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Andy Whittemore
After graduating from GDA, and a summer not so gainfully employed with Peter Buck and Steve Blair as the Three Fifths, I was off to Trinity with Colin Studds and managed to graduate with a BS in Biology and squeak into Columbia P&S for medical school. That summer prior to starting the medical grind, Rhodie and I married and worked as live-out domestics for a couple in Tenants Harbor, Maine. We moved to NYC, and Rhodie went to work for the Visiting Nurse Service on the Lower West Side. After four years of medical school, the next seven were consumed by Surgical Internship and Residency, including a year in training as an NIH laboratory investigator, and a year of Clinical Fellowship in Vascular Surgery. An additional two years in the Navy, as Chief of Vascular Surgery in Norfolk, Virginia with the 6th Fleet, polished off my draft obligations. At the age of 34, I finally joined the staff at the then Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston at Harvard Medical School and began to earn an honest living in 1979.
Rhodie and I have three terrific children and one equally terrific grandchild, Maggie, with another Anthony due in October. Our oldest, Tony, lives with his wife in Rumson NJ and commutes on the ferry to Wall Street. He saw the wisdom of a non-medical career and is an investment banker, originally with Saloman Bros., now Deutchbank. He and Patty are the parents of the grandchildren. Josh has had it with N.E. winters and has been in the Palo Alto area for several years in the Biotech Industry, initially in mechanical/electrical engineering, now as a software engineer for a start-up. Our youngest, Sarah, was married last summer and is an elementary school teacher in the Lincoln school system.
After the children were off on their own, Rhodie went back to the School for the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston, with all the kids with purple hair and rings in every orifice. She's done some great work and she tells me that she's nearly ready to graduate! I keep plodding along here at the now Brigham and Women's Hospital as Chief of Vascular Surgery and Professor of Surgery at Harvard, and more recently as the hospital's Chief Medical Officer. I have had an amazingly privileged career and marriage, and am one thankful dude!
Andy Whittemore |