Carl Allamby’s professional trajectory could be reduced to the plot of a feel-good movie. Skimming over the details, his is a story of a once-poor boy from the wrong side of Cleveland, who went from fixing cars to fixing people, from mechanic to medical doctor.
And technically, all of that is correct. Allamby did go from owning an auto repair shop almost straight out of high school, to recently starting his first job as an emergency-room attending physician at Cleveland Clinic’s Hillcrest Hospital in Mayfield Heights, Ohio.
But the more accurate truth is that in this case, Allamby’s social and economic mobility — the kind that embodies the so-called American Dream — was of the tortoise vs. hare variety; it stretched out over decades.
“If somebody were to watch most of my life over the past few years, it would be me sitting in a…
