Harriet S. Kaplan

Harriet S. Kaplan April 17, 1929 — January 3, 2026

Harriet Smith Kaplan, née Harriet Smith, was a loving and loved daughter, wife, mother, grandmother, aunt, cousin and friend. She was an accomplished and respected psychiatrist. She died peacefully and at home on Saturday, January 3rd, 2026. She was 96 years old.

A funeral service will be held on Friday, January 16th at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time at Hillside Memorial Park, located at 6001 West Centinela Avenue, Los Angeles, California, 90045. The service will be live-streamed and recorded for later viewing at: https://hillsidememorial.livecontrol.tv/88569dc5

Harriet and her late husband, Melvin were among the earliest members of Congregation Ner Tamid of South Bay after they first moved to Palos Verdes in the summer of 1960.

She had survived her parents Esther and Manuel Smith, and her brother Julius Smith. She is survived by her sons: Robert Kaplan (Susan Kaplan); Martin Kaplan (the late Robert Duffy); and Roger Kaplan (Joyce Kaplan).

She was the proud and loving grandmother of: Robert and Susan’s children, Isaac Kaplan (Rebecca Hattery-Kahn) and Tessa Kaplan; and Roger and Joyce’s children, Samara Kaplan and Adam Kaplan.

Harriet was a pioneer and a trail blazer. She described herself as a “tomboy” when a young girl, always eager to explore her childhood town of Stevens Point, Wisconsin. She had a reputation for scaling tall wooden fences and coming home with more than her fair share of splinters in her arms as a result.

Stevens Point’s P. J. Jacobs High School saw Harriet graduate in 1946 as valedictorian of her class.

She embraced independence and intellectual rigor, even in the face of societal resistance to the ambitions of a “young lady.” After high school she expressed a desire to study architecture abroad, in France. But this dream was not encouraged and did not materialize. Undaunted, she matriculated as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where her favorite spot to read and study was floating in a canoe in the middle of the campus lake – weather permitting, of course!

When her family migrated to Los Angeles in 1948, she first transferred to the USC School of Nursing. But ultimately, she found it frustrating to be told that a nurse need not know about all the details of medical knowledge that sparked her interest. It was her mentor, instructor, friend and later godmother to her first son, Molly Wallach, who urged Harriet, despite societal resistance, to change career paths, with the goal of becoming a physician. She then enrolled at UCLA where she received her B.A. degree, majoring in zoology, in 1951.

She spent the next year working in a research lab at the fledgling UCLA School of Medicine. Then she was accepted into the prestigious Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. One of initially only two women in her class, she earned her medical degree in 1956.

She served her internship at UC San Francisco, followed by a medical residency program at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center – where Melvin just happened to be the Chief of Internal Medicine. They started dating in November of 1957 and were wed at the Beverly Hilton on February 23, 1958. The result was a loving marriage that lasted 59 years until Mel died in 2017.

Harriet balanced, or juggled, career and family in a no-less-than heroic style during an era when role models for such things were few and far between. Her first specialty was nuclear medicine which involved the therapeutic use of radioactive isotopes of elements such as iodine for thyroid disease.

Son, Robert, was born in 1959, followed by Martin in 1960 and Roger in 1964. Harriet chose to step away from active practice for a few years while her children were very young.

Then, on July 1, 1970, at the age of 41, she dove back into the deep end of medicine and began a second residency, this time in Psychiatry. This was to define her professional career path until her retirement.

Upon completion of her residency at Harbor-UCLA, she ran its psychiatric crisis intervention clinic for many years. She followed that with a position as psychiatric liaison with other departments at Harbor, especially endocrinology and diabetes clinics. Throughout her career she was also devoted to serving as an officer in many medical professional organizations.

Both Harriet and Melvin were Silver Knight awardees at what then was known as the Harbor-UCLA Research and Education Institute (REI). Some years later, REI was renamed the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation.

After retiring from full-time staff at Harbor, Harriet opened a private practice, from which she retired in the late 1990’s. She remained engaged in teaching and medical professional programs until around 2020, when the pandemic and her own health challenges made such continuing involvement too difficult.

Harriet was fortunate to have been able to remain, for the rest of her days, in the house in which she raised her family with Mel.

Hers was a life well-lived. She loved her family and friends. Her life was guided by the imperative of tikkun olam – “healing the world.”