Meaningful Conversations That Matter: Life Stories, Legacy, and Connection Podcast Episode Transcript

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Welcome to the Remembering a Life podcast. Today I'm joined by my colleague and friend, Louis Weiss. Most people, including me, call him Skip. Skip is the publisher and owner of Chicago Health and Caregiving Magazines, titles that have been awarded nationally and regionally. Both magazines are published semi-annually and are read by an estimated one million patients in nearly 4,000 waiting rooms throughout the Chicago Metro area. The magazines have become the dominating local players in targeting healthcare consumers, as well as enhancing health and care literacy. Skip is from the family that established Weiss Memorial Hospital on Chicago's North Side.

Skip and I have had a lot of great conversations about our lives, but we definitely don't know everything about each other. So today we're going to use a deck of conversation cards to share some new stories with each other. We're using the Have the Talk of a Lifetime Conversation Cards deck and pulling questions out at random to ask each other.

This deck has 50 questions that help people get to know friends and family better. Welcome, Skip. I'm so glad you're here.

SKIP WEISS:
Gail, thanks for having me. I'm delighted to be here today.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
All right, we're going to jump right in. And I'm going to start with a really positive question, Skip. I pulled out a card that asks, when in your life have you felt happiest?

SKIP WEISS:
I think the time that I felt happiest was probably ages eight to 10. It was a period of discovery and freedom. I was riding my bike all over my neighborhood. Life was good. I had no worries, very few responsibilities. And it was a happy time. And I picked 10 because I was 10 in 1962 and in November of that year when President Kennedy was assassinated, I would say that was the end of that happiest period and my innocence was changed, altered as the world around me changed.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
So do you think that's kind of when you realized, okay, bad things happen in the world too?

SKIP WEISS:
Yeah, precisely. There wasn't fairness. There was also cruelty. Not all people were good and that not all people believed in community. I began to realize that we needed to take better care of each other. Yeah, it was an upsetting time. But yeah, I'm curious with you, what are your fondest memories of your family, including sibs, cousins, and others?

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Oh boy. Okay. So that takes me way back because similar to you, some of those fondest memories are when I was very young. And I have two sisters. They are eight and 10 years older than me. And the first thing I think of when I think about my fondest memories are being in the basement with my sister, Valerie, and using cardboard boxes to create these elaborate ... Well, I thought they were elaborate at the time. They probably really weren't. These elaborate sets for plays that we would put on in the basement. I remember distinctly putting on the play Hansel and Gretel, and of course there were only two of us. So we kind of cut Hansel out of the whole thing and it was just Gretel and the witch. And I remember taping strips of paper onto a card table to make a little cage for Gretel.

And I remember my sister wanting it to be very fair. So we did the play twice with each of us playing the parts. I can smell the cardboard and I can remember how it felt to be in that little cage that we had made and the programs that we made for our parents, and we even charged money. I think it was 10 cents a person. That's definitely one of my fondest memories from my childhood.

SKIP WEISS:
I love that. I love it. But when you were that age, did you have any idea what you wanted to do when you grew up?

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Well, like a lot of little girls, I loved horses and I wanted to be a veterinarian. And that carried through for quite a while, probably until about middle school, I would say. But that didn't pan out and that's okay. I still love animals, but yeah, I really wanted to be a veterinarian.

So along those lines of when we were young, so I just pulled out a question about what was your favorite subject in school and why? I'm really curious about this one.

SKIP WEISS:
History jumps out at me. I was fascinated by the stories of the shifts and changes in our world, as well as the people who made them or inspired them. I remember loving it in grammar school. In high school, I remember taking an AP history class of US history and had a outstanding teacher that it was a small group of us, maybe 15 in the round and intensive reading, but great stories well beyond a typical textbook. His name was Angus Johnston. I'll never forget. And then in college, it was the same. Well, I didn't major in history. I took quite a few history classes and my favorite was a course on the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, and it was taught by another outstanding teacher, Neil Brogdon, at Scripps College in Southern California. And it too was in the round, and it was a more of a Socratic course and lots of reading.

