John P. McGovern, MD: A Lifetime of Stories

Chapter One. Growing Up in DC

Growing Up in DC The year 1921 was a good year to be born. World War I had ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. For the first time in years, America’s focus on the war was receding into the past, and many Americans felt that the Great War was the last war. The 1920s, comfortably positioned between the two world wars, was a time of great optimism and growth. These were the years when F. Scott Fitzgerald was publishing classic chronicles including This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Great Gatsby (1925). Sinclair Lewis published the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Arrowsmith (1925), about a physician from a small midwestern town, torn between research and community medicine. The Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age— call it what you will, it was a special time in American history. It was the time of Prohibition, which tested our nation’s morality in new ways as speakeasies and gang violence emerged on a grand scale. A new type of American woman came into her own in this era, one who smoked, drank, danced, and voted. The Great Depression was more than a decade away, and newspaper headlines of the year were reporting such good news as the purchase of twenty acres by the New York Yankees to build Yankee Stadium, the delivery by air of the first US transcontinental mail from San Francisco to New York, the lectures on a new theory called relativity delivered in New York City by a professor named Albert Einstein, and the isolation of a substance called insulin by two scientists at the University Chapter One growing up in dc | 11 of Toronto.1 A man in England named Churchill was making a name for himself as Minister of Colonies. Dig deeper into the headlines of 1921, and you find more ominous signs of events to come. Lenin proclaimed new economic politics in Russia, deadly race riots rocked Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Communist Party of China was founded, and Adolf Hitler became the leader of the National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party. Still, many of these darker headlines of the day were lost to front pages that had the nation buzzing as Babe Ruth hit his 120th home run on June 10 and became the home run champion of baseball, and then just a month later set a new record of 137 career home runs. During that month of June in which Babe Ruth was making history, John Philip McGovern was born in Washington, DC. To family and friends, he was Jack. Of all the good fortune in young Jack’s life, perhaps the best was being born into the McGovern family. On June 2, 1921, he became the first (and would remain the only) child of Francis Xavier McGovern (1893–1951) and Lottie Brown McGovern (1893–1979). Welcoming his new child to the world, F. X.—or Mac, as he was really called—sat down and in the strong and artful hand of the general surgeon he was, wrote his son a three-page letter on American Red Cross stationery. figure 1.1. Jack McGovern, age four months. 12 | chapter one My dear Little Jack: This is your first letter. Daddie wants you to be as good a little boy as you can. You are too young now to know what your Dear Mother suffered in order to bring you into this world, but you will one day know and realize it. You have a dear sweet Mother; a mother who will always love and cherish you. She has shown Daddie by her actions how intensely and sensibly she loves you and I want you always to love her. Never show by actions or word anything but a boy’s love for his mother. As you grow older Daddie will tell you of your Dear Mother and he will teach you to love her in a way that will make her realize that all she has done and will do for you will be appreciated by you. Mother will, I am sure, teach you to love Daddie. I love Mother, Mother loves me, we both love you and you love us both. Hence our little family will be happy in love. So Jack my darling Boy, spare your Mother all you can. She has not yet fully recovered from her efforts to bring you into this world and...