Dr. Amy Acton: The Childhood Behind the Doctor Ohio Trusted

This week Brett re-releases a previous conversation with Dr. Amy Acton, the former Ohio Department of Health director who stood beside the governor every afternoon during the pandemic and told the state what she knew as she knew it. She is now the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio, and Brett opens the episode with a few words on why he wanted this one back in front of people now.

Amy grew up on the North Side of Youngstown as the steel mills went dark. She and her brother went without food, lived in a tent one winter and spent a summer in a basement. At twelve she told the truth about what was happening at home, which led to a police department, a grand jury and a courtroom. The last time she saw her mother, her mother turned her face away.

She also talks about what she built from that. The books she carried home from the school library every day. The ten days in a hospital at age eight that made her want to be a doctor. The seventh grade move to a new school that changed her whole trajectory, and why that luck of the draw became her life’s work in preventive medicine. Brett asks her where the belief came from that she was smart enough, and she answers with the random school teacher, Charlotte’s Web, and wanting it badly enough to will it.

From there they cover the Bronx during the crack epidemic, the panic attack that taught her she couldn’t just push through, the mentor who introduced her to preventive medicine, the decision to back her career down for her kids, and the lunch meeting where a governor opened with “tell me about your childhood.” Amy explains why she calls herself the Ted Lasso of politics, what was running behind the press conferences that nobody saw, and why she stepped down when she could no longer honor what she believed. The conversation closes on Rapid 5, the vision for 145 miles of Columbus waterway that she sees as public health hiding in plain sight.

In Amy’s words: “I am a very ordinary person who found herself in an extraordinary moment in history.”