C8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, AUGUST 2 , 2020
obituaries
CORRECTIONl The Aug. 1 obituary of former
Tanzanian president Benjamin
Mkapa incorrectly stated that
Tanzania obtained independence
from England. It obtained inde-
pendence from the United King-
dom.BY EMILY LANGERIrene Pollin’s daughter, Linda,
was 16 years old when she died in
1963 after an operation to correct
a congenital heart defect. Linda
was the second child Mrs. Pollin
and her husband, Washington
real estate developer Abe Pollin,
had lost to a heart condition; their
son Kenneth, called Jay Jay, had
died 11 years earlier, after his first
birthday.
“The death of the child ends
part of the parent’s own future,”
Mrs. Pollin once reflected. “In fact,
part of them dies with the child.”
After Linda’s death, Mrs. Pollin
and her husband descended into
what both described as deep de-
pressions. Abe Pollin emerged
from his in part by building an
affordable housing project named
for his daughter in the District
and by channeling his energy into
the purchase of the Baltimore Bul-
lets in 1964.
He and Mrs. Pollin, a co-owner
of the NBA team and active part-
ner in her husband’s development
work, moved the franchise in 1973
to Prince George’s County, where
they built the Capital Centre, and
later to Washington, where their
$220 million investment in what
became the Verizon Center (now
Capital One Arena) was credited
with revitalizing the downtown
neighborhood.
In addition to the Wizards —
the NBA team’s name since 1997 —
their sports empire grew to in-
clude the WNBA’s Washington
Mystics and the NHL’s Washing-
ton Capitals as the Pollins estab-
lished themselves as one of the
most prominent couples in the
city’s civic and philanthropic life.
For the 46 years that she and
her husband owned the Wizards,
Mrs. Pollin spent her evenings
cheering on the team. But for
much of that time, she devoted
her days to what she described as
a new calling after the devastating
losses of her children.
The mother of two other sons,
Mrs. Pollin returned to school in
her 40s to complete her college
degree and then pursue a master's
degree in social work. She became
a psychotherapist and social
worker and created innovative
counseling centers serving pa-
tients with chronic disease and
their families.
“I wanted,” she once told The
Washington Post, “to give people
the kind of help I so desperately
needed and could never find.”
Mrs. Pollin died July 28 at her
home in Amherst, Mass., accord-
ing to a family statement. She was- The cause was pulmonary fail-
ure, said a family spokesman,
Matt Williams.
As a developer, Abe Pollin was
known primarily for the apart-
ment buildings he built across the
Washington area. One of them, a
luxury high-rise in the Friendship
Heights neighborhood, was called
the Irene.
“Abe used to bring rolls of
building plans home at night,”
Mrs. Pollin told Washingtonian
magazine in 2011. “We’d spread
them out on the bed. I did design
work on every project. With the
teams, we talked over players,
coaches. There was nothing we
didn’t talk about.”
Mrs. Pollin said publicly that
their marriage was strained by the
deaths of their children, which
contributed to two separations.
“I wasn’t angry at Abe, and he
wasn’t angry at me,” she told The
Post. “We were angry at the situa-
tion we were in. If only someone
had pointed this out to us. It
would have saved us so much
time.”
Mrs. Pollin started two counsel-
ing centers, including one at
Washington Hospital Center,
where she and other therapists
provided individual, family and
group counseling. She wrote two
books, “Taking Charge: Overcom-
ing the Challenges of Long-Term
Illness” (1994), co-authored with
Susan K. Golant, and “Medical
Crisis Counseling” (1995), with
Susan Baird Kanaan, in addition
to a memoir, “Irene and Abe: An
Unexpected Life” (2016).
Irene Sue Kerchek was born in
St. Louis on June 29, 1924. She
met her future husband at 17,when she traveled to Washington
to visit an aunt who was married
to his uncle. They settled in Wash-
ington, where Abe Pollin’s father,
Morris Pollin, ran a successful
construction business, and where
Mrs. Pollin’s parents opened a
grocery and liquor store.
The young couple married in- Two years later, Linda was
born. Mrs. Pollin began to grasp
the severity of her illness when
Linda tried to walk and turned
blue from the effort.
“After my daughter died, there
was such a gaping hole in my life,”
she told Washingtonian. “Besides
the normal, loving relationship
you have with your child, she had
a congenital heart ailment, so I
was always thinking about her,
keeping an eye on her. Constantly,
for 16 years.”
Shortly after Linda’s death,
both of Mrs. Pollin’s parents died
of heart attacks and her sister was
diagnosed with paranoid schizo-
phrenia. Mrs. Pollin endured
a years-long suicidal depres-
sion, finding her only relief in
tranquilizers.
“There was nothing else,” she
said. “I went from therapist to
therapist, psychologists, psychia-
trists. Not one knew how to deal
with the grief. I just wanted to
function.”
She found renewed purpose in
her university studies, receiving a
bachelor’s degree in anthropology
from American University in 1971
and a master’s degree in social
work from Catholic University in
1974.
The Pollins were known in
Washington and beyond for their
extensive philanthropy. They de-
veloped a close friendship with
Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime
minister whose assassination in
1995 contributed to their decision
to change the name of their NBAteam from the Washington Bul-
lets to the Washington Wizards.
In 2012, Mrs. Pollin donated
$10 million to the Hadassah Med-
ical Organization to create a car-
diovascular wellness institute in
Israel named for her daughter.
The next year she gave $10 million
to the Ciccarone Center for the
Prevention of Cardiovascular Dis-
ease at Johns Hopkins University,
where she also established a car-
diology professorship in memory
of her son.
Also in 2013, she gave $10 mil-
lion to establish the Linda Joy
Pollin Women’s Heart Health Pro-
gram at the Cedars-Sinai Heart
Institute in Los Angeles. She also
funded the Linda Joy Pollin Wom-
en’s Heart Center at Brigham and
Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Those initiatives were in addition
to Sister to Sister, a foundation
Mrs. Pollin established in 2000
with the goal of preventing heart
disease among women.
Abe Pollin died in 2009 at 85.
The next year, the Pollins sold
their majority share of the Wiz-
ards and the Verizon Center to
former AOL executive Ted Leon-
sis, who had purchased the Capi-
tals in 1999 and the Mystics in
2005.
Mrs. Pollin’s survivors include
two sons, Robert Pollin of Am-
herst and James Pollin of Chevy
Chase, Md.; two grandchildren;
and three great-granddaughters.
In her personal struggles, Mrs.
Pollin told Washingtonian, she
had learned from the athletes she
watched for so many years from
the owner’s box. They showed her,
she said, “that you can pick your-
self back up when you get
knocked down.”
“You see an athlete at the top of
his or her game get injured and
then have to work back,” she ob-
served. “Sometimes it takes
months. It’s very impressive, the
discipline it requires.”
[email protected]IRENE POLLIN, 96
Longtime co-owner of the Wizards, Capitals and Mystics
JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
Irene Pollin h elped bring the NBA and NHL to Washington with her husband, Abe Pollin, and started innovative counseling centers after
losing two children to heart defects. “I wanted to give people the kind of help I so desperately needed and could never find,” she s aid.FUNERAL SERVICES
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