Читать книгу Summer of Shadows - Jonathan Knight - Страница 20

In many ways, Dr. Sam Sheppard was the embodiment of the American dream.

Baby-faced and handsome, Sam had been a popular student at Cleveland Heights High School, an excellent athlete and voted president of essentially every club he joined. In his senior year he was selected the “Most Likely to Succeed” in his class. Though a year and a half older, Marilyn Reese was drawn to Sam’s charms just like many other girls in high school. Though she went off to Skidmore College while he was still in high school, their relationship continued to blossom. But after he departed for California for medical school—the Los Angeles Osteopathic School of Physicians and Surgeons—he realized he couldn’t live without her. She joined him there, and they were married in February 1945.

He graduated later that year, but they stayed in California, renting an apartment, enjoying the ocean and weather and the free and open lifestyle of the West Coast, which fit their active and social natures. They returned to Cleveland seven years later, in 1952, when Sam became part of the family legacy, joining his two older brothers, Richard and Steve, and his father, Richard Sr., staffing Bay View Hospital, a Georgian-style mansion that had been purchased by Sam’s father and converted into a hospital in 1948, the same year Sam’s beloved Indians captured their first world title in twenty-eight years. In the six years that followed, as the Indians regularly fell just short, Sam Sheppard continually came up aces. His career blossomed at Bay View as the new hospital—and its reputation—grew. Well-liked by his patients, he was referred to informally as “Dr. Sam,” in part to distinguish him from his brothers and father.