Chances are, if you’re walking around Ibis on any given day and hear someone humming or singing behind you, the singer is Hari Cheryl Sachs! Hari is a member of the Ibis Singers and sings in the Cabaret, but that is only a small part of who she is.

Hari and her husband, Ira, are Maryland natives who met while both students at the University of Maryland in College Park. They were engaged before they graduated and have been married for 43 years. They are the proud parents of four sons and 5-year-old twin grandsons. Two sons live in Virginia, and two in Georgia. Their youngest son was a Gerber baby and is getting married this summer near Gettysburg.

Following graduation, Hari went to the University of Maryland Medical School in Baltimore and did her residency at Children’s National Medical Center.  She worked as a general pediatrician for 40 years in two separate practices.  She volunteered at the National Institute of Health in a pediatric endocrinology clinic during her first practice.  Then, she practiced part-time at a second pediatric practice while working for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to help ensure that drugs were properly labeled in children based on pediatric studies. While at the FDA, Hari served as a liaison to the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Drugs and spearheaded a paper published in 2013 on the transfer of drugs into breast milk.  Hari retired from the FDA but occasionally acts as a consultant to drug companies on pediatric drug development. She loved pediatrics because she got paid to play with other people’s children!

Ira started his career as a mechanical engineer and then got his MBA. He transitioned to business and IT consulting, which he did for most of his career. Eleven years ago, he published a book, “Performance Driven IT Management; his book introduces a novel five-step process called performance-driven management (PDM), which explains how to reduce risk on large Federal IT projects.  

Hari and Ira moved to Ibis in 2018 and retired in 2020. They learned tennis for the first time when they arrived in Ibis. Ira plays golf, and Hari is just learning. She doesn’t quite love it yet! She recently won the 2023-24 Tennis Club Championships, mixed doubles, Silver Division, with Robert Caires, and her senior D6 tennis team took first place in their blue division. Summers are spent in Ocean City, MD, where Hari enjoys one of her favorite things, watching her beloved dolphins from their balcony overlooking the ocean.

The couple loves to travel, cruising in France last May and most recently on a safari with other couples from Ibis (see January 2024 Stroll). Their next trip with some of these couples will be to Iceland in August. New Zealand is on their bucket list. One of their sons spent a semester abroad in Australia, so they enjoyed some quality time with him in Sydney.

Both are amateur photographers; Ira has had many pictures displayed at the Ibis Art Show, and Hari just had her first photo displayed at the show.  The Sachs’ home is filled with many of Ira’s photographs and modern works of art, including several of which Ira’s late mother Gertrude painted. Mrs. Sachs was an accomplished American abstract collage artist who had exhibited at many local and national exhibitions. She had a studio in Baltimore. When both of Ira’s parents passed away in the late1980s, their house had been left empty before the sale, and unfortunately, several of Gertrude’s best-hanging art pieces were stolen. Fortunately, the artwork was still in the basement, but the stolen art was never recovered.

Hari says she has to pinch herself daily because she and her family are lucky to be part of Ibis and have made many new friends. We hope you never stop pinching yourself, Hari, and please keep singing!