For Ira Ackerman, working at Sinai Hospital was always more than just a job or livelihood. It was a major part of his life.
A Pikesville resident who was born at Sinai, he met his wife Amy while working the night shift there, and his children and grandchildren were all born at the hospital.
Oh, and he worked at Sinai for nearly half a century, starting back when Jimmy Carter was president.
“I enjoyed every second of what I did for a living and I told people if I had to go back, I don’t think I’d do it any differently,” he says.
After 45 years, Ackerman recently retired from Sinai, where he worked as a biomedical electronic technician repairing and maintaining medical equipment.
“I enjoyed what I did because it was rewarding,” says Ackerman, 65. ”So many people counted on you, whether it was in cardiac surgery, the intensive care unit, or labor and delivery. Doctors repair patients and we repair the equipment they use to repair patients. We’re the ‘doctors of medical equipment,’ that’s the way I look at it.”
During his long career at Sinai, Ackerman says he saw and did it all.
“I’ve worked during blizzards, hurricanes, strikes at the hospital when the housekeeping staff went on strike,” he says. “I’ve mopped floors. I’ve used a snow-blower to blow snow off the emergency room decks so helicopters could land. …
“You’ve got to give a lot of hats off to health care workers,” he says. “It’s a tough job.”
A particular point of pride in his career, Ackerman says, was working closely at Sinai in the late 1970s and early ‘80s with cardiologists Dr. Michel Mirowski and Dr. Morton M. Mower, co-inventors of the implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, a device that has saved countless lives.
Among his friends and associates, Ackerman is known as a man of good spirits, limitless energy and creativity. In his retirement, he says he plans to continue his passion for innovation and tinkering around. And he’s hoping it will pay off.
Ackerman has invented a game called Gridiron Golf that incorporates the rules of football for scoring with miniature golf. The game is played on a small rug with a miniature football field on it. At the other end is a small board with “mouseholes” that denote touchdowns, points after and field goals. The player putts the balls to score.
The idea was conceived at a Halloween “trunk-or-treat” gathering Ackerman attended in 2022 in the neighborhood where his children and grandchildren live.
“My granddaughter loves ‘Toy Story,’” he recalls. “I made a board with some holes in it and put the ‘Toy Story’ characters on top, and we had a rug and the kids would hit a little plastic golf ball. Well, the kids kept lining up and lining up, and at the end of the night, one of the fathers came up, and said, ‘This would be a great tailgate game.’
“And the lightbulb went off in my head.”
Ackerman says he and his company, Ackerman Innovations and Designs LLC, already have 500 Gridiron Golf games in production, with pre-sales of more than 100. The game has a U.S. copyright trademark and design patent.
Meanwhile, Ackerman has already lined up media appearances to promote the game to the community. “We’re probably going to do a live feed from the manufacturing company in Baltimore,” he says. “It’s a Baltimore-based game. It’s a venture that I never thought would ever come around. But I’ve always been a tinkerer. I always like to play and do things with my hands.”
Gridiron Golf is for players of all ages and can be enjoyed by families together. “My granddaughter can play at the age of 3,” he says. “If you can stand and use a putter, you can play.”
Born and raised in Baltimore, Ackerman became a bar mitzvah at Liberty Jewish Center (now known as Moses Montefiore Anshe Emunah Congregation in Greengate).
“We love to keep the holidays,” he says of his family. Ackerman’s son became a bar mitzvah at Levindale Hebrew and Geriatric Center, with residents there attending the service.
Ackerman says he always encouraged his non-Jewish colleagues at Sinai to feel free to pepper him with questions about the Jewish holidays, and taught them essential Jewish phrases like Shalom and L’Shana Tova.
“They knew when it was Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah,” he says. “You kind of cross-train people in a culture.”
These days, Ackerman says he has no plans of slowing down, despite the well-earned milestone of retirement.
“The guys at work would say, ‘Ira, you need to drink decaf!’ I hope I can keep this vitality as long as I can,” he says. “But I like doing for others. I get pride out of it. It gives me self-worth that I’ve done the right thing for my children and grandchildren. They’re thankful and they’re grateful, and that’s all worth it to me.”
For information about Gridiron Golf, visit gridirongolfgame.com.
Anna Lippe is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer.
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