March 12, 2024

While Mercy Home celebrates St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago by parading through our city’s streets, one Mercy Home alum will traverse 13.1 miles of thoroughfare in the Big Apple to raise support for the place he called home as a teenager. After running 8 Chicago Marathons in support of Mercy Home, Zamkin will take on the NYC Half this March 17th. His appreciation for the lifeline that Mercy Home provided him and thoughts of the young people who live there today will be the wind at his back, and the motivation he needs to cross the finish line. 

Patrick Zamkin has come a long way in life. Today he has a beautiful family and a successful career in finance. He is a Mercy Home board member. And he runs the Bank of America Chicago Marathon every year as a member of our Mercy Home Heroes team. 

But his childhood was turbulent. 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 his 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, made friends, and found a family.

“You feel like you matter again. That all is right in the world,” he explained. “That there’s hope.”

At Mercy Home, he was able to get a good education with the right encouragement and support he needed to excel.  From there he worked toward a 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.

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.”