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 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
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
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.