You had to be prepared because if you weren't and he asked you a question and you fumbled, your small group would all know. And so there was a lot of pressure to keep up, but the stories were fascinating. The story of how the United States from those classes early on grew and developed was fascinating to me. I'm so interested in our country and our government and how it has shifted. And it was the same thing with Nazi Germany to see how the country could change from a peace-loving country to a war-like country back to peace and all of the factors that came to play at that time.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
I really think that a teacher can make all the difference in the world when it comes to learning. I did not have the same experience as you. I had teachers who read the same yellowed notes year after year.

SKIP WEISS:
Right.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
So I'm a little envious that you had such a great experience. Do you think ... Did what you learned and those teachers influence you in any way moving forward with anything that you do now in your personal life? Has that interest in history continued?

SKIP WEISS:
Yeah, it certainly made me more aware and active in my community. Those courses certainly made me more sensitive to not just the shifts in history, but the people, and that included not just leaders, but neighbors and how they thought, what they felt, choices that they were making, people who had more than others, people who had less than others. And it certainly drove a sense for me of how do I help particularly those who have less to have more, more rights, more food, better healthcare. So yeah, it did. It very much did affect me personally, and it's played out in many different ways in my life. I'm curious, I know from past conversations that you have been active. What was your first job or volunteer activity or an activity like that that has meant a lot to you?

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Oh my goodness. Well, my first job doesn't mean a whole lot to me, to be honest, other than it made me realize I am not good at sales. I was 14 years old and I found a job in the newspaper back in the day, that's how you found a job. And I did cold call sales for Kirby Vacuum Cleaner Company.

I was not good at it. To be quite honest, I quit before I was fired, but it was a very valuable lesson to learn that sales isn't my thing. And I was only 14 years old, so I'm going to cut myself some slack on that too. But I would say where I really started to think more globally and even more locally about how things affected people was when I worked at the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin, which was in the early '90s. So it was really the height of the AIDS epidemic. And that was such a positive experience for me to be able to be part of that cause. And that continued even after I left and I volunteered to manage an art auction that benefited the organization and things like that. So that's when I really started to expand and leave kind of what had been a really kind of sheltered life and really think more about the impact of what we did and how it helped others.

And that has definitely continued on.

SKIP WEISS:
That's beautiful. In all of it, in all of your career, can you describe one of your personal or professional accomplishments that has meant the most to you?

GAIL MARQUARDT:
I'm going to select a personal accomplishment. In college, I had a minor in photography and I kind of stopped doing photography when I had kids and had other priorities. And just over 10 years ago, I picked it up again and I was really fortunate to be able to show my work in museums and galleries throughout the area here in Milwaukee. And that was such a great personal accomplishment for me because it really was all me and it was a time in my life where I was really seeking something and that fulfilled what I needed at the time. So that I think is one of my most significant personal accomplishments. How about you?

SKIP WEISS:
Well, I could probably name one for both. When I was younger, my wife and I, my wife at the time and I had had our first child and she was born with a very rare form of cancer and passed after three months. And we set out to raise money in her memory to endow a chair in hematology and oncology at what was then Children's Memorial Hospital here in Chicago, now Lurie Children's. And it took about seven years time. We had a goal of a million dollars and through the help of a wonderful group of friends, we put on annual events and in seven years we were able to raise a million dollars, endow the chair. And it goes now to research and childhood cancers. And that's something that I continue to feel really great about. I think it was funded about 30 years ago, so it's been a while to see it grow and see different professors take the chair and lead the department in hematology oncology at Lurie Children's.

And then on the professional side, I think starting both Chicago Health and Caregiving Magazines has been so incredibly rewarding. Chicago Health was started in 2010 and caregiving in 2020. And I know through anecdotes that it's doing what we had hoped, which was to educate people about health, to give them information where they can make better choices, where they can advocate for their best health. And that's a good thing. It warms me to know that something that we created has affected so many people in positive ways.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
All of that is such an amazing legacy for your family as well, and the effects of that will be felt for generations. That has to feel really good.

SKIP WEISS:
Yeah. It really ... If I do nothing else, it will be a great legacy.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Definitely. What card have you pulled next, Skip?

SKIP WEISS:
Gail, I know you're a reader and a movie goer. Do you have a favorite book, poem, movie, or quote?

