{"id":2345,"date":"2020-02-11T18:28:40","date_gmt":"2020-02-11T18:28:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drmirkin.com\/?p=2345"},"modified":"2020-02-12T20:05:07","modified_gmt":"2020-02-12T20:05:07","slug":"kirk-douglas-23-years-of-rehabilitation-after-a-stroke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/?p=2345","title":{"rendered":"Kirk Douglas: 23 Years of Rehabilitation After a Stroke"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"KirkKirk Douglas, who died at 103 on February 5, 2020, was one of the 20th century\u2019s most famous actors. He starred in more than 90 movies and earned three Academy Award nominations, received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981 from President Jimmy Carter, and an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in 1996. He was also a prolific producer, director and author. He courageously risked his own career when he defied Hollywood’s infamous blacklist at the height of Cold War paranoia by hiring Dalton Trumbo<\/a> to write Spartacus<\/em> and giving him on-screen credit.<\/p>\n

In 1964, he and his wife founded the Douglas Foundation, one of the largest and oldest private philanthropic institutions in the entertainment industry. The foundation’s projects have included rebuilding more than 400 school playgrounds in Los Angeles and a facility for care of Alzheimer’s patients at the Motion Picture Home, also in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

His Early Years Had Many Parallels to My Own Experience<\/strong>
\nDouglas was born Issur Danielovitch in 1916 to Jewish parents who emigrated from farms in what is now Belarus near the Russian border. I feel great empathy for Douglas because his roots and upbringing were so similar to mine. His family moved into the poorest neighborhood in Amsterdam, N.Y., and spoke only Yiddish at home. Like my father, who came at the same time and from the same area in Russia, Douglas\u2019s family came to America in 1908 to save their children’s lives. During the reign of Tsar Nicholas II, males between 12 and 25 years old were likely to be conscripted into the Russian army. Young men from wealthy families could buy their way out, but the poor — which included almost all Jewish families — were dragged into service, and during the Russian-Japanese war they were given old guns or wooden sticks and told to march into the Japanese machine guns to almost certain death. During the last years of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, many Jewish families struggled to save enough to send their oldest son to America, where he would try to earn enough to bring his younger brothers over also.<\/p>\n

Issur (then called Izzy Demsky) was brought up in severe poverty as the “ragman\u2019s son” in their town. His father bought a horse and a small wagon, and drove up and down the streets selling second hand goods, rags and junk. My father collected nickels and dimes for $500 life insurance policies for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company from immigrants on Fridays after they got paid and before they drank it away or spent it. He told me that he came to America at age four, but many years later, I found his Ellis Island immigration papers and he really came here when he was 11, too old to start in kindergarten, so he never went to school. We lived in Roxbury, one of the poorest sections of Boston. Douglas said he had more than 40 jobs before he became an actor, and paid for his own college education at St. Lawrence University by working as a janitor and gardener. I paid for my education by selling ice cream from a truck for 90 hours a week for nine summers in Quincy, Massachusetts. Douglas told a biographer, “The drive that got me out of my hometown and through college is part of the makeup that I utilize in my work. It’s a constant fight, and it’s tough.” (The Films of Kirk Douglas<\/em>, Tony Thomas, 1991).
\n