Big Brains and Broken Hearts: Excerpts from a Life

Big Brains and Broken Hearts: Excerpts from a Life

January 25, 1950. It was a Wednesday. It was snowing. St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital, Division Street at Leavitt. Polish nuns, refugees from the War or not, heads wrapped in white wimples, topped by flight-worthy origami. One of the first things Mike could see as his newborn eyes began to focus: Sister Anonymous, one of Mike's mother's teachers in the nursing school. She knew Mike's father, a Taylor Street kid who had graduated from the U of I Med School in the Class of '38, a few years before America joined the War. Internship at St. Mary's. He was still doing rounds there and carrying his black leather house calls bag around with him that snowy January 25th. Bought a three flat at Central and North, and opened his first office there, a few streets north and more than a few west of of St. Mary's on Division, about ten minutes east of Oak Park and a house big enough to house six kids and a grandma and grampa in a neighborhood of lace curtains and proper northern Europeans. Catholic ones, mostly. Not used to the company of garlic-eaters. Mike was meant to be a middle class Catholic school boy. Parish school. Local Catholic high school for boys. Hard worker. Great at spelling. Top grades. Remarkably sickly kid for a doctor's family. Football team? Notre Dame? Med School at U of I? But then there was Yale. But then there was Naples. Big brains. Broken hearts. Excerpts from a life.