Archive for the ‘Latest Blog posts’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

19th century Fabiola ladies championed health care for all

posted on March 6, 2011

Fabiola Hospital in its heyday

By Laura Thomas
Heritage correspondent   

Kaiser Permanente Oakland stands today on one of the busiest intersections in the city, destined to bustle even more with the new medical center rising in place of the MacArthur-Broadway indoor mall.   

What many may not realize is that the groundwork for the Kaiser Permanente complex was laid – both literally and figuratively – in Oakland’s early years by a group of high society women of the Fabiola Association.   

In 1887, it was at that same corner, then New Broadway and Moss Avenue, on 2 ½ acres of land covered with oak, eucalyptus and locust trees donated by Anthony Chabot, that the Oakland Homeopathic Hospital and Dispensary constructed a splendid turreted Victorian building. They named it the Fabiola Hospital after a wealthy woman who built a public hospital in 4th century Rome.   

It looked more like a railroad baron’s mansion than what we might think of as a medical building, but it was in line with what those 19th century matrons thought was best for sick people – an environment that was home-like and comforting.   

Privileged women strive for underprivileged

Bucolic setting of original Fabiola hospital

The group had been organized by Kate Kirkham 10 years before. She witnessed a carriage accident and was horrified to learn the victims would be taken 10 miles to a San Leandro hospital, the nearest hospital at the time. She collected $50 donations from 18 women of her circle – local water developer Chabot was a friend of hers – and opened the group’s first facility on Market Street.   

They formed the Fabiola Association to support their work, which focused on providing medical care to anyone who needed it. In its early years, the association members were proponents of homeopathic care.   

Once the hospital went up, the association members established a nursing school that accepted men (an oddity at the time), a diet kitchen, and a visiting nurse service. They began a program of expansion that didn’t abate until the Great Depression hit in the 1930s.   

Fabiola grew to meet community needs

Interior of maternity cottage late 19th century

Fabiola’s expansion was much like the evolution of the modern-day Kaiser Permanente’s complex. Before 1900, Fabiola annexed a Queen Anne-style cottage to the main building for the nurses’ quarters, and then added a facility for children and a maternity “cottage.” Over the following 20-plus years, the hospital spread across Broadway with the takeover of a Red Cross facility and the building of a graceful Spanish-style nursing home designed by Julia Morgan.   

A new surgical building went up in 1907 along Moss Avenue and Howe Street. The final spate came in 1923, accompanying a building boom across the city, when the Fabiola ladies built another nurses residence at 3797 Piedmont Ave., with a tennis court.   

The year ended with the completion of a modern 50-bed maternity hospital at the corner of Moss Avenue and Broadway appointed with, according to the Oakland Tribune, “antique walnut, rich rugs and cretonne hangings.”   

The much-touted maternity building, you may realize, became home to the first Kaiser Permanente hospital in 1942. But there’s more to this story.   

Both Kirkham and Kaiser dreamed of better access to care

The Kaiser Foundation Health Plan’s mission is built upon the work of earlier generations that saw providing adequate health care as a duty of the society. And people of means often took it on as their personal mission. Henry Kaiser was inspired to set up the Kaiser health plan by his mother’s untimely death, much as Kate Kirkham was prompted by the suffering she witnessed in the accident.   

In the progressive era, women across the country started hospitals and clinics for women, children and the poor. The Fabiola Association was part of the trend. Members insisted in their by-laws that the hospital be managed by women and that the staff doctor always be a woman.   

Fabiola maternity hospital circa 1924

They were privileged women with feminist instincts who financed their work by staging endless parties, teas, rummage sales and a big horse racing event that were covered in detail – down to the gowns each woman wore – in the Oakland papers. Reading between the lines of the Tribune, Herald and Post-Enquirer provides an insight into the social mores and strict sense of personal duty of a century ago.   

Society ladies took care of working nurses

The Fabiola women were fiercely devoted to the welfare of the nurses. In 1902, they were encouraged by the board president to take turns sending their carriages out “at 8 o’clock in the morning to take the night nurses out for an hour or two driving in the quieter parts of our suburbs” to help them relax before going to bed.   

There were power struggles among the ladies who served on the Fabiola board and at least one strike by nurses which necessitated the matrons’ heading over to the hospital to hoist the bed trays up from the kitchen. They were also taken to task by local ministers who berated them for raising money through gambling, with the Fabiola Derby Day at the Oakland Trotting Park.   

Again, owing to their social status, such criticism didn’t stop them. “Oakland’s most exclusive dames are members of Fabiola and they are indignant over Rev. Baker’s strictures,” reported the Tribune in June 1904.   

Each year, the Fabiola Association issued their service statistics. In 1900, they saw 871 patients of which 619 were hospitalized. Of those, only 131 paid the full hospital charges, the rest paid nothing or just what they could afford. By 1930, the hospital saw 4,753 patients, of which 517 received free care.   

Unfortunately, the good works wrought by the Fabiola ladies soon came to a crashing halt. Hard times reduced paying customers and donations dried up. The hospital closed in October 1932. The Tribune’s headline was “Fabiola Ends Experiment in Feminism” and editorialized that the regret felt by Oaklanders for its loss “was akin to grief.”   

Original architectural beauties demolished

Early the following year, the glorious original hospital – a building that would qualify for landmark status had it survived – as well as the children’s annex, nurses home, and the surgical building were all razed. The new maternity hospital was saved in hopes the operation could be resurrected.   

Instead, the Fabiola Association turned over all its assets to Samuel Merritt Hospital in 1940 with the stipulation that it be used for those unable to afford hospital care, and the women went to work for another decade to aid that effort. The real estate, including the hospital, was estimated at a $75,000 value.   

