Thank you to Johns Hopkins for this lovely article about my family’s tradition of giving. Below is an excerpt, and you can read the article in full in the Johns Hopkins Department of Surgery’s winter newsletter, Cutting Edge.

Phyllis Mindell, 81, still recalls the coats her father Sol Gross made out of remnants of Persian lamb in a rented New York loft. Despite his allergies, he’d patch the scraps together, in 10-inch strips, to create coats to sell at modest department stores.

“He was an unsuccessful furrier, it was the worst possible thing for an intellectual,” Mindell says from her home in Washington, D.C. 

At the time, however, the world, and with it the Gross family, was being battered by the Great Depression.

“You did anything you could to make a living,” she says. 

The family lived frugally, but there was one thing Sol and Esther Gross always had money for: charity. Before taking a trip in the late ‘60s, Mindell’s father brought an envelope to her house and placed it in a book. Were something to happen to him, she was to send it to the address marked on the envelope.

“When he returned, he took the envelope and mailed it away,” says Mindell, who’d been unaware her father had been helping support a less-fortunate family overseas.

This compassion left a mark on Mindell, a writer who ran a successful business teaching advanced communications.