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Dr. Walter Hofman is Pa.'s most-credentialed coroner

FOR MOST PEOPLE, retirement is a time to trade tension for a pension and bustle for a breather. But Dr. Walter I. Hofman, 72, is not most people. Eight years after retiring as chief pathologist and medical-staff president at Roxborough Memorial Hospital, he's busier than ever.

FOR MOST PEOPLE, retirement is a time to trade tension for a pension and bustle for a breather.

But Dr. Walter I. Hofman, 72, is not most people. Eight years after retiring as chief pathologist and medical-staff president at Roxborough Memorial Hospital, he's busier than ever.

Last year, he became coroner in Montgomery County, making him the county's first board-certified forensic pathologist to hold the elected post - and the most-credentialed coroner statewide.

As if deducing the cause and manner of death for the 1,900 bodies his office handles annually weren't enough, Hofman also teaches at Arcadia University and the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine and serves as a spokesman for a controversial traveling exhibit of plasticized cadavers.

He writes a monthly column for the Times Herald on public-health issues, from suicide to the perils of co-sleeping. And he frequently testifies as a forensic-pathology expert in courts all along the East Coast.

"I feel very bad for physicians who retire," Hofman said. "What a waste of talent! They have seen more in their lifetime than younger physicians. They have trained and studied for years. And for what? To give everything up at age 65 to go golfing?"

Hofman is no dour doom-and-gloomer addicted to working.

Rather, 44 years after graduating from medical school in Switzerland, he still gets juiced by his job.

"I am a medical detective, and I never know what's going to come in the door," said Hofman, who has performed more than 10,000 autopsies.

Among his most memorable cases: a "John Bobbitt-type" episode in the 1990s out of South Jersey. "He bled out, and she choked [on her partner's penis]," Hofman said of the unlucky deceased couple. "We kept the details of that under wraps for obvious reasons."

His role as spokesman and ethicist for the "Our Body: The Universe Within" exhibit frequently lands him in the media spotlight, most recently last month, when a judge in Paris ordered the show closed because of insensitivity.

"Thirty million people have seen these three shows," Hofman said of the competing exhibits of preserved cadavers. "If it's presented in a non-ghoulish way, it's our past. It's educational."

In a morbid job, Hofman keeps his sense of humor, a survival strategy that helps him cope with horrors few could imagine.

While most medical offices are somberly adorned with anatomical explainers or uninspired artwork, a stroll into Hofman's office is like an abbreviated tour of the Mutter Museum if a stand-up comedian ran the medical-oddity menagerie. A wall clock is shaped like a skull, its pendulum a swinging skeleton clutching a top hat. On another wall hangs a Van Gogh print of a skull smoking a cigarette.

Nearby, a display case houses the skull of an unclaimed man whom Hofman nicknamed Harry and who "liked the demon rum too much." The shelves also showcase a rope used in a suicide and a faded photo of an amputated breast showing the killer's bite marks around the nipple.

Keeping up with his wife's quick wit fosters his good cheer, Hofman said. "People with a morbid personality don't go far, especially in this job. You have to deal with people, so you try to find something positive in tragedy," he added.

That sentiment may sound surprising given his start in life.

He was born Jewish in Nazi Germany's Berlin. When he was still a baby, his family fled with him to London and later emigrated to New York.

Since then, he has racked up enough accomplishments to fill a nine-page resume.

He has worked in hospitals from Chicago to Boston and logged time locally at Lankenau and Roxborough Memorial hospitals. He has taught at universities from Penn State to Harvard and done forensic pathology work in Baltimore, Trenton, Detroit, Dallas and several counties in South Jersey and Massachusetts.

"The local people [of Montgomery County] are very lucky in getting him, because they are getting a medical examiner for the price of a coroner," said Broward County Medical Examiner Dr. Joshua A. Perper, who has handled the high-profile cases of Anna Nicole Smith, Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler and model Krissy Taylor.

Perper first met Hofman when both were residents in the Chief Medical Examiner's Office, in Baltimore, in the late 1960s. They have remained friends since.

Hofman does make time for hobbies.

A barbecue buff, Hofman learned his grilling and smoking techniques from nationally known butcher and cookbook author Merle Ellis.

He got so hooked on perfecting his meat methods that he went to barbecue-judging school in Tennessee, became a master judge and traveled the country for several years judging and running barbecue contests.

Hofman also grows produce in his Merion yard, which boasts cherry, peach and fig trees and will soon be filled with tomato plants, herbs and blueberry bushes.

And he loves to travel with wife Ethel, a syndicated food writer.

He acknowledges that his profession may strike some as macabre. But he considers his work as coroner a community service.

"I am a firm believer that you have to get up in the morning and have something to do," Hofman said. "I enjoy this job for the mystery of finding out what really happened, the cases where you really have to go hunting for the clues." *