Toby and Dr. Morton Mower, Denver’s newest power couple, reside at an address fit for royalty. Original paintings by Renoir, Monet, Degas and Picasso transform the upscale condo into a veritable museum.
Within minutes, their Baltimore accent, comfortable demeanor and humorous banter — the latter primarily directed at each other — make one feel right at home.
Toby, 76, and Mort, 82, officially arrived in Denver a year-and-a-half ago but have lived part time in Breckenridge, Telluride, Beaver Creek and Vail respectively for three decades.
Dr. Mower is famous. He even has his own Wikipedia page. But don’t expect him to volunteer that information.
A cardiologist, he co-invented the implantable cardioverter defibrillator with Dr. Michel Mirowski in the 1970s. Technically retired, Mort still conducts medical research at John Hopkins University.
Toby is an activist and a philanthropist who knows how to accomplish the improbable. For example, Baltimore had an addiction recovery house for Jewish men but nothing for women.
“We’d been married for a while,” says Toby, who earned an MA in clinical psychology and focused on addiction counseling, “and we were both asked to be on the board of the Recovery House for Addicted Jewish Men.
“I couldn’t understand why there wasn’t a women’s house. The board said it lacked the financial means. So Mort and I gave a challenge grant to the federation.”
A series of volatile difficulties ensued. One year turned into two; two sputtered into three. Finally, the couple took it upon themselves to purchase the home for women. The two centers eventually merged.
During its 14-year existence, the Recovery House for Addicted Jewish Women had one of the highest recovery rates in the country.
Although the Mowers’ generosity and communal involvements have benefitted countless causes, Jewish National Fund is definitely uppermost in their hearts.
Toby has been a national JNF board member since 2002. She’s also a life member of the women’s division and on the Sapphire Society’s executive board. Mort is on the national board.
“We’ve tried to remain low key since we moved to Denver,” Toby smiles. Myriad organizations, respected positions and awards aside, it is their relationship that takes center stage.
But unlike effortless love-at-first glimpse narratives, this one will knock you off your feet.
In 1960, Mort was an intern at Mercy Hospital in Baltimore, which had an excellent infectious diseases program. Toby worked across the street as a lab assistant at the Baltimore Rh Lab.
“One day we had a very unusual case,” Mort says, “and I was given the task of taking a specimen of spinal fluid over to the infectious disease lab.
“They told me I had to deliver the specimen properly — and if I failed, I could forget coming back and should just keep walking.”
Mort entered the lab and explained his situation to the petite lab assistant. “Where should I put it?” he asked.
“She said, ‘I don’t care where you put it. Throw it in the trash can.’ Well, I knew that was the wrong answer. So I went to my boss and complained.”
Toby throws her head back and laughs.
“It was a very busy day,” she defends. “I had to label over 100 blood samples. We were doing a measles study before the vaccine came out. There were hundreds of tubes.
“Also, I was very facetious and sarcastic in those days,” she grins.
“My boss came over later. ‘Toby,’ he exclaimed, ‘you’ve done it again!’ But he knew I was joking around.”
“It wasn’t funny,” Mort deadpans.
The next year, Mort became a resident at Sinai Hospital. Toby had enrolled in nursing school, also at Sinai.
“This guy was considered the biggest introvert at the hospital,” Toby says of Mort. “So I decided to show off for my classmates and let them see that I could call a doctor by his first name.”
Mort was walking back to the doctors’ residences when he noticed Toby heading his way with her friends.
“Suddenly she stuck out her foot and tripped me,” he says, aghast at her audacity all over again.
“I’m looking up from the ground and she says, ‘Aren’t you Morty Mower?’ I said yes. ‘I thought so,’ she grinned and kept going. I thought that was very strange.”
Ostensible adversaries, they occasionally bumped into one another at Sinai. After Toby entered her senior year of nursing school, she was assigned to the ER.
“Whenever there was an emergency, it always seemed like Mort and I wound up in the same room — and we worked together perfectly. Sometimes when I got coffee, he would join me and start telling me jokes.”
“It was gallows humor,” Mort qualifies. “There’s a lot of stress in the emergency room. You tend to try and lighten the mood.”
Both Mort and Toby attended the Wednesday night at the movies series for student nurses and doctors but never sat next to one another.
One night, Toby arranged to arrive late in order to sit in the back, where Mort usually sat by himself.
