More than a Doctor

I first met Dr. Alfred Frontera, who died in 2024 at the age of seventy-nine, when I worked as a clinical psychologist at Community Rehabilitation in Kingston, New York. When he referred patients to me, he would sign his notes with a special notation, a capital F that looked like a ship’s anchor. Both of us were members of the Order of Malta, a Catholic lay religious order that works in many war zones and disaster zones worldwide. Gradually we became friends.

Once we met unexpectedly on a Saturday morning. My son, William, and I had wanted to get the earliest appointment for blood work at our local hospital. It was before 8:00. William has Down syndrome and was about twenty years old. He has always been quite a conversationalist and has many things to say, bolstered by his seventh grade reading level and his positive view of people. So, when I had to step away for a moment, he remained in the waiting area. Upon returning, I heard his characteristically loud voice magnified by the hallway. Keeping up the tempo and volume was another voice that I didn’t recognize. It was Dr. Frontera. He had never met William before. The topic of conversation might have been Jackie Chan or Daniel Radcliffe or some event that happened at school, but Frontera knew just how to keep up the conversation. They became instant friends.

“He was a Renaissance man,” said Dr. Eugene Heslin, Chief Medical Officer of the New York State Department of Health, who was a close friend of Frontera. “Anything he wanted to do he could achieve. He had limitless energy. He gave so much to the community.”

Frontera was born in 1944. He grew up in Brooklyn and attended Xaverian High School and Fordham University. He would have made a good Jesuit but ended up using his talents in a different direction. He completed his medical residency at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City, where he met his wife, Veronica. He was on track to become a permanent faculty member there, but one weekend, he was driving up to Albany, New York, and stopped off in Kingston. Someone he talked to offered him a job. He took it. For the next forty-eight years, he made Kingston his home.

Photograph courtesy of UCF College of Medicine.

Frontera established a family practice residency program in Kingston and worked in it until his retirement, training over one hundred medical residents. He believed in his community and wanted to give back all the good things he had received. “He knew what people needed,” Heslin said. For years, after the work in Kingston was done, Frontera would drive north to Lake Katrine to work at Community Rehabilitation Center with children suffering from neurological and physical impairments.

“My father’s deep, abiding religious faith was the core of his personality,” said Dr. Tom Frontera, also a neurologist. “At breakfast on Sundays, he would hold a Bible study session with the family that included handouts.” His faith manifested itself in many aspects of his life. His reading in the evening included not only neurology articles but also textbooks about Catholic theology. His Knights of Malta robe hung in his closet in a place of honor.

One evening, visiting the Fronteras’ house, I met a man dressed in colorful garments. Very well spoken, this man was a high-ranking prelate in the Roman Catholic Church – Archbishop Matthew Ndagoso, a graduate of the Angelicum University in Rome who now worked in the Archdiocese of Kaduna, Nigeria.

Kaduna is a city in Northern Nigeria, where violent fighting occurs between the government and extremists. Two priests accompanied the archbishop to Frontera’s house – they joked that in their country they had to protect him with rifles. Within the past several years, two of Archbishop Matthew’s priests have been murdered. Many of the bishops and archbishops in this part of the world take the gospel very seriously and live among the poor they serve. Their priests are prepared to give their lives to protect their archbishop. Dinner at Frontera’s gave them a respite from their struggles, and encouragement to return.

Dr. Jonathan Zimmerman, a Bruderhof physician, is one of the hundred residents Frontera taught in Kingston. “When I met Alfred,” Zimmerman said, “his first words were ‘We’re going to make you a good family doctor, and family doctors need neurology.’ He was the consummate physician in the old sense. Alfred was gentle, brilliant, and personable as well. He was my mentor, teacher, and colleague; gradually, he became my friend.”

“He was family to me,” Zimmerman says, “and he was honorary grandfather to my five children. He’d do many activities with them. He and Veronica came to visit us when our son was born. Later our children would make drawings for them, which the Fronteras would prominently display on their refrigerator.”

One day Frontera called Zimmerman and said, “Dad’s dying.” Zimmerman and his wife met the Fronteras at the hospital. “We sang and we prayed,” Zimmerman remembers. “One song was ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’ (Grant Us Peace), a prayer used for centuries in the Roman Catholic Church. We sang together in the ICU as his father passed.”

According to Heslin, Frontera’s style of medicine was simple: “Listen to patients; they’re telling you the answer. Your job is to put it into medical terms. Watch them, see what they do, and pick out the pieces. People would walk up to him and say, ‘You saved my life.’”