Lawrence Kaplan, WWII vet, Plandome Heights resident, dies

Bill San Antonio

Plandome Heights resident Lawrence Kaplan, a World War II veteran who earned five battle stars during his tour in Europe, died suddenly last Tuesday after a brief illness. He was 98.

Kaplan received his battle stars for participating in nine months of continuous battle, fighting in Normandy, Northern France, the Rhineland, the Bulge and Central Europe. He was also part of the Allied forces that helped liberate the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in 1945.

“Larry didn’t speak about it too early in those years. It was too difficult for him to talk about it, but later on he told me about it and particularly how he came to Buchenwald and how there were still a few people wandering around like they were lost,” said Kaplan’s widow, Jeanne. “They didn’t know where they were or what happened, and I could only cry as I listened to the story.”

Kaplan was tasked with photographing and mapping enemy positions so Air Force personnel could bomb the region and allow troops on the ground to advance.

For his accomplishments on the battlefield, Kaplan later received the New York State Conspicuous Service award, a citation from the Republic of France for “Liberation From German Domination,” and was profiled by Who’s Who in America.

“He was very lucky, he was never injured,” Jeanne said. “One time, he had to drive an officer to the battlefield from wherever they were and on his way back, the enemy put a log across a road and he was in a Jeep and it turned over on its side and hurt his knee. It wasn’t serious, but we always laughed that he was an uninjured soldier but hurt his knee on the way out.”

Kaplan was drafted into the military in 1942 and was sent to officer training school at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. His classmates there included former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Sen. Frank Church and former West Virginia Gov. Arch Moore.

Kaplan joined the 6th Armored Division at Batsford, England, the division made a 10-day, 250-mile trip on the Brittany Peninsula to help surround the German base at Brest, capturing 5,000 Nazis along the way while suffering light casualties.

“The entire campaign was a complicated, leap-frogging affair,” according to a Stars and Stripes newspaper account from that time. “Gen. Grow’s men sometimes surged forward so rapidly that they found themselves operating beyond areas covered by the maps in hand.”

Kaplan attended P.S. 188 in Brooklyn and then New Utrecht High School for a year before moving on to Abraham Lincoln High School. He graduated in 1933.

Upon returning from the war, Kaplan began taking economics classes at Columbia University, eventually earning his Ph.D. there. He later taught economics at Baruch College and was later the first chair of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s economics department, serving from 1965-85 when he was required by law to retire from being a full-time professor.

“My plan all along was to become a professor,” Kaplan told Blank Slate Media in November 2013. “That’s really all I set out to do.”

“He was very warm and friendly and I was very impressed that he was so bright. He seemed to know everything, whatever I asked him there was always an answer,” Jeanne said. “I was so impressed that he was going for his Ph.D. and I just thought he was brilliant. It made a big impression on me.”

Kaplan met Jeanne in 1945 after taking a job teaching economics at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, where Jeanne was also a teacher.

“I went home that day and I remember exactly what I said. I said mom, I met a very nice boy on the bus today and if he calls, please be nice to him,” Jeanne said. “My mother said, I’m always nice, and I just said, I know Mom, but this is the kind of boy I’d like to marry.”

Kaplan said in November that he was so nervous about asking Jeanne on a date that he had another teacher tell her he’d like to take her to the movies.

“I knew she was the one for me,” Kaplan said. “I knew she was the one I was going to marry. That first day, I fell in love.”

The couple married on June 9, 1946, mere months after they began dating. The Kaplans moved to Manhasset in 1977.

They had three children together, two daughters named Harriet and Marcia and a son named Sanford. The Kaplans have seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Kaplan and Jeanne participated in the Town of North Hempstead’s annual marriage recommitment ceremony, celebrating 68 years of marriage.

Kaplan has also served as chairman of Temple Judea’s adult education program and the president of the Council of Municipal Retiree Organizations in New York City.

More recently, Jeanne said Kaplan was trying to add a cannon to Manhasset’s World War II memorial on Shelter Rock Road.

Plandome Heights trustees held a moment of silence for Kaplan prior to the start of their village board meeting on Wednesday.

A funeral service was held for Kaplan on Friday at Temple Judea. He was buried at a family plot at Mount Lebanon Cemetery in Queens. Kaplan’s family sat shiva through Wednesday.

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