematology/Oncology depicts Mendelsohn wearing a tuxedo with a snazzy printed bow tie, a wise smile spreading across his bearded face. Inside, he reveals himself to new patients. Boxes of New Testament Scripture dot the brochure — really a testimony — in which Mendelsohn unashamedly summarizes his life story, writes about being introduced to Christianity and outlines his faith-based philosophy regarding treating patients.

“My part has been not only to continue to see my patients every day … but [try] to manage all these super-intelligent beings, being the medical director,” Mendelsohn says. “There’s a mountain out there to climb because of insurers and the government. That’s a challenge we fight every day.”

Mendelsohn will be the keynote speaker for the Nov. 19 Tux ’N Trees gala, the cornerstone event of the 40th annual CARTI Auxiliary Festival of Trees. The four-day holiday celebration and fundraising event benefiting CARTI cancer patients is Nov. 16-19 in the Wally Allen Ballroom of the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock. This year’s theme is “Cirque du Festival.” Christmas trees are donated or sponsored by various individuals, companies and organizations and auctioned off during the festival.

In the past, information disseminated during Tux ’N Trees has focused on the doctor-patient relationship. “But we’re going to do it a little differently this year,” focusing on all aspects of services now provided by CARTI, Mendelsohn says.

When Mendelsohn sees a patient, he follows the apostle Paul’s statement in 1 Cor inthians 9:19-23 — in order to be effective in his ministry, he becomes all things to all people.

“If I’m in the room with a guy from east Arkansas who’s a rice farmer, I’m going to take on that, I’m going to be that. I’m going to offer all the wisdom that I have in terms of medicine. If I’m in the room with an interior decorator from New York, I’m going to be the guy that that guy or girl feels comfortable with, so that we don’t have to worry about me being some highfalutin’ doctor.”

Highfalutin’ is not who Mendelsohn is, says his associate, Dr. Balan Nair.

To him, Mendelsohn is “just amazing. … somebody [who] everybody looks up to in the organization.” In addition to having “a wicked sense of humor” that keeps everyone in stitches, “he’s consistent about doing the right thing for the patient. I think it’s probably because of his spiritual underpinnings, his spiritual decision making,” Nair says.

Of course, patients of all faiths — or of no faith — are treated with respect. But Mendelsohn loves to relate the joy of his religious experience and his journey to that experience.

“My part has been not only to continue to see my patients every day … but [try] to manage all these super-intelligent beings, being the medical director. There’s a mountain out there to climb because of insurers and the government. That’s a challenge we fight every day.”

Mendelsohn was the youngest of four children and the only son born to a pair of Reform Jews from World War II Germany. His mother’s parents had been killed in a concentration camp. His parents came to America and settled in Fort Smith. Shortly after his bar mitzvah, the then 13-year-old Mendelsohn was sent to St. Mark’s School of Texas, an Episcopal boys’ boarding school in Dallas.

“My dad was a doctor, a radiologist, and what I didn’t know at the time was that he had gotten a cancer diagnosis,” Mendelsohn says. “I think he wanted to protect me from him undergoing treatments. I wasn’t even aware of his diagnosis until two or three years later.”

After graduating from St. Mark’s, Mendelsohn headed to Northwestern University in Chicago for a year before transferring to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He finished second in his class, earning a Phi Beta Kappa key, and was accepted to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.

But by that time he’d learned more about his father’s illness, and almost as a reflection of the elder Mendelsohn’s physical pain, the son grappled with mental and emotional pain. “Growing up, he was kind of my rock,” he says. Now, “I would watch him, as he suffered, yell out to God — ‘Where are you? How could this happen?’” By the time I got to med school I wasn’t even sure why I was there. He was dying. I was drinking and trying to escape from all that.”

But then came what Mendelsohn calls the defining moment of his life — “I met Sonya.” The former Sonya Marie Ray was a fellow Fort Smith native, a University of Arkansas at Little Rock student and an actress at nearby Murry’s Dinner Playhouse. “I got a lot of free meals” there, Mendelsohn remembers fondly. The couple got engaged in 1979, the year his father passed away.

“I dated lots of girls and met lots of people, but Sonya was totally different,” he says. “She had a relationship with Jesus, and it just made her different. And that really touched me because I was looking for hope.”

So Mendelsohn found himself studying the Bible, especially the New Testament. “Before I was halfway through Matthew, I realized that this was a Jewish guy, writing about another Jewish guy — to a bunch of Jewish guys,” he says. “I mean I couldn’t believe how Jewish it was. And I was just captivated by that.”

The Mendelsohns married June 14, 1980, then “I spent the next couple of years just becoming a Bible scholar,” he says.

