An Interview with Jean Kirsch, M.D., conducted by Shoshana Fershtman, J.D., Ph.D.

S: Would you like to share something about how you grew up? Your early life?

J: I grew up in my maternal grandparents’ home in a rural area of northeastern Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border. My mother's sister, my aunt Betty, was only 16 and still a high school student. My mom was a single parent, very young and uneducated. She was only 19 when I was born in 1937. I had a brother, two years younger.

My father was a wanderer, I guess. He was the oldest boy in a family of four kids who lived a mile away down our country road. The way I figure, he seduced my mom and got her pregnant, then was forced to marry her. But shortly after my birth he took off for parts unknown. Finally, she went looking for him and found him in a small town just across the border with West Virginia, where he had become the city manager. I think that was probably when she got pregnant with my brother. Since he never returned, my mom took us a mile down the road to live with her parents when my brother was about a year old. When my mother and my grandmother and my aunt Betty gathered to send me off to the bus stop for my first day of school in September 1943, they called me “sober sides” because I was frowning with impatience to be off and away (Figure 1).

That was my earliest home life, with my mother having boyfriends that she met at the USO1 dances in nearby Youngstown, Ohio, where she had found a job as a bookkeeper. World War II had started with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. My maternal uncle Ray, recently graduated from high school, hurriedly married his sweetheart and then because he had always

been interested in construction, jo