Veryl Rosenbaum, a lively resident at Vista Grande in Cortez, was kind enough to share parts of her colorful story, though what follows barely scratches the surface of her adventurous life.
Rosenbaum was born 89 years ago in Windsor, Ontario, across the river from Detroit. At 12, Rosenbaum and her family packed their things and moved to Detroit. A few months later, her dad died of a heart attack.
“Me, my mom, my sister – we all got jobs, or else we’d have to move into an apartment, which was a bad thing at the time,” Rosenbaum said, laughing.
She remembered getting a job as a short-order cook, and how, thanks to all the hard work, “we didn’t have to live in an apartment.”
Years passed, and she married a doctor and joined a circle of doctor friends.
“We’d talk patients and pills, it was so boring,” she said. “The wives were so bored.”
But, in her defense, she “was only 17 when we married, and he was 24. We were little children who knew nothing about marriage,” she said.
So they divorced, and eventually she met the great love of her life, Jean Rosenbaum.
“I don’t remember the years, it’s been so long,” Rosenbaum said. “Jean had divorced his wife also, and we fell in love.”
She said they were friends first, which is the soundest foundation on which to build a relationship because “romance can turn so quickly from love to hate.”
“But friends work it out,” she said.
Rosenbaum remembered how she first heard of Jean, in a newspaper article about his lifesaving invention.
At the time, Jean was a 24-year-old student and hospital intern at Wayne State University in Detroit when he was inspired to develop the external pacemaker, which electronically helps a person’s heart maintain a steady beat.
A news release spoke of his distress “at the sight of people dying,” which was, in part, his inspiration for inventing it.
But the seed was planted many years before that, when Jean was a child and watched the movie Frankenstein.
“Inspired by this, Rosenbaum wondered if a small jolt of electric current could be mechanically produced to stimulate a damaged heart to cause it to beat regularly, thus reviving a patient,” according to a story called “Medicine in the Movies.”
Before the pacemaker’s success, though, people picked on Jean.
“He was called a ghoul by his own professors because carried that machine around,” Rosenbaum said. “They made fun of him. He knew it worked, though, and it did.”
After tinkering with the prototype for some time, “Jean and a colleague had the opportunity to try it out on a dying patient one evening while the rest of the staff was away,” a news release said.
The patient “came back to life.”
“Overnight, he changed the world,” Rosenbaum said. “Imagine opening the door to electronic medicine.”
And it was that news story where Rosenbaum first learned of Jean.
She said that he never accepted any money for the device he discovered in 1951 that, over the years, has saved millions of lives.
The original machine was handmade out of wood, leather, plastic and metal parts. It’s now on display in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.
“The children were playing with the machine, so I encouraged him to put it in the Smithsonian. It’s not a toy,” she laughed.
Jean’s pacemaker is used externally; the implanted one was developed a few years later, in 1960.
Not long after Jean’s pacemaker was invented, to demonstrate what it could do, Rosenbaum put on her videographer hat and made short film called Frankenstein and the Pacemaker.
“I edited it, but it had no ‘umph,’ and it’s got to have that,” she said. “It’s got to grab you.”
So Jean wrote a letter to Mel Brooks that started, “From one Jew to another, I have not made a dime on the pacemaker.”
In the note that followed, Jean asked Brooks for footage from his 1974 comedic horror film Young Frankenstein to use in the educational video.
“He (Brooks) gave us pictures and music from Young Frankenstein. What a man, what a sweetheart,” she said.
The pacemaker wasn’t Jean’s only contribution – he was a writer, too.
“We wrote together,” said Rosenbaum.
They wrote stories on practical psychology, with books titled Conquering Loneliness, How to be Friends with Yourself & Your Family and Love in a Dying World.
“American publishers would send us all over the country, we had a great time traveling together. We had the time of our life,” she said.
One time, Rosenbaum had just finished a radio interview and she met Shirley Temple, who was on after her.
“She was the same sweetheart we saw in the movies,” she said.
Rosenbaum said that she wrote Stepparenting, but put Jean’s name on it.
“When I wrote it, people were just started getting to get divorced,” she said of the 1977 book. “When you walk into family as a stepparent, you’re immediately hated.”
The book, then, helps stepparents navigate an otherwise difficult, uncomfortable situation.
A New York Times Bestseller published in 1972, Is Your Volkswagen a Sex Symbol? got Jean on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson not one, but three times.
“It’s about revealing yourself through how you live. But we said, let’s make it hilarious,” said Rosenbaum.
The book’s preface starts, “What deep psychological forces cause us to select the kind of car we have, the pets we treasure, the house we love, and our very manners and ways of doing things?”
“Your habits, indeed, tell all.”
The preface concludes there, and leads into Chapter 1: “Is More Horsepower Really More Happiness?”
Rosenbaum herself was a psychoanalyst, an author, a professional watercolorist.
She also worked with the Medical Missionary Sisters at the Natural Childbirth College in Santa Fe and as a blackjack dealer for 27 years at the Sky Ute Casino Resort in Ignacio.
She said she’s “blessed with gifts,” as in psychic gifts, that allow her to do things like dream analysis.
“You have bright blue eyes, they’re sparkling,” she said, gazing into mine.
“Men never liked me looking into their eyes. They said I could see right through them,” she laughed.
Rosenbaum underscored her gratitude for having spent the first 12 years of her life in Canada, where they “treat boys and girls the same.”
“It was a great foundation of total self-confidence,” she said.
From the start, she had instilled in her the idea that “women weren’t any less than men, like they were in America.”
When Rosenbaum became a psychoanalyst, which focuses on healing through the unconscious, she first recalled how she “loved” the role, and said she started seeing teens “when I was close to one myself.”
What’s more, “there weren’t many women psychoanalysts at the time. But I had a good reputation, and confidence.”
It didn’t take her long to realize “that Freud was wrong.”
“He’s European, and Europeans don’t know a thing about Americans,” she said of Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurologist.
“He said I was having hostile dreams – well, yeah, we’re hostile people,” she said.
While Freud “opened the door” to psychoanalysis, Rosenbaum holds that Carl Jung “is the man.”
Jung proposed the idea of the collective unconscious, in which there’s a shared, universal unconscious among us all. He cites things like archetypes as proof.
It was this practice that initially turned her and Jean on to Durango – a patient invited them out and showed them around.
She and Jean raised their kids there and lived there until he died in the 1990s.
“He got cancer of the throat, it was painful,” she said. “There’s a time with cancer, when you know you’re going to go.”
“The night before, he was in a coma and asked me to bring him all the love poems he wrote for me. I was reading them, crying. And he turned to me and asked what’s wrong,” she said.
“He had green eyes again – eyes get all dark during cancer – and he looked like he was 30 again. When I remember him, I see that face.”
Rosenbaum is now living at Vista Grande Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center in Cortez. She’s still painting watercolors and conducting dream analyses.
“I was born with joy of life,” she said. “It’s quite a story when you think about it, but not when you’re living it.”
