THREE DOCTORS

Authors and 'Three Doctors' bond with fathers

By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

NEWARK — They're three friends from Newark's inner city who demolished the stereotypes, overcame the odds and became doctors and authors.

They called themselves "The Three Doctors." Their third book, The Bond: Three Young Men Learn to Forgive and Reconnect With Their Fathers (Riverhead, $24.95), arrives Thursday.

That also happens to be the birthday of Rameck Hunt's father, Alim Bilal. An ex-con and former drug addict, Bilal belatedly put his life together, inspired by his son's success.

"The publisher didn't know it was his birthday," Hunt says. "It's spooky in a way, but maybe it's a sign: that it's a book that was meant to be."

Hunt, Sampson Davis and George Jenkins, all 34, grew up in broken homes. As they tell it, their mothers and grandmothers did all the heavy lifting of being parents. Their fathers were mostly absent.

That part of the story is all too familiar. The rest is not: The three friends pledged in their senior year of high school that they would all go to college, then on to medical school.

They did, and they wrote about it in their 2002 best seller, The Pact: Three Young Men Make a Promise and Fulfill a Dream. A children's version, WeBeat the Street: How a Friendship Pact Led to Success, followed in 2005.

Hunt, an internist at the University Medical Center in Princeton, N.J., came up with the idea for the new book. At first, he thought it would be about just him and his father.

But as he talked to Davis and Jenkins, "we realized that each of us had a similar but different story to tell. We had all grown up in a world where it seemed normal for men to abandon their children."

Davis, an emergency-room doctor at Newark's St. Michael's Medical Center and two other hospitals, has a Christmas memory of the year when he was 6 when his father pulled a gun on his mother.

"Mine wasn't the kind of house where you could learn a lot about conflict resolution," he says.

Jenkins, a dentist in Harlem and a professor at Columbia University College of Dental Medicine, grew up with little contact with his father, who lived in South Carolina.

"I'm not sure I even knew his phone number," he says.

Never a Father's Day

In their predominantly poor and black Newark neighborhood, Hunt says, "Father's Day was kind of like Rosh Hashana," the Jewish New Year. "It seemed like a celebration for other people, a day that belonged to another culture."

For their book, they enlisted the assistance of Margaret Bernstein, a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who wrote an article about them they liked.

They set out not only to describe their childhoods but also to include their fathers' stories and the sons' attempts to get past their lingering resentments. "Sometimes a son has to take it upon himself to bridge the gap when a father can't," is how Hunt puts it.

At the end of a workday last week, the three doctors all looked tired. They were meeting at the Newark campus of Rutgers University, where they have an office for their educational/medical foundation (threedoctorsfoundation .org). But the more they talked about their book, the more energetic they became.

Not that is was easy to write. Jenkins recalls that his initial enthusiasm for the project dredged up "bitter feelings I had buried about my dad, feelings that eat at you and can eat you up." For a while, he stopped work on the book, waiting to see chapters from Davis and Hunt. And he had to persuade his father to open up to Bernstein about his failures. Jenkins says, "My attitude was, 'At least he can do this for me.' "

Davis' father, Kenneth, 81, became too ill to cooperate, but the other two dads did. "Both were extremely likable men," Bernstein says. "Although they were absentee fathers, they weren't villains."

By then, Hunt's father, 52, had rebuilt his life and talked "easily about his life and his flaws and his many regrets," she says. "He knew how to wield his personal story effectively, like a cautionary tale."

She found George Jenkins Sr., 65, "wanted badly to not repeat the pattern of fatherlessness he'd had in his own life. Yet he didn't know how to create that bond during his brief visits with his son. I found it sad; he had thought he could wait until George became a man to explain his side of the story, but it was too little too late."

Newark: 'Worst of all'

In 1975, two years after the three doctors were born, Harper's analyzed the 50 largest cities and declared that Newark "stands without serious challenge as worst of all." After decades of losing white and middle-class black residents, downtown is in what officials call a "renaissance," but Newark remains one of the most violent cities. Per capita, its murder rate is three times higher than New York's.

In August, even jaded Newark was shocked by the murders of three black college students who, police said, weren't involved with a gang or drugs, just socializing at a playground. Witnesses said they were lined up and shot in the head in an apparent robbery.

"It's so senseless," Jenkins says. "They weren't bad kids. They weren't in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. How can you protect them?"

Hunt knows how quickly a life can change on the streets. At 16, he got into a fight with a crackhead, and to show off to his friends, he "gently" stabbed him in the thigh with a knife. Hunt was charged with attempted murder, but the case was thrown out when the victim failed to appear in court. The close call helped him realize "that being a rough guy wasn't me."

None of the three doctors is married or a father. All are dating, a subject they kid each other about. And all say that growing up with absentee fathers has made relationships with women harder.

"I never got a chance to see how to treat a lady every day, how to compromise, how to make a relationship work while raising a family," Jenkins says.

Hunt says: "We didn't write a how-to book. We're not telling anyone how to be a good father. But we wanted to help inspire and provoke people to think about their fathers or their sons and daughters."

He hopes the book is "more universal than it appears on the cover: three young black guys, like this is only a problem for black families."

Statistics do show fatherlessness is most common among poor black families, but Hunt says: "It can be problem even if the dad is in the home but emotionally unavailable. They don't have statistics for that."

At the funeral of Davis' father in May, a relative showed Davis a copy of a résumé Davis wrote when he was in medical school.

"My dad had made copies of it and sent it around to relatives down South to show what I had done. He was proud of me, but he couldn't tell me directly. So part of me has to say, 'That's OK. That's who he was.' "

For years, Jenkins didn't want anyone to think "that my father had something to do with the success I've experienced. So I admit that I have put up a wall between us."

Changing that remains a work in progress. His father's chapter in the book ends hopefully: "I continue to invite George to family reunions so he can meet the folks down here who are so proud of him. Perhaps one of these days, he'll make it."

Jenkins hasn't but says he hopes to someday: "It's always at the wrong time. I'm busy. I've got a new job, and I've got the foundation, and I've got my own life.

"But it's not malicious. I used to have a lot of resentment that he wasn't there when I needed him, but at some point you've got to let it go and say, 'What's the point?' One of these years, I'll make that reunion."