My Husband – Mark Leavitt

My husband, Mark, was born in 1950 in Chicago, IL. In 1957 his family moved to Tucson, AZ where he attended school. When he was 10, he became interested in radio and electronics, and thanks to a supportive neighbor and other mentors he earned progressively higher grades of amateur and professional radio operator licenses. At just 15, he landed a job at a Spanish-language radio station and even ended up being “the world’s youngest Jewish Spanish DJ” for a while!

After graduating Tucson High School in 1967, Mark went on to earn his degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Arizona. There he met Susie Poplack, a student from Oregon, and they married upon graduation in 1971.

He went to work at a defense technology company, ESL Inc, in Sunnyvale, CA, where Mark summarizes his work as “designing antenna systems for spy planes.” ESL was good to Mark, providing full tuition support as he earned his MS and PhD at Stanford. In 1976, newborn daughter Amy joined the family, which seemed to trigger a re-evaluation of life and career by Mark. Soon he applied for and was accepted to medical school at the University of Miami in Florida. The family moved to Florida as Mark undertook an intense, accelerated 2-year medical school program with their 1-year-old in tow. As Mark completed his MD degree, Susie’s health was failing from juvenile-onset diabetes. They decided to do Mark’s medical residency in Portland where Susie’s family would be around to help.

Mark completed residency in 1982 and opened a private practice of Internal Medicine at St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland. Sadly, Susie’s health problems progressed until her death in 1985. Now with a solo practice and a 9 year old to care for, he remarried, and at the same time began writing his own medical record software. This led to Mark’s third career as an entrepreneur and CEO of a company called MedicaLogic in Hillsboro, OR.

As experienced co-founders joined Mark, MedicaLogic grew rapidly in the 1990’s to a company with thousands of customers and hundreds of employees. But the time demands did drive Mark to leave medical practice in 1992, and contributed to the end of his second marriage in 1996.

I met Mark in 1998 through MatchMaker.com. I was living in North Bend, OR and he in Portland. After many months of emails and phone calls, we met in person and both felt we were a good match for each other. A year later we were married in Sedona, AZ with all our children and grandchildren present. A year after we were married we moved to the country 25 mi. west of Portland in North Plains, OR. Mark continued as CEO of Medicalogic and in 1999 the company went public at the peak of the dot-com boom. When the bust came, however, the company was sold to General Electric. After a brief stint with GE, Mark left in 2004 to help found a non-profit organization that, working with the Federal government, created standards for electronic medical records. In 2010 he officially retired from that fourth career. He now has somewhat more time to help around the farm, but really he’s far from being retired. He’s turned his energy back to electronics and inventing, as well as mentoring and volunteering to help young entrepreneurs and students in related fields. I have been very blessed to share the past 18 years with Mark. Visit his website, markleavitt.com to learn more about his current activities.