You may think I’m a nobody, just a faceless cog in the direct mail advertising machine. And you’d be right. But I’ve had my close brushes with fame! For instance, there was my San Francisco elevator ride with Gloria Steinem in 1986. And in a Manhattan elevator the same year, a hirsute gent asked me pathetically, “Don’t you know who I am?” I had to admit that I didn’t. “I’m Tony Orlando,” he said, and so he was.
Then there was Telly Savales, his back bumping mine in a bar in Duluth, Minnesota, and John Lithgow, strangely alone at a Mickey Mouse breakfast at Disney. The list goes on, but I’ll spare you. There’s just one more link to fame I want to share, my link with a person of real greatness, not just a product of show biz.
A few years ago, the mother of my son’s best friend mentioned that she had just returned from Boston. She’d been to a symposium featuring her brother, a Harvard professor. “There was this guy there who wants to write a book about him,” she said. I pictured an out-of-work freelancer and a dry academic treatise.
Turns out that “this guy” was Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize winner, author of several nonfiction bestsellers that I had read and deeply admired. And my friend’s brother was not just any academic, but — I’ll quote a New York Times front page article — “a charismatic and chatty healer” whose who brought Harvard level health care to rural Haiti and is the subject of Kidder’s best-selling Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Save the World.
Kidder’s storytelling is brilliant, but the star is Farmer, who began his impossibly impressive career while a student at Harvard, becoming a modern-day Robin Hood who shuttled between Boston and Haiti with “borrowed” medicine in his suitcase while earning his M.D. and a Ph.D. in anthropology seemingly in his spare time. He now teaches at Harvard Medical School and criss-crosses the globe fighting for equity in health care (he found himself referred to as “a pest” in the files of a major drug company), yet spends much of each year with patients in Haiti, Peru and Siberia. With associates, he launched the non-profit Partners in Health (www.PIH.org), which now has multiple clinics, hundreds of local workers, and thousands of saved lives to its credit. The model is copied all over the world. Long renowned in professional circles, Farmer now shows up in places like Reader’s Digest and the Today Show Book Club. Is it going to his head?
‘’We didn’t do it to be a model program,’’ said Farmer in a 2003 article in the New York Times. “We did it because people were croaking.” All that accomplishment, and self-deprecating humor, too!
And he has a darned nice sister and nephew, too, right here in town. Have I mentioned that I know them?
Thanks for reading!
(This is a rerun from May, 2007. Dr. Paul Farmer has become truly world-renowned since then, and is now serving the United Nations as Bill Clinton’s Special Deputy for Haiti, so has been widely interviewed since the Hait earthquake and is a key figure in heading up the relief and rebuilding efforts.