Dr. Norman Kemler, 92; an old-fashioned family physician

"He was the quintessential country doctor in the city," said his daughter Andrea, of Newton, describing her father's 47-year general practice in a lower-middle-class community in Jamaica, Queens, N.Y., with many new immigrants. "His patients loved him. He took a lot of time with them and most stayed with him forever."

He made house calls until he closed his practice in 1994, she said. If he had patients in the hospital he would visit them every day.

Dr. Kemler, who so loved his work that he did not retire until he was 75, died April 19 at his Canton home of heart failure. He was 92.

Born in Boston and raised in Revere, he might have opened a practice in the area but for his internship and residency, which took him to New York. However, his roots were in New England.

In 1998, Dr. Kemler and his wife, Annette, came home to Massachusetts to be near their children and settled at Orchard Cove, a retirement home in Canton.

"My father was an amazing man," his daughter said. "He had been working out regularly and then had a small heart attack about 18 months ago. His doctors gave him two months to live. He had such a joy of living."

Another daughter, Beth, of Brookline, spoke of his practice. "In terms of his career, Dad epitomized the best of 20th-century medicine. He was an internist who understood that mental well-being and physical health were really intertwined. If a person came to him emotionally and mentally distressed, he let them talk. He also understood that things such as exercise, diet, and lifestyle were also important."

In the 1960s and 1970s, she said, he became "very interested in biofeedback and would go to biofeedback conventions. He understood the importance of prevention and had a contract with SAS [the Scandinavian airline] to provide a preventive medical intervention for their executives."

Though his hours were long, his daughters said, Dr. Kemler never shortchanged his family. A nephew, Kenneth Kaplan, a Weston psychiatrist, learned very young how kind and generous his uncle was. When Kaplan was 9, he said, his father was killed in an explosion from a gas leak outside their home in Medford.

"It was Norman who told us our father had died," Kaplan said. "He never actually said it, but he knelt down to our face level and said, 'Sometimes, when soldiers go off to war, they don't come back.' He was very gentle."

Dr. Kemler became a "second father" to Kaplan and his younger sister and helped their widowed mother - his sister - all he could.

Seeing her struggle, Beth said, made him impress upon his own daughters the importance for a woman to be well-educated and independent.

His own parents realized the importance of education for their four sons and daughter. After Dr. Kemler graduated from Revere High School in 1934, his financially struggling parents moved the family to Burlington, Vt., where Dr. Kemler would be the first in his family to go to college.

As a resident of the state, he was able to attend the University of Vermont at a low tuition rate. While a student, he met Annette Margulis at a dance at their temple. He was 18 and she 16. They dated all through his college years and while he attended the University of Vermont Medical School. They married in 1943, the year he graduated.

When Dr. Kemler entered the Army's medical corps in 1944, he was scheduled to go overseas, his family said, when an "occasional benign arrhythmia" kept him stateside. He served at Fort Hood in Texas and at Fort Ethan Allen in Vermont, returning to civilian life in 1946.

After the war, Dr. Kemler moved his family to the Briarwood section of Jamaica, Queens. His first medical office was in the one-bedroom apartment where he lived with his wife and three children. His wife was the bookkeeper and his high school-age daughters were receptionists on Saturday.

Eventually, he moved his practice into a building in Queens and was associated with several hospitals in the area. The family moved to Old Westbury on Long Island in 1959.

He was a tall, slender man, who always dressed well "and loved a good bargain," his daughters said. He was "a listener" for others and knew when to give advice and when to offer empathy and support, they said.

He loved his homes, they said, and enhanced his yards with shrubs and ornamental bushes. When Dr. Kemler and his wife moved back to Massachusetts, they caught up with their play-going and went on outings together. Mrs. Kemler died in 2001.

His daughters recalled that when he was in practice and spending as much time with each patient as needed, Dr. Kemler would often be late for his next patient. If the patient complained, he would say, "If you needed me to listen, wouldn't you want me to do the same for you?" They said he never changed.

In addition to his daughters, Dr. Kemler leaves a son, Barry, a physician, of Avon, Conn.; a brother, Stanley, of Norman, Oklahoma; five grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

Services have been held.