Doctor Everett W Forman: A Few Words about a Man of Few Words

STAMFORD — On the 16th of December, 1944, a young doctor, Everett Forman was as far forward as his commanding officers could put him. This was the result of  "a dispute with a superior officer." He was in a Battalion Aid Station. The American army was pushing the Germans back ever since Normandy, and were now in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium.  Without warning, all hell broke loose. The Battle of the Bulge began.

The next day, it was clear that this was not simply a battle to push the Americans back. 113 US soldiers were captured and lined up in a field and machine gunned. Remarkably, a few lived to tell the story. 84 were murdered. For five weeks, Everett crawled and ran through enemy fire, going from foxhole to foxhole doing all he could to save the shot and shelled wounded. In his own words, "He was in the forward area sufficiently long to receive the Combat Medical Badge which was subsequently deemed sufficient for a Bronze Star."

Everett was soft spoken and humble. In his understated recollection of his life, he downplays his accomplishments. At 85 years old, he wrote in the third person. He wrote as if describing what another had done. My mother told another story of his service. Everett was married to her sister Lillian.

Mom would say, "He served through the Battle of the Bulge. He said the sound of the artillery and concussion from the explosions were nearly constant as he worked to save the wounded. It wasn't until the guns stopped and the battle was over that Everett broke and had to be sent home for a rest. Lillian and I took care of him." That period of recovering from the horror and hell of that fight for survival and struggle to save lives was the last time Everett spoke of his wartime experiences. He recovered and returned to service and was discharged with the rank of Captain.

From the record of his service ribbons, Everett's war began at Normandy. The landing took place before his altercation with his superior officer, so he likely landed on the beach at Normandy sometime between the evening of June 6, the first day to June 8, the third day, by which time all the medical units of the battalion were ashore and treating the casualties.  After the war and being discharged from the army, Everett put all the heroism and horror behind him and devoted his life to his patients and family.

Dr. Forman's grandfather started the family tradition of medicine around the time of the Civil War. His father took up medicine at the turn of the century. Dr. Forman recalled that several of his professors in medical school asked if he had ESP, as he was often one step ahead of them as they taught surgery. He did not tell them that he had assisted his father in surgery prior to going to medical school. Many in Stamford will remember Everett's son Seth, who grew up in Stamford and then joined the Peace Corps and fell in love with South East Asia, and also fell in love and married there. He became a lawyer and is now retired, on Guam where he lived and practiced. He sent me his father's short memoir.

In the memoir, Everett reveals his quiet sense of humor. He was a fine chess player and was sitting down to play chess with Seth's new wife. He set up the board wrong, so when he won it would be more funny and unexpected. He admits that what he did not expect was that Seth's wife was a better player and beat him. He had a fondness for practical jokes, and would often collect fortune cookies and using surgical retractors carefully remove the fortunes from the cookies and replace them with ones he'd written. This nearly backfired when their friends brought another couple to dinner. The wife of that couple was rather straight laced. She opened her fortune cookie to find, "May the wind at your back never be your own." There was a moment of silence, and then she uncharacteristically burst into laughter. Everett was much relieved.

His love of practical jokes started early. At five years old, he was given a toy cannon that fired a pellet at a break apart ship. He hit it again and again, setting the cannon farther and farther back. When his uncle tried, he missed, Young Everett set up his own next shot. "He'll hit it," his father told his brother. He did. His father noticed that Everett set the toy cannon on a barely perceivable seam in the carpet, and cleverly moved the game when his uncle was about to try.

Eventually he became a doctor in Stamford. He was on the staff of the Stamford Community Hospital and his specialty was obstetrics.  His son Seth recalls another winter, in the peace of our Catskill Mountains, when he made a house call. He charged ten dollars to come out in bad weather when he was needed. The patient's father paid him, then they found Doctor Forman's car had been snowed in. The man dug out his car, then charged Everett twenty dollars. This was exactly the kind of ironic humor Everett loved, and he loved his practice in Stamford.

Besides humility and dedication, Everett had an ingrained sense of humor. Paraphrasing his own unpublished recollection of an event, shortly after the war, he and Lillian, and another two couples went to a jazz evening on Long Island. It was loud, packed and the air was thick with smoke. They couldn't get a waiter to bring them the check when they wanted to leave early. Everett got up and buttonholed a waiter and whispered in his ear. At once the check came with three waiters who helped them through the crowd. It wasn't until years later that Everett confessed to his wife that he had said to the waiter, "My girl has epilepsy and is about to have a fit."

In the days when Stamford's major modern convenience was the telephone, Everett created a telephone tree, with every one of his patient's blood types, so that in an emergency, he could find a blood donor if a patient needed a blood transfusion. In his short memoir, he reflects on how he came to be more present to his patients. He speaks of sitting on the edge of an elderly patient's bed as he explains her medical condition and medications to her grown daughter. He felt a tug at his jacket and he turned to the patient who said, "I want to be somebody too." He found that an important lesson in speaking directly to his elderly patients.

Early in the 1950s, when he began his practice in Stamford, there were times he'd accept produce for medical services. When his son Seth thinks back to his childhood, he recalls with some nostalgia that they always had a freezer full of meat from a patient who owned a meat processing plant. Seth remembers this with some fondness, "Eating steak on Guam is probably like ordering Sushi in Stamford," he opines.

One of my fondest memories of my Uncle Everett was when I was a young teen. One day Everett took me to a small diner near the intersection of Railway Avenue and Main Street, perhaps where T.P.'s  Café is now found. He encouraged me to eat anything I wanted, suggesting a thick milkshake and hamburger with fries, everything on it. After lunch, as we walked home he told me that he wanted to test me for diabetes and wanted me to enjoy lunch, rather than spoiling it by worrying what the test might show.

In those early days from 1950 to 1967, an unattributed article from a newspaper (the Mountain Eagle?) sent to me by Seth,  estimated that Dr. Forman helped to bring 900 of our neighbors into the world. When I meet neighbors of my age, I ask if they knew Uncle Everett and many say, "Oh yes, he delivered me!"   It is always followed by a smile and comments about his gentle nature and his dedicated care.