Fabiola maternity hospital renovated and reopened as the first Permanente Foundation Hospital circa 1942

The hospital was considered still quite modern with its reinforced concrete construction, and Henry Kaiser and Dr. Sidney Garfield were quite pleased to find it in 1942 when they were running out of room to treat shipyard workers at the Richmond Field Hospital. They paid $333,000 for the land and renovations and reopened it in August.   

The Fabiola building served as the core of the original Kaiser Permanente complex during the war and early days of the public health plan. Many additions and renovations on the site characterized Oakland’s flagship facility’s growth over the past 65 years.   

At one time, the Fabiola was painted pink, Henry Kaiser’s favorite color, and in its last iteration was encased in aluminum, one of Kaiser Industries’ main industrial products. The 1923-built, four-story building was torn down in 2005 as part of the Oakland Medical Center rebuild project currently under way.   

Kaiser Permanente carries on Fabiola’s original mission

Few Oaklanders remember the old hospital now, though scores were born in the homey maternity cottage, including my father in 1920. The new Fabiola building on Howe Street is the last reminder of that “institution of real Christian socialism” – as defined by its president Mrs. J.P.H. (Catherine) Dunn at its closing – that was the original Fabiola.   

If in later years Henry Kaiser was accused of being a “socialist” for putting forth a prepaid, group health plan, he stands shoulder to shoulder with Kate Kirkham and her successors in realizing his shared humanity with those in need but without means.   

One hundred and thirteen years separate the pastoral beauty that surrounded the 19th century Fabiola Hospital from the current scene: pavement, numerous traffic signals and striped crosswalks that knit together Kaiser Permanente’s modern complex. But the legacy of thoughtful health care and community benefit is what abides.

For more about Kaiser Permanente’s community benefit programs, go to http://tinyurl.com/4fcswsh

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in Latest Blog posts | 2 Comments »
Printable Version

Country Joe brings Florence Nightingale’s legacy to life

posted on February 18, 2011

By Ginny McPartland
Heritage writer  

Nurses have a friend in the music business, I discovered recently. Country Joe McDonald, who many will remember as the creator of one of the most famous anti-Vietnam war anthems, has become enamored with nursing angel Florence Nightingale and her dedicated, compassionate and intelligent successors.  

McDonald, who inspired 300,000 Woodstock Festival revelers in 1969 with his “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag,” today sings the praises of nurses who carry on the tradition begun by Nightingale in 19th century Europe.  

Country Joe at Nightingale's grave in East Wellow, England. Photo by David Bennett Cohen

He has developed a comprehensive Florence Nightingale Web site and a 50-minute live show that incorporates the story of Nightingale and of the many who have followed in her footsteps, especially in times of war. In the road show, McDonald performs four original songs of tribute to nurses. 

Nightingale marshaled female forces to care for war victims  

An upper-class Englishwoman, Nightingale (1820-1910) embarked on an aggressive nursing mission in her early 30s. In 1854, she essentially forced the English army to allow her and 37 other women to take care of wounded soldiers on the Turkey battlefront in the Crimean war. At first the army rejected the women’s help but relented and welcomed the nurses when the casualties became overwhelming.  

The first action Nightingale took was to clean up the hospitals and the patients to prevent unnecessary deaths from infections. After the war, she implemented sanitary measures in English hospitals and applied her mathematical skills to collecting data and showing how by insisting on sterile environments nurses could save lives.  

Nurses stand by soldiers in war  

McDonald, who co-founded the 1960s rock band Country Joe and the Fish, became interested in Nightingale when he went to a 1981 seminar about the problems of Vietnam veterans in Berkeley, California. His eyes were opened to the contribution of nurses throughout history, and he realized that nurses who cared for the war-injured had not been adequately recognized.  

“One speaker was a Vietnam War nurse named Lynda Van Devanter who was the first Vietnam War nurse to ‘come out’ and speak for women in the military. As a member of the audience I was stunned at the realization that I was also guilty of ignoring women in the military in my writings,” relates McDonald, who joined the U.S. Navy in 1959 but did not see action.  

After the seminar, he looked up nursing in the encyclopedia and found a biography of Florence Nightingale, considered the founder of modern nursing. Next he went to the now-defunct Holmes Bookstore in Oakland, California, and bought an autographed copy of Sir Edward Cook’s Nightingale biography. McDonald devoured all he could find about Nightingale’s life and work – and was hooked.  

“I visited Florence Nightingale’s home at Embley (England) along with her gravesite at East Wellow, her summer home Lea Hurst (in Derbyshire, England), the Selimiye Barracks Hospital in Turkey (scene of the care of the Crimean War victims), and Kaiserswerth in Germany (where she graduated from nursing school). I began work on a major film treatment of her life. I am still working on that film treatment and am still a student of her life,” he writes on his Web site.  

Singing praises to the lady nurse  

One of McDonald’s tribute songs, “Lady of the Lamp,” recalls Nightingale’s nightly walk among the mass of war injured during the Crimean War. Carrying a lamp, she covered a four-mile route as she checked on patients lying on cots 18 inches apart. Legend has it that the soldiers kissed her shadow as she passed.  

McDonald has also penned and performed three other songs, “The Girl Next Door (Combat Nurse),” “Clara Barton,” and “Thank the Nurse.” “The Girl Next Door” is the closest to McDonald’s Vietnam War protest message, with the lyrics pondering the “why” of war. The song begins:  

She grew up in America, just the girl next door
Never thought to question what we were fighting for
They sent her off to war and showed her death and pain
And the girl next door will never be the same.   

You can see the similar sentiments in McDonald’s spirited and passionate “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag:”  

Well come on all of you big strong men, Uncle Sam needs your help again,
he got himself in a terrible jam, way down yonder in Vietnam,
put down your books and pick up a gun, we’re gunna have a whole lotta fun.  