“It was ‘An Affair to Remember,’ a wonderful sad movie,” she recalls. “And he cracked jokes during the entire film.”
Mort asked her out for a cup of coffee. “That coffee lasted over three hours,” Toby says.
When she returned to the nurses’ dormitory, her housemother had a big smile on her face. “I asked her, ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘You just went out with the man you’re going to marry,’ she said.
“I looked at her the way you are looking at me right now. Then I said, ‘You know what? You just might be right.’”
“It was witchcraft,” Mort pronounces.
Married on Sept. 23, 1965, the couple hit the 50-year mark last month. They are the parents of a son and a daughter.
Mort Mower grew up in a poor family in Baltimore. His father moved the clan to Frederick, a small town outside the city, to open a shoe shop. They maintained “an advanced degree of kosher,” Mort says.
Frederick, which had one synagogue, “was a rather anti-Semitic place at the time,” he says. “I was the only Jewish kid in my high school and had to find innovative paths to and from school to avoid trouble.”
After his father died at a young age, the family returned to Baltimore, where his mother prepared sandwiches at a Woolworth counter.
When Mort was 15, his uncle developed a serious illness. The family physician visited him regularly. Inspired by the doctor’s quality of patient care, he applied to Johns Hopkins University to study medicine.
Mort graduated from Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Sciences in 1955 and earned his MD from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1959.
The US Army interrupted his residency at Sinai. From 1963-1965, Mort served as captain and chief of medicine in the Army Medical corps in Bremerhaven, West Germany.
In 1966, while completing his fellowship at Sinai, he became the co-investigator of a coronary drug project. He began working with Mirowski, an Israeli doctor, on the implantable heart defibrillator in 1969.
Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, Mort held several positions at Sinai, including chief of cardiology. He’s taught at major medical colleges throughout the US.
Born Tobia Hinda Kurland, Toby describes her family “as very dysfunctional. My father owned a drugstore in Baltimore and worked all the time. A housekeeper basically raised me.
“My parents were extremely frugal, so I assumed we were poor — but we probably weren’t. I’m not sure.”
Using the reverse intonation of her youth, Toby says she “didn’t know from a synagogue because my parents couldn’t afford the dues. I attended Sunday school for six months and quit.
“I really knew nothing about Judaism except the High Holidays were a nice place to meet guys.”
Toby’s assimilated identity led to a showdown during the first year of their marriage.
“We celebrated Christmas and Easter in my house,” she says. “The first year Mort and I were married, I said, ‘It’s Christmas Eve, let’s go.’ ‘Where?’ To my parents’ house to exchange presents.
“Mort asked me, ‘You are Jewish, aren’t you?’ Sure. ‘Tell me what we’re doing again?’ So I repeated myself. ‘It’s not my holiday,’ he said. ‘I want to nothing to do with it.’”
That was her last Christmas exchange.
Toby received her RN degree from Sinai in 1963, a BS from Johns Hopkins in 1986, graduate level certification as a substance abuse counselor and an MS in clinical psychology from Loyola University in 1986, and an honorary PhD from Ben Gurion University in 2002.
Not bad for a woman who used to hate school.
Toby deftly drops a bombshell while reminiscing about a major celebrity who appeared at an event for Baltimore’s Jewish Recovery Addiction program several years ago.
“No one believed that Jews could be alcoholics back then,” she says.
The speaker, whose identity she loyally protects to this day, announced that he had been sober for 21 years.
“I thanked him after he finished speaking,” Toby says. “I held his hand and whispered, ‘I’m going to do something I’ve never done.’”
She turned to the audience and inhaled deeply.
“If you think I’m crazy now, you should have met me before I got sober 26 years ago,” Toby said.
“You could hear a pin drop.”
Toby has been sober for 33 years now.
A functioning alcoholic for many years who was successful at work, she says her addiction never caused a problem in the marriage.
“I would come home and start my drinking at 4 or 5 p.m.,” Toby says. “Then I began noticing that I wanted to drink earlier and earlier in the day.”
Her therapist referred her to a 12-step program.
In the late 1980s, Toby ran her own substance abuse practice. “I told my patients that if they didn’t start attending a 12-step group within a certain period, they had to find another therapist.
“I didn’t need the money,” she says of her practice. “I was working so people would get well.”
Thanks in large part to Toby’s perseverance, Ben Gurion University became the first Israeli institution of higher learning to offer a program that teaches doctors, nurses and social workers how to spot addiction and familiarize them with appropriate treatments.
