{"id":558,"date":"2016-01-24T01:42:00","date_gmt":"2016-01-24T01:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drmirkin.com\/2016\/01\/24\/erich-segal-parkinsons-disease\/"},"modified":"2019-10-08T22:24:53","modified_gmt":"2019-10-08T22:24:53","slug":"erich-segal-parkinsons-disease","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/?p=558","title":{"rendered":"Erich Segal: Parkinson&#8217;s Disease"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Erich Segal was on the track team with me at Harvard and ran the Boston Marathon with me several times. \u00a0Both of us were mediocre runners trying to prove ourselves. A line in one of his novels, <em>The Class<\/em>, described both of us: &#8220;Fear of death is universal. But what lies beneath that fear is the terror of insignificance. Of not being remembered, not counting.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>At age 33, he wrote his best-known novel, <em>Love Story<\/em>, that sold more than 21 million copies, was the top selling work of fiction for 1970 in the United States and has been translated into more than 33 languages. \u00a0He wrote the screenplay for the movie of the same name, starring Ryan O\u2019Neal and Ali MacGraw, that was the top box office attraction of 1970 and gained him an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. \u00a0The film grossed nearly $200 million and received seven Academy Award nominations. \u00a0Just about everyone remembers &#8220;Love means never having to say you\u2019re sorry,&#8221; which is number 13 in the American Film Institute&#8217;s list of 100 Movie Quotes. \u00a0Segal \u00a0said, &#8220;The reason people cried over <em>Love Story<\/em> is because I did. \u00a0I was innocent. I believed every word I wrote.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/JASEIR8hjzk\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Early Life, Education and Academic Career<\/strong><br \/>\nHe was born in 1937, in Brooklyn, N.Y., the son of a rabbi, and studied Hebrew, German, French, Latin and Greek. \u00a0At Harvard he was the class poet and the Latin Salutatory Orator. \u00a0He received his masters and doctoral degrees at Harvard also. He published some outstanding scholarly books on the Greek tragedian Euripides and the comic Roman playwright Plautus and was offered a professorship at Yale where he had the largest class in the school, with more than 600 students enrolled.<\/p>\n<p>In an Ivy-League school, a professor has only a few years to gain tenure or permanent appointment. \u00a0If he does not get tenure, he has to leave. Erich was distraught that Yale did not give him tenure in 1972 and he was convinced that he was denied tenure \u00a0because of his fame from his popular novel and movies. He went on to teach Greek and Latin literature at University of Munich, Princeton, Tel Aviv, Dartmouth and Oxford University.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Boston Marathon<\/strong><br \/>\nHe became obsessed with running in high school and, like me, ran on the Harvard track team because everyone who came out for the team got a uniform. \u00a0Like me, he ran in the Boston marathon because neither of us was fast enough to run in the major meets. He ran in 20 consecutive Boston Marathons. \u00a0When he met famed novelist Philip Roth, he told him, &#8220;I admire your work.&#8221; Roth replied, &#8220;I admire your running.&#8221; \u00a0Both of us spent our lives trying to run every day, but in the 1980s Parkinson&#8217;s disease prevented him from running and chronic recurrent running injuries forced me to switch to racing on a bike, which I still do today.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/69nWnL2mxbs\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>The Story of Love Story<\/strong><br \/>\n<em>Love Story<\/em> tells of Oliver Barrett, a wealthy WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) from an old-New-England family and a star hockey player at Harvard, who meets Jennifer, a Radcliffe (now Harvard) student and the only child of a poor widowed baker. \u00a0 Oliver cannot believe that this poor student has never heard of him, the famous Harvard athlete. \u00a0They fall in love and Oliver takes Jenny to meet his father, who tells Oliver that if he marries her, he will be cut off from the family fortune. Oliver has always had a strained relationship with his father and decides to defy him to marry Jenny.