If you exchange emails with Alan Hoffstadter, you will see the phrase, “Give Blood… Give Life!” under his signature. To Alan it’s more than a slogan. He devoted his professional life to ensuring a safe and ample supply of donated blood.

A “born and bred” Chicagoan, Alan grew up in West Rogers Park and attended Chicago Public Schools, then the University of Illinois-Chicago. He and his wife, Lynn, raised their family in Oak Park, in a home that is just 400 feet from the Chicago city limits.

Alan’s career as an immunohematologist and transfusion medicine specialist took him to several major medical centers, including Cook County Hospital, where one day he came upon a plaque honoring Dr. Bernard Fantus, who in 1937 founded the world’s first hospital blood bank at County, and was a resident of Oak Park.

“I didn’t know I was working at the source,” Alan recalled. Learning of his interest, Dr. Fantus’s niece gave Alan access to her uncle’s papers at the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago. Thanks to Alan’s advocacy, Dr. Fantus earned a place on the “Wall of Fame” in the Oak Park Village Hall—side by side with Frank Lloyd Wright, Betty White and other luminaries.

As a self-described “accidental blood-bank historian,” Alan was often called upon by local media to explain why donating blood is important. He continues to be an advocate and volunteer since retiring in 2009. “I’m the old geezer who hands out the cookies and juice after you donate,” he joked. He pointed out that high school students account for about a quarter of the blood donations in the Chicago area.  “They are a joy to be with,” he says. “If anyone wants to know what the future of this country can be, they should spend a day with these volunteers. They give you a sense that we are going to be okay.”

Choral singing also makes Alan think we are going to be OK: “I seem to be at my most relaxed when I am singing, and I seem to feel best when I’m doing it in the company of others.” While he’s aware of studies that document the health benefits of singing, “The only answer I’ve got is because it makes me feel good.”

Singing has been making Alan feel good since he was nine years old, when “I was pulled out of my Sunday school class by a cantor who drilled a group of us on one vocal line. But what he didn’t tell us is that he had dragged other children out of class and taught them the same song, but different parts. Then he brought us all together in one room. You can imagine, for a nine-year-old boy, that hearing the music in four parts was an astounding experience.”

Alan has been singing ever since, in high school and college choirs as well as community choruses. He spent several seasons with Sing to Live, a choir for people whose lives have been affected by breast cancer (Alan’s mother passed away from the disease).

Alan joined the Oak Park-River Forest Sounds Good Choir in its second season. He is living proof that you don’t have to be able to read music to enjoy singing with Sounds Good. “I’m an obstinate non-reader of music,” Alan says, a condition he attributes to growing up with a father who was a fine musician. “Some kind of teenage angst caused me to rebel about learning to read music.”

In Sounds Good, Alan has found “a community of people to whom I don’t have to explain my references—they’re my age—it really means a lot to me.”

Asked for a one-word description of himself, Alan came up with “sanguine,” which Webster’s defines as “confident” or “optimistic.” But it’s interesting to note that the Latin root of sanguine means “blood,” and a person with a sanguine temperament is “marked by sturdiness and cheerfulness.” That’s an apt description for the resident blood bank historian of the Sounds Good Choir.