GAIL MARQUARDT:
So I have some all time favorite books, but what I'm going to talk about, I think instead, is a book I just finished a few days ago. Have you heard of ... I See You've Called in Dead. It's by John Kenney.

SKIP WEISS:
No, I have not.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
I mean, go get a copy of this book. John Kenny writes for the New York Times. He's a humorist and this book, it's fiction, and it's about a man who goes on a really bad blind date. He's recently divorced, goes on a really bad blind date, like so bad that the woman he's on the blind date with brought her boyfriend. And that night, he drinks a little too much and he decides to write his own obituary, which is his profession. He writes obituaries for a newspaper. Well, he accidentally publishes his obituary, which is a funny obituary. It's not even serious. So his employer, rightfully so, is not very happy with him that he has published this obituary. So they put him on leave until they can decide if they're going to fire him or what they're going to do. While he's on leave, he starts going to funerals of people he doesn't even know, total strangers.

He finds them in the paper and he goes and he experiences other people's funerals. And I laughed out loud while I read this book, which is something I normally don't do. I am not going to give away the ending, but you will laugh and you will cry. This is an incredibly moving book about death, the importance of living your life well and what it's like to grieve. There is some powerful grieving going on in this book as well, but really one of the best books I've ever read. It reminds me of another book that I absolutely love called Death Winds a Goldfish by Brian Ray. He's an illustrator also for the New York Times, oddly enough. And he wrote an entire book about death having to take a leave of absence because he's never taken a vacation and throughout an entire year, death learns how to live.

And that book is also funny, but also incredibly powerful, and it really is mostly illustrations. So those two books together, given the conversation we're having today, those are two of my favorites.

SKIP WEISS:
Oh, that's great. Even from your book choices, you're a big fan of humor. Can you tell me what or who in your life made you laugh so hard that you cried?

GAIL MARQUARDT:
I can't immediately think of one instance because the people I immediately think of make me laugh every single time, like laughing to the point where it hurts and I am crying. It's a group of friends that I worked with starting, oh man, it's got to be 30 years ago. And I only worked with them for a year and a half, but we have continued to gather. We are at trivia team, so we do trivia together and I know that every single time I gather with these friends, we are going to laugh so incredibly hard and it feels so good. And to have that 30 years of friendship and all of the things that only we know, if anyone else came to one of our gatherings, they would have no clue what's going on, but I am incredibly grateful for that group of friends.

SKIP WEISS:
That's great. Yeah. For me, two professional comedians come to mind, Robin Williams and Steve Martin. I am belly aching, laughing in so many of their sketches. And I do have one friend, Alan Korn, who I knew from many years ago. We went to camp together and are on a board together. And Alan just has this knack of telling hilarious stories that the moment he opens his mouth, you're just prepared to let it out. It's just so fun.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
That's amazing. And I knew you and I were friends for a reason. I love Steve Martin and Robin Williams too. I miss Robin Williams so much, but love seeing some of the work that he did.

SKIP WEISS:
Do you travel much?

GAIL MARQUARDT:
I don't travel a whole lot. I travel a bit for work, but not as much as I would like for pleasure.

SKIP WEISS:
Of the places that you've gone, is there a particular place that was most beautiful that you ever visit? And if so, what made it so beautiful?

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Well, hands down, it's not even a competition for me. The Pacific Northwest and the rainforests in Washington State, the coast in Washington state, the rainforests are absolutely magical and the old growth forests, the sense of calm that you find there, the green, the lushness, the variety of areas just within that one state. I was just talking to someone else about this, about you've got the mountains, you've got the rainforests, you've got the coast. It's such an incredibly peaceful place to be.

SKIP WEISS:
I agree. I love that place and also the water, both the ocean and Crater Lake and other places like that, that just adds to that sense of peace and beauty.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Yeah. I'm actually going there in just about a week and a half and I can't wait and-

SKIP WEISS:
Lucky. Lucky you.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
It's winter there and it's going to be really rainy, which makes everything even more lush and I can't wait to experience it.

So we've talked a bit about childhood and this question is inviting you to reflect back on being a child. What words of wisdom would you pass on to your childhood self?