CHORUS
and its 1,2,3 what are we fightin for?
don’t ask me i don’t give a dam, the next stop is Vietnam,
and its 5,6,7 open up the pearly gates. Well there aint no time to wonder why…WHOPEE we’re all gunna die.  

now come on wall street don’t be slow, why man this’s war a-go-go,
there’s plenty good money to be made, supplyin’ the army with the tools of the trade,
just hope and pray that when they drop the bomb, they drop it on the Vietcong.  

Affinity for nursing runs in the McDonald family  

The last song “Thank the Nurse” pays tribute to the everyday nurse who does the hard work of standing by the sick night and day. The lyrics are timeless but apropos for today. Joe McDonald should know about a nurse’s daily work: His wife Kathy McDonald is a labor and delivery nurse at Kaiser Permanente (KP) Oakland, California, and his brother Billy is a nurse practitioner at KP in nearby Richmond.  

CHORUS
Thank the Nurse that’s nursing you.
The one that nursed you through.
Thank the Nurse that’s nursing you,
For saving your life….for saving your life..
For SAVING YOUR LIFE!  

“Country Joe’s Tribute to Florence Nightingale and Nursing,” debuted at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists in 2009. Joe continues to take the show on the road and will perform March 2 at Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas. Audio clips of his songs and the lyrics are available online. 

McDonald’s Web site has an educational bent, and teachers can find encyclopedic quality facts about Florence Nightingale and her legacy. Visitors to the site can even access a YouTube video that has an 1890 audio of Nightingale speaking. She recorded a segment for an English cancer prevention campaign in which she said: When I am no longer even a memory – just a name, I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life.”

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in Latest Blog posts | 3 Comments »
Printable Version

Henry J. Kaiser in Modern Healthcare’s Health Care Hall of Fame

posted on February 7, 2011
By Bryan Culp

Director of Heritage Resources

Henry J. Kaiser, inducted into Health Care Hall of Fame

Henry J. Kaiser (1882-1967), the co-founder of Kaiser Permanente and a titan of industry during the first half of the 20th Century, has been inducted into Modern Healthcare’s Health Care Hall of Fame for 2011.

Along with Sidney R. Garfield, MD (1906-1984), Kaiser was a champion for a new kind of health care system in a period when prepaid, group practice was not accepted by the American medical establishment. “He is greatly restless and restlessly great, one of America’s last real Horatio Algers,” the Oakland Tribune and Parade magazine said of him in 1958.

“I am very pleased to hear that my grandfather, Henry J. Kaiser, has been selected as one of Modern Healthcare’s 2011 Hall of Fame inductees,” said Kim J. Kaiser of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals Board of Directors.

“Henry Kaiser created many successful businesses during his life, but he was most proud of Kaiser Permanente. It is fitting that he join 1988 Hall of Fame inductee, Sidney R. Garfield, MD, since it was the partnership between an entrepreneur and business leader, and a dedicated and innovative physician which created the Kaiser Permanente prepaid, integrated health care model. Henry Kaiser and Sid Garfield would be pleased to see how their partnership continues today.”

Henry Kaiser in good company in Hall of Fame

Modern Healthcare and the American College of Healthcare Executives created the Health Care Hall of Fame to honor men and women who have made outstanding contributions to the health care industry. Prior to this year’s inductees, 87 health care visionaries and innovators had been inducted.

Among those 87 are Sidney Garfield, MD, who was inducted in the hall of fame’s inaugural class in 1988. Other honorees include American Red Cross founder Clara Barton (1993), chairman of Johnson & Johnson Robert Wood Johnson (1990), former U. S. surgeon general C. Everett Koop (1997), and Massachusetts Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy (2010).

At age 75 when Henry Kaiser’s industrial empire was at its zenith, the builder of some of the 20th century’s iconic bridges, dams, ships, airplanes, and automobiles said, “Of all the things that I’ve done, I expect only to be remembered for my hospitals.  They’re filling the people’s greatest need – good health.”

Health plan has roots in Great Depression

With Sidney Garfield, Kaiser forged Kaiser Permanente out of the challenge to provide Americans quality medical care during the Great Depression and World War II, when most people could not afford to go to a doctor.

The health care program that today bears his name emerged in all but name in the late 1930s when Kaiser was establishing his reputation as the builder of the great dams of the American West – Hoover, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee. In 1938 he partnered with Garfield to provide health care for his workers at the remote Grand Coulee site in Mason City, Washington.

Garfield had earlier successfully experimented with prepayment in a five-year industrial medical care program in the deserts of southern California.  Prepayment took the form of a modest, affordable, payroll deduction that spread the cost of care for the injured and ill over a large number of healthy people, and it ensured a stable income by which a medical care operation could meet expenses.

Workers’ health paramount to Kaiser

Garfield’s ideas resonated with Kaiser who viewed the experimentation as needed in those economically challenging times to find ways for people of modest means to obtain health care. Garfield remembered their first meeting – what he thought was to be a routine job site inspection – this way:

“To my surprise, he seemed more interested in the welfare of his workers, in the medical care program that we were developing for them, than he was in the progress of his job…. He spent the whole day going through our facilities, discussing our plans and questioning me on all the details of the operation … how we had developed the plan and what the principles were, and how and why it worked….”

“By the end of the day I felt like I had been vacuumed and completely drained of all information I knew about medical care.  When we had gone about as far as we could go … he said, ‘Young man I think you have a plan that should be made available to everybody in the country.’”

“From that time on we were bound together by this common belief and interest in developing our health plan,” Garfield said.

