Darcel Rockett
Three words come to mind when meeting Dr. Phyllis Loeff: stylish, gracious and smart. Loeff, like so many others, gets up early every day to prepare for work. She exercises, gets dressed and dons makeup before seeing patients in the study at her Highland Park home.
At 96, Loeff is a psychiatrist who has been practicing for over 50 years. While working at such an age may seem a feat unto itself for many, Loeff is humble.
“There’s people who have bad things happen … people who get very depressed and can’t find a way out of the depression — these are patients that I have experience of working with and helping,” Loeff said. “There are people who have behavior patterns that they have to understand or find a way of changing because it bothers other people. I help them readjust themselves to an acceptable place in relationship to those who are close to them. There are people who have lost somebody recently, older people, people over 65, I’m sure I have more of those patients than most younger doctors have because they know that I understand that time of life.”
Daily, she can be found in a leather chair surrounded by tomes of her youth and education in her wood-paneled study or at her computer on her sun porch poring over her patient notes, with orchids and greenery at her back and children’s books nearby, which she reads to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
The bespectacled psychiatrist has a calming demeanor and cadence when she speaks, and offers a variety of jams that she makes and bottles herself to houseguests. Cooking is a passion for her; her fudge brownies are her piece de resistance, according to daughter Nanette Allen.
Loeff’s life is a robust, blessed one, as evidenced by the many pictures of her family (four children, eight grandchildren and a few great-grandchildren) throughout her home, where the Talmud sits in a room with a baby grand piano. And at the center of her life is a passion to help others, as her daughter Wendy Freeman attests.
“To the best of my memory, when my mother was a very young and very serious intern at Cook County Hospital she had many experiences with patients that have become part of her story and our family history,” Freeman said. Stories such as how Loeff once came to the aid of a non-English-speaking Polish woman in labor, who she met during her obstetrics and gynecology rotation at Cook County. Loeff, who was pregnant with Freeman at the time, couldn’t imagine being alone while going through labor. So she insisted on taking over the Polish woman’s care, staying with her during her labor and delivering the baby.
In looking back at her career that began in 1949, Loeff is very matter-of-fact about her trajectory: “I took my chances.”
A native of the Austin neighborhood, Loeff graduated with a medical degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Medicine at the age of 22 — she was one of 33 women in the medical school class. She married Harold Loeff, a war veteran and OB-GYN physician at Michael Reese Hospital, the day before she started her 1 1/2-year internship at Cook County Hospital. She would later take a 17-year break from her career to have her three girls and one boy. She picked up her profession when her youngest, Thomas, was 9 years old. She remembers being a 39-year-old first-year resident at the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute.
“I really didn’t know how I was ever going to be able to manage getting trained at that time of life and taking care of my family and I had no idea I could do it, but I took my chances because I felt like if I ever got to be 60 years old and had never used my medical training, I wouldn’t forgive myself. That’s a major philosophy for me: I took my chances and found my way,” Loeff said.
By 42, Loeff went into the practice of psychiatry. A peek behind Loeff’s office door and one can see the license she received from Cook County Hospital as a member of the house staff.
Raised by a religious, domestic mom and a journalist father (Louis Saxon, a financial editor of Chicago’s American, which the Chicago Tribune bought in 1959), Loeff credits reading William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” at the age of 16 as leading her to the psychiatric field.
“I thought the poor soul (Hamlet) was so sick, and his girlfriend was so sad, she threw herself away and killed herself. There was a lot of behavior and responses and interactions that made me think, ‘What is this all about?’” Loeff said. “I didn’t think of it as being a make-believe, fantasy kind of thing … it was so strongly written and so convincing that this is something that human beings suffer from, I was really involved in wondering how this happened, or why does it happen. I felt so sad for him and that’s when I said I have to find out what’s going on in people’s brains. And you have to be a doctor to do that. So that’s how I got to medical school.”
She was also inspired by her late uncle, Dr. Harry Asher, a dentist who practiced in Chicago for more than 60 years, doing so for his last 35 years with only one arm. He was the dentist of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley. Loeff said Asher exposed her to many cultural things like the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and gave her books. She read a medical book at the age of 9, and while she couldn’t tell what it meant, the idea of what she could do with her life was there.
“He was the one who seemed to recognize that I had a certain kind of potential,” she says. “I sort of give myself credit for keeping my hope that I could do something. I was surrounded by ambitious people … and very early on I began to admire what being a doctor meant. It stayed with me.”
With over five decades of experience in psychiatry, Loeff says what separates her from other practitioners is that she spends an hour with each client to learn about who they are as a person, going back as far as their grandparents to get a decent history. She says that’s necessary to get to the root of the person’s concerns. She’s seen the profession change with the introduction of more medications, but she still prefers digging for a patient’s reality through an in-depth, in-person, holistic approach. She’s had clients who have been with her since their 20s and 30s who are now grandparents themselves. She says it’s “a rewarding kind of thing.”
“If I pull out an appointment book from five or 10 years ago, you’ll find that I’m busier now and I see more patients,” she said. “It took 60-some odd years before I had the maturity of understanding. I’m thinking much better than I ever did before. After years and years of seeing what the outcome is, I watch people grow up and go through it and get old. I’ve had that privilege of watching to see what time does bring, and that’s a blessing in its way, because it helps me to understand what I’m dealing with or what the depth of something is.”
Loeff is recuperating from a recent fall that left her with a broken left ankle, but you can’t tell. Sitting in her study with her pearls and Italian brown and ivory brogues on, Loeff said she wants her legacy to be one where she helps people look into troubling things without being destroyed by learning from them, instead coming out wiser and stronger. It’s a legacy of compassion and resilience that she would like to pass on. She hopes her grandchildren and great-grandchildren will see it so they can be noble and brave about what they believe in and pursue it.
Loeff’s granddaughter Ariel Freeman Sanett said Loeff was her first best friend.
“Her work is so completely who she is, but in a way that includes her family,” Sanett said. “I would sit outside her office door waiting for her to finish with a patient, and when she introduced me, her patients already knew who I was. This interplay between work and family is what humanizes her even further, and what informs her work.”
The Allen family said Loeff’s “open-mindedness and the coexistence of an exacting diligent mind with a constant need to keep learning and broadening her horizons” speaks to her extraordinariness.
Loeff’s eldest daughter, Deborah Loeff, a pediatric surgeon at the University of Chicago, said her mom is a remarkable role model and force of nature. Phyllis introduced her children to the world of puppetry and children’s theater when they were young and that influenced Deborah’s decision to become a children’s surgeon.
“I combined a commitment to the care of children with all the manual, creative skills needed in the ‘operating theater’ as the British refer to the operating room,” Deborah Loeff said.
And Phyllis Loeff’s legacy is practiced in her work every day in hopes of giving people peace, sending people off with a stronger sense of comfort and control, happiness and contentment.
“They know they can’t change the past but they’re gonna change the future,” Loeff said. “You have to come to a place of contentment, a tolerance for the past. And that does give you a lot more contentment than you had before, so that you can go forward with a sense of confidence that you’ll be able to handle and do certain things without fear of your vulnerabilities or other problems of the past. My blessing is that I still can do my work, which I love, and which I find every human being I talk to has their own soul and their own story. I’m very grateful to have lived long enough to get smart.”
