Blog: Behind the Book Reader Interview with Ed Ravine

Readers of The Boys in Brown are familiar with the character of Marion Biere. She was one of the book’s main protagonists, a retired healthcare worker who adopted a sick black child, LaRon, and nursed him back to health. Her late-in-life mission was to raise LaRon, educate him in a religious environment and finish high school at Carmel Catholic. What possessed this woman, in her 60′s at the time, to do such a thing?

Ed Ravine (left) worked with Marion Biere (right) at the Lake County Health Department in the 1970′s and 1980′s. Currently a licensed clinical professional counselor who lives in Evanston, he was a great source in The Boys in Brown, providing first hand accounts of Marion’s actions during that stretch of her life. He was kind enough to share more stories of his time working with Marion and insights on her character, spirit and deep faith.

Marion Biere and her husband, Jim, were born during the Great Depression. They came up in an age where humility and service were not advertising key words but authentic human qualities. How much did her background inform her decision to adopt LaRon?

Jim and Marion Biere were Korean War era people who were on the tail end of the World War II generation, so they were selfless, serve your family, serve your community, serve your country kind of people without needing any accolades. Good Catholics, good parents and maybe pretty modest about all of that. I don’t think Jim or Marion beat their chest about their kids at school, but there was a deep pride anyway. The generation that followed Marion had some promise.

So the next generation that comes along, the 1960’s, which had the potential for some altruism ends up failing, ends up coming out. There’s civil rights, there’s women’s rights, there voting rights, international human rights. That World War II, Korean War-veteran, war era, Eisenhower people come up against that hopeful altruism. I feel like I was a big part of it and a lot of my generation departs from that for sex, drugs and rock and roll. Houses and raising their kids and removed from doing anything to help others. They are self-contained. What’s importnat about Marion is it’s a portrait of the last generation that was selfless.

Any Korean War veteran will tell you they weren’t really celebrating when they came home. With Vietnam vets it was a different thing. The country was in turmoil and the reason they weren’t celebrated was much more complicated. When the Korean War vets came home, they are very quiet about their service and about the result of the war. I have an uncle, ironically Uncle Sam, who served in Korea and that’s the way he was. The selflessness with which Marion grew up with and the way she was educated as a nurse, it carries through from the time I spent with her on and off for 20 years. To see how quiet she was, utterly devoted to the poor men and women who came into the clinics that she served in a very quiet way. They said to me they couldn’t lie to her for some reason. That was resounding universal things that people said to me. They coudn’t look into Marion’s eyes during a conversation and not lie.

Is there a story of her time at the clinic that illuminates how giving she was?

Marion dispensed methadone to heroin addicts. One day she hurt her hands in a car accident. She calls and asks me to come pick her up. She said she couldn’t drive but that she was coming in anyway, that we’ll work this out, we’ll figure out how to do the medication although her hands were hurt. We must have had 50 people coming in that day for medication. She came in and showed me how to do the medication, which was totally illegal – I’m not a nurse, I’m not a doctor –  but she said ‘we have to do this, I’m supervising you, it’s relly simple.’ So I prepare the 50 doses and I’m handing it out. I realized just how dedicated she was. Jim picked her up and took her to a hospital and we had a subsitute nurse for awhile as her hands were injured. She was our mother. She was a mother for a core of Vietnam veterans. She was everybody’s mother.

In the book, there are sections about Marion’s time at the LCDH, about her work helping to rehabilitate drug addicts and ensure expectant mothers got proper care. She was an unsung hero, a pioneer in the health care field of that era. What is her legacy?

An addict stops maturing emotionally the year he or she starts using. So when an addict starts using in their early teens their maturing level is exactly that – 12, 13, 14 years old. They need a good parent figure. Part of the trust and virtue of having someone like Marion Biere is really good therapy and re-parenting people, so when they stop using they can catch up with their maturing.

Marion would go out and get the nurses on the various units to donate complete Thanksgiving dinners. And for those families where there were just the kids, or a father who was disabled, or a mom, she’d help these families cook a Thanksgiving dinner. We had a residential facility and she’d come help on Christmas Eve. What she did with LaRon is what she did in our clinic. Really authentically religious people can harvest that peace of mind; that faith, hope and love can get you through anything. Marion had that. It got her through the years of working with these unusual people who came in to see us. Her care for those in the clinic – for all of us really – was deep and I think she parented us the way she parented LaRon. I know she harvested the good in her heart, in her family’s heart. I know she harvested mine.

The Boys in Brown is available now on Amazon.