\u00a0 With his allowance cut off, they struggle to live on her meager teaching salary while he goes to law school. \u00a0After law school, he accepts a high-paying job with a law firm in New York City and they decide to have a baby. She finds out that she can&#8217;t get pregnant because she has leukemia, which at that time was incurable. \u00a0As Oliver leaves the hospital after his wife&#8217;s death, his father hugs his son for the first time since Oliver was a child.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Real Jenny in Erich Segal&#8217;s Life<\/strong><br \/>\nWhen Erich Segal was in high school, he saw Janet Sussman in the school hallway and fell in love with her. \u00a0She was the daughter of educated Russian-Polish immigrants, was very smart and like Segal, was solidly Jewish. \u00a0She started to receive \u00a0love letters from Segal that continued for 16 years. She had never even spoken to him before the letters started to arrive and never dated him, but he kept on writing. \u00a0She went to Barnard College (now part of Columbia), majored in music and French, played the piano and even composed some musical pieces. \u00a0In 1960, Segal followed Janet to Paris where she was staying with her sister. He certainly was persistent. \u00a0He eventually met her parents and spoke Russian with her father, Polish to her mother, and Yiddish to her grandmother, but Janet was not impressed. \u00a0In 1961, she married a man who had gone to their same high school. \u00a0Erich saw the wedding announcement in the paper and wrote Janet a letter to congratulate her. Still his letters kept coming.<\/p>\n<p>Erich had become a professor of Greek and Latin literature at Yale and had also written screenplays for several movies. \u00a0In 1969, in the middle of the night, he called Janet to tell her that he had written a \u00a0love letter to her and it was more than a hundred pages long. \u00a0It was the book, <em>Love Story<\/em>. It didn&#8217;t matter to Erich that she now was a married woman, had three children and her husband was the founder of the Gartner Group, the first of his several successful companies that established him as a pioneer in information technology. \u00a0The next year, Segal invited her to come to the premier of \u00a0the film version of <em>Love Story<\/em> and she accepted. \u00a0After 17 years of marriage, Janet divorced her husband and has never remarried.<\/p>\n<p>In 1998, Segal told reporters that the hero of <em>Love Story<\/em>, Oliver Barrett IV, was inspired by two Harvard students, actor Tommy Lee Jones and former vice president Al Gore, who was the son of a US senator. Gore was an outstanding football player and captain of his high school football team at the prestigious prep school, \u00a0St Albans, in Washington, D.C. He had married his wife, Tipper, while they were in college, so some people thought that Tipper was the model for Jenny. \u00a0However, in a later interview Segal acknowledged that Janet Sussman, not Tipper Gore, was the inspiration for his heroine. \u00a0He told the writer, \u00a0\u201cWhen you lose the woman you love, it is over for you, whether she leaves you for another man, or she dies. You are still alone. It was at this point that I started thinking about <em>Love Story<\/em>. That&#8217;s why in the book, Jennifer dies, because for me she had died.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/qb4Rfj1wp0Q\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Erich Segal&#8217;s True Love<\/strong><br \/>\nIn 1974, when he was 37, he met Karen James in London. She was a children&#8217;s book editor who was married but separated from her husband. For the next month after Segal returned to the United States, he sent daily letters and made daily phone calls. \u00a0He then flew back to England and refused to leave until she accepted his proposal of marriage. \u00a0It worked. She divorced her husband in Reno and married Segal. \u00a0He said that <em>Love Story<\/em> had caused a &#8220;bad case of hyper-success that traumatized me and she straightened out my life.&#8221; \u00a0She helped him finish a sequel to <em>Love Story<\/em> called <em>Oliver&#8217;s Story<\/em>, and several other books that followed. \u00a0They had two daughters and remained married until his death 34 years later.<\/p>\n<p>He never repeated his success with <em>Love Story<\/em>, but he did write 44 books including other best sellers such as \u00a0<em>Oliver&#8217;s Story<\/em> (1977), <em>Man, Woman and Child<\/em> (1983), <em>The Class<\/em> (1985) and <em>Doctors<\/em> (1987). In 1988, he told reporters: &#8220;When I find myself feeling guilty for all that success and thinking <em>Love Story<\/em> was overrated, I pull out my <em>Encyclopedia Britannica<\/em> and see myself listed as writing in the tradition of the classic sentimental novelists, and then my ego relights.