Core principles of health plan

The two health care pioneers founded Kaiser Permanente on the principle of prepayment that spread the cost of care over a large number of healthy people, and provided stable revenue for medical care, clinical research and education to enhance the quality of care. 

Prepayment triggered best practices in the prevention of injury and illness, to the betterment of workers’ lives and to the improvement of health care finances.  With the cost barriers removed, the ill presented earlier for treatment establishing a true practice in preventive care, the early detection of disease, and the emergence of lifestyle medicine to maintain health and enhance the quality of life. 

Multispecialty group medical practice maximized physicians’ abilities to care for patients through doctor-to-doctor consultation, through the training and mentoring of young physicians, and through the inherent quality controls built into the group. 

Facilities under one roof brought the doctors’ offices, laboratories, pharmacies and hospital all within proximity, reduced costs through economy of scale, and most effectively utilized the time of both physicians and patients. 

This is Henry Kaiser’s ninth inclusion in lists of hall-of-fame honorees, including the U.S. Labor Hall of Fame in Washington, D.C., where he was honored in 1990, and the California Hall of Fame in 2009.

Henry J. Kaiser was known in every American household for his renown as a builder and as the “patriot in pinstripes” that revolutionized shipbuilding during World War II.  Click on the video to see his appearance on the TV classic, “What’s My Line?” in September 1957.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Posted in Latest Blog posts | 2 Comments »
Printable Version

Early Permanente physicians: making do with makeshift facilities

posted on February 4, 2011

By Laura Thomas

Heritage correspondent

The first Kabat-Kaiser Institute was housed in this Washington, D.C. mansion.

In the early days of Permanente medicine, co-founder Dr. Sidney Garfield had to be nimble at getting the resources needed to take care of newly signed-up plan members. Working quickly to add new groups just after the war, often Garfield had to scramble to hire doctors and set up care facilities. Sometimes that meant occupying whatever building was available immediately – however seemingly unsuitable.

From the late 1940s into the 1950s, thousands of union workers in the Bay Area joined the Permanente plan and were able to get care at the new Kaiser Foundation Hospital on MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland. But the Bay Area was growing beyond the towns on the bay shore in the wake of the war’s great westward migration, and the medical plan had to grow with it.

Thus, when Henry Kaiser and Garfield took on members too far away to make an easy drive to central Oakland, the physicians moved into any building deemed workable. The health plan took over many wartime health facilities and small hospitals, but at different times, Permanente doctors and nurses saw patients in examining rooms fashioned out of the bedrooms of a motel and a once-stylish, turn-of-the-century hotel, the offices and storerooms of a San Francisco office building, the tight quarters above a modest dress shop and a ranch house on an historic estate.

First postwar facilities at Vallejo military-style hospital

Kaiser’s first opportunity to extend the health plan beyond the shipyards came right as the war ended.  Residents of the apartments and dormitories built for the workers that flooded Vallejo to work at Mare Island and the Benicia Arsenal had laid the groundwork in 1944 by lobbying for a government-sponsored hospital.

Vallejo military-style Permanente hospital in 1948

They succeeded in getting the Vallejo Community Hospital, which was built – military cantonment style – between a slough and a hillside on the north edge of town. Now that the war was ending, the barracks-like facility was slated for closure and the tenants re-grouped. They appealed to Permanente to come to Vallejo to care for up to 25,000 people living in eight housing projects.

In September 1945, the doctors moved into an infirmary downtown near the corner of Fourth and Maryland streets. The facility, which had been used by the U.S. Public Health Service during the war, was renamed the Permanente Medical Center. With only 60 beds, the makeshift hospital was temporary.

By 1947, Permanente re-opened the nearly new Vallejo Community Hospital and  – with the ample space it provided in several single story buildings spread over 30 acres – was also able to bring to Northern California the Kabat-Kaiser Institute, now called the Kaiser Foundation Rehabilitation Center. The original institute was established in Washington, D.C., at Henry Kaiser’s behest to help victims of neuromuscular disease, including his son, Henry J. Kaiser, Jr., who had multiple sclerosis (MS).

Later when a new Vallejo hospital was built in 1972, the campus continued to house the outpatient departments. In 2010 the newest Vallejo medical center was completed with 248 beds, a state-of-the-art rehabilitation wing with two gymnasia, and halls filled with natural sun light and the works of North Bay artists.

Next stop San Francisco

 The first doctors recruited by Garfield had no grandiose expectations. Most were committed to the ideal of health care for the masses, accepted the salary offered and the challenge of making do. It was all about “good humor and team spirit,” as long-time allergy supervisor Renee Owyang recalled in 1982 as she reflected on her early years in the first San Francisco clinic.

This former ambulance company building at 331 Pennsylvania St. in San Francisco was renamed Permanente Harbor Hospital in 1948.

In 1946, while the Alameda-Contra Costa County Medical Society was preparing an attack on Permanente medicine and its prepaid, group practice health model, shipyard workers at Hunters Point joined the health plan. To avoid attracting controversy in San Francisco, Garfield’s doctors took over a small clinic that had served the workers during the war on the third floor of an old lower Market Street office building and put the name of Dr. Cecil Cutting on the door.

In 1948, the Permanente Foundation acquired a 35-bed hospital in the Bayshore District of San Francisco near Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard. The old structure at 331 Pennsylvania St. had been previously owned by an ambulance company. Garfield had the picturesque building refurbished and re-named it Permanente Harbor Hospital.

For years before the Market Street clinic merged with the new hospital on Geary Boulevard, the San Francisco staff saw patients and even began an allergy department in a loft area that was served only by stairs and a freight elevator. “We often served as elevator operators for our allergy patients who were unable to climb the stairs,” Owyang said. She remembers putting out several buckets on rainy days to catch drops falling in the waiting area from the roof and enjoying the various tunes created by the rhythmic plops: “often we were tempted to rotate the buckets to get a new tune.”

