The four of us were at a wedding in Austin when we received multiple calls from Philadelphia, where Josh’s son Daniel had invited Catharine to his senior prom. Josh told us that she was in the hospital with appendicitis, but that we shouldn’t worry, because he had called the hospital, told them he was a surgeon (true—although technically just for animals) and that he had authorized them to go ahead with surgery. He was furious when Rosemary laughed, because Catharine had her appendix removed when she was 5. Turned out she had food poisoning and sadly, missed the prom.
We all decided to embrace Texas with a vengeance, and this resulted in trips to the Hill country and eventually Big Bend National Park where we enjoyed the superb scenery and rafting.
It was on one of those trips that we had to coax Josh out of the raft on the Mexican side since he was convinced that only setting foot in Mexico would produce serious GI problems. Other pioneering adventures took us from Chihuahua on a train to the Copper Canyon in Mexico (with lots of booze and snacks to ward off any maladies) and to Alaska where we explored the Inside Passage with naturalists in a small ship.
Sometimes Josh and Margaret went further afield without us, which on one occasion had a disastrous result. Josh, on horseback was trying to outrun a zebra while on a safari in Kenya. It was Rosemary who received a call from Pan Am asking that she arrange an ambulance to meet him at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, and she then got him into St. Luke’s Hospital where she was on the staff (now a CHI institution), where he underwent major orthopedic reconstruction of his severely broken leg bones.
Since 1993, when Irv retired from the Anderson and we began our subsequent healthcare-related consulting in Scotland, Mexico and New York, our families have remained intertwined. We always knew there would be a warm welcome when we visited them in Houston with spirited conversation about science, politics, and life in general. Birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, vacations—we have done them all.
Irv is soon to be 97, and he finds travel—particularly by air—rather tiring, but in December of last year, we decided to do a day trip on a Saturday from our home in Savannah to Houston to visit Josh and Margaret.
How glad we are that we got to spend several hours together with Josh and Irv talking about past scientific successes and musing about the future of cancer research and treatment, the fields they have both loved and enhanced so much.
It is just one more detail for the memory bank of a man we were privileged to call a dear and very close friend for more than 37 years.
Josh… life won’t be the same without you.
Krakoff is a former head of the Division of Medicine and Mackey is a former Director of Planning at MD Anderson Cancer Center.