Around Chicago, the brown honorary street signs bearing the names of famous people often don’t grab our attention. So you can imagine that signs honoring folks whose names are a bit more obscure, well, fade even more into the landscape.
Last month, a group of people gathered at 29th Street and King Drive to unveil Arnold M. Tatar, M.D. Way, recognizing Dr. Arnold Tatar, who has practiced medicine over the last half century. Along the way, he has earned numerous honors and garnered respect from peers and patients, many who have been seeing him since he began his practice.
It was longtime patient Paul Brozek who decided the street sign was in order.
“I was driving around the city, and I just happened to notice all the signs for the musicians and entertainers,” said Brozek, who has been with Tatar for nearly 30 years. “I thought: ‘Who would be more deserving than a doctor who’s dedicated his life to saving lives?’ “
Tatar has been practicing medicine since 1961 and spent 30 years at Michael Reese Hospital, which was a stone’s throw from the street sign until the main facility was torn down this year.
Dr. Audrey Tatar is Arnold Tatar’s daughter and shares a downtown internal medicine practice with her father and several other physicians. She told me that a man who has been a patient of her father’s since 1962 came into the office last week to congratulate him about the sign.
“I think that says a lot about my father,” said Audrey Tatar. “He didn’t do anything splashy like discover a new gene, but he’s been steadfast for the last 50 years and has worked hard every day. He still loves medicine, and his patients have stuck with him.”
Audrey Tatar, 49, said that since she was very young, she wanted to be a doctor like her father. And Arnold Tatar’s earliest memories of her are the same.
“When Audrey was 10 years old, one day I brought home a beautiful wall plaque inscribed with the Hippocratic oath,” said Arnold Tatar, 78. “I thought I would hang it in my study, and Audrey said, “Can I have it?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ And she hung it over her bed at a height where she could see it. About a week later, she had memorized it.”
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Tatar said that when he was young, he wasn’t as sure about his professional path. He grew up on the South Side and spent much of his time in his father’s clothing store, which back then was in a booming business district along 63rd and Halsted streets.
He flirted with the idea of becoming an attorney or politician, but his high school peers suggested in a school prophecy that because Tatar excelled in science and was deeply empathetic, he was well-suited for medicine.
“I have to say that made me think,” Tatar said. “The things that were attracting me in the other direction were superficial. It was enjoyable being president of the student class and all those things, but I realized that shouldn’t determine one’s career.”
In 1957, he started his internship at Michael Reese Hospital, where he was born and would work for three decades in several jobs, including as president of the medical staff. From 1959 to 1964, he lived with his young family in the nearby Prairie Shores apartment complex.
“We could have looked out of our window at the sign,” he said. “It’s my life coming full circle.”
Tatar said he’s seen many changes in family practice over the years: the profound impact insurance companies have had on patient care; the ways advances in medical research and technology have made some procedures far less invasive.
“It’s hard to imagine now, but years ago, we had to rely so much more on the patient’s history, what we heard with our stethoscope and what we felt with our hands,” he said.
Tatar, who has been married for 52 years, has two other daughters. One is a lawyer, and the other has an MBA. He said it is his middle child’s career that has been in near lock-step with his own.
“About 31 years after I was an intern at Michael Reese, Audrey was an intern there,” he said. “Thirty-one years after I was chief resident at Michael Reese, she was chief resident there.”
On her desk in her office, Audrey Tatar keeps a framed Christmas picture from 1966 that includes Santa and her family.
She said her father, who’s dressed in an Army uniform, had the picture taken so that he could send it to patients to let them know that his stint in the military — he was a lieutenant colonel in the Medical Corps — would be ending soon and he’d be returning to Chicago.
“When I was about to begin my practice,” Audrey Tatar said, “one of my father’s patients had the photograph framed and gave it to me.
“One of the things that allowed my practice to blossom early on was that my dad’s patients transferred their trust from him to me. He’s still happy to come to work every day, and that’s one of the things that made me want this for my career.”