SKIP WEISS:
I would say be yourself. Know yourself, know your true self, not someone else's image of you. How often do people make choices because of the way they look to others instead of from you from the inside? I know I used to do that so much of the time, but now, and frankly, thanks to my wife, Kathleen, I try to live much more in the moment, not in the future, not in the past, to be my genuine self and to choose from that place. I know that if I had felt that way as a child, I probably would have made many different choices in my life, but I'm glad even as an adult that I've come to that place today because it gives me much greater peace and much greater optimism for myself.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
I can completely relate to that. I think about all of the, as I grew up, society put pressures on me about what I was supposed to do and what I was supposed to do next. And having kids myself and seeing how they navigate the world is really kind of inspiring that they don't feel as locked in by what society feels they should be doing.

SKIP WEISS:
Yeah. It's a great place to live from.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Yeah.

SKIP WEISS:
And I did have choices back then. I just don't know that ... I realized it. And sometimes it's the trial and error and getting bruised or just not being ... Realizing that you're as happy as you could be, that it takes those lessons and maybe occasionally a teacher, another person to alert you to choices you're making and who you really are. And the choice that you just made, was that the best choice given who you are. And I've been lucky to have Kath in my life these last 23 years to remind me and slowly but surely it's allowed me to live differently.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Is Kathleen one of the most influential people in your life? That happens to be the card I selected next. Who has been influential in your life?

SKIP WEISS:
I would say yes. I would say that she's clearly been the most influential. She's certainly the most grounded person I've ever met. She knows her own values so well and lives from them. And when I'm not living from mine, it's frustrating for both of us and she reminds me that I can choose differently, reflecting on my values. And so I would say yes, absolutely. She's clearly the most influential person in my life.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
That's wonderful.

SKIP WEISS:
Was there somebody that was particularly influential in yours?

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Well, I have three adult children. They are in their early to mid 20s, and so they are all finding their way in the world, and they are all incredibly different from each other, and beautiful, and talented, and wonderful in each of their own ways. So I think I've really learned about the beautiful diversity that exists among all of us as humans, and that my children are not at all like me. They might be like me in a few ways, but they are really their own people. And I hope that I have helped inspire that in them. To your point about being yourself, I hope I've encouraged them to be themselves. You learn how much you can love another human being when you have children, and you also learn the importance of letting go. And I think that's such a valuable lesson of learning to let go and let your children live their own lives, and still being a part of that, but recognizing that they have their own path that they're going to pursue.

Aside from that, every parent learns patience, I think, from their children as well. And at each phase of their lives, it's a different kind of patience, but I think that's a really important lesson as well and has inspired me to have patience in other aspects of my life.

SKIP WEISS:
Yeah, I would agree to all of that. My kids are in their mid 30s, and I experienced all of what you just described. And sometimes the letting go was particularly painful. I remember dropping my son off, my oldest son off at college. We live in Chicago, and he chose to go to the University College of London.

And that's far away. And I took him to London to settle into his living space and have him get ready for his first semester. And when it came time to part, and for me to head back to the airport, I broke down, and I was that way for quite some time. It was just really, really hard. And yet, when I saw him the next time, it was so joyful to see how he was managing. My fear was here, my ex and I had been taking care of him, of course, all these 18 years, and somewhere in the back of my mind and in my heart was, can he manage on his own?

Before he'd just come home every night, we'd have dinner, he'd do his homework, go to school the next day, and he was somewhere where I could get him if he was in trouble, but now he was across the pond a long way away, and that wasn't available to me, and I had to trust that he could be on his own. And of course, that was probably being overprotective, over controlling, and he was great, and so was my youngest when he left. Yeah, there's a lot of things mixed up with all of that, that the letting go was particularly hard, but it was one of the things that I learned is that the kids will be okay. Yeah.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
When my My daughter was recently home. I said, "Are you happy?" And she said, "I'm very happy with where I am in my life right now." And as a parent, isn't that the most amazing thing that you can hear?

SKIP WEISS:
Yeah, absolutely.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Yeah. So it was a little brave for your son to go to London to school. This question is for you though. Describe the most adventurous or brave thing you've ever done.

