Memories submitted by Anna Nardo

While Dad was in the hospital, his younger sister Anna (my aunt) wrote a letter to my mother and me about Dad’s childhood. She has asked me to share it with you here:

Dear Sharon and Abby,

I realized that you may not know much about Mickey’s life as a boy, an adolescent, or a college student before he went to medical school and met Sharon. So I want to share my memories of these early years. Of course, this version of Mickey’s story is filtered through the eyes of a younger sister; Mickey was five years and four months old when I was born. If his condition stabilizes, maybe you could read my memories to him and he could set the record straight.

Of course, I have to depend on family stories about his life before I became conscious of his presence. Back in the 40s new mothers were kept in the hospital for several days after giving birth. Thus Mom learned about Pearl Harbor in Erlanger Hospital when Mickey was only four days old. Dad, who at the time was coaching football for Baylor, a boys’ military academy, immediately set to work to keep himself off the front lines. His chemistry degree landed him a job making TNT at a munitions plant near Chattanooga. Nevertheless, he was away much of the time, and Mom had to take care of the new baby on her own. Both Mickey and Mom told me that, as a young child, he was often ill with respiratory problems. As a result, he spent much time in bed. Mickey once told me that he feared he would die, and that these early experiences made The Secret Garden an important book for him. It tells the story of a spoiled brat, who is transformed by sharing a secret garden with a sickly boy and helping him regain his health.

My first memories of Mickey are in a house on Duncan Ave., which was provided by McCallie School, another boys’ military academy where Dad coached football and ran a summer camp. It was a small house and we shared a room. I remember us waking up one Sunday morning, running to Mom and Dad’s room, jumping on their bed, and chanting “Rolling off the ship” as we pushed them from side to side until they surrendered, got up, and made us pancakes. Another weekend treat was white bread, liberally spread with butter, cut on the diagonal, garnished with a dollop of strawberry jelly, then broiled. The triangle shape made it special. One Christmas morning, I remember waking up first and finding that Santa had set up a train around the Christmas tree for Mickey. He loved the train, but even more vividly I remember his fascination with Lincoln Logs–an early sign of his life-long predilection for tinkering. I also have one vivid memory that suggests Mickey’s early scientific bent. Dad used to go fishing on the weekends, and when he came home sunburned and hot, he would grab a water bottle kept in the refrigerator. One day, however, he grabbed a bottle that Mickey had filled with soapy water to see if it would freeze. Dad spit out the cold soapy water, cursing like a sailor and mistaking Mickey’s science experiment for a practical joke.
One summer, when Dad was running a boys’ camp at McCallie, he brought home a movie and a projector borrowed from the camp. He draped a sheet over the back of the house to serve as a screen. On that summer evening, all the neighborhood kids, including Mickey’s next-door friend Chalmers McIlwain, sat on the ground in the back yard to watch Hop-a-long Cassidy. Another summer, we took a car trip to the Smokey Mountains. Mickey and I battled over an imaginary line that demarcated our separate back-seat space. I have a vivid memory of stopping at a scenic overlook where Mom saw two bear cubs. She had packed some graham cracker cookies; the scalloped edges and pink icing are engraved on my memory. In a moment of insanity, she enticed the cubs with the cookies. Needless to say, a very annoyed Mama bear showed up, and Mickey, Mom, and I had to jump in the car. Dad must have been fishing because he doesn’t appear in my memory of this unforgettable event.

After Dad left coaching to manage a woolen mill, when Mickey was about 10, we moved from Duncan Ave. to the house you remember on Mayfair Ave. Later, the city built a two-lane road over the Duncan Ave. site, so the house no longer exists. You also may remember that our new house was five houses down the street from the  Brainerd Baptist Church. Everybody we knew, except our family, were regular church-goers.

As a boy, Mickey roamed the neighborhood with his buddies. Developers had not yet built on all the woodland in the subdivision, and there was an inviting drainage ditch to play in. I remember one day Mickey came home wet and muddy carrying a jar with a fish he captured in the ditch. Punishment ensued. And he may or may not have once tied me to a chair with Dad’s neck ties so that I couldn’t change the TV channel to watch my beloved Zorro. On the 4th of July, a neighbor down the street, who had been in the military, gathered all the neighborhood boys, including Mickey and his older friend Phil Olstein, to shoot off fireworks and bottle rockets in his front yard. Our terrified terrier, Mutsky, hid under the bed. During these years, I remember Mickey as looking pretty scruffy most of the time, even more so when he caught ringworm and had to have his head shaved and wear a stocking cap to cover the smelly ointment smeared on his bald pate.

