Physician, cofounder and executive medical director of Calvary Hospital in the Bronx
(1933– )
We had a four-room apartment in a walk-up building. My three sisters, believe it or not, slept in one of the two bedrooms, in one bed. My parents had the other bedroom. I slept in the living room on what’s called in Italian a branda, a foldout bed, that was kept in the closet when it wasn’t used. It was great when one of my sisters got married because then there were only two sisters at home, but I still didn’t get a bedroom. At times there’d be conversations going on around me or my sisters would be entertaining their boyfriends on the sofa in the living room, while I’d be lying on my branda in the middle of the room.
The insulation in that room was bad. It was freezing in the winter, and we had no blankets to speak of. My father would put his heavy coat on top of me when he came home from work. That was my blanket. Other than that, there was only like leftover cloth and stuff that my grandmother brought over on the boat from Italy. The bedsheet was made from sacks that originally held rice that they stitched together. This was about as comfortable as sandpaper. I would’ve frozen to death if my father hadn’t given me his coat.
But I had no negative feelings because I didn’t even imagine how others might’ve slept. I felt very loved. My three sisters spoiled me as much as you could spoil any kid in the Bronx. I was this little prince when I was born, and to this day I’m very spoiled. When my dad was up in the morning, I could smell the coffee brewing even before I got out of bed. That was such a wonderful smell. Such a wonderful memory. There just was no room. We were stuffed into that apartment.
My dad was an extremely wonderful guy. He had no education, but he was determined to get himself a civil service job so that after the Depression he would be more secure. He was hit hard by the Depression because he was out of work a lot. He finally got a job with the Housing Authority and became a supervisor in one of the projects in 1938. His dream for me was to be a plumber.
He pointed out that it was complicated to change a pipe. At that time all the pipes were steam-fitted. He said, “Look, here’s Nick the plumber. Look at the car he drives! Look at the house he has! He always makes a living no matter what’s going on. And Mickey”—’cause he never had any great aspirations for what I was going to do with myself—“you gotta become a plumber, you gotta get a trade.”
I’ll confess that in P.S. 76 the teachers were anxious to get rid of me, to have me leave to go to Evander Childs High School. I was not a great student and spent lots of time with my friends in the streets. That changed when I went to high school.
I was challenged by this teacher, Mrs. Lubell. She looked at my IQ test scores and said that they were definitely not my scores. She wanted to know where I sat. Well, I sat next to my friend Menasha, who was smart. Mrs. Lubell was sure that my test was not on the up-and-up because she knew me as a pain in the neck. She thought that I cheated, that those high scores weren’t really mine. So I had to retake the IQ test and I suddenly found myself removed to another classroom, which was far more challenging, and Mrs. Lubell was my new homeroom teacher.
It was a bridge from my group of kids who I hung out with, who were totally unmotivated, to this other group who were motivated educationally. So I figured that I could sit in the class with the advanced kids but still have a leather coat, a ducktail haircut, and have lunch and hang out with the other guys.
I would do their book reports in the cafeteria during lunch. They’d get in line, and I’d say, “Tell me what the book was about.” Like tell me what the basic story was. And they’d say, “Well, it’s about this guy, he got shot and blah blah blah.” So I would construct a page of stuff having never read the book. And the guys I did it for, they very much respected me ’cause I helped them out. That meant that I got respect in the street. I also got girlfriends.
When you grew up in that neighborhood, as far as a future was concerned, you were either going to take numbers, be a loan shark, or you were going to be an athlete or do some menial job.
One summer day we were outside. A big black car pulled up in front of my building on Bronxwood Avenue and somebody got out. He had a black bag and was a very good-looking elegant man who then went into the building and disappeared.
We all knew that one of our friends, Johnny, was sick and wasn’t able to come out for a while. A crowd formed around the building. This Dr. McLeod came out of the building, tipped his hat, and went into the car. Everyone was impressed, because apparently the doctor had diagnosed what was wrong with Johnny. There was a lot of talk and excitement about this guy, this doctor. I was absolutely awed and said, “That looks like something I’d like to be.” So it was then that I got the idea to be a physician. I was thirteen or fourteen at the time.
I talked to Mrs. Wilson, who was a teacher at P.S. 76. I went to see her because I heard that her son was a doctor. And she said, “You don’t need courage to take care of sick people. You need courage to do your studies. That’s what you need.” It was an impetus for me to change. That and Mrs. Lubell. I needed to get my act together.
I knew that I wanted to be someone. I didn’t want to be a housepainter or a plumber. I wish I could say that at that point I wanted to help people, but my goal was to “make it” somehow. I was the first one in my large extended family who went to college.
I wanted to be revered by the family. And that did happen. Not only by my immediate one, but my extended family as well. First cousins, second cousins. They all were so excited when I finished medical school that they had this large party for me. I still have the pictures. Actually, it spawned many other doctors in the family whose fathers said to them, “Forget about being a wallpaper hanger. If Mickey could do it, then you could do it!”
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Note: During a commercial break on TV, I saw an ad for Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. Pictures of a Dr. Michael Brescia caught my attention. He had the same name as a boy I remembered from my classes at P.S. 76 and Evander Childs High School, so I wrote to him at the hospital and found out that he was indeed the Michael Brescia I knew from childhood.
We agreed to have lunch at an Italian restaurant near Arthur Avenue in the Belmont section of the Bronx, which is still an Italian neighborhood. I tried to put together the picture of the kid I remembered from school with the face of the mature person sitting opposite me in the restaurant. The pictures fit, but when I heard Dr. Brescia’s stories I realized that, although I could remember him, I actually knew nothing about his childhood. After high school we had lost touch completely.