The physician who joined Tremont Functional Rehab and Health last year died October 4 at 77. Friends remember a doctor, gardener, and lifelong rider who did things her own way.
Tremont is mourning the loss of Dr. Joy Marshall, the general practice physician at Tremont Functional Rehab and Health Collaborative (2401 Scranton Rd.) who was also a familiar presence on Cleveland’s bike routes and in its civic life. She died October 4. She would have turned 78 on October 12. Dr. Marshall joined Tremont Functional Rehab and Health last year (see ‘The Doctor Is In: Dr. Joy Marshall Joins Tremont Functional Rehab and Health,’ by Bruce Checefsky, The Tremonster, September 2025)
Tremonster Brooke Willis raised awareness of her passing in a public Facebook post that day, calling her a “beautiful friend, biking advocate and community activist.” Family and friends gathered that afternoon at the new Reserve Care Hospice Center Cleveland to express their love for her. This post will be updated with details of any further service or memorial, if announced.
According to a tribute published on Outspoken Cyclist, the Substack newsletter and podcast by Diane Jenks, Dr. Marshall was injured in September when she crashed her eBike after encountering an animal on her way home from dinner, only moments from her house.
Dr. Marshall’s path to medicine was anything but typical. A Cleveland Heights native, she married at eighteen and lived for a year in Oaxaca, Mexico. Back in Cleveland, she and her husband opened a University Circle restaurant called Fantomas, now L’Albatros. After the marriage ended, she raised her children on her own, at times on public assistance, and worked as a barmaid and specials cook at Nighttown on Cedar Road. She eventually raised four daughters, according to the Outspoken Cyclist tribute.
It was at the former Nighttown that a lunch regular, then Case Western Reserve University president Louis A. Toepfer, asked what she planned to do with her life. She told him she wanted to go to medical school. He told her that raising children alone, helping launch a restaurant, and learning a second language all counted for something, and he pointed her to the pre-med dean. She got in and she started medical school at 36.
She carried that story into the exam room. Many of her patients, she said, reminded her of herself, people who had been “beaten down before they could even get started.” She wanted them to know it was possible to make it.
Medicine ran in the family. Her father was a physician at East Cleveland’s former Huron Hospital, and as a little girl she rode along on his Saturday rounds and noticed that patients smiled whenever he walked in. She wanted to give people that feeling too.
When The Tremonster, Plain Press, and La Villa CLE profiled her in September 2025, Dr. Marshall described how she approached every new patient: “This is a partnership. I work for them.”
She spoke Spanish, a real help to patients in nearby Clark-Fulton, home to the highest concentration of Hispanic residents in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. She preferred referring patients to a person rather than a department, and valued working beside colleagues at Tremont Functional Rehab and Health who could see her patients quickly instead of leaving them to wait weeks elsewhere.
She was open about her convictions: that vaccination is a public health issue and a moral one, and that the United States should have universal health care.
Diane Jenks, who has known Dr. Marshall for more than 50 years, described her as “One of the most impressive human beings I’ve ever met,” a family physician who was among the most loved and respected in Cleveland. She also recalled finding Dr. Marshall in tears one morning in the late 1990s over an elderly patient who had not gotten the help she needed, grieving and angry at a system that Marshall felt had failed her.
Dr. Marshall was a lifelong cyclist who, per the tribute, commuted across town to work most days and ran errands by bike. She and Jenks first met in the mid-1980s, when Marshall rolled a Dawes mixte bicycle with a baby seat up to the registration table of the former Emerald Health Triathlon, a half Ironman that Jenks founded. Asked whether she really planned to ride that bike, she said yes. She finished the swim, bike, and run ahead of quite a few other competitors, and thought it was no big deal.
Her independent streak made the news, too. Jenks recalls that Dr. Marshall was once ticketed in Cleveland Heights for roller-blading down a main street, an officer having written her up for riding a toy in the street. She contested the ticket in court, lost, paid a $75 fine, and kept right on skating.
Away from the road, Jenks writes, she was an amazing gardener and cook. Jenks’s tribute is illustrated with a photo of “Joy’s Garden” by Neil Slobin.
Neighbors who knew Dr. Marshall, as a doctor, a fellow rider, or a friend, are invited to share memories in the comments below or by writing to TheTremonster@TheTremonster.org.
