In July of 1948, my father began his medical residency at Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital, in training for a career as an obstetrician and gynecologist. He remained at Bellevue for a year.
My parents met, and began dating, in early 1949, as my mother's television career was starting. They would soon become engaged.
The hospital, which had opened in the early 1930s, was named after the mother of Frank Hague, who for three decades was Jersey City's Mayor (a tenure which ended in 1947).
From January to March of 1949, my mother had been a singer on a weekday musical program on television's DuMont Network, The Stan Shaw Show. In March, the month she turned twenty-one, she began singing on a new nightly DuMont musical program, Teen Time Tunes. The program went off the air in July, the same month my father began working at the Jersey City hospital.
The picture above is of my father, from 1949, standing outside the hospital.
In August of 1949 my parents were married in Manhattan.
My father worked at the Margaret Hague hospital until the end of 1949. In December of 1949, my mother began singing on bandleader Kay Kyser's TV program on NBC.
In 1950, my father continued his OB/GYN residency at New York's Harlem Hospital. He completed his residency, at the hospital, at the end of 1952.
At the start of 1953, my parents left New York for the Boston area. My father had been hired by a medical practice in Boston; he later opened his own office. He left private practice in the late 1980s.
Not long after my parents left New York, my mother sang for a time on a morning radio show in Boston, and in 1954 and 1955 had her own weekly TV program on a Boston station. She appeared on other Boston TV programs through the years, and in the 1960s began a decades-long voice-overs career.
She died in the spring of 2001, at 73. My father died on New Year's Day, 2022, at age 100. I miss them both.
