Harry Ronis, 99

Harry Ronis, former Woodmere and Cedarhurst resident who served as the former president of his local chapter of the NAACP, died on Nov. 30, two months and five days short of his 100th birthday. He was 99.

Ronis was born on Feb. 5, 1915 in Philadelphia and came to live in Cedarhurst when he was 8, living with his family on Central Avenue above his family’s cigar store. A graduate of Lawrence High School in 1933, he attended Columbia University and the City College of New York during the Great Depression, where he majored in chemistry. During that time, he also enjoyed acting. It was through acting when he met his wife, Leona. While performing in a theater group, he played the husband to Leona’s wife in Clifford Odets’s “Awake and Sing.” 

Near the end of World War II, Ronis became a sergeant in the Army and worked in Army hospitals in Northern France and Ireland for three years. When the war ended, he returned to New York and married Leona the first day he was released, on Dec. 1, 1945. He went on to own and run a clinical laboratory called the Nassau Diagnostic Laboratory. He and Leona raised two daughters in Woodmere. 

Ronis was also passionate about human and civil rights. He committed himself to humanitarian causes, becoming involved in various organizations for peace, anti-nuclear weapons, gun control and the civil rights struggle of the 1960s and ’70s.  In the 1970s, he was the president of the local NAACP chapter.

Passionate about the arts, Harry had a vast knowledge and keen love of the fine arts, theater, classical music and literature, according to his daughter, Kim Gerstein. He had a subscription to Carnegie Hall for more than 50 years, she said. 

“My father used the city like a playground, going to museum shows, galleries, and especially classical music concerts,” Kim said. “When he moved to the city, I became his companion to all of the concerts, and we went to hundreds of them over the 11 years that he lived in the city. He was scholarly in his knowledge of fine art and classical music. We would sit in our seats and the minute he opened the program he could tell me everything I needed to know about the composers, the period of the pieces and the pieces themselves.”

His friends, Kim said, called him the “mayor of the Five Towns” because he’d lived most of his life there. Ronis moved to Manhattan after Leona’s death in 2001, at the age of 88, in order to be closer to family, friends and the cultural life of the city. 

In addition to his daughter Kim, and her husband, Gary Gerstein, Ronis is survived by another daughter, Amy Ronis and her husband, Curt Chaplin; his grandchildren, Cammie and Jake Chaplin; one sister, Rose Mandel, of Fla.

A memorial service is planned for sometime in the spring, Kim said.