Tag: life

  • Moving to San Francisco

    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.

  • Early Life

    Early Life

    Richard Fine was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. His mother, Sylvia Miller Fine, was of Ukrainian/Russian/Lithuanian Jewish descent, and his father, Arthur Fine, was of German Jewish descent.

    Sylvia was a homemaker and Arthur ran two movie theaters, the Regal and the Main, in the Over the Rhine section of Cincinnati. Their son Jerry, is two years younger. Richard had a brush with death at age five. A bad case of pneumonia led to his being the first child in Cincinnati to receive penicillin, a substance so precious that it was recovered from his urine. After that “he always wanted to be a doctor,” according to his younger brother, Jerry. Arthur dies in 1955, when Richard was 15 and Jerry 13. It was a watershed moment in both their lives. (quote from Jerry) Richard graduated from Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati.

    He received his undergraduate degree from Cornell College in Ithaca, New York, where he majored in Anthropology and began referring to himself as Dick Fine. He also managed to have his fraternity, Zeta Beta Tau, of which he was President, kicked out of the national organization for admitting Negroes and women. He received his M.D. degree from Cornell Medical College in Manhattan. The summer following medical school he volunteered with the Peruvian Health Service (Spanish name on CV), on a boat delivering medical care to indigenous people along the Amazon River in Peru. This experience predates the backcountry journey of Che Guevara when he wrote the journals which became the Motorcycle Diaries. In any event Dick was on course to be an activist physician.

    In pursuit of that goal he applied for and was accepted for a residency in internal medicine at the University of California San Francisco, where he hoped to be fully engaged in the political movements swirling around the Bay Area in 1966.