When he hit adolescence, his appearance changed dramatically. He grew tall, noticeably taller than Dad and the other males in the Italian branch of the family. On one summer trip to Bellaire, Ohio where Dad’s family lived, I remember our great Uncle Mike making jokes in broken English, which he thought were hilarious, about Mom’s feeding Mickey the stuff you put on tomatoes. According to Dad, Uncle Mike had been a bootlegger during prohibition. But now He was limited to one glass of wine only when he had guests. These orders were strictly enforced by his tiny wife, Tia Angelina, who spoke no English at all and whose black dress and white lace collar I have since seen in many movies. I remember that we kids were sent to call on Uncle Mike and Tia Angelina, and the minute we entered the house, Uncle Mike handed Mickey a glass of wine.

In adolescence, Mickey’s attitude toward clothes also changed dramatically. This was the era of ducktail hair, skin-tight jeans, black tee shirts, and hidden cigarettes. I remember him looking very cool as he combed his “do” in the morning, sullenly ignoring Dad’s mockery of his pink pants. I never knew all the details, but Mickey got into a number of scrapes during these years. On one occasion, he and his buddy Robert Profit took Robert’s parents’ car out for a joy ride and had a fender bender. Again, punishment ensued. I also remember Dad’s insistence that Mickey mow the lawn and pull crab grass out of the juniper bushes in front of the house, and I remember Mickey’s resistance. In fact, grass became a theme in their relationship. Dad got him a summer job wielding a scythe on the property owned by the mill where Dad worked. I remember Mickey’s sunburns. Not infrequently, conflicts erupted in paternal rants followed by maternal mediation. And not infrequently, the commotion woke me up at night; it was scary. But the big drama of these years centered on McCallie School. Dad’s story was that Mickey asked to go there because he discovered that Robert Profit was learning higher-level math than he was. I find it hard to believe that Mickey ever willingly entered a military academy. Even if he did choose to transfer from  Brainerd Junior High to McCallie, his attitude must have changed almost immediately. I remember daily battles over his uniform, sleeping too late, and after-school detentions.

Once Dad relented and let him transfer to City High School, Mickey’s life improved considerably. Soon, he became a big man on campus: named “Best Dressed,” the president of the High Y Club, the escort for the winner of the Miss CHS pageant, and a member of DeMolay. (This is a quasi-Masonic club for adolescent boys named after the last Grand Master of the Knight Templars!). Not just part of the “popular” crowd, Mickey was recognized as one of the class intellectuals. He played the narrator in a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. He belonged to the select literary circle that gathered around Miss Johnson, an eccentric English teacher with a high-pitched giggle, a fancy up-do, and a theatrical flare. When his peers chose him as “Class Poet,” he wrote a sonnet that began, “Bartering education, how great the cost . . . . ” (You can tell that I memorized his high school yearbook.) Still, his closest friends always seemed to be interesting misfits, like Macky Kirkpatrick, rather than other “popular” kids.

During his college years at the University of Tennessee, Mickey’s world focused on fraternity life. Whenever he came home, he had strange tales to tell of the wider world–tales about a “dog” party where the “brothers” competed for who could bring the ugliest date (I don’t think he participated), about making up a new Kappa Sigma initiation ritual that included putting pledges in a coffin then “resurrecting” them, and about a student chapter of the militantly ant-communist John Birch Society. Twice, he brought home stray kittens that had showed up at the Kappa Sigma house where he lived. He named them Melvin Glick and Sybil Glutz. Even more wonderful than the kittens, he brought home records of Dave Brubeck, Ahmad Jamal, George Shearing, Dakota Staton, Joan Baez, the Kingston Trio, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. I don’t think I could have survived my own adolescence without this great gift of music.

One Christmas when he came home, he dumped his dirty clothes on the floor of his room, then disappeared with his friends, returning home very late for several nights. After repeated reminders to wash his clothes, Mom, who had no intention of washing them for him, left the following poem on his bedroom door:

(Original version of “Good King Wenceslas”)

Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen
When the snow lay round-about
Deep and crisp and even.

Brightly shone the moon that night
Though the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight
Gathering winter fuel.

