Dr. John Baptiste McClellan III’s instruments were a scalpel and his trumpet.
The orthopedic surgeon loved to play for staff and patients in hospital hallways, especially around Christmas. He was a Miles Davis fan and listened to everything from jazz to James Brown while performing reconstructive surgery on knees, hips and shoulders.
Dr. McClellan died Jan. 21 from cancer. He was 73.
He worked at a number of Chicago and suburban hospitals over the years, last practicing medicine at Franciscan Health Olympia Fields in 2022 and previously at Little Company of Mary, Michael Reese and Ingalls Memorial.
Resident physicians knew him as Dr. Johnny Mac, according to Dr. William Payne, a friend and former colleague.
“And his patients, they just loved him, they all loved him,” Payne said. “It’s hard to put into words the connections he was able to make, but he was a game-changer in their lives in one way or another, through surgery, offering counsel or just listening to their concerns.”
Dr. McClellan wore tailored suits and drove luxury sports cars, always with a trumpet in the trunk.
“There wasn’t an Armani suit he didn’t love,” said his wife, Dr. Leslie Camille Wren McClellan, who was a general surgery resident at a hospital in Minneapolis when a mutual friend suggested the two should meet. “He always looked sharp.”
Their relationship took root over the phone before Dr. McClellan traveled to Minnesota to meet her in person.
“I was at the airport waiting for him and I didn’t have the foresight to have a little sign and he looked around and saw me and came walking straight up to me and I said ‘How did you know it was me?’ and he said ‘Because I wanted it to be you,'” his wife recalled.
“A few months later, I was getting off an airplane at Midway to come see John and he went down one knee at the gate and asked me to marry him and I didn’t immediately answer because I was just speechless and another woman in the crowd said ‘Well, if you’re not going to marry him, I will’ before I snapped out of it and said yes.”
The couple lived in Flossmoor before moving to Lake Forest in 1995.
Dr. McClellan was born April 15, 1951, to John William McClellan, a mail carrier, and Joy Lillyn McClellan, a teacher.
He grew up on the South Side and graduated from Wendell Phillips High School in 1968. He then attended college and medical school at the University of Illinois Chicago and completed his residency at Cook County Hospital in 1981.
“His paternal grandfather was a physician who had a practice for 50 years in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and John’s goal was to be like his grandfather,” his wife said.
In his youth, Dr. McClellan played in marching bands and distinguished himself as a soloist.
In recent years, he was a member of a band called Jazz in the Forest and sometimes sat in with a group named Vat of Chocolate that his friend Dr. Ari Mintz, a radiologist, was a part of.
“We’d sometimes play together at the Wooden Nickel in Highwood, and I loved seeing him walk in to this dive bar, and he’d have on this beautiful fur hat just looking like nobody else in the place with his instrument gleaming, and he’d play his heart out,” Mintz said. “He just had a love of music and a gentle soul.”
Dr. McClellan served as a reservist in the Air Force Medical Corps and was called up to serve during Operation Desert Storm.
He was also a member of Christ Church Lake Forest, where he played in the church band and lent his booming tenor voice to the gospel choir.
“He was incredibly positive and was a great man of faith and just full of more energy than any kind of kid you would ever know,” his wife said.
In addition to his wife, Dr. McClellan is survived by daughters Dana Joy Lynn McClellan and Camille Frances McClellan, his son John Baptiste McClellan IV and two grandsons. Services have been held.