Long before Dr. Francisco Martinez began treating Spanish-speaking patients in his Humboldt Park office, joining the Spanish Army as a 17-year-old shortly before civil war broke out in 1936.
He and his father, who had served as marching musician and composer in an Army band, were on the side that eventually led to dictator Francisco Franco taking over the country.
No one saw the battle, said Dr. Martinez, Marco Martinez.
After the war, his mother, a strong-willed French woman, drew the ire of local officials when she raised the French flag over their Barcelona home during a parade and he refused to salute the fascist, he said.
“He said, ‘I don't like it.' And they weren't going to arrest a woman at that time, but they arrested her husband and son and they were political prisoners who were sent to Morocco for two years,” said Marco Martinez.
Dr. Martinez had access to books in prison and began to study medicine. After his release, he attended medical school in Spain and went to the United States and Chicago in 1955, where he began working as a medical resident at Cook County Hospital.
It soon became clear that his future lay in the United States, so he approached his friend and fellow physician, Dr. Elio Fornatto, for help.
“After I analyzed the situation, the only way was for her to marry an American citizen, so she immediately said to me ‘Can you help me?'” recalls Fornatto, 94.
“And I did, I set him up with an Italian girl who had previously been an American herself, and they became friends and married six weeks later at City Hall. I am a witness,” he said.
The couple had two sons and lived in Austin until moving into their dream home in River Forest.
Dr Martinez works long hours.
“He didn't charge too much or increase his prices. I can't say he is a great businessman, ”said his son. “There were stories that his patients would give him government cheese as payment, and we'd make grilled cheese sandwiches out of them. He knew famine and war and hard times, and it was very different back then, unlike a lot of insurance companies and paperwork and bureaucracy.
His son also became a doctor and treated some of his father's patients after retiring in 1999.
“They say he did more than treat ailments, he was a counselor for everyday family problems. Now we have social services and behavioral health, and he is the one, like many doctors today in the 70's where they are everything to the communities they serve.
Dr Martinez died May 24 of natural causes. He is 105 years old.
“He was a very quiet man, he didn't talk much about the war, my mother did most of the talking,” says her son. “I once asked him, ‘How do you feel being on Franco's side?' And all he said was the other side killed priests, and he was a devout Catholic.”
Martinez returned to visit Spain many times throughout his life.
“When we visited Spain under Franco, no one looked happy, and when we caught up with Franco, when it became a democratic monarchy, I told him that things looked different and people smiled, and he said, ‘That's what happened. happens when you have freedom,'” his son said.
Dr. Martinez never met Ernest Hemingway, the famous novelist who grew up in nearby Oak Park and worked as a journalist covering the Spanish civil war, but one of Dr. Martinez once gave him a copy of Hemingway's “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and forged Hemingway's signature as a joke.
Dr Martinez is conservative and disciplined. He wears a tie on Sunday. He does the morning exercise popularized by the Royal Canadian Air Force. And his sons wore scratchy tweed suits when he took his family to dinner in downtown Chicago, where good table manners are an absolute must.
“But I think people are really impressed by how open-minded he is,” said his son. “He really likes to discuss many things. He reads a lot. He is a seeker of knowledge.”
“Funny because, in many ways, my parents had very traditional marriages, my mom did traditional European wife stuff, she did her clothes every day, cooked all the food, but she also got into real estate and owns apartments. buildings and in many ways they are their own independent people,” he said.
Martinez, whose wife died in 2015, moved into a fifth-floor condo in River Forest in his later years and walked up and down the stairs every day to exercise.
“One of his nannies once asked me after he moved into the condo, ‘Aren't you afraid he might do something in the kitchen or leave the stove on?' And I said ‘He hasn't been in the kitchen for 80 years, he's not going to start now,” his son recalled with a laugh.
Apart from his son, Marco, Dr. Martinez is survived by another son, Francis, a judge in Winnebago County, Illinois, and four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
Service has been held.