Marilyn Huestis

[摘要] In the 1950s, when the world seemed a safer place, a parent might send a young child on an overnight train to a relative in a distant city. Marilyn Huestis was five years old and her sister was three when they made the journey from Hyattsville, Maryland, to Jacksonville, Florida, to see their grandparents. As it sped along, the train hit and killed a man who had wandered onto the tracks, which delayed the trip for 12 hours. Later, the two sisters offered their seats to a woman traveling with three children and then moved to another car. The train was delayed yet again as the conductor, who had been checking in on the two girls, searched frantically for the apparently missing sisters.“The next year—we were 6 and 4—my mother put us on a bus. I learned responsibility pretty early,” said Huestis. One might say that she had been learning since she was a toddler. When she was one and a half, her father, a Marine Corps pilot, was killed in a plane crash while flying home from a mission. Her mother, Margaret, was three months pregnant with her sister and would soon be diagnosed with a malignant thyroid tumor. “She couldn't do chemo or radiation until the pregnancy was over, so she really thought she was going to leave us as orphans,” said Huestis.Margaret survived the ordeal and went on to marry another Marine Corps pilot who would raise and love Marilyn and her sister Robin as if they were born to him. By then, she had already begun teaching her daughters—and she would have another, Anne—two life lessons: “You need to have a career, you need to be able to support yourselves—that was a very strong message from really early on,” said Huestis, who is chief …

[学科分类] 过敏症与临床免疫学