Seeing It Through

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Pat Gerleman remembers the day her husband Jim paid his back rent to his brother John '62. Jim had been living with John in his apartment in San Francisco while going to college, first at San Francisco City College, then San Francisco State and Golden Gate University for his MBA. No scholarships, no family money, just patching jobs together to cover tuition. 

The deal was that Jim wouldn’t pay rent until he finished school and found work. No paperwork, of course — just a promise between brothers. That happened. And sure enough, Jim showed up on John’s doorstep with a check in hand. “It was quite unbelievable to me,” Pat says. “It just struck me how honest and hardworking they both were.”

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It’s that sense of honesty and commitment that nearly 50 years later has led Pat to shepherd a gift of $14.2 million to support scholarships at the College of Medicine – Tucson in the brothers’ honor — money built over years of modest investments made with extraordinary foresight, including in Apple and Google, passed from John to Jim, then from Jim to Pat. 

To understand this a little better, let’s go back to Olpe. (“O, L, P, E,” Pat says.) Tiny city in Kansas. When John was born in 1938, Olpe had a population of about 350 people; by the time Jim was born 11 years later, it had dropped slightly. John and Jim were two of nine boys — John, number five; Jim, the baby, number nine — raised in a two-bedroom house that didn’t have an indoor bathroom until Jim was in high school. People in town referred to the boys as the “Gerleman baseball team.”

Pat remembers seeing it, Olpe. “It was so moving, in the sense that, ‘Wow, this is America.’” 

Time passed and the team scattered. Some went into the military or worked at the slaughterhouse; others, like John and Jim, moved on to college and city life. (The boys’ mother, Loretta, had two sisters living in Tucson. Pat thinks this is how John ended up at the University of Arizona.) John went on to work as an accountant. Jim spent more than 25 years at California Savings & Loan, which is where he met Pat.

One year, everyone convened back in Kansas for a visit. One of the Gerleman nephews had become a doctor and put together a presentation for his uncles about high blood pressure, which several of the brothers struggled with. Some waved it away (“‘I don’t go to doctors,’ blah blah blah,” Pat says.) John and Jim took it to heart. 

That, Pat thinks, is when John got the idea: What if he could take this money he’d been building and give it to people — people like his nephew — committing their lives to medicine in hopes that these issues might one day be solved? 

Like the rent all those years earlier, the plan was simple: John made sure his nieces and nephews got their education paid for, then asked Jim to make sure whatever was left over went to scholarships for incoming medical students at the University of Arizona. No strings, no attenuating formalities. “John trusted Jim unquestionably,” Pat says. 

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John passed away in 2008. Jim grew the investment until his death in 2023, at which point, Pat reached out to the university. She was struck by COM – T’s Pre-Medical Admissions Pathway Program, which awards scholarships to students from underserved or underrepresented communities who commit to serving their communities for a year in a primary-care setting. But she also considers it a privilege to take the burden off anyone studying medicine to do good. 

“I think it’s horrible to have doctors come out of medical school owing hundreds of thousands of dollars,” she says. “And then, you know, how do you get those doctors helping the people that need it most when they have to work to pay back all that money?” 

In some ways, though, Pat doesn’t have to think about it at all, only carry out the promise that she made to Jim and Jim made to John. “This gift is not a small portion of a large estate,” she says. “It is a sum of years of hard work and of lives without luxury.”

“Two people made a decision, and look what’s going to happen,” she says. “I’m just very, very proud of my husband and his brother.”