[Verse added by Mom]

Bring me sticks and bring me logs,
Bring them by the barrel.
You and I shall blaze the Yule
With my son’s apparel.

Where nagging had failed, poetry worked, and Mickey took time off from gallivanting with his friends to wash his clothes.

When I think back on the summers when Mickey came home from UT, I can see two clear signs of the empathy and the ability to read people that made him a great therapist. He found a job that was much more to his liking than cutting grass with a swing blade: he sold suits, ties, and shirts at an exclusive men’s store called The Gentry Limited. The owner was a Jewish tailor with a German accent whose wife had escaped the Holocaust. There weren’t many Jews in Chattanooga, so the family was pretty isolated. Since the store was doing well, the German tailor decided to buy his wife a new house. But when moving day arrived, she completely freaked out. The tailor had no idea what to do, so Mickey simply took over, escorted her away from the chaotic scene where strange men were entering her house to haul off her belongings, and stayed with her until the move was completed. Although as yet untrained, Mickey recognized that the wife was experiencing a psychotic break; the confusion of moving had revived traumatic memories from the war years.

Although not at the time, I can now see a second sign of his future career choice in his efforts to teach me to waterski. We always had a boat for Dad’s fishing excursions, and on the weekends we often joined him for trips to Chickamauga Lake. All the cool kids could waterski, and I wanted to be one of them. The way the process is supposed to work is that you put on the skis, crouch with your knees pulled up to your chest and the points of the skis sticking up out of the water, hold onto a handle on a rope attached to the back of the boat, and when the boat starts, its force pulls you to a crouching position with the skis flat, running along the surface of the water. Then you stand up. But the process didn’t work for me. While Dad drove the boat, Mickey stood in the stern, watching me fall over every time Dad gunned the motor. I was mortified and in tears, then he yelled to me, “Stop trying!” I had been trying to pull myself up instead of letting the boat’s force pull me upright. His advice worked like a charm, and I experienced the exhilaration of zooming across Chickamauga Lake with the other cool kids. As a college student who had changed majors three or four times, Mickey intuited one of the major psychological cruxes of my life. When I get myself tied in knots, I try to remember that it once worked to “Stop trying!”

For a couple of years in college, Mickey dated a girl named Carol. I remember her in two contexts. First, I stayed with her in Knoxville, when Mickey took me to see a Peter, Paul, and Mary concert. I went with the two of them, Macky and his future wife Karen, and Macky’s younger sister and her blind date from the fraternity. Since I was a super fan and had memorized all the Peter, Paul, and Mary songs, it was a kind brotherly act to invite me–even though I felt like a pitiful tag-a-long with these three couples. The second memory I have of Carol and Mickey involves Oral Roberts, the televangelist. Mickey was fascinated by televangelism, and one Sunday morning he insisted that he and Carol, a pretty, conventional Tennessee girl, watch Roberts’s program. After his stem-winding sermon, Roberts put the palm of his hand up to the camera and invited all the sick and shut-in viewers to place their hands on their TV screens in order to experience the miraculous healing powers he could channel. At this point, Mickey grabbed the startled Carol and dragged her across the floor to place her hand on the screen. I could tell that she was not amused.

But Mickey’s antic sense of humor did find a kindred spirit in Macky. When Dad got a video camera for Christmas, Mickey and Macky decided to stage an impromptu silent film. Macky, in cape and mustache, tied poor shivering Karen, with only a scarf to protect her from the cold, to a railroad track because she could not pay the rent. But heroic Mickey rushed to the rescue and chased villainous Macky off with a cane. Carol didn’t appear in this production.

Maybe it was Carol’s humorlessness that ended the relationship when Mickey left UT–without a diploma because he had neglected to turn in his ROTC uniform. So off he went to UT medical school in Memphis, where he met Sharon and your part of Mickey’s story begins.

Feel free to share these memories with anyone that might be interested in the young Mickey.

Love,

Anna

(Written 2/6/17)

Memories submitted by Macky Kirkpatrick

When did you meet Mickey?
1955

Where did you meet him?
Chattanooga

Memory of Mickey

My older son, John Michael Kirkpatrick, called me from L.A. He had seen the video of Mickey’s Memorial Gathering and said, “Damn! Mickey really was larger than life. He affected so many lives.” John said he especially liked the Santa Claus guy’s Mickey stories.

