Joseph Sabino Mistick: Pittsburgh’s own Freddie Fu

Like so many other immigrants before him, Freddie Fu found Pittsburgh, and he fell hard for it. The renowned orthopaedic surgeon and head of UPMC’s Department of Orthopaedic Surgery died Sept. 24 at 70, here in the town that he loved and that loved him back.

Freddie — everybody called him that — was a whirlwind. His medical and academic accomplishments fill pages, but Freddie just wanted to help people, whether they were average folks or the famous athletes that he treated at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex.

Freddie trained thousands of medical students and residents, but he also taught the rest of us. He even made it OK for guys to go to the ballet in this tough town, because Freddie showed us that ballet dancers were athletes, too, by treating them alongside right tackles and wide receivers.

He was dedicated to diversity and excellence, recruiting and training women and minority medical students to follow him to Pittsburgh and flourish in a specialty that had been a white male domain. MaCalus Hogan was a resident at the University of Virginia when Freddie recruited him to be the first Black orthopaedic surgeon hired into UPMC.

Hogan, now a professor and vice chair of the department and chief of foot and ankle surgery, said, “Freddie pushed and molded us as surgeons, chiseling away at our rough spots, but he always let us be who we are as people.”

“Freddie wanted us to be humble, but confident in who we were. He and I would always say to each other, ‘Be ye not afraid.’ And Freddie would end it with, ‘Be ye not afraid to do what is right.’ ”

As the news spread about his death and friends exchanged tearful calls, this was the big question: How could Freddie — vibrant and irrepressible — be gone? Hogan explained the inexplicable, saying, “His cancer was like him. It was rare and passionate, and Freddie handled it with grace and on his own terms.”

“And, having had him in our lives, we are all better off now and going forward.”

In the early 1990s, there were news reports that Freddie was in the process of leaving for a hospital in Philadelphia. Pittsburgh without Freddie was just as unimaginable then as it is now, so Mayor Sophie Masloff quickly got him on the phone.

As Freddie told it, she used every trick in her Jewish grandma’s bag of tricks — pleading, cajoling and arm-twisting with a heavy layer of guilt. He loved that the mayor called and gave him the full treatment. And he stayed, because he always knew that he belonged here.

Freddie and Hilda, true Pittsburghers, raised their family here and became part of our fabric. They were everywhere, raising money for good causes, tending to the needs of medical students and pitching in wherever the community needed help.

In the end, what began as a love story between a man and a city ended on the same note. His friend from Dartmouth College, former Post- Gazette editor David Shribman, wrote about one of his last calls with him: “Freddie said, ‘I want to thank everybody. I love you.’ Freddie meant that ‘you’ in second-person plural.”

As St. John of the Cross said, “At the end of life, we will be judged on love alone.”