Sanders' early life in Brooklyn taught lessons, some tough

By ADAM GELLER
today


Excerpt:

His mother was hospitalized about two hours away, in southern New Jersey. The hospital, known today as Deborah Heart and Lung Center, started as a tuberculosis sanitorium for poor New Yorkers in the 1920s. The advent of antibiotics kept tuberculosis in check, and the institution remade itself as a specialist in heart treatment, while continuing to provide care without billing patients.

Patients were referred mostly by a network of labor organizations and fraternal groups, many of them Jewish, that supported the hospital through donations, spokeswoman Donna McArdle says. Sanders said an uncle helped his mother gain admission.

Sanders moved back home the following semester. A few months later, his mother died and Sanders transferred to the University of Chicago. By the time Sanders graduated in 1964, his father had also passed away and his brother had relocated to England. Without immediate family or a home to go back to, Sanders returned briefly to New York before moving to Vermont.

A few years later, Sanders sat down with his cousin, Benjamin Glassberg, to talk about what lay ahead for them. Glassberg says he was surprised when his cousin began talking about making a longshot run on a third-party ticket for one of Vermont’s seats in the U.S. Senate.

“Gee Bernie, politics? What interests you in that?” Glassberg, now 77, recalls asking. “And he would tell me about his thoughts and the fact that he was very concerned about things such as medical care and ... because his mother was ill for that period of time, I could understand where he was coming from.”

Sanders says his family’s experience finding treatment for his mother helped shape his view that “health care is a human right — it’s not a privilege — and that was not the case back then and that certainly is not the case right now.”

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