The Gathering felt like revisiting Sharon and Mickey’s 50th wedding anniversary celebration. The Nardo’s friends and colleagues were getting together once again to thank them. For opening their doors to strangers. For saving people’s lives. Most of the people assembled at Emory’s Brain Health Center were adults. They had known Mickey as Dr. John Nardo, the psychiatrist who had the brains to write computer code and the balls to call out practitioners who violated the honor code of his profession.

After the memorial service, I promised Sharon that I would write something for Abby’s website, but I didn’t have a beginning a middle or an end. Just fragments. Maybe those bits and pieces will tell you something about how John Michael Nardo grew to be larger than life.

Macky’s Mickey stories:

In the mid-1950s, Mickey and I entered Brainerd Junior High. Over the next three years, we saw each other in the halls and on the playing fields, but we didn’t really know each other at that point. 

Brainerd is a neighborhood in Chattanooga, Tennessee named for David Brainerd, an eighteenth century Connecticut minister who helped establish The Brainerd Mission to the Cherokees. The school taught over 300 male and female students. It was abandoned in 1838 with the Indian Removal. A small gated cemetery marks the site      now. Mickey and I used to ride our bikes by it on the way to Chickamauga Creek.

The beginning of a beautiful friendship.

After graduation, Mickey enrolled at McCallie, a military prep school. I went to Central High, a football school. He wore a blue uniform and marched in drills. I wore a khaki ROTC uniform and marched in drills. McCallie and Central were within blocks of each other. I had a particularly odious drill instructor. Each drill, he would fall in line behind me and step on the heel of my shoe. When I stopped to put the shoe on, he would order me to, “Drop and give me 20!”  There are a couple of hundred school days in a year. At Central, I think I had a split lip or a black eye on 100 of those days. After drill, the DI suggested we meet after school and settle this like men. After the last class, he showed up with, like, four men.

The McCallie School sits at the base of Missionary Ridge. You can make your way across the campus pretty quickly, and with five guys chasing you full speed, it’s a not a bad idea. When I thought I’d lost them, I took a breather. That’s when this guy walked by. He was taking off his tie when he looked over at me. “I know you,” he said. “You went to Brainerd. Why are you sweating so much?”

“Drills,” I said.

“God, I hate drills,” he said. “I need a different school.”

That about did it. Mickey and I started walking home through the Missionary Ridge Tunnel. We came to his house first. As we were walking up the driveway, this boxer dog knocked me ass over tea kettle and started chewing on my ROTC uniform, ripping the pants leg seam apart. Mickey’s little old lady next door neighbor appeared on her porch, waggled her index finger disapprovingly and said, “Bad Duchess!”

For years, whenever some particularly awful catastrophe happened, Mickey would just say, “Bad Duchess!”

Trading HONOR TRUTH DUTY for TRUTH POWER HONOR

Almost the same mottos, almost. Duty commands that you conform to a set of rules. But power? Power unleashes all sorts of possibilities. When Mickey chose to transfer from McCallie to City High, he showed an uncanny ability for making good decisions. (A recurring theme.) And he didn’t just flourish. He took the bit between his teeth and broke every stick of furniture in the place.

Mickey named National Merit Scholarship Finalist
Mickey chosen as Class Night Speaker: Class Poet
Mickey selected as escort for Miss C.H.S. of 1960
Mickey voted Best Dressed
Mickey inducted into National Honor Society
Mickey plays the Stage Manager in “Our Town”
Mickey serves as president of Hi-Y
Mickey elected president of the Deputy Council

Mickey accomplished all this in just two years of high school, then topped it off by earning a scholarship to The University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

The gray car and other 1950s conspiracy theories

Mickey’s folks owned a Chevy they called “Sputnik.” On a clear night, the world could see Russia’s menacing satellite streaking across the heavens. And on weekends, after Mickey had done his chores and earned the right to drive Sputnik, we came to appreciate the irony of the car’s nickname. Mickey said it wouldn’t do 35mph sliding down Lookout Mountain in an ice storm. He developed a theory that his father set the isochronous governor at droop speed to prevent him from drag racing.

The second player from the left in the back row is 1902 Chattanooga Lookouts pitcher, Creed Bates. He would go on to have a distinguished military career, then become the Principal at City High. Everyone called him Colonel Bates. His brother taught math. We called him Master.

