Dr. Eugene Glick

Dr. Eugene Glick (1929-2010)

Dad’s life came straight out of an American immigrant storybook. A first-generation citizen, Eugene Glick embodied the most beautiful and enduring qualities of this country’s myths and dreams: achievement through merit, service to those in need, and a deep commitment to provide love and comfort to his family. He was a remarkable physician, an exemplary father, a dogged political activist, an enthusiastic musician, and an unselfish supporter of our most unusual mother, Ruth. Dad was one of the kindest, most genuine, good-tempered, and generous men we have ever known. Both Steve and I are deeply honored to be his surviving sons.

He was the only son of Russian Jewish immigrant parents who survived the pogroms and the Russian Revolution before coming to the United States in the early 1920s. Genia and Isaak worked seven days a week, 16 hours a day running a corner pharmacy in Philadelphia in order to boost young Eugene up in the New World. They lived in the back of the store, and Dad said he didn’t remember having family dinners because somebody always had to mind the counter.

He took the boost and flew his Jewish mama’s coop. At 17, he packed into a Pontiac with his cousin Gene Gluck and made a mad, cross-country dash-and-back several years before Kerouac, narrowly missing an amputation at the jaws of a Yellowstone grizzly bear. He fledged to university at the unfortunately-named Ursinus College, where he quarterbacked his single-wing team in the leather helmet years and performed in Gilbert and Sullivan spectacles. He summered as a waiter and counselor in the Poconos, playing folk guitar on the 1950 Martin D18 he received for his 21st birthday (which Pete Seeger once grabbed from Pop to tune it). On the day Dad returned from basic training in Ft. Dix, where he served briefly in the Army Reserves, he learned he had been accepted to the hometown medical school, Jefferson, where his eldest son would also train. He married his high school sweetheart, a union to a woman with great beauty and intellect that lasted a miraculous 56 years before Ruth Elaine Moser’s death two years ago. (Dad famously reported to his father-in-law that Mom was pregnant with Robert Paul, 15 minutes after conception.)

After medical school, he packed his growing family off to California (with son number two, Daniel Jay, in utero), where he reinvented himself as an obstetrician and gynecologist at a fledgling health maintenance organization named Kaiser-Permanente. Baby son Steven Roy was born in the waning years of the Eisenhower 50s, and the family soon moved into a suburban tract home at the furthest edges of Los Angeles, with a swimming pool in the backyard and three sports-mad sons who became his best friends.

In the momentous year of 1967-1968, he took an almost unheard of job as a trailing spouse when Mom accepted an offer to do linguistics research in Uganda. He soon found a role as a professor at the Makerere University Medical School in Kampala, conducting groundbreaking maternal and child health studies. He also caught a 120-pound Nile Perch that was bigger than he was, which wasn’t hard to do if you were his sprouting teenage sons, but was impressive for a fish.

That year transformed the country, transformed our family, and transformed our dad. After returning from Africa, he and mom became deeply involved in Civil Rights politics and anti-Vietnam War politics, hosting SNCC parties at our house and losing me (temporarily) at an anti-war rally in San Francisco. Dad decided to go back to school at UC Berkeley to get his Masters in Public Health, which launched him and our family into another chapter as Northern Californians. In those pre-Roe v. Wade days, Dad would do illegal abortions because he was seeing too many botched abortions in his practice. As he later said in a documentary about early abortions, “I knew what I was doing was against the law, but I also knew the law was wrong.” He was right; the law was changed.

Reproductive rights for women and sex education became our parents’ passion, which led naturally to our father leaving Kaiser and opening a women’s health clinic in Reno, Nevada. For nearly two decades he worked at the front lines of the abortion wars, driving past picketers, cleaning up stink bombs, and working the political back channels to shore up support for a woman’s right to choose. His deep compassion, expert clinical skills, and warm humor helped salvage the lives of thousands of women – and allowed them to have children when and if they chose to.

Even after retiring, he continued to lobby and work tirelessly on behalf of reproductive choice, testifying at colleagues' malpractice trials as an expert witness, and authoring a book on surgical abortion that is still being used to train medical students today.

Dad lost his eldest son and doctor-doppelganger Bob to breast cancer in 2001, a loss that we still grieve and always will. Mom and Dad moved from their stunning Lake Tahoe home to Chico to focus attention on their astounding grandchildren who survive them: Michelle, Brandon, Jason, Britney, Kolya, Casey, Zoe and Travis.

After Mom passed away in 2007, Dad had a mini-Renaissance even as his health began to fail: He focused his medical energy on end-of-life issues, becoming a vocal member of Compassion & Choices and consulting to help California write new legislation to allow physicians to help their patients with more humane deaths. He traveled to Israel to visit his beloved cousin Rena, and went to New York to help another beloved cousin, Shelley, celebrate her 80th birthday. He gave generously to help Obama get elected, and believed deeply in the ACLU. Just months before passing on, he attended the National Abortion Federation annual meeting, and was welcomed as a venerated and beloved elder statesman.

Our family celebrated Dad’s 80th birthday on December 10, along with his grandson Casey who turned 21 on the same day, his daughters-in-law Renda and Melanie, and the

rest of the Chico crew. In truth, Casey did help Dad to blow out the candles.

In Dad’s last year, his body and mind began to deteriorate. The aforementioned years of playing football without a proper helmet, winters of skiing in a marginally-controlled speedball down black diamond slopes, and decades of wrestling with three rambunctious sons had taken a toll on his back and neck vertebrae. He had a bionic hip, a brain that suffered from a few too many momentary blood losses, and a ticker that was host to a stent that couldn’t compensate for his closing arteries. On Thursday, December 7, he suffered a stroke at dinner that paralyzed his right side. He asked me to fly out the next day.

On December 9, 2010, at halftime of the Eagles-Cowboys wildcard game, Dad asked Steve and me to help him to bed and not just because the Eagles were getting creamed. He hadn’t given up, but his body had given out. Steve and I crawled into bed on either side of him, and told him that he was the best father that anybody could have ever hoped for. We told him we loved him deeply, and thanked him for the immeasurable gifts he had given us.

Dad hugged us both, and told us he was content with the beautiful life he had led.

We are thrilled to have had him as our father. He was a great man, and we will miss him.