Long-serving Dundalk pediatrician turns 85

First published Friday, Aug. 2, 2024 in the Dundalk Eagle.

Dr. Cross O’Donovan ran a pediatric office on Dundalk Avenue for over 40 years. Now, he’s turning 85 and looking back at his career.

“My favorite part was just dealing with kids and their families,” he said. “I spent a lot of time trying to convince young mothers that they knew more than they thought they knew about raising their kids.”

Big changes in his industry and in Dundalk accompanied him, he said.

“The whole place got turned upside down,” he said.

First Western Electric shut down, then Bethlehem Steel Mill closed and Procter and Gamble left. Much of the manufacturing base that formed Dundalk disappeared.

It didn’t affect his practice much, he said, because most of the workers’ kids were older than the ones he treated.

Changes in the industry did affect his practice, though. As medicine got more and more expensive, insurance companies cropped up. Instead of patients paying directly, his office had to send the bill to their insurance companies.

“I wouldn’t say that it changed the way I operated, but it did for some of my colleagues,” O’Donovan, who was the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics’s Maryland chapter, said. “The surgeons in particular. They couldn’t even tie their shoes without checking with the insurance companies.”

He retired to working one day per week in 2007 and fully retired in 2013. In his newfound spare time, he fixed his house up, golfed (unsuccessfully, he says), watched the Orioles and helped out as a teacher’s aide at Battle Grove Elementary School.

In 2019, six years after his full retirement, he moved to Raleigh, N.C. to be with two of his three kids who moved there — “one of the smartest decisions I’ve ever made,” he says.

He sung in the Chorus of the Chesapeake, a barbershop choir, for 45 years. He now sings in a Raleigh barbershop chorus.

Dundalk Pediatric Associates is still going strong without him, but has moved to Merritt Boulevard. O’Donovan visits Baltimore occasionally, he said, since he still has a sister living here and a “smattering” of friends around.

“I seem to have outlasted most of them,” he joked.

O’Donovan turns 85 on Aug. 17.