The Board of Trustees was committed to seeing the hospital develop. They signed on at once to my vision for the, the future of the hospital. I explained to them that, in order to attract the kinds of people that I thought would do what the hospital would profit from having done, required much more laboratory space than the hospital had, and that it was crucial that we address that need early. The then head of the hospital, the... the person who was the titular director of the hospital wasn't in complete accord with that and we... we did have disagreement on that point. He's, when the trustees supported me with respect to the priority of their building, that is to say, a research building first and a new patient care building second, he subsequently left and we sought a new director. I played a role in that. Mitchell Rabkin was... had had no previous experience in hospital administration, but he agreed to come in that role.
I recall the meeting that I had with the then President of the Hospital Board of Trustees, wonderful man, who was head of a local business called the Green Shoe Company. The man's name was Sam Slosberg. The Green Shoe Company made children's shoes, and about a year before my meeting with Sam Slosberg he, quite by chance, had recruited my brother who had a small children's shoe company and the one that Slosberg was in charge of was one that wanted very much to get my brother, so they bought the... the company. My brother, who has served as a model for me in many ways, an extraordinary man, deeply committed to the problems of society and has expressed that commitment in a variety of ways, my brother had... apparently had a meeting with Sam Slosberg on the afternoon of the evening on which I made the pitch for a science building to, to Sam. And, Sam turned to the people around him and said, 'All day, all day I've had to put up with the unreasonable demands of this man's brother, and in the evening, seeking a little bit of repose, I come and find myself putting up with his unreasonable demands!' But that was more or less the spirit of the, of the trustees of the hospital, and it was just an exciting place to be.
The men that we recruited that came to head the various units, hematology and cardiology and endocrinology, and kidney disease, people who were just starting out, by and large, when they arrived, by the time the, a... a period of four or five years had gone by, were getting offers themselves for chairmanships in various places around the, the country. Dan Kimberg ultimately went to Columbia Presbyterian as chairman of the department of medicine. Dick Nesson went to the Brigham and Women's Hospital ultimately as president of the hospital. Lou Sherwood went to, to the, to the, the Albert Einstein Medical School as chairman of the department of medicine. Who else? Lou Sherwood... Howard Frazier came to the School of Public Health to Head the Center for the Evaluation of, of Health Practices. Stuart Schlossman went to the Dana Farber Centre. A group of very gifted, deeply committed, wonderful colleagues.
