Rubin: At Children's Hospital, a hands-on, name-off volunteer finally gets credit

Mike Duggan said lots of nice things in John Levy's eulogy, got some laughs, bobbed some heads, maybe sparked some tears. He did a fine job for a good friend, and exactly one year later, the line that most resonated with Levy's family became untrue.

"John is the greatest philanthropist you wouldn't know existed," the mayor of Detroit said, "because his name isn't anywhere in the city."

Now it is. As of an unveiling scheduled for Wednesday evening, the entry point to Children's Hospital of Michigan in Detroit shall be known as the John G. Levy Lobby ― which would be just another name on a place, except that this one comes with something for sick or frightened kids to do, and indirectly with puppies.

"My mom and my sister and I really wanted something that would make the kids smile," said Jody Levy, John's elder daughter, who was raised and still lives in Birmingham. "That's what we've accomplished."

The smiles start with an endowment, something the hospital's patients wouldn't care about or understand. John Levy volunteered at what he simply called "Children's" for 45 years, and served at one point as board chair of the entire Detroit Medical Center.

After he died at 72 of esophageal and liver cancer, his family established the John G. Levy Endowment ― there's the name again ― with a goal of raising $250,000 for child life services at the hospital. From their perspective, that means items like art or music classes, yoga and therapy dogs, or as Jody put it, "all the things that bring the joy."

The endowment is already closing in on $400,000, and the thank-you for donors is part of the large installation in the lobby with brightly colored bounding balls.

Their names are inscribed on white, high-density foam cubes, tilted sideways in a frame that's probably 20 feet wide and 5½ feet tall. When kids press a big button beneath a short biography of John Levy, the balls whip around, then carom their way downward.

Crafted by a Ferndale design and display company called Echo Charlie, it's a sort of pinball and pachinko hybrid, and it's lots better than thinking about medical tests or chemotherapy.

A most productive pastime

John Levy did a lot of things business-wise, most notably a FEMA-scale restoration company called Base Tactical Disaster Recovery.

Other than that, he did Children's.

“Dad didn’t have regular hobbies," said younger daughter Melissa Levy Lien. "The hospital was his hobby.”

He didn't necessarily talk about it. His kids were surprised to learn how deeply and in how many ways he was immersed. But it made sense, Jody said; whatever he was doing at a given moment, he was zeroed in.

"He was everybody's first phone call," she said, a terrific way to live and to be remembered.

As a granddad, he'd crawl into cribs to read bedtime stories. He was his daughters' softball coach, and he was the baby boomer in charge of the soundtrack on family road trips, cranking the volume on Chicago or Styx.

"He could operate in the micro and he could operate in the macro," Jody said, and maybe that fits with the focus on child life services.

It's important to have the best equipment, and that was always a higher priority for John Levy than attaching his name to things.

As Children's Hospital CEO Archie Drake pointed out, it's also important to remember that the patients are kids.

Facets of child life services

Drake arrived at Children’s in December 2022. Levy was already sick, so they never met, but Drake said he heard stories that made him come to life.

Levy had a child-size love of Halloween, for instance, and the hospital talked about tying something to the holiday in his honor, but he didn’t make it to fall.

Chances are they would have bonded over the value of child life services.

“I hate going to the dentist. I’ve got to psyche myself up,” Drake said, offering himself for an analogy. “Change that to a young child who has to undergo a serious or significant procedure, or a medical course of treatment.”

Child life services helps with the quest for comfort, he said, and also for simple normalcy. The broad category includes things like helping kids keep up with schoolwork, or stay connected with siblings, or remain steady psychologically.

Those specialists are in the budget, he said.

John Levy never forgot the areas that aren't, "and we feel like we've really honored him," Jody said. "The way we've done it, we know he would be very proud."

He would be touched, she said. He would appreciate the mission. And OK, he probably would have said to rethink the name.

Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Late Children's Hospital volunteer John Levy gets his name on a wall