While we come from different eras and are 62-years apart, my 87-year-old maternal grandfather Nathan Price and I, his lone grandson, have formed a strong, unique bond over a shared love of sports.
This bond explains why the former college football running back, orthopedic surgeon, Vietnam War veteran, father of three and grandfather of six not only expressed strong admiration for my persistent desire to enter the sports journalism field, but also for turning his middle child Amy, my mother, into an enthusiastic baseball and basketball fan.
Price was born on September 28, 1937 and raised in a tight-knit, working class Jewish family in Philadelphia alongside his younger sister Carol. He became passionate about football at a young age by playing touch football with friends at a neighborhood park. In fact, my grandfather remembered that he was out playing when his parents drove home with his newborn sister.
Price played high school football with famous, controversial comedian and actor Bill Cosby at Central High School. He worked his way up from the freshman team his first year to the varsity football squad his junior and senior years. One vivid memory my grandfather shared of his high school playing days was the annual Thanksgiving morning games against Central’s arch-rival Northeast, who was led by future Pro Football Hall-of-Fame cornerback the late Herb Adderley.
I wish I could have seen Price in action. Although he was not on the same tier as Adderley, the bruising, tough athlete did star on Swarthmore College’s Division III football team before entering medical school to become a doctor, not a dentist as he originally envisioned.
After one collegiate game, Price recalled an exclusive fancy dinner experience, which showed just how much he likes to eat, a trait that was somewhat passed down to my mom and me
“We played Pennsylvania Military College [now known as Widener] and they were heavily favored but we beat them,” Price said. “One of our alumni, his last name was McCabe and he was president of Scott Paper Company. One thing I remember about it was that the first course of our dinner was oysters. Most of the people on our team had never eaten a raw oyster. So I had 24 oysters to start the meal as I took everybody’s oysters that they did not want or were afraid of eating.”
Fast forward a decade, Price married Andrea, aka Lovi as she was affectionately nicknamed. The two of them were in the early stages of raising my mom, her older sister Michelle and younger brother Bryan when their lives were uprooted.
Price enrolled in the Berry Plan, deferring his two-years of Vietnam War service until he finished his medical residency program. He spent the first-year at the Great-Lakes Naval Memorial Hospital, just north of Chicago. Thinking he was going back there for his second year, his orders got changed. Instead, Price spent eight months tending to soldiers on the front lines in Vietnam before receiving an early discharge to return home because his dad died.
Seeing photos of what he experienced in war-torn Vietnam goes to show how bad-ass and courageous he was and still is, especially keeping in mind that he left behind a wife and three-young kids. That spirit carried over into his medical career, in which his patients often faced tough realities.
“I came away with the feeling that desire to live played an important role in whether these older people survived surgery for their broken hips,” Price said. “People no matter how old they were, if they really had a desire to continue living, they did. If they felt this was too much for them and they said to heck with living any further, they passed away.”
Speaking of death, I unfortunately never met my biological maternal grandmother as she succumbed to breast cancer a few years before I was born. It would be cool to be like Marty McFly in “Back to the Future”, obtaining the ability to go back in time to meet this woman whose art-work is all over the house where I was raised.
Nevertheless, Price recovered shortly after Lovi’s death, remarrying Karen, who I have known as my grandmother my whole life. He has not missed a beat in retirement, traveling the world with my grandmother, including going back to Vietnam to revisit one of the most impactful experiences of his life. Even as he gets older, my grandfather remains sharp as a wip, a massive sports fan and one of my biggest supporters.
