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The Gift of Art: A Fitting Tribute From a Son to a Father (Class of 1938)
One of the more non-traditional gifts to the School of Dentistry in recent years is coming from Harvey P. Sackett, an attorney in Napa, California. In honor of his father, Sidney A. Sackett, who graduated from the dental school in 1938, Sackett is making a bequest of an art collection that includes prints by American artists Roy Lichtenstein, Wayne Thiebaud, Andy Warhol and Albert Hirschfeld, among others.
After giving considerable thought to the future home of his art collection, Harvey decided the School of Dentistry would be the most fitting recipient. His father, who practiced dentistry in New York City for 47 years, never lost his love for the University of Michigan. Sidney was on campus for five years, taking undergraduate classes and earning his dental degree. He often referred to his time in Ann Arbor as “the best five years of my life.”
As Harvey was growing up in New York, his father told many stories about attending U-M. “I heard about Michigan from a very, very, very early age,” he says. Michigan sports heroes from Sidney’s college days and the ensuing decades were household names. Sidney’s love of U-M led to Harvey’s love of U-M, which continues to this day. “I knew how to sing ‘The Victors’ before I knew how to sing the National Anthem,” he says. In recent years, he has made annual trips to Ann Arbor, the university, the dental school and football games. Harvey treats U-M as his alma mater, even though he earned his undergraduate and law degrees elsewhere.
Before his father died in 2004, Harvey created a student scholarship in his father’s name. And now he is establishing this second gift – the artwork bequest – to further honor the memory and life story of his father.
Sidney A. Sackett grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the son of Russian immigrants. The family had a meager existence, made worse by the death of Sidney’s mother before he was a teenager. After contracting the mumps as a child, Sidney also had to deal with hearing loss that required hearing aids. He overcame that challenge in high school well enough to be offered an English scholarship to Yale University. However, someone suggested that teaching English would be difficult for a person with hearing loss; a better profession would be one where he would work physically close to people, like, for example, a dentist. That led him to enroll at the dental school at the University of Maryland in Baltimore.
At the end of his first year, Sidney returned home because he couldn’t afford the tuition or other basic necessities as the Great Depression deepened. He spent a year working at the gas station of his brotherin-law. A relative attending U-M suggested the university as an option for Sidney because it was an excellent school and relatively affordable. Sidney acted on the advice and made his way to Ann Arbor where, despite the Depression, he accomplished his educational goal. To earn money for his expenses, he sold his football tickets and worked for the campus department that maintained buildings. His campus work spawned a story that survived over the decades. Sidney was washing the exterior of windows at iconic Angell Hall on a frigid winter day when a professor approached him and asked if he was a student. Sidney said he was and assumed he must be doing something wrong. But the professor asked to be taken to Sidney’s boss. The professor asked the boss, “Do you have children?” “Yes,” the boss answered. “Would you want your child out here in the bitter cold washing windows?” the professor asked. “No,” answered the boss. “Well, this student shouldn’t be doing that, either,” the professor declared.
Harvey thinks of the story every time he is on campus. “Being emotional at heart, when I go by Angell Hall it just tugs at my heart, knowing what my dad went through,” he says.
After a stint in the U.S. Army, Sidney returned to New York to practice, first as an associate, then buying his own practice. His patients were not up-scale New Yorkers; they lived in the Bronx, Jackson Heights and Jamaica in Queens. Regardless of his patients’ socioeconomic status, Dr. Sackett was dedicated to providing excellent, if not lucrative, dental care for them. That in turn provided a good, if modest, life for his family.
Harvey chose a different career path, earning his law degree in California and specializing in Social Security disability law there for the last 45 years. His successful career allowed him to begin collecting art early on, mostly from what the art world labels the Post-War and Contemporary Art Market. The 18 prints he plans to bequeath to the School of Dentistry are appraised at $336,000. Beyond his father’s connection to U-M, Harvey sees the close ties between art and dentistry as another fitting reason to present the artwork to the dental school. Like Harvey, Sidney had an eye for art, and he understood that a significant part of his dentistry was artistic in nature. Harvey remembers that his father was a perfectionist with beautiful hands – “the kind of hands that Michelangelo would have wanted to draw,” he says. Sidney used those hands not only to craft beautiful dental care for his patients, but he was literally an artist who used gold from his practice to design and fabricate charms for the charm bracelets of his wife, daughter and sister for many years. And in retirement, he took up painting.
Ultimately, the gift of art will provide a visual link between Sidney A. Sackett and the educational institution that meant so much to him and his family. “I thought that, above and beyond any monetary contribution I could make to the dental school, this would be a lasting presence after I’m gone, in honor of my dad,” Harvey said. “That’s why I decided to do it. This would be a lasting testament to my dad.”