Mickey and I were watching TV with his family in their living room one night when The Perry Como Show came on. Mickey’s sister, Anna, marveled that Perry Como was always so laid back. I said, “He’s in a coma.” The four of them gasped. You don’t insult Perry Como in Johnny Nardo’s house.

 

Johnny Nardo

Chattanooga Moccasins are pictured above: left to right, line, Kintzing, Kelly, Earle, Martell, Koeniger. Burnett and Klein; backs. Nardo, Wade. Watland and Trew.

Mickey’s father, like Perry Como, was a second generation Italian who had worked his way out of the coal fields. Johnny said goodbye to Bellaire, Ohio with a football scholarship to Princeton. His older brother,  Andy, was already a lineman on the University of Chattanooga football team. The Chattanooga coach had heard about Johnny’s talents. He gave Andy train tickets to New Jersey and $100 and told him to convince his brother to come play for Chattanooga.

“How?” Andy asked.

“Give him the hundred bucks.”

“He won’t do it for the money,” Andy said.

“Then think of something. Just get him down here.”

Johnny said Andy came into his dorm room and simply told him, “Mama says for you to come south and play ball with me.” Johnny became an All-American running back. He ran the Volunteer Army Ammunition (TNT) Plant during World War II, then coached football at McCallie, and later managed Peerless Woolen Mills. He was tough. And smart. Inheritable traits.

Nita

Nita Lawson Nardo

Mickey’s mother once taught special ed in a grammar school. I asked her if she ever worried that a kid might have been misdiagnosed. She said the problem wasn’t in the diagnosis. It was in the treatment. So, and stop me if this sounds like someone else we know, she did something about it.

Nita saw educational capabilities already in place, across Tennessee and throughout Appalachia, and she figured out how they could be harnessed. She helped develop a series of home-oriented preschool education handbooks for mobile classroom teachers and aides. She always championed community-centered schools. Nita helped establish cooperatives, encouraging school districts to use local resources more effectively by working in concert with the state department of education and a nearby college or university. With this kind of joint effort, it wouldn’t be too expensive for individual school districts to provide specialized services.

Mickey and Anna earned every accolade. But I still think they won the birth lottery.

Another good choice.

Mickey started UT as an engineering major. That might surprise some people. It shouldn’t. He was naturally curious about mechanical systems. Why, only the summer before we left for Knoxville, he had disassembled my Winchester Model 61 pump .22 rifle and put it back together with only one part left over. Now he had a 4-point average and a full-ride scholarship. He maintained the good grades but decided to change his major to pre-med. Mickey dreaded telling his dad, not because he would disapprove. He knew his dad would worry about the money without that scholarship.

Mickey and I and a couple of our fraternity brothers rented half the second floor of this wonderful old house. Very spacious. We each had our own sleeping quarters and a common area for The Animal. The Animal was a king sized brown chenille bedspread that rose as a mound to cover a week’s worth of each guy’s dirty laundry.

Satisfactory outcome.

We were at the Kappa Sigma house on a Saturday night dancing to a live band violating occupational auditory safety standards when three members of the Tennessee football team walked in the door. Big guys, led by All-SEC Mike Lucci, who would go on to have a long NFL career. Mickey spoke briefly to the 6’2”, 230-pound middle linebacker, and the players turned and went away.

I went over and asked Mickey, “What did you say to him?”

“I told him this was a private party and he would have to leave.”

“And?”

“He left.”

Boy meets girl. Boy gets it right.

The University of Tennessee had an accelerated program called the 3+3. After your junior year, if you’d completed the required courses and passed the entrance exam, you could earn both a bachelor’s degree and a professional degree in 6 years. I entered law school in Knoxville. In the first week, a criminal law professor christened me “Platitudes.” I thought he was a disillusioned cynic. I was right. And within the year, so was I. I went into advertising.

Mickey went to UT Med School and launched what was to become a remarkable career. But you know that, and besides, it’s not the point. The point is that Mickey made the choice of a lifetime. First, he met a girl in Memphis. Second, he married her. And third, if they didn’t live happily ever after, they came closer than any couple I’ve ever known.

