Cynthia Berger Friedenberg was a talented harpist.

If you ask Lori Rudolph and Dana Storr to describe their mother, Cynthia Berger Friedenberg, you come away with two main thoughts: She was elegant, and she was tough.

“She was a fighter,” Storr says, emphasizing that last word. “When I think about her, she never came off as frail.”

The roots of that fighting spirit may have been planted at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, where Friedenberg underwent the landmark “blue baby” operation. She was among the first of thousands to benefit from the surgery, introduced in 1944 by Johns Hopkins chief surgeon Alfred Blalock, pediatric cardiologist Helen Taussig and laboratory technician Vivien Thomas.

After Friedenberg died in 2021, Rudolph and Storr made a gift to establish the Cynthia Berger Friedenberg Endowment Fund, which supports research in the Johns Hopkins center that’s named for the three pediatric cardiology pioneers who saved their mother’s life.

Rudolph and Storr don’t remember exactly how they found out Friedenberg had the blue baby operation — they just knew. 

“It was just part of who she was,” Rudolph says.

Storr remembers a key moment in 1997, when she walked with her mother through The Johns Hopkins Hospital as Rudolph underwent a routine surgery. During their stroll, Storr says, her mother stopped in front of portraits of Blalock and Taussig. 

“I asked, ‘Why are we staring at these two people? Why are they important?’ And she didn’t say anything,” Storr says.

Years later, Storr watched the 2004 HBO film Something the Lord Made, which chronicles the development of the blue baby operation. That answered many of her questions.

When Friedenberg suffered a major stroke in 2021, her doctors asked Storr and Rudolph about her health history. That prompted them to see whether there might be a connection between the blue baby operation and her stroke. Those questions connected them with the Blalock-Taussig-Thomas Pediatric and Congenital Heart Center. 

After their mother’s death, Rudolph and Storr wanted to support organizations that were special to her. The more the sisters heard about the Blalock-Taussig-Thomas Center’s work, the more they envisioned a legacy for their mother within it. That prompted their gift to support pediatric cardiology research. 

“With all the cuts in medical research right now, it was important to us to ensure that there are other families who can benefit from the cutting-edge research that’s done at Hopkins,” Rudolph says.

Adds Storr: “If our endowment can help another child’s pediatrician say, ‘We need to look into this research at the Blalock-Taussig-Thomas Heart Center at Hopkins,’ that’s everything to us. This is our way of saying ‘thank you’ while also remembering our mom.”