A NEW ATTITUDE

The couple left Little Rock so that Mendelsohn could complete an internal medicine internship at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. They came back for his residency at UAMS, then took off again when he accepted a fellowship in oncology at the University of Kentucky at Lexington. “Before we moved back here [in 1985], I realized that I needed that relationship with Christ. Even though I’d lost my dad, I suddenly had some evidence that God loved me, and there was a purpose for my life. And that changed everything.”

While at Kentucky, Mendelsohn was offered a job opportunity back in Little Rock, and he took it.

He and Dr. Tony Flippin formed Little Rock Hematology/Oncology in a small office at what is now CHI St. Vincent Infirmary with four employees.

It was a leap of faith.

“I was not really ready for private practice,” Mendelsohn says. “I was certainly not trained in business. I didn’t feel gifted, really, to do what I was about to do.” But he felt the opportunity was a calling. “I said, ‘God, I want you to use me to help others in dire need, [help me] become the best oncology physician I can be, and just build this practice anyway you want. I’m committing it to you.’”

In 1994, Flippin announced he was leaving to practice in Fort Smith. Mendelsohn kept taking on new doctors and increasing the staff. The practice moved to the Baptist Health campus and, by 2004, had grown to a $50 million operation.

Still, Mendelsohn and his colleagues dreamed of a cancer center that not only put all the doctors under one roof, but also encompassed all testing and treatment, as well as the professionals who provide other services for cancer patients, such as dietitians and social workers.

“We met with different entities for four or five years as we continued to grow and expand,” Mendelsohn says. “In 2011, we started meeting with CARTI.” By that time, the practice had grown to eight oncologists, five radiologists and 180 employees. “We felt like merging with an entity like CARTI, with capital, would give us an opportunity to stay in business and build a center and fulfill that dream.”

MINISTER OF MEDICINE

Oncology has to be a calling, Mendelsohn says, because the minute you step into a room with someone who’s going through what is likely the worst time in his life, it’s like jumping into a turbulent river. The object is to somehow help him deal with cancer.

He tries to help from a spiritual standpoint. “There has to be more to life than just [giving] chemotherapy.” In addition to the prayer he offers, “there’s so many new treatments, so many diseases for which we are so much better [equipped to battle]. Again, the challenge of making these drugs affordable has been formidable. But everyone’s trying. Hopefully we’ll get there.”

Having developed what he and his wife called the Ministry to the Inner City, they brought it to the Little Rock area after their last move here. Their church, Fellowship Bible Church, was involved in Step Ministries in the Eastgate Terrace housing project in North Little Rock. They began washing cars to raise money to send the young people from there to Kamp Kanakuk, a Christian summer camp in Missouri.

“God just really got involved in that,” Mendelsohn says. “After two or three years of washing cars, we were sending hundreds of kids to camp every summer.”

As that event grew, they developed a 5K race called Run for Their Lives, which later became the Bank of the Ozarks Run for Their Lives 5K and benefited several additional nonprofits, including Keith Jackson’s Positive Atmosphere Reaches Kids (P.A.R.K.). In 2007, the race’s last year, it was a big 5K road race — and benefiting from the addition of a banquet raised $1 million to break the record for one-night fundraising that year.

Arthur Boutiette — Mendelsohn’s friend, fellow race organizer and Arkansas’ director of Disability Determination for the Social Security Administration — praises him for “his giving spirit and the fact that he’s always wanting to help people who have less than he has” without wanting recognition.

Boutiette also praises Mendelsohn for a work ethic that he would display with humor. “We would always be working on the race, and I would be standing around giving orders. And he would say, ‘Are your legs painted on?’ Meaning, ‘get to work.’”

Mendelsohn has also worn the hat of instructor. He has taught a course, “The life of Christ from a Jewish Perspective.” He and Sonya, as an outreach, hold a Messianic Passover (the celebration of God leading Jews out of slavery in Egypt).

FAMILY MAN

When he’s not tending to patients, Mendelsohn, a veteran of four marathons, runs and plays golf and, through the years, has been a devoted father to his four now-grown children: Katy Mendelsohn Brooks of Dallas, Jacquelyn Hall and Mary Mendelsohn of Little Rock and Max Mendelsohn, who is ranked as one of the top amateur tennis players in the country and will be heading to Pepperdine University on a tennis scholarship.

Brooks describes Mendelsohn as a devoted father who has always been “fun and lighthearted.”

“Growing up, most of my favorite memories [involve] him coaching me in softball. He was just always there,” she says. She and her sisters loved to shadow him at work and pretend to be nurses, she says.

“We all wanted to be his twin. We all wanted to be like him. With his intellect comes lots of humor and wisdom.”