Rambling ranch house turned into Walnut Creek clinic

This Arts&Crafts style home in Walnut Creek was converted to a Permanente medical clinic in 1952.

In 1952, Henry Kaiser, who lived in Lafayette, was eyeing the small, but bustling town of Walnut Creek as the place to locate a new hospital and found a 5-acre site along Newell Avenue. The owner was Edward Counter, soon to be mayor of the town, who lived there in an old, rambling Arts&Crafts style house he and his wife had turned into a cultural center. “It was kind of a collecting place for all the little (old) ladies of Walnut Creek, you know, and they had a tea room,” remembered the hospital’s administrator, Jack Chapman, in 1982.

Chapman also noted in an oral history that the price had been fixed at $75,000, but the ever impatient Kaiser was seen at the property. “He couldn’t wait, you know, he stomped around here one night and somebody saw him and automatically it went up 25,000 bucks.”

The house that had once been surrounded by orchards was turned into a clinic, with an older home at the back becoming the housekeeping department and a swimming pool turned into a morgue, Chapman recalled. When the clinic opened, he was joined by a gardener, to take care of the grounds, a nurse, receptionist and three doctors. By the end of 1953, a new clinic and hospital had been built on the property and 35,000 people trooped through it during an open house that lasted two weeks.

And not a minute too soon, for in the same month (September), Local 1440 of the steelworkers union up the road in Pittsburg voted to join Kaiser –  after a bitter campaign by local doctors designed to dissuade them — and suddenly 10,000 more people became Permanente members. “They demanded then that we open a clinic,” Chapman said.

A motel on Los Medanos Street behind Pittsburg Post-Dispatch building was purchased and used for nine years until a larger clinic was built in Antioch. “So we bought this funny little building that was about to be a motel,” said Dr. Wallace Cook in 1982 “and turned each motel room into an office. It had a courtyard so you peeled off and went to surgery or medicine or wherever, depending on which motel room your doctor was in.”

Southern California coastal group finds space above a dress shop and in posh hotel

San Pedro Permanente medical offices expanded to Pacific Avenue over a dress shop in 1951.

In 1950 Ira “Buck” Wallin MD hurriedly set up shop in a medical office in downtown San Pedro when longshoremen union members joined the health plan. The interim clinic was pulled together in two weeks with Harry Bridges, leader of the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s union, breathing down Garfield’s neck.  

There were 3,000 new members to handle and, within seven months, 30,000 retails clerks were added to the Southern California membership rolls, many living in the San Pedro-Long Beach communities. Busting at the seams, the plan found space for several more doctors and the administrative offices above a dress shop on South Pacific Avenue.

By 1954, a new clinic was opened in a large Victorian house on Atlantic Avenue in Long Beach, which had room for five internists, including a pediatrician, and had an X-ray department, but no laboratory. It became popular immediately and another site was opened in the turn-of-the-century Kennebec Hotel, which had been a center of action in Long Beach’s heyday as a beach resort.

Remodeled in 1950, the guest rooms were equipped with toilets and showers and accommodated surgery, internal medicine OB/Gyn, pediatrics and physical therapy.

The old Kennebec Hotel, across from The Pike amusement park, was used as a Permanente Long Beach clinic in the early 1950s.

“It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter but had a good view of The Pike,” said staffer Hannah Wilson. The Pike, the mile-long boardwalk and amusement park that was still roaring in the 1950s featured such attractions as a large indoor swimming pool, carousel, rollercoaster and 10-cent rides for children on Wednesdays.

In 1992, the Long Beach clinic relocated a fourth time to its present site on the Pacific Coast Highway, just before the traffic circle. On most days, members and staff have a clear view of the city’s high rise buildings and the Walter Pyramid at California State University, Long Beach.

The clinic is modern and efficient, but no doubt it has little of the charm of those earlier facilities, none of the pink bordello walls, warm ocean breezes or shrieks of delighted children, that the staff and doctors remember from the old Kennebec.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in Latest Blog posts | 1 Comment »
Printable Version

Widow of Permanente pioneer shares fond memories of Garfield

posted on January 24, 2011

By Steve Gilford 

Senior KP History Consultant 

Ira "Buck" Wallin, MD, pioneer of Southern California KP

A recent phone call brought me the sad news that Jeanne Wallin, wife of the late Ira “Buck” Wallin, MD, a Southern California Permanente Medical Group pioneer, had passed away this month at the age of 89.  

I first met Jeanne a bit more than ten years ago when my interest in recording first hand accounts of the origins of Kaiser Permanente led me to her and Buck Wallin, one of the first Permanente doctors on the ground in Southern California. 

In 1950, after just a few weeks at the Permanente hospital at the Kaiser Steel plant in Fontana, Calif., Permanente founder and executive director Sidney Garfield enlisted Wallin to open medical offices to care for longshoremen at Los Angeles harbor in San Pedro. This was the first expansion of the program into Southern California outside of the steel plant and the beginning of the Southern California Region.  

After Buck’s death in 2002, I remained in occasional contact with Jeanne. A cheerful, articulate woman with an easy manner, she enjoyed reminiscing about “the old days.” Unlike others I had talked to about Dr. Garfield, Jeanne Wallin knew him neither as family nor as physician. He’d been a friend with whom she, her then-husband, Joe Lydon, and a group of other couples, would often share weekend afternoons and evening parties. 

