Blue Genes Read Free Page B

that his father wanted him to study dentistry (“to support the family”), a notion that Dad detested. He had his heart set on law and politics. However, to please—or at least pacify—his father, Dad entered the medical school of the University of Pittsburgh.
    Dental studies were not as long or as arduous as those required for physicians, but the first semester was the same for both, mainly involving dissection. Dad told two stories about his dental school attendance, both of them quite amusing. Unfortunately, he told the same two stories over and over, until Tony and I knew them by heart, by which time they ceased to be interesting. One sticks most in my mind. It shows something about ingenuity, life in the 1920s in Pittsburgh, and my father’s mind-set.
    Dissection of the human body was done by teams of three students. My father picked two young men to do the work with him. Unfortunately, none of the three had the few bucks it took to purchase a dead body from the university, so Dad and his cohorts decided they could do what the dental school did: go to the coroner’s office and get a body that was going to be buried in potter’s field—the burying place for unclaimed bodies—and transport it to the lab themselves.
    They looked in the paper and found the ideal body: a woman who had been dead only a few days and who, according to the paper, would be interred in a simple grave within twenty-four hours if no one claimed her. The three stooges approached the morgue and “claimed” Ella Morgan (the name found on the woman’s identification, according to the paper). “A cousin,” my father said. The official at the morgue laughed long and hard. “You’re med students, huh?”
    “How did you know?” they asked, chagrined.
    “Come on, fellas, I’ll show you.”
    Ella Morgan was black. None of the three applicants was. While Dad and his friends felt foolish, the pudgy official was delighted to have Ms. Morgan taken off his hands. He gave her to the students.
    Ella weighed 250 pounds, which caused a number of problems. Outside waited the Model A Ford they had borrowed for the job. Piling Ella into the rumble seat was not easy, but they managed it. All three of them crowded into the front seat; no one wanted to sit with Ella. It began to snow, and the slippery, steep road up the hill to the university was too much for the Model A—especially with a dead body in the backseat. The vaunted ability of Mr. Ford’s automobile to go up hills better in reverse didn’t pay off, and the car skidded to the side of the road.
    “We’ll have to carry her,” said my father.
    And carry Ella they did, up many, many flights of stairs, stopping every so often to curse themselves for being smart alecks and cheap. Arriving, at last, at the lab’s doors, they encountered another problem. They were locked. It was late. By now, tempers flaring and ingenuity at a low, they had only one choice. They broke a basement window, slid the body in, clambered in themselves, and carted Ms. Ella Morgan to an empty dissecting table.
    As Dad put it: “In the morning, we could barely face one another, much less Ella.”
    Dad lasted that one year and then quit.
    At the same time, Samuel and his family moved back to New York City, and Dad returned with them, joined by Lou Berko, a cousin with whom he had struck up an enthusiastic friendship in Pittsburgh. Together, they decided to go to a night course at Brooklyn Law School. It would take longer than going during the day, but they could have jobs during the day if they went at night. That would help them pay the tuition. Luckily, at that time, one didn’t need a college degree to go to law school, so they both got in.
    Lou and Dad pursued the law with intelligence and energy. To help support himself, Dad got a clerkship in the law office of one Fiorello La Guardia, a man who understood something about pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. He had done much the same as Samuel Lukacs, finding work