Memory submitted by Smoooochie Setzke

When did you meet Mickey?
2004

Where did you meet him?
Through Abby

Memory of Mickey
Mickey. How do I describe the round about way that I met him and got to know him. Abby and I met on Tribe what seems like a lifetime ago, but was around 2003. She was always pretty candid (shocking right 😛 ) about her life and shared a lot about her family with some of us. So, before I met Mickey I knew of “Abby’s Dad”. Advice, musings, etc. were shared through Abby. Abby’s Dad. But then he started a blog and he shifted to Abby’s Dad Mickey, and he was not the boring old man his blog advertised him to be. His advise, musings, etc. became a direct voice into my own head and his view of the world was a perspective that was interesting and insightful. It was like having a family friend sit on the porch and tell you stuff that was actually useful and interesting. Abby would still share the back story (and the amazing stories of Sharon, as well) and so he was still partially Abby’s Dad, but he was also very much Mickey-the not so boring old man.

Memory submitted by Athena Nawar

When did you meet Mickey?
1981

Where did you meet him?
Emory

Memory of Mickey
I first was introduced to Mickey as Dr. Nardo when he swept into the classroom of our medical school’s introduction to psychiatry class. Our class had been a mocking, troublesome one and the original instructor had suddenly quit. We sat sullenly and suspiciously. Mickey began to speak in his natural, evocative style and won over a classroom of defensive, hurt students.
Many of us chose to become psychiatrists that day and others gained a better respect for the discipline.

Many years later I was privileged to have Mickey as a teacher in the analytic school and even more blessed to work with him for a couple of years in the same private practice setting. I was able to spend some time just chatting with him on lunch and coffee breaks, gaining tidbits of knowledge and wisdom and sharing some common experiences from work and life. His ability to truly listen was a gift I hold dear.

He will remain a part of my heart and hopefully, of my work.

My warmest thoughts to Sharon, Abby, Caitlin and Christian,
Athena

Memory submitted by Ken Cook

When did you meet Mickey?
1988

Where did you meet him?
We met to talk about computers and his program “PsyC”

Memory of Mickey
Mickey gave me many gifts over the years: great companionship, his knack for listening, his endless curiosity, compassion for my nuttiness, patience with my cluelesness, and many other things. We shared interest in computers, ham radio, sailing, fishing, to name a few. His biggest and life-changing gift was my ADHD diagnosis which has since brought new understanding to my life. Do I wish he would have quit smoking? Hell yes, but he made his choices and willingly dealt with the results. I once told him that he had the most interesting and unique group of people around him, and I’m so honored and humbled that I got to be one of this group. Mickey, I hope you have a heavenly smile on your face……… Ken

Memory submitted by Kathy Shands

When did you meet Mickey?
1982

Where did you meet him?
At Emory Psychiatry

Memory of Mickey
I met Mickey around 1982, when I was a resident in Psychiatry at Emory. I had less contact with him than some of the other residents, because I was training in Child Psychiatry, so my memories of Mickey in the years from 1982-1986 are a little hazy, but he was always the guru in the background.

In 1986, as I was trying to figure out where my career should go, Gail approached me to ask if I would like to go into practice with her and Mickey and Andy Hurayt. I could not believe I was being given such an incredible opportunity, and I jumped at the chance. We built an office building at Lenox Pointe, with invaluable architectural help from Sharon, and moved in during October of that year. For 18 years, until Mickey retired in 2004, Gail, Mickey, and I (Andy soon headed off to the coast) were partners in a very successful private practice. The fact that it was very successful can be attributed in large part to Mickey, who had trained, it seemed, about half of the mental health practitioners in Atlanta. Thanks to him, we had an amazing referral base.

More than specific memories (although there are a few of those as well), I have a general sense of Mickey as the “eminence grise” of our practice. He was always there, usually in his office, seeing patients, but reliably emerging at lunchtime to sit in our group room to chat, tell stories, do crossword puzzles (in ink), play computer games, rescue our computers from various offspring (who couldn’t keep their hands off them) and to provide invaluable informal supervision. His advice was always helpful, and he was gratifyingly appreciative of my occasional supervision of him in return. Occasionally, he would be found lying on the floor of the group room because of severe back pain but would always manage to get up and go back to work.

In the early years, before he gave up alcohol, we would have TGIF parties weekly at the office. One specific memory is on one of those TGIF nights my husband, Joe, was planning to join us but called to say he had slipped on our outdoor stairs and had a deep gash in his knee. Mickey, who had not forgotten his earlier life as a “real” doctor, mobilized all of us to move the party to our house, where Mickey supervised Gail’s husband as he sutured Joe’s knee at the kitchen table.

