Larry A. Sheingorn
		By Louie Estrada  Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, May 29, 2005
	From a Love of Fixing Things, a Career of Many Parts
							Ophthalmologist Larry Sheingorn wears another of his hats, a TV producer's     headset, for Montgomery Community Television. (Family Photo)
Larry Sheingorn went from techno-nerd in high school to a career as an ophthalmologist while never quite letting go of that inquisitive child within.
The 52-year-old laser eye surgeon revealed a natural aptitude for all things mechanical when at the age of 4 he managed to fix a broken toilet in the family's brick colonial house in Washington's Barnaby Woods section.
It seemed that from that point on he searched out broken machines, especially anything electrical -- toasters, radios and televisions -- that he could then take apart and peer inside at the layout of wiring, levers, coils and bulbs. By the time he was a student at Woodrow Wilson High School, he was running his own television repair business, Conrad Enterprises, out of his parents' basement.
To this day, some 40 years later, stacks of labeled boxes he filled with television parts remain there untouched, his mother, Helen Sheingorn, said with an approving grin as she reflected on her son's precocious nature.
As a physician, he wrote and licensed a computer software program, FastOffice, to help manage his solo practice in Rockville, where his guiding mantra was one doctor/one patient at a time.He patented inventions for ophthalmic equipment, including a visual field testing device.
He also made house calls, but not the kind one generally envisions for a doctor. With his bag of tools at his side, he visited his patients to fix their televisions, hot water heaters or whatever electrical appliances happened to need repairs.
His eyes would light up when he found out a patient's television wasn't working. He'd ask a lot of questions to delve for a deeper understanding of the problem, then go out to the person's house and fix it, Helen Sheingorn said of her son, who died of esophageal cancer May 6 at his home in Boyds.
He was always trying to understand how things work. That's why he had so many interests and hobbies. He really was able to squeeze three lifetimes into one, she said as she sat at a dining room table at the home in Boyds with Sheingorn's wife, Beverly Rollins, and older brother, Bill.
Given his mechanical aptitude, his family was not surprised when he was accepted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was on track to become a mechanical engineer. Instead, he shifted his scientific curiosity to the intricacies of the human body. He enrolled in a six-year joint undergraduate and medical degree program at Northwestern University. After graduation, he completed an internship and residency in ophthalmology at Washington Hospital Center. After that, he opened a practice in Rockville and saw patients there for more than 20 years until his illness forced him to retire in 2003.
Even as he pursued his career, Sheingorn's fascination with television continued. In the mid-1980s, he enrolled in classes at a community access station, Montgomery Community Television. He studied stage direction, camera work and editing. He then used these skills to produce television shows, including The Doctor's In, which featured interviews with health insurance executives and medical professionals. That show aired on MCT on Thursday evenings until March.
Sheingorn did not confine his television endeavors to medical subjects. He produced and hosted a public access show featuring stand-up comedians. The thickly mustachioed Sheingorn positioned the show in the time slot before his favorite network show, Saturday Night Live. In his loud and forceful manner of speaking, he would tell a joke or two before introducing comedians he had met at clubs.
He couldn't stand to be idle, Bill Sheingorn said. To him, eating and sleeping were necessary inconveniences. At his office, he often would forgo lunch, sucking on sour balls instead.
In his last two months, Sheingorn learned about locksmithing. And on the day he died, he repaired a friend's car horn as well as a sliding screen door at his home leading to a deck overseeing a rural landscape.