Patrick Zamkin, Mercy Home board member, found refuge at Mercy Home on his 15th birthday after a tumultuous upbringing. Grateful for the care he received, he's now a Hero to other children with the same life-changing opportunity.
Today, Patrick Zamkin has a beautiful family and a successful career in finance. He is a Mercy Home board member. And runs the Bank of America Chicago Marathon as a member of our Mercy Home Heroes team.
He’s come a long way in life, and yet every year when he runs along the marathon’s 17th mile, it’s a return to the place where his new life began—Mercy Home for Boys & Girls.
It was there on his 15th birthday that his mother pulled up and dropped him off at Mercy Home’s front door. And it was the second time in his young life he had been given away. His birth parents felt they were too young to care for a child, so they placed him in a foster home at 18 months old. The Zamkin family adopted him at the age of three, but just three years later, his new father died of cancer, leaving his adopted mother all alone to take care of him.
His mother eventually began dating a series of men she met in bars. One of these men worked at the nearby steel mills during the day and drank at the local tavern at night. He took the boy to the tavern regularly. Zamkin says he learned to play pool when he was hardly tall enough to see over the table. That same man would discipline Zamkin with violence.
“I remember being slapped so hard across the face that I had the perfect handprint on my face for about two weeks,” he says. It was because he carried some groceries inside without removing his shoes.
Zamkin was made to feel like a guest in his own house. His mother often told him that she never wanted him, that he was his father’s idea. So finally, on Zamkin's 15th birthday, she brought him to Mercy Home for Boys & Girls.
“I just remember being in the car with one of her boyfriends and my mom and them dropping me off,” he says. “And I remember her boyfriend, actually, was more upset about it than she was.”
Zamkin spent his birthday unpacking his bags, wondering what he had done wrong. “I had no idea what this place was about,” he remembers. “I thought this was a place for bad kids. And I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what it was that I did that was so bad.”
Pat Zamkin learned at Mercy Home that he was no bad kid—that he was in fact, loved. He did well in school, he made friends, he found a family.
“You feel like you matter again. That all is right in the world,” he explains. “That there’s hope.”
At Mercy Home, he was able to get a good education with the right encouragement and support he needed to succeed. From there he worked toward a great career in the financial industry.
That’s why, today, Zamkin is so dedicated to helping provide more boys and girls with the nurturing home that changed his life forever.
For the past eight years, he has run the Bank of America Chicago Marathon with our Mercy Home Heroes team, raising funds and awareness for the children of Mercy Home.
Running 26.2 miles is no easy feat. But for Zamkin, it’s worth it—not only to inspire our children, but to repay the generosity of friends like you, who gave him such a life-changing 15th birthday gift.
In addition to Chicago, he has also run several other marathons and shorter-distance races. And this St. Patrick's Day, March 17th, he will run as part of our Inaugural Heroes team for the 2024 United Airlines NYC Half.
Zamkin and a team of 6 other past Chicago Marathon Heroes will take on 13.1 miles of the Big Apple, beginning in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, running over the Manhattan Bridge, continuing through Times Square, and finishing in Central Park.
“I’ll do it. Because someone did it for me,” Zamkin says. “There’s no distance that’s too great for Mercy Home, as far as I’m concerned.”