Another specific memory is around Mickey’s retirement. His much-loved dog had died shortly before that, and Gail and I decided to give him a dog as a retirement gift. We found one we really liked at the ASPCA and asked Sharon to approve it. Sharon thought our choice was too active and immediately picked Annie, who was calm, affectionate, and the right size for her to walk. I’ll never forget how surprised and happy Mickey was when we arrived in Jasper with Annie.

The last time I saw Mickey – before he went in to the hospital -was at Gail’s house shortly after Christmas. He looked ill, and in fact was, but he didn’t let that stop him from sitting at the table, entertaining a group of us with stories about his life, including many memories of his time in England.

I loved Mickey and always will, and I can’t believe he is not just up the road in Jasper, being wise and funny and impressively productive in his retirement. I will sorely miss him.

Memory submitted by Barney Carroll

When did you meet Mickey?
2008

Where did you meet him?
He wrote to me by E-mail.

Memory of Mickey
Our first contact was somewhat fraught. An E-mail arrived from Mickey out of the blue. He reproduced the 2006 letter to The Wall Street Journal from Bob Rubin and myself that followed our exposing of the chair of Emory’s psychiatry department for undisclosed conflict of interest (inter alia). Mickey reproduced our letter to WSJ in his E-mail and added a snippy question: Didn’t you train (him)? I set Mickey straight and referred him to the correct people.

A silence of 18 months or so followed, then I stumbled upon the 1Boringoldman blog, began commenting there, and pretty soon we started up a regular dialogue. Along the way I was able to give Mickey some pointers about where or how to look for good information on KOL-COI issues and corporate shenanigans in the psychiatric drugs business. What I recall most about that period was Mickey’s remarkably rapid learning curve, not to mention his prodigious output. Also, though he was diffident at first, he quickly integrated with groups of experts to whom I introduced him, and he made serious contributions to our rolling informal seminars.

The culmination of Mickey’s transformation from psychoanalytically oriented practitioner to card carrying research analyst was, of course, his key role in the RIAT deconstruction of Glaxo Study 329. What he did was a tour de force.

Losing Mickey has for me been like losing a brother. We grew up professionally in the same era, so we had a great deal in common. I still get bothered on a daily basis when I realize that I can no longer share with him some juicy new gossip, or newly published article, or a new outrage, or just a fun piece.

May he rest in peace and may his archival work remain through his website.

Memory submitted by Helen Boone

When did you meet Mickey?
1972

Where did you meet him?
Air Force friends from the 70’s

Memory of Mickey
After Hurricane Katrina I was working again for Habitat for Humanity, and Oprah Winfrey developed a plan to build a street of houses in Jackson, MS, for families who had left New Orleans after the storm. This was going to be a week-long blitz with 10 or 12 houses, and we needed volunteers. I invited Mickey and Sharon to come over to stay with us and work. It was great fun: Sharon, as the architect, could identify which pieces went where in the construction. Mickey, on the other hand, could do it all. His (and her) community spirit reached far and wide.

Memory submitted by Larry Thompson

When did you meet Mickey?
1971

Where did you meet him?
U.S. Air Force

Memory of Mickey
I arrived at RAF Lakenheath with a terrible headache. I thought I was just jet-lagged, but the headache and confusion increased. A flight surgeon on night call assumed that I was an addicted anesthesiologist needing narcotic without an OR supply. He wrote me off, but Mickey Nardo, covering the next day, also suspicious that I might be needing a “fix”, didn’t write me off. He had the insight to know that I had been at Wichita Falls, Texas for basic training, where equine encephalitis was epidemic at the time. He admitted me to the hospital, where a spinal tap sent to N.I.H. confirmed his diagnosis. It would be fair to say that “Mickey Nardo saved my life.” I will always be grateful to him for his ability to read me well enough to believe that I would not be an addict.

Memory submitted by Walter Boone

When did you meet Mickey?
1972

Where did you meet him?
In the Air Force as internists.

Memory of Mickey
Mickey and I served as Internal Medicine partners in the Air Force at Lakenheath AFB in the UK in the 70’s. There was a little rebellion on our part: wide blue ties, unauthorized haircuts, borrowing gates to use for pig roasting, etc. But I think that is where we learned to practice medicine. Together we got our footing in sharing patient stories and searching for solutions. He went on to become a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst; I trained in gastroenterology. Those years, however, were among the best I remember as a physician. Our friendship has never wavered through the years.