THE GOLDEN VET

Sidney Wallach enters a spacious meeting room at Northwestern Medicine Lake Forest Hospital. It’s February 16, a scheduled day for an afternoon treatment.

And two days before his birthday.

Family members and medical personnel and hospital staffers had gathered there among swaying balloons before the World War II veteran’s arrival.

“Happy Birthday!” the beaming folks bellow.

Wallach’s face lights up and temporarily blinds the band of well-wishers, including his four children. His highly infectious smile—it’s not on some CDC list, yet— melts his audience instantly. Wallach, still smiling, then closes his eyes, looks straight up, and raises his pumping arms as if he’d just won a world championship.

But if you know him well, or are lucky enough to have met him, you’re the true victor. The former Sears salesman oozes more positivity than the combined number of red clips in a truckload of jumper cables and has cornered the market in happiness.

He essentially wears joy, daily.

Wallach would turn 102 on February 18.

One. Hundred. Two.

Babe Ruth belted 35 home runs and knocked in 96 runs in the summer after Wallach was born. The first issue of Time magazine was published a few weeks after Wallach turned 1.

Wallach later sits near a table in the hospital’s meeting room and opens cards and gifts. The warmth of his smiles vs. the warmth of his hugs? Call it a draw.

One gift is a Northwestern Medicine zip-up hoodie, likely to bump a sweatshirt out of his weekly wardrobe rotation for good. A sizable portion of his birthday cake’s icing depicts a gray runway; during World War II, Wallach—a corporal in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—built runways while serving in Greenland at Bluie West One (later known as Narsarsuaq Air Base), a secret air base where thousands of aircraft landed en route to the war in Europe and North Africa.

Wallach lifts a forkful of cake and toasts, “To the gang at Northwestern Medicine, I love you guys! The care you give me at this hospital, it’s great … it’s unbelievable, unbelievable.”

The endearing former Cub Scout and Boy Scout Scoutmaster has been a frequent visitor to NM Lake Forest Hospital for about five years. His care team there adores him.

The woman behind the moving birthday bash is Lake Forest’s Terry Girmscheid, a gregarious-to-the-bone patient access specialist at Northwestern Medicine Lake Forest Hospital. Her late father, Paul Gerjol, also built runways, in Okinawa, Japan, in World War II. Paul’s boot camp was the same as Sidney’s.

“The first time I met Sidney he had his World War II cap on,” Girmscheid recalls. “My dad would never go out without his cap. That’s how Sidney and I started talking. He’s happy and he loves America. World War II veterans are true warriors. They fought to the end and never gave up, and that’s how Sidney is now.”

Wallach was drafted in 1942, at age 20, and served through His journey to Greenland began with a trip from Shenango, Pennsylvania, to Boston Harbor. He then found himself aboard a Canadian ship that zigzagged for seven days en route to the Land of the Greenlanders, who often watch the sunrise at 9 a.m. and have to wave goodbye to the massive star only six hours later. They also shrug at back-to-back days of 40-below-zero temperatures.

A sergeant once ordered Wallach to fire his gun to obliterate an iceberg in a fjord near Greenland. Wallach obeyed and turned into a sharpshooting, Olympic-level biathlete— minus the cross-country skis—right then, right there. Wallach received three overseas bars, one service stripe, a European African and Middle Eastern theater ribbon, an American theater ribbon, and a Victory medal. Christmas trees displayed outside village halls aren’t that decorated.

Wallach and his wife of 51 years, the late Barbara, raised their four children—Harlan, Mike, Wendy (Ottosen), and Robyn (Carlson)—in a Chicago suburb. Sidney taught chess to them and, in ensuing matches versus his offspring, probably came close to matching the University of Oklahoma football team’s streak of 47 consecutive wins spanning three seasons in the 1950s.

“Mom told Dad, ‘Let them win once in a while,’” Mike says. “But Dad’s response to that was, ‘No. They’ll never learn that way.’ My father was competitive. I finally beat him in chess one day, after he had returned home from work, which was the best time to take him on.

“He was exhausted,” the son adds.

Dad Wallach typically earned more income than some of his superiors did because he worked on commission and had the consummate work ethic. He still trades stocks, and the avid Chicago Bears and Chicago Cubs fan occasionally bets on sports—usually no more than $5 per game—but only after reading up on each matchup.

In 2019 he learned how to play the tile-based game Rummikub. There are 106 tiles in the game, or four more than the total number of years he’s been thriving and inspiring on Planet Earth.

“My dad is the Rummikub champion of our family,” Robyn Carlson says. “He’s good at games, good with numbers … ask anyone at the civic center he visits and they’ll tell you how sharp he is. But he’s also a wonderful storyteller. We loved hearing all about what he experienced during World War II.”

“I like everything about my father,” Wendy Ottosen says. “He’s the best.”

And more than happy to share two of the reasons the halo above his head is stuck on high beam.

“I don’t drink or smoke,” says Wallach, who also doesn’t eat an apple a day.

His healthy culinary maxim starts, “An egg a day … .” Wallach’s daily breakfast fare is a fried egg, with spinach and toast.

On a mid-February afternoon inside his second home, surrounded by loved ones and an assemblage of admiring hospital employees, Wallach savors every heaping forkful of his birthday cake.

“Fabulous,” he says.

So is Sidney Wallach.

“He is filled with so much love for life and his family,” Girmscheid says. “When I spend time with Sidney, I feel like I have my dad back for a little while.”

“His approach to life has always been remarkable,” Mike Wallach says. “Everything about my dad, from his demeanor to what he says, is positive. He rolls with the punches, loves people. He loves … life.”