Raymond Steinberg Malvani

“Ray was an unreconstructed ‘60s kind of guy who mixed scholarship with decency and human concerns,” recalled longtime friend and colleague Neal E. Cutler, a former professor of political science in the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences who now works for the National Council on Aging.

From 1949 to 1951, Malvani made $50 a month working for the American Friends Service Committee in rural Nayarit, Mexico. As a multipurpose worker in a community development program, he staffed a village-supported recreational center, dealing with aspects of public health, agriculture, recreation and fundamental adult education, and he assisted rural teachers in village betterment programs.

During the mid-’50s, he was the manager of Singing City, an interracial choir that toured the American South.

As a Los Angeles social worker during the ‘60s, Malvani was active in the civil rights movement and helped to implement the Johnson Administration’s war on poverty, including the federal Fair Housing Act. From 1964 to 1967, he was director for program planning and development of the Economic Youth Opportunities Agency in Los Angeles.

As a community organizer for the U.S. Agency for International Development from 1967 through 1971, he was a community planner and organizer in Panama, providing technical assistance to the Panamanian government and promoting interagency coordination and program innovation in urban and rural community development.

As a USC gerontologist during the 1970s and ‘80s, he led a pioneering study of long-term care for the elderly and co-authored an influential textbook about case management in the provision of services to the aged.

As a playwright during the late 1980s, he wrote Broadway Sings Out, the longest-running show in San Fernando Valley history. The show combined socially significant Broadway songs (including If I Were a Rich Man and Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?) with satirical dialogue on racism, sexism, classism, immigration, war and peace, politics and environmental issues.

“My father was a wonderful designer and had wanted to become an aeronautical engineer,” said son David Steinberg of Hollywood Hills. “But a high school counselor told him that Jews were not aeronautical engineers, so he became a social worker instead.”

During his 12 years at USC’s Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center, Malvani directed a major research project for the center’s Institute for Policy and Program Development. The “Staying at Home Project” -- a study of long-term care for the aging in Los Angeles County -- examined a broad range of public policies, programs and practices affecting opportunities for older persons to remain in their own homes.

Malvani found elderly people were often put in nursing homes unnecessarily and prematurely. Many physicians were too quick to recommend institutional care for their elderly patients and often failed to explore the alternatives.

The USC study focused on multiple facets of long-term care, rated them according to importance and feasibility for improvement, and concluded that the No. 1 issue was case management -- the process of determining need and the best way to fill it. “We looked not just at a single program, but at the system as a whole,” Malvani said in a February 1986 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “We needed to see how things connect and do not connect.”

His university colleague, Phoebe S. Liebig, an associate professor of gerontology and public administration, said Malvani was ahead of his time.

“Ray Malvani was at the cutting edge of many issues in aging that are mainstream today but weren’t when he was doing his research -- case coordination and case management, elder abuse, public guardianship and conservatorship, comprehensive service delivery for the elderly, and performance evaluation and accountability of area agencies on aging,” Liebig said.

Malvani’s research was funded by Los Angeles County, the U.S. Administration on Aging and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

During his USC years, Malvani was co-author (with Genevieve Carter of the School of Social Work) of a textbook titled Case Management and the Elderly: A Handbook for Planning and Administering Programs (1983). Liebig called the book “the gold standard in textbooks on this issue for the next half-decade.”

He was associate editor of the first edition of the Encyclopedia on Aging (1987) and past chair of the social research, policy and planning section of the Gerontological Society of America, the nation’s premier scientific association in gerontology.

MALVANI WAS a research associate professor at the Andrus Gerontology Center from 1973 until 1985, when he was awarded emeritus status.

After his retirement, Malvani set out to merge his social concerns with his interests in theater by writing a musical revue. He began collecting socially relevant songs -- spanning 85 years of musical theater history -- on research trips to libraries, archives and old record stores. Broadway Sings Out, a tuneful tribute to Broadway songwriters who have spoken out on social and political issues, opened in 1989 at the Onion Community Theater in Sepulveda. The two-hour show proved such a hit that it moved in January 1991 to the West End Playhouse in Van Nuys. There it was the first and only Valley stage production to last more than 80 performances and to qualify for Actors Equity status.

Raymond Maryn Steinberg was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., on March 13, 1926, the son of Polish immigrants Hyman Malovani Steinberg and his wife, Frieda (née Maryn) Steinberg. He graduated from Pittsburgh’s Taylor Allderdice High in 1943, served in the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1946, earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1946, and earned a master’s degree in social work from Bryn Mawr College in 1957.

In 1953, he married his wife of 45 years, the former Lucille Kanne, in Philadelphia. The couple moved to Los Angeles in 1960, and Malvani directed the San Fernando Valley office of the Welfare Planning Council. He earned a doctorate in social work from UCLA in 1976. Going back to the family’s Polish roots, the Steinbergs changed their name to Malvani in the late 1980s.

Malvani is survived by his wife, Lucille; sons Adam and David; daughters Lora Malvani and Ellen Steinberg; and one grandchild, Andrew Malvani. David Steinberg is an alumnus of USC. Ellen STEINBERG is film and performance artist Annie Sprinkle.

SERVICES WILL BE HELD at 5 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 14, at the Sepulveda Unitarian-Universalist Society, 9550 Haskell Ave., North Hills. The family suggests that memorial donations may be directed to the Sepulveda Unitarian-Universalist Society (of which Malvani was a long-standing board member) or the Society of Americans for Separation of Church and State (1816 Jefferson Place, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036).