In December 2014 the doctor himself was diagnosed with late stage cancer, which still didn’t prevent him from walking Sarah down the aisle at her wedding to Sergio Valentini in Buenos Aires in March 2015.
When word got out that Dick Fine was seriously ill, doctors, nurses, secretaries, clerks and family members teamed up to create a professionally produced film of his life and times entitled Biker with a Moral Compass: Dick Fine and the Evolving Culture of San Francisco General Hospital.
Dick and Kathleen also shared a house in Inverness, California where they kept a sailboat, the Shiksa, with which he took many residents sailing after their grueling tours of duty on the hospital wards.
Dick and Kathleen did not postpone anything they wanted to do, including travel to England, Scotland, France, Spain, Africa and Central and South America, as well as all over the United States.
Dick apparently passed along his love of seeing the world to their daughters Lynn and Sarah, who lived in Argentina for a number of years, where their parents visited a number of times.
Dick knew even before he finished medical school that he would leave the East Coast for California.
“It wasn’t from TV. I just knew about the Free Speech movement and the anti-war movement and civil rights and I knew I had to be there. I applied to San Francisco General’s internship program. My interviewer was this gray-haired woman pediatrician. She said she didn’t have time to interview me, because there was this demonstration in Berkeley she wanted to go to. So I said, ‘Let’s go.’ It was Mario Savio speaking in Sproul Plaza. After that, I knew I had to go there. It was the only program I applied to. I was in Peru when the acceptance letter came. I had told my mother where I was, but poor Sylvia had no way to reach me.”
In 1974, Dick met Kathleen Campbell, a secretary in the Outpatient Department. They lived together for seven years, married in 1981, and had twin daughters, Sarah and Lynn, in 1983. Dick supported Kathleen in obtaining her law degree and becoming a federal court attorney in 1986.
They lived in the same house that Fine had purchased in 1968, while he was still a resident. For many years they rode the same motorcycle 1974 BMW R/75 on which he had given her a ride from the hospital to her flat in the Mission on that fateful day he broke his rule about not dating anyone from work.