SKIP WEISS:
I had an experience a little over 50 years ago. I was 21 years old. It was 1973. And I was an employee at a overnight camp in Northern Minnesota. And my job that summer was to take seven 15 year olds out on a five-week canoe trip in the Canadian wilderness, a couple hundred miles north of the US Canadian border with another co-counselor. And we had a route and this was at a time when there were no cell phones, there was no GPS and very few places where we could get help if we had an emergency. And I didn't really think about it as being brave or adventuresome when I did this. But years later when I thought of, and I was a parent and I thought of having a 21 year old taking my kids out on something like that, it dawned on me what an enormous risk this trip was and what trust the owners of the camp had and the two of us to lead this group because communication was so difficult.

There were fly-in fishing lodges where we could occasionally pull up to go visit them and see if we could borrow their phone, which used satellite communication. And for the first three tries, the first three weeks, we couldn't get through to the camp to let them know that we were okay because of sunspots or something like that. And so the camp didn't hear from us, literally didn't hear from us for four weeks. And I guess I reflected and realized how adventuresome that was, how risky that was to the owners, how trusting the parents were in us. Brave, I didn't even think about it being brave. I did recognize it as an adventure for sure. And it was one of the great, great times of my life. And I've kept up with many of the kids that were on the trip and everybody looks at it the same way, only they were our fellow travelers and my co-counselor and I were the two leads that had responsibility for these seven lives.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Well, you win. That is incredibly adventurous. And at the time, like you alluded to, it was probably like, "Sure, let's do this. " And now as you get older, our life experience informs us of all the things that could have gone wrong.

SKIP WEISS:
Right, exactly.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
And we're probably much more hesitant to have those kinds of adventures now than we were back then, if only we could recapture some of that from our youth, right?

SKIP WEISS:
Yeah. Even my wife and I have done canoe trips in the years that we've known each other. About seven or eight years ago, we were up in Quetico Provincial Park and it was only five days and we weren't that far away from civilization where we needed to worry, but far enough away where if something had happened to us, the other would be responsible for getting us both back to civilization. And that was kind of scary, but we knew how to take care of ourselves and I still love doing that. It's a risk that's manageable and the payoff out in the wild is just, you can't beat it.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Right. I understand that for sure. So we've established you're pretty adventurous, but is there a passion you wish you could pursue, but just haven't had the time yet?

SKIP WEISS:
You know, you had mentioned photography earlier in the conversation, and it's something that I have always loved, but I just haven't found the time to get serious about it. I have a really good camera, not just an iPhone, that I don't use often enough, but capturing pictures is so important to me. It helps me with my memory, it helps me relive, it helps bring back joy of past times, past events, and I love it. I really, I just enjoy the creativity of composing a picture and getting it right. And there's so much of photography that I don't know that I could improve on, particularly night photography or places where the lighting is more complicated than just a direct sunlight. I love the stories that photographs take, and it's one of those things that when I do retire, I will be spending a lot more time doing for sure.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Well, this really has been an amazing conversation. I have learned so much about you, Skip, that I did not know before.

SKIP WEISS:
And right back at you.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Yeah.

SKIP WEISS:
Yeah.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
This was really wonderful and would love to continue some of these conversations as well about some of the things that we talked about today. Thank you so much for engaging with these questions and being open and kind of vulnerable too to answer some of these questions that are really personal. So thank you so much for that.

SKIP WEISS:
You're welcome. And thanks for sharing the cards. I found them really both lovely and challenging and forcing me to reflect. It was terrific to review them and a great opportunity to talk with you today and to learn more about you as well, Gail.

GAIL MARQUARDT:
Yeah. Oh, I'm so glad you enjoyed the conversation. Yeah, the cards are wonderful. They are available at rememberingalife.com in the online store for anyone who's interested in checking them out. We covered less than half of the questions that are in the deck today. So definitely worth checking out and having a really meaningful conversation with friends, family. This can be done one-on-one. This can be done during a family dinner, just a really lovely way to have a casual conversation about things that matter to us in our lives. And for more information about Remembering a Life, visit rememberingallife.com.