Clara Dostal

Clara Adelaide Dostal (née Weidmann; 1911 – legal death December 10, 1972) was the sixth person cryopreserved by the Cryonics Society of New York.

Born in Queens, New York, she earned a Master’s degree in education from New York University, graduating at the top of her class. In 1941 she married Frank Dostal, a man with a heart condition who might otherwise have gone off to war; they had two children. Stricken with polio when the second child was born in 1944, she eventually recovered but inspired by the experience designed a self-propelled vacuum cleaner to make it easier for handicapped people to clean, received a patent on it, and was written up in The New York Times. The Hoover company then started marketing a very similar product as their "Hoover Dialamatic." She was preparing a lawsuit against them when stricken with cancer and she turned to cryonics.

She had signed a contract which allocated $20,000 from her estate to CSNY. She legally died from cancer at the George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C. when she was 61 years old. She was perfused and maintained in dry ice at CSNY's facility for nearly two years until November 1974, when her two children, by now unhappy with the cost and the emotional burden, had her buried.