Permanente founder had movie star quality 

Jeanne Wallin, at left, playing cards with Sidney Garfield, MD, on Sea Star about 1976

Jeanne, a native of Oakland, Calif., had married Wallin in 1987 after the death of Lydon, a marketing consultant.  It had been Lydon who, in 1972, had introduced her to Dr. Garfield. Before Jeanne met Sidney Garfield, Lydon told her, “You’ll like this man, he’s such a gentleman; everyone likes him.” Soon Jeanne and Joe had become close friends with Sidney, his wife Helen, Health Plan Regional Manager Karl Steil and Karl’s wife, May. 

“Almost every weekend, Sid and Helen came down (to Alameda) so we spent a lot of time together.” What they all had in common was a fondness for boats and so much of their social time together was aboard either the Steil’s boat or their own, berthed near each other at Alameda’s Ballena Bay Yacht Club.  

According to Jeanne, Dr. Garfield had a movie star quality. “He reminded a lot of people of Spencer Tracy . . . The women adored him.” Even so, she recalled, “He was very, very quiet around me.” However, after they’d become better acquainted, he began to open up a little. 

“One day, we were cruising somewhere.  He and I were sitting out in the cockpit and he told me all about designing the Oakland hospital. . . . and how originally he wanted to be an architect.  He had a very quiet way about him.  He was utterly charming.  I could see why women liked him so much.” 

Garfield pushed good health, not health plan 

Dr. Garfield didn’t mind that she and her husband were not members of the Permanente Health Plan. In the 1970s when Jeanne mentioned to him that she and Joe were planning a trip to Europe, he insisted that they have a medical checkup before they leave.  “You cannot go until you have a ‘multiphasic,’” he said. 

The multiphasic program was basically a battery of screening tests that was offered to Kaiser Permanente members. The advantage was that in a short period of time, with minimal inconvenience, a patient could get a complete health examination. Sidney told them that if they went through the multiphasic examination before they left, they could leave the country knowing that they were in good health. 

Garfield arranged simultaneous appointments for the couple at the Oakland Kaiser Permanente hospital. “Of course, my husband went one way and I went the other . . . Sid personally took me through the whole multiphasic. We’d have little stops: open a door and go in and there’d be cake and cookies and a cup of coffee.  It was the most wonderful way to get all these physicals done and over with.” 

Garfield as architect and planner collaborated with Wallin 

She remembered another one of the Garfield innovations she’d seen that afternoon: colored lines painted on the medical center floors to help patients find their way easily from one test station to the next. “Well, I thought it was fantastic, following the lines.  He told me how he’d invented all this stuff. 

“Then he showed me through the whole hospital and how he designed the rooms to be between the central corridors and the outside ones off of the center corridors.  It was so charming of him to share this with me, and you could tell the great pride he had in it.  Great pride. I felt very honored,” she related. 

In the mid-1950s, Dr. Garfield collaborated with Medical Director Wallin on the design of the 56-bed Harbor Hospital in Harbor City.  When membership grew, Wallin and Garfield worked together to plan that hospital’s expansions.  In the early 1960s, the two men again collaborated to plan and launch the new Bellflower service area, including the layout of the hospital, the budgeting and selection of the 60-physician staff. 

In 1966, when the health plan took over the financially troubled San Diego Community Health Association, Wallin became the founding medical director there.  Dr. Wallin served on the board of the Southern Permanente Medical Group until 1973. He stayed on in San Diego as a member of the staff there for several more years until he moved to the Bay Area. 

When Jeanne met and married Dr. Wallin, she took great pride that Buck had played an important part in what had become the largest private medical care program in the world. Following her death, her family paid her a high tribute, “Jeanne embraced life in both difficult and joyous times.”

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in Latest Blog posts | No Comments »
Printable Version

Health care coverage for workers’ families didn’t come easy

posted on January 16, 2011

By Ginny McPartland 

Affordable health care was an elusive commodity in 1930s America. Medical practice was becoming more sophisticated, and qualified doctors were in great demand. Consequently, private professional care was out of reach for many Americans. Employer-sponsored health plans started to spring up in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but even those progressive prepaid plans were slow to add workers’ families to the coverage.  

In 1944, during World War II, the issue of family health care reached a critical point on the West Coast. War industry yards and plants were frantically producing ships, aircraft, tanks and other war materiel; thousands of migrant workers and their families flooded rapidly expanding communities. Many workers were sick when they arrived, and many became injured as they worked at breakneck speed to meet production deadlines. 

Permanente medicine, developed by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser and enterprising physician Sidney Garfield, was launched to take care of workers in Kaiser’s West Coast shipyards. The two had done this before: Garfield had set up a prepaid plan for workers on the Los Angeles Aqueduct project in 1933, and he and Kaiser had teamed up to care for workers at the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state in the late 1930s. 

The Kaiser-Garfield prepaid, group practice plan for shipard workers was progressive and exemplary by all accounts. Unlimited medical care for the individual workers was provided for 50 cents per week. But Garfield and his doctors had their hands full, so initially only the worker – not the family members – was covered by the health plan. 

Young patient seen in Fontana Kaiser Steel plant clinic

Stuart Lester of “Medical Economics,” writes in the February 1944 issue: “The principal threat to the permanence of the Permanente Foundation – which provides virtually unlimited medical care for 130,000 Kaiser shipyard workers in two states* is the workers’ complaint that it makes no provision for their families.” 

The article continues: “The family problem is especially acute in the shipyard town of Richmond, Calif., where the ratio of physicians to population is something like 1 to 4,000 and where the only hospital facilities of any consequence are those provided by Kaiser’s Richmond Field Hospital.” 

In Richmond, Portland (Oregon) and Vancouver (Wash.), nonsubscriber family members were treated for a fee.  Office visits were $2.25. For maternity, $200 covered prenatal care, delivery, hospitalization, C-section if required, postnatal care, and care for the newborn. Employees at the Kaiser Fontana steel plant in Southern California were the exception. In 1944, Fontana workers could purchase complete coverage for a family of four for $1.80 a week. 

