Thank you very much, Joel, for your generous introduction. I’m deeply honored to be this year’s recipient of the Boston Bar Foundation’s Public Service Award. This award is particularly meaningful because it is given by an organization of lawyers who, despite being overworked and underappreciated, are reaching out to the community and supporting a broad range of public service projects.
I have been particularly impressed by the Foundation’s programs for children in inner-city Boston. These children need the financial assistance and personal mentoring provided by the Foundation. I know the importance of role models from my own childhood; I had the benefit of a remarkable role model—my older brother Michael.
Let me tell you about Michael’s difficult childhood and his remarkable career as a doctor. Next I will draw a few lessons from Michael’s career as a doctor. Then I will draw a few lessons from Michael’s life for the many children who must cope with difficult challenges at home and in school.
Before Michael was five years old, he had undergone several operations to reconstruct his mouth and palate. Because of Michael’s birth defect, he had to attend speech therapy and contend with a facial scar. Both took a terrible emotional toll on him. I can remember, when he was seven or eight, other kids making fun of him because they couldn’t understand what he was saying. I can remember, when he was sixteen or seventeen, his girlfriend’s parents cutting off the relationship because they feared he might pass on his birth defect to their grandchildren.
Michael survived high school, went on to college, and then to medical school to pursue his dream of becoming a doctor. Michael had a hard time relating to the dry details of science courses during his first two years of medical school. But he became a star in the last two years when he did his clinical rotations. Michael was devoted to his patients and they loved him. He also found time to organize an ambulatory care program for migrant workers who picked vegetables in New Jersey during the summer. As a result of his outstanding work, Michael became a Robert Wood Johnson fellow and received a PhD in public health at Johns Hopkins while doing a cardiology internship there.
Michael then moved to Boston to teach and raise a family. In Boston, Michael was a whirlwind of activity. At Boston City Hospital, he established and trained a corps of paramedics to ride the ambulances to accident scenes. Every spring we still give out the Dr. Michael Pozen award to the paramedic of the year. Michael and another doctor launched a major research project on how emergency rooms should handle patients complaining of chest pain. Their work led to a computer program that helps doctors decide how to treat these patients most effectively. At the same time, Michael saw lots and lots of patients at the hospital. And he was one of the few doctors who would make home visits if one of his patients had a heart attack in the middle of the night.
Thus, it was a tragic irony that Michael, at the tender age of thirty-six, went to sleep one night and did not wake up because of a heart attack. The extensive autopsy was inconclusive—no heart disease, just sudden heart failure. My personal guess is that Michael had another birth defect that had not yet become evident.
Michael left a wife and two sons, ages three and seven. His widow devoted herself to raising the boys, and I tried to supply the boys with a male parental figure. Both are now young men, who have done very well personally and professionally, despite their father’s premature death.
While Michael’s story is a tragic one, I believe we can draw some lessons from his life.
The first is a message of hope for all those born with a disability or handicap. My brother was a person who could hardly be understood as a boy, yet he went on to deliver lectures regularly at medical school. Here was a person with a visible birth defect, yet he went on to marry and father two handsome sons.
The second is a message to all of us, to be more sensitive to children who lose a parent at an early age. The deck can be stacked against them at a time when support and encouragement are essential—when the measure of their lives is so dependent upon the adults around them.
In the U.S., children are “losing” parents and growing up in single-parent homes for many reasons, not only because of the early death of a parent. Unfortunately, it appears to be a growing trend. As recently as 1960, just 5 percent of all births in the U.S. were to unwed mothers. But by 1970, almost 11 percent of U.S. births were in that category. That category doubled again by the mid-1980s to 22 percent. And by 1996, almost one out of every three births in the U.S. were to unwed mothers.
Let’s look at the issue from a different perspective. In 1970, 11 percent of children under eighteen lived in single-parent households. By 1998, 28 percent did—with the mother in the vast majority of cases. But it’s not just single mothers. In fact, according to the Census Bureau, the number of single fathers grew 25 percent from 1995 to 1998, to over two million single-father families.
Many of these kids are doing just fine, thankfully. But many are not. We need to reach out to these children—whether they suffer from the emotional, educational, or financial handicaps that may result from growing up with just one parent.
Third, it’s so easy to be consumed by the day-to-day pressures of our own lives, our own careers, and our own families. But we need to step back and look beyond our offices and neighborhoods, to consider what’s happening outside of our own professions and industries. In the investment business, we seem to be obsessed with every major earning announcement and every utterance from the Fed, while other vital issues exist below our radar screens.
I applaud the Boston Bar Foundation for reaching out to the community to address children’s needs. This is important work. In five, ten, or twenty years from now, the kids I’ve talked about this evening are likely to become our customers, our clients, and our employees. These are not children in some far off country; these are not children in some nameless institution; these are our children. And the work we do today, in mentoring them as children, will help their lives immeasurably.
I urge all of you to continue your generous support for the work of the Foundation.