Dr. Mike
In August, 1971, fifty-two years ago, I hitchhiked my way from Cleveland, Ohio to Ithaca, New York, a distance of 330 miles. I was traveling from my summer job at Case Western Reserve University to my freshman year matriculation at Cornell University. In those days, freshmen at Cornell mostly lived together in the ghetto of West Campus in what were called the University Halls, a set of six cinderblock three-wing dorms, four stories high each that looked like most of the post-war low-income housing in New York City. I was assigned a room on the third floor of Dorm 4, facing west towards Cayuga Lake, but not high enough on East Hill to actually see the lake. My room was a double, as were most rooms in those dorms, and I was assigned to share it with Mr. John Plunket of Dublin, Ireland. I guess that made sense to some housing administrator since I was shown as from Rome, Italy, so I guess they thought John and I would have a lot in common. We were both engineering students, but beyond that we had little similarity to one another. But we were both raised well enough to be able to be perfectly civil with one another even though we clearly were moving in different directions from day one.
Before leaving Cleveland and because I was traveling light, I mailed a box to myself with all my worldly belongings, which included a very inexpensive pre-bundled stereo that I had purchased for $99 during the summer at some discount store in Cleveland. I had never owned a stereo before and had learned over the summer (Cleveland being the center of Rock n’Roll in America even though few of us recognized that reality in 1971) that you could not be a member of the American youth cult unless you surrounded yourself with music, or at least made motions in that direction. The thing about stereos is that you need albums to play on them and I came to America from Rome with none. I bought a few albums in Cleveland with my primary influence being a secretary in the Sociology Department where I worked. She had taken me to my first concert, which was some new upstart from Cleveland called Cat Stevens (a.k.a. Yusuf Islam), so I had bought copies of Tea for the Tillerman and Teaser and the Firecat. I also had a copy of Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across the Water. I only knew a few other singers even though this was only a few years after Woodstock. I was neither a folk singer sort, so Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie were not on my screen, nor a hard rock guy following The Doors, Three Dog Night and The Rolling Stones. I was more into pop than anything else and when I look over the top records of that year I see an incredible amount of greatness from Carly Simon to Carole King to Marvin Gaye to Tina Turner to Cher and to John Denver and even the Carpenters and the Osmond’s. But the guy who stands out to me that year was Rod Stewart and his Maggie May. That song plays over and over in my ears from that first semester…”it’s lat September and I really should be back at school…”
The fall of 1971 was a very busy time for me. It is always an adjustment for college freshmen, but add to that my reentry into American mainstream young life from my three prior years living in Italy. Somewhere along the way that fall, as I got to know my fellow floor mates, I got a number of requests for additional music since I was one of the few residents that had a stereo, cheap as it may have been. I guess all these freshmen were taking care not to get too distracted as they started their college careers, but no one had advised me that way, so everyone liked listening to my stereo. One friend in particular had taken a liking to a new soft rock band called Bread. When we came back from winter break, I went out and bought the latest Bread album. To be sure, Bread never made it to #1 on the charts, but the album’s title song, Baby I’m A Want You did make it to #3, so it was not without some popularity. I played that record constantly that spring.
Since my college days, I have stayed in close touch with a number of my classmates, none more than the friends I made on that Freshman floor in UHall #4, especially the other sixteen who all joined Phi Sigma Epsilon fraternity together with me in the spring of 1972. There was only one of the gang of floor mates that I hung out with that freshman year that did not join Phi Sigma Epsilon with us. That was one of the two guys who had the room directly across the hall from me. His name was Mike and he was one of those guys who always had a smile on his face and was quick to laugh at almost anything. He joined one of the cooler fraternities than PSE, a fraternity called Phi Gamma Delta or nicknamed Fiji. Fiji was famous on campus for its early spring Fiji Island party where its members covered themselves in purple grease and wore Fiji Islander garb and frolicked in the cold streets of Ithaca. Fiji was very much cooler than PSE could ever hope to be. But Mike was even cooler than Fiji because he stayed friends with us regular folk over at PSE and never allowed the cool factor at Fiji to go to his head. I played golf and skied with Mike over our four years at Cornell and we formed a lasting friendship that has endured all of these years.
When Cornell graduation rolled around for us, I chose to head to another part of campus to attend the Cornell Business School. Mike had always straddled between going to Law School or Medical School. He was a good, but not obsessive student and did well enough to have his choice in either direction. I think he got in everywhere he applied, less due to his academics and more due to his winning personality. He chose medical school and went off to George Washington University in Washington D.C., where he chose to join the Air Force ROTC (or whatever they call the program for medical students) to pay for the advanced degree. After getting his MD, he added a Masters of Public Health along the way and spent a long and interesting career as an Air Force Flight Surgeon. All that time, as I was building my banking career, Mike and I stayed in touch and while we didn’t see each other often, we managed to meet for a game of golf or a ski outing whenever possible. I always felt like no matter how long it had been since I saw Mike, that we were able to just pick up right where we left off.
A few years ago, when I was asked to teach ethics here in San Diego, I thought of Mike and asked if he would be willing to be a guest lecturer in my course. For one reason or another, I have always thought of Mike as one of the most ethically minded people I know. Naturally, he agreed. He had retired from the Air Force as a Colonel and was pursuing a career in entrepreneurial public health, but keeping strong ties to the Department of Defense. He was appointed to the Defense Health Board where he was asked to chair a committee on Active Duty Women’s Health Care Services, and marshaled the effort to generate a magnum opus report of how the Joint Command could fill the all-important gaps that existed in the Anti-Discriminatory gender process in the military. It was the perfect topic for the law, policy and ethics class I was teaching. Mike, or as one student called him, Dr. Mike, has now taught the class three semesters in a row for me and I must say, I am more impressed with his report and him as a friend every time I hear it, as I did the other night. Mike is he rarest of friends. He is one of those guys I only see or speak to occasionally, and yet I feel as close to him as I do to any friend I have. There was something special in him in 1971, just like there is today. When we spoke today to do the usual class port mortem, Dr. Mike told me that he found himself humming Baby I’m A Want You all day since he can’t think of me without thinking about Bread playing on my $99 stereo across the hall in UHall #4. Thank you, Dr. Mike for fifty-two years of great friendship…where is Bread when you need them?