Physicians debate how to cover families 

“Medical Economics” writer Lester refers to three possible solutions proposed at the time: an expansion of the Permanente plan to include family members; an expansion into the Richmond area by the California Physicians’ Services (CPS) prepaid plan as operating in other war industry communities; or the development of a prepaid arrangement for families through a private physician network. 

The California Medical Association (CMA) launched the CPS in 1939 to offer prepaid care to low-income families in California. Initially, the physicians association’s plan offered a “full coverage contract” that included all outpatient physician services. In 1942, CPS excluded the first two doctor visits from coverage to make the plan financially viable, according to the April 1943 issue of the CMA’s “California and Western Medicine.” In 1943, CPS, the precursor to Blue Shield, had 39,000 commercial members, 5,100 government rural health program subscribers and a total of 32,000 war housing resident members in Vallejo, Marin, Los Angeles and San Diego. 

Permanente Richmond Field Hospital

“Dr. Sidney R. Garfield, Kaiser’s medical director, sees two obstacles to an extension of his program to include families: One is opposition by the local medical societies. The other is lack of facilities – particularly in the hospital at Richmond,” Lester wrote in “Medical Economics.” The article noted that expansions of the Richmond Field Hospital and the Permanente Foundation Hospital in Oakland were under way. 

The second proposal – having CPS provide family coverage for Richmond area workers – had been tried previously and failed. In 1942, CPS  had offered a family plan in nearby El Cerrito and was not able to attract enough members. The coverage for non-Kaiser workers was enticing: a $5 flat fee no matter how many family members. It wasn’t practical for Kaiser employees, however.  To take advantage of the CPS plan, a worker would have to buy his or her own coverage for $2.16 a month and then pay $5 for the rest of the family. 

According to the “Medical Economics” article, solving of the family care issue by fee-for-service doctors was doomed from the beginning.  A shortage of private doctors and inadequacy of medical facilities made any such plan unfeasible.  Also, California private practice physicians were admittedly just tolerating the Permanente model of prepaid, group practice with salaried physicians. One private doctor told the magazine: “The Kaiser-Garfield groups are doing a job right now that is aiding the war effort, and are doing it well. But we don’t like their system.” 

Kaiser extends coverage to shipyard families 

In the spring of 1945, the Permanente medical plan, now with expanded facilities to accommodate more members, was extended to the families of all Kaiser shipyard workers. “Medical Economics” reported the details of the Permanente family care plan: for $117 a year ($2.25 per week) for a family of four, coverage was extensive. It included 111 days of hospitalization, complete diagnostic services, necessary drugs, physician services at home or medical office, major and minor surgery, and ambulance service within a 30-mile radius. Members paid an extra charge of $60 for comprehensive maternity care, $15 for a tonsillectomy and $2 for a house call. 

“Medical Economics” concluded the article with this statement: “Insurance men pointed out that the total annual cost for a family of four, $117 a year, is an amount which has generally proved to be too high for any wide participation on a voluntary basis.” 

Workers who left the shipyards could maintain coverage for a “slightly higher” premium as long as they continued to live in the service area. This retention provision foreshadowed Kaiser and Garfield’s plans to keep the Permanente medical care plan alive after the war industries shut down. 

*Kaiser shipyards health plan actually took care of workers in three states, California, Washington and Oregon, and enrolled up to 190,000 members at the peak of the war.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in Latest Blog posts | No Comments »
Printable Version

Permanente embraces its partnership with labor

posted on December 31, 2010

By Laura Thomas

Henry J. Kaiser and Sidney R. Garfield, MD, survey the site for the Walnut Creek Medical Center, completed in 1953

Throughout its history, Kaiser Permanente has relied on the “can-do spirit” of its dedicated workers and on the support of organized labor to keep the prepaid health plan strong.

Coming out of World War II, the medical plan had proven its viability in caring for a large shipyard workforce, but with the end of shipbuilding contracts, Henry Kaiser and Permanente founder and medical director Dr. Sidney Garfield had a big problem. Where were the large numbers of new members going to come from?

Kaiser, a friend of labor, attracted workers’ unions whose leaders understood the power of prepaid health care and wanted it for the welfare of their workers. Bay Area workers – from Oakland city employees, who were the first to sign up, to union typographers, street car drivers and carpenters – embraced the Permanente Health Plan with its emphasis on preventive medicine.

In 1950, Harry Bridges brought the 6,000-member International Longshoremen and Warehousemen Union (ILWU) into Kaiser Permanente, bringing the total West Coast membership, including Los Angeles, to almost 160,000.  In 1951, the Retail Clerks union added 30,000 to the membership rolls in Los Angeles.

Opposition tries to squelch KP

Despite this success, Kaiser and Garfield often faced rear guard actions from private practice doctors who felt threatened by group practice medicine. In 1953 when KP opened a new hospital in Walnut Creek and sought the health plan contract with workers in the U.S. Steel plant in Pittsburg, California, all hell broke loose in that small town along the Carquinez Strait.

A family visits the new KP Walnut Creek facility completed in 1953

Before Kaiser Permanente came along, the steelworkers union had both a national hospitalization plan and a local supplementary health plan with local private practice doctors. The workers were not satisfied with the current health plan and were complaining that providers charged too much and were lackadaisical about responding to emergencies and requests for house calls.

For their part, the Pittsburg area doctors argued that inflation required rates to rise and disputed the idea that service to members was lax.

Kaiser Permanente already provided care to steelworkers at the South San Francisco Bethlehem Steel plant and was prepared to expand services to the Pittsburg area. The beginning of KP’s negotiations with the Steelworkers Local 1440 in Pittsburg raised the hackles of the 41 private practice doctors already established in the area.