She’s excited that BMH-BJ, Temple Sinai and Boulder’s Har HaShem are now hosting recovery programs for Jews and non-Jews.
The Mowers could talk for hours about JNF. Toby has been involved since 1995, and Mort’s interest developed in tandem with hers.
“I really like the people I’ve met through JNF,” says Toby, who was simultaneously active in Hadassah and the Baltimore federation. It wasn’t long before she was appointed to the JNF Baltimore board.
“We were both doing a lot of philanthropic work with JNF. Then Mort and I were asked to join the national board. Mort was particular enthralled with Ronald Lauder.”
Lauder had a “great idea for building reservoirs to prevent the drinking water in Israel from washing out to sea,” Mort says. “I thought it was a dandy idea and strongly supported it.
“Everyone thought I was an expert in water,” he recalls. “The truth is I learned as I went along.”
As national chair of the Sapphire Society, a network of women that supports JNF through philanthropy and dedication, Toby empowers women to take a forceful role in the organization.
For example, the Sapphire Society approached JNF several years ago and announced its intention to build a small town in the Negev, primarily undeveloped at the time.
“The board said, ‘These crazy women want to build something in the desert!’” Toby says. “We had collected enough money. But nothing happened.
“Three years after our proposal, the national board decided to build up the Negev. I sort of laughed when I heard this. It took the women to show them the way.”
Mort is particularly proud of his involvement in JNF water-related projects, which have increased Israel’s dwindling water supply by an estimated 12%.
The couple also supports the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, which educates students from Israel, Jordan and additional Arab countries.
“JNF now has a seat at the table in Israel,” Mort says. “We have forged a relationship with the government. We are no longer seen as outsiders.”
The Mowers’ zeal for JNF has not diminished their extensive philanthropic and organizational visibility in a wide range of Jewish and non-Jewish endeavors.
Hadassah Baltimore chapter, the Baltimore Zionist District, P’tach School, CU, UCD and Johns Hopkins University Arts Program are among the groups that have recognized the couple individually and jointly.
Their board memberships could light up a Broadway Playbill magazine.
Fully acknowledging their financial blessings, the Mowers are committed to sharing their good fortune and time with others.
“In order to keep it, you have to give it away,” Toby says simply.
The framed art — not mere decorative acquisitions to compliment a sofa but original masterpieces carefully accrued — contributes a perpetual third voice to the conversation.
During a break, Toby points to paintings rendered by great artists that typicially hang in major museums or are reproduced as posters.
She cites names, dates, styles and provenances. “That’s from Picasso’s Blue Period. Do you know why they call it that?’”
Her explanations elucidate. There is no hint of pretension.
“We have 130 Renoirs in storage, and we often lend them out for fundraisers,” she adds.
Collected by the couple through the decades, the paintings, etchings and cups mesmerize the viewer, who feels any verbal response would sound lame.
Earlier, Mort left the room to print out Toby’s CV. Upon his return, he sits next to his wife.
Fifty years of marriage is a long stretch by anyone’s standards. Asked to share their secret of their success, Toby volunteers quickly and succinctly.
“Learn to let go,” she says. “If you argue, let go of it.”
Mort offers his own philosophy.
“I’m a saint,” he shrugs.
“People see me as very tough and hard to talk to,” Toby says. “I’m really a puppy; a teddy bear. But don’t mess with me!”
She lauds Mort’s desire to keep current on all medical subjects, not only cardiology.
“It’s one of the things I love about my husband. He will speak to experts in an unrelated field to help family and friends. And he has a photographic memory.”
Apart from sainthood, does Mort have any additional suggestions?
“I don’t see what the problem is,” he says. “We each have our own interests. We support each other. And we stay out of each other’s way.”
Toby agrees.
“This is not the first condo we’ve had in Denver,” she says, looking over at Mort. “We had one downstairs here that was much smaller. We had to find something bigger.
“If we had stayed there, that would have ended the marriage!”
Now there’s plenty of room.
“I try not to get in her way and she tries not to get in mine,” Mort says.
“That’s not to say we don’t argue,” Toby adds. “We do.”
“True,” Mort concedes. “But I’m always right.”
Toby casts a sarcastic twinkle at her husband.
“He makes mistakes,” she says. “But he’s never wrong.”
Andrea Jacobs may be reached at andrea@ijn.com.