Mickey Sloss
This is page is about my mom, Mickey Sloss. She died one year ago this weekend, and it is still hard to process. I'll try to add some of my thoughts and remembrances here as time goes by, but Steve's Xmas message below is a great start.
Alice “Mickey” Sloss was a remarkable woman, truly one-of-a-kind. She was iconoclastic and fiercely independent, standing up to the McCarthy-era hysteria as a young woman and later to what she believed was an immoral war in Vietnam. She helped Jonas Salk develop the polio vaccine and others with countless other biomedical advancements during a long career as a research assistant. Full of contradiction she could be in the same moment gruff, critical, and profane as well as generous, loyal and courageous. She sewed Kate’s wedding dress at the same time discouraging her from marrying yours truly; she loved her grandchildren in a way I imagine grizzly bears love their cubs, aloof but highly protective. On one occasion with her three young grandchildren standing before her she loosed such a blasphemous tirade against religion that a wide-eyed Caitlin observed later that “even God must be afraid of Grandma Mickey”. She could never quite separate the personal from principle—upon learning that Kate was joyfully expecting our third child she sent Kate literature from Zero Population Growth, Inc. After her own kids were grown and her husband had died Mickey lived something of a monastic life—well, almost a monastic life; no God, lots of cigarettes, and more cats than I suppose most monks are allowed to have. Her favorite activity was sitting in a comfortable corner chair to read and smoke, but she traveled the world and slept on the ground under the stars well into her seventies. She volunteered at the Free Clinic of Cleveland every week for nearly 30 years until she could no longer walk more than a few steps, and had a beautiful singing voice that nearly no one had ever heard.
In the end Mickey’s body and mind finally just wore out. She told Kate a number of times during her last months that she was really annoyed about not having died yet. And in the end, I believe an amused God was quite gentle with one of His most avid critics. Mickey quietly slipped away with Kate at her side, at peace for perhaps the first moment of her life. At her memorial her many friends shared touching and funny stories of this remarkable woman, and afterwards many of the largely African-American custodial staff of her living center came up to Kate to quietly tell her how kind and caring Mickey had been to them over the years. So here’s to you, Mickey. You will be missed, remembered, and loved even by your ne’er do well son-in-law.
************************************Mickey links
Antigenic Specificity and Cellular Mechanisms in Leukocyte Adherence Inhibition Analysis of Immunity to Simple Proteins and Hapten-Protein Conjugates was published while she was running the researach lab for Dr. Arnold Powell of the School of Medicine at CWRU, where she worked for the last 20 years of her career.
This is from 1951, early cancer research using e. coli. This must have been during our one year living in Champaign when I was 2-3 years old. She already had her M.A. in Bacteriology, and had worked with Dr. Jonas Salk at Michigan researching an influenza vaccine. Mickey worked in the lab, and I remember visiting the monkeys that were being tested.
****************************Here is a video we took on Mother's Day in 2001 when Mickey came to visit us, and we went to a party at our friends Linda and Darrell's home and flower farm in Greene County. This is one I learned from Mickey, I don't remember a recording, but I do remember hearing at the time "with a cigar at every door", and of course this offered a surrealist view of the problems of society. Fortunately I asked my parents about this congative dissonance I was experiencing in my 4 year old head, and they explaine why guys with guns were guarding, not cigaring the doors.