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Parkinson&#8217;s Disease<\/strong><br \/>\nSegal\u2019s lifestyle was exemplary. \u00a0He ran more than 40 marathons, ate a healthful diet, was never overweight, never smoked, drank alcohol sparingly and was not promiscuous. \u00a0However, he developed Parkinson&#8217;s disease when he was In his 40\u2019s, which was the most likely explanation for the heart attack that caused his death at the young age of 72.<\/p>\n<p>More than a million North Americans suffer from Parkinson&#8217;s disease in which nerve cells don&#8217;t produce enough of a chemical called dopamine. \u00a0It usually starts after age 50 and causes progressive shaking, stiffness and slow movement, depression and difficulties with memory and thought processes. The face may show little expression, the arms stop swinging as the person walks and speech may become slurred. \u00a0The symptoms worsen as the disease progresses. Symptoms include trembling, stiffness, slowness of movement, poor balance and coordination, difficulty walking, talking, chewing, swallowing, or speaking or doing simple tasks, depression, sleep problems, and dizziness on standing up.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/CqEwPqUO1Bw\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Parkinson&#8217;s disease does not appear to be hereditary and it often strikes people who have no apparent risk factors. \u00a0A leading theory is that it is caused by lack of a chemical called mitofusin 2 necessary for normal function of \u00a0mitochondria that turn food into energy (Science. April 26, 2013). Parkinson&#8217;s disease patients frequently die of heart failure because both the brain and heart require the most energy, so damage to the mitochondria causes both the brain damage and the death from heart failure in Parkinson&#8217;s patients.<\/p>\n<p>There is no cure for Parkinson\u2019s disease at this time. Current treatments try to control symptoms and improve quality of life.<br \/>\n\u2022 Medications: Parkinson\u2019s disease symptoms are caused by a deficiency of the brain chemical dopamine, so the main drug treatments raise brain levels of dopamine, but so far all of the drugs lose effect as they continue to be used.<br \/>\n\u2022 Physical therapy<br \/>\n\u2022 Deep brain stimulation implants stimulate the brain with intermittent electrical shocks<br \/>\n\u2022 T&#8217;ai Chi may help to improve balance<br \/>\n\u2022 Exercise devices such as a tandem bicycle, which allow the patient&#8217;s muscles to be moved by someone else, can help to improve coordination.<\/p>\n<p>At Segal&#8217;s funeral his daughter Francesca said, &#8220;That he fought to breathe, fought to live, every second of the last 30 years of illness with such mind-blowing obduracy, is a testament to the core of who he was\u2014a blind obsessionality that saw him pursue his teaching, his writing, his running and my mother, with just the same tenacity. He was the most dogged man any of us will ever know.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Erich Segal\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Erich_Segal\">Erich Wolf Segal<\/a><br \/>\nJune 16, 1937 \u2013 January 17, 2010<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/47u6IJ2GVdM\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>What is a Latin Salutatory Orator?<\/strong><br \/>\nThere were no iPhone cameras running when Erich Segal gave his Latin oratory in 1958; the video above is from 2007. The tradition of Latin speakers at Harvard graduations dates back more than 350 years, when the entire ceremony was conducted in Latin. Now the Latin Orator is selected based on the humor of the topic and skill in its delivery. The oratory shown here is about Star Wars; the audience follows along from a translation in the program. I was there for my 50th reunion and to see my youngest son, Kenneth Mirkin, graduate in the Class of 2007.;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At age 33, Erich Segal wrote his best-known novel, Love Story, that sold more than 21 million copies, was the top selling work of fiction for 1970 in the United States and has been translated into more than 33 languages. He was on the track team with me at Harvard and ran the Boston Marathon with me several times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7602,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-histories-and-mysteries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}