Funny how little has changed over the past 50 years.
Interview with Dr. Robert Simon
"Bob Simon, who says he’s “probably the only Republican at Cook County Hospital,” may have compassion for the working poor, but he’s quick to note where he draws the line. And he doesn’t care who’s offended. “I did not come here to help the bum on the street–the alcoholic or drug addict who comes to the ER 40 times a year just to get a place to sleep. I didn’t come here for ‘the homeless,’ because I’ve worked for 18 years in emergency medicine–I know what ‘the homeless’ really are. I’m not a liberal. Die-hard liberals talk about ‘the homeless.’ If they actually saw what they’re defending I don’t think they’d be so die-hard. Most of the homeless really don’t care about themselves or are psychiatrically impaired. You can give them any opportunity in the world, and they would not take advantage of it. They could do things for themselves, but they won’t. So who the hell cares about them? To me, society wastes enormous energy, money, and resources on them. I can say this, as I come from a family of 16 children whose income was less than one-third of the official poverty level.”
Simon was the 13th child of 16 in a family of Lebanese immigrants. He grew up in Detroit in a Lebanese-Italian neighborhood, near Gate 12 of the Ford Motor Company. His father’s name was originally Abdul-Jalil, but some anonymous official at Ellis Island dubbed him Simon when he immigrated near the turn of the century. When his father’s first wife died after the birth of her 12th child he returned to Lebanon to find a second mate. Bob Simon was the oldest of her four children.
“My father was a common laborer, a complete illiterate. He worked at Ford Motor Company and was an unpaid union organizer for the United Auto Workers. He worked with Walter Reuther, and he was at the ‘Gate 12 massacre’ when other union organizers were killed. In those days auto workers were treated like slaves. But he died condemning the unions of today. ‘Now they spend 95 percent of their time defending the 5 percent of workers who are derelicts and don’t deserve their jobs.’ That’s not what he made those sacrifices for.”
The family depended on a nearby Salvation Army thrift shop to clothe themselves. Simon remembers a 25-cent overcoat that got him through the Michigan winters during high school.
He won full scholarships to college and medical school, entering Wayne State University in 1968. His intensity and single-mindedness got him through the college premed courses in just two years, even though he was also working washing trucks and busing tables. “I used to average about four hours of sleep a night, then every ten days or so I’d sleep for eight or ten hours. I didn’t know what the scholarship situation would be, and I wanted to get done with it.” From 1970 to 1974 he attended medical school at Wayne State and worked nights as a janitor.
After doing his internship at Detroit General Hospital, he spent three years in Michigan’s upper peninsula working in an emergency room and spending a couple of days a week working with an orthopedist or a plastic surgeon. In 1978 he did his residency in emergency medicine at the University of Chicago, then went to UCLA, where he practiced and taught and wrote. He’s the author of five books, two of them classics in the field of emergency medicine, and about 50 journal articles."