These doctors, all members of the East Contra Costa branch of the Alameda-Contra Costa Medical Association, quickly devised a new and better plan to offer the union, including 24-hour emergency service and a cap on fees.

Offer steelworkers couldn’t refuse

Joseph Garbarino, in his 1960 study of the Pittsburg conflict for the University of California, reported that the union bargainers welcomed Kaiser Permanente because of its offer to provide comprehensive care for a specific price for a specified period of time. This arrangement was attractive to the local union whose leadership had never before been able to negotiate such a favorable deal with their private practice providers.

The first Pittsburg clinic was in an old motel

The Pittsburg area doctors were furious and immediately mounted a campaign to discredit the Kaiser Permanente agreement.  The doctors appealed to the steelworkers to reject the decision of their insurance committee and place the KP plan and the private doctors’ revised offer side by side for a vote of the full membership.

Fred Pellegrin, a Kaiser Permanente physician in the new Walnut Creek facility, remembers a rally where the local doctors “begged us not to go to Pittsburg … People stood up, yelling at us, called us Communists. It was a real shouting match.”

Using full-page newspaper ads, handbills and direct mail, the fee-for-service doctors bombarded the community with arguments supporting their plan and implied that the national Steelworker union officials were investigating the local’s decision.

The union answered the doctors’ charges in its newsletter and then agreed to a Sept. 3 (1953) election. Both sides agreed to a break in hostilities for the month of August. The agreement called for the doctors to stop their campaign and for the union leaders to remain neutral on the election.

The truce ended just days before the election when the union distributed voting packets with both health plan proposals, and included a leaflet encouraging members to favor the Kaiser Permanente plan. Enraged private practice doctors took to the battlements again, issuing a more detailed plan explanation and blasting the union in a full-page newspaper ad.

The doctors hired a truck with a loud speaker that cruised through workers’ neighborhoods broadcasting their opposition to Kaiser Permanente. They enlisted supporters, including Pittsburg doctors’ wives, to distribute literature in the steel company parking lot. Plan B was to drop leaflets from the air if solicitors were barred from the plant. According to news reports, tensions rose and the sheriff’s department was called, but no clashes occurred.

Victory of KP health plan

The Pittsburg medical establishment’s effort failed as steelworkers voted 2,182 to 440 to retain the Kaiser Permanente plan. For KP, this was a victory, but more struggles related to organized labor were yet to come.

Financial troubles in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in labor issues that threatened to stunt the health plan’s progress. Happily, those years of turmoil spawned Kaiser Permanente’s landmark Labor Management Partnership (LMP), which forged a cooperative relationship between KP’s 26 unions and the health plan leadership. The partnership fosters a respectful collaboration to improve health care for members and to create a positive work environment.

Kaiser Permanente unions had a big role in bringing about that partnership. In the midst of hostile bargaining in 1995, union leaders realized the labor disputes could damage the future of the health plan. Kathy Schmidt, a member of the bargaining team from Oregon, recalled, “We realized: here is the most unionized system in the country. Why don’t we try to help them? We learned more about trying to have a Partnership.”

Then-Kaiser Permanente CEO David Lawrence reached back across the abyss and agreed. “What I remember thinking about at that meeting was: We’ve got nothing to lose by being forthcoming about what I believed needed to happen …about the kind of collaboration that I think is required to deliver modern medical care in all of its complexity,” he told Harvard University researchers in 2002.

Today, scholars at both Harvard’s School of Government and Stanford University’s School of Business are following the progress of the LMP and consider it a prime example of labor and management cooperation. Its continued success will contribute to the realization of KP’s goal of being the model for health care delivery in the United States.

Read more about the Labor Management Partnership.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in Latest Blog posts | 1 Comment »
Printable Version

Permanente traditions advance with total health assessment campaign

posted on December 29, 2010

By Ginny McPartland 

Longshoremen line up for their health assessment or "physical" in 1961

I recently took an online total health assessment (THA) through the healthy lifestyles program on Kaiser Permanente’s members Web site, kp.org. This was my second time (in three years) so I knew the drill: answer quite a few questions about my health and lifestyle habits and find out where I stand health-wise. I did it for me, but I had another motive. By taking the assessment, I earned $50 for charity.

When I first heard Kaiser Permanente was offering its employees a $50-to-charity incentive to take the THA, I wasn’t that impressed. I didn’t think the donation would convince people to participate in KP’s initiative to build a healthier workforce. I also didn’t think $50 would go that far. I have to admit I was WRONG!

By mid-December, more than 22,000 (14.5%) KP employees nationwide had taken the THA and by that small action collectively raised an impressive $1.1 million. Now that will go a long way. How far? For starters, each $50 could buy 700 pounds of fruits and vegetables or 77 dozen eggs for the hungry. Or it could provide 10 pediatric flu shots for needy kids. Multiply those items by 22,000 donors and you get the picture. 

The money raised by the 2010 THA incentive program will go to community healthy eating initiatives and to support health care for disadvantaged people and families, especially the homeless, the disabled and those living with HIV/AIDS.  The KP region whose employees raise the most money will receive an extra $50,000 for charities in their communities. The winner will be announced in January; the money will be awarded in March.* 

1951 brochure announcing Longshoremen assessment program. Image courtesy of the ILWU.

I think it says something about the KP culture that so many employees were motivated to raise money for others less fortunate than themselves. If they hadn’t felt compelled to take the assessment for their own sake, they were motivated to help others. Of course, Kaiser Permanente has given millions to good causes over the years through its Community Benefit programs.†

Total health assessment by any other name

Given our history as a preventive care organization, it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that Kaiser Permanente has been a champion of the total health assessment for over 60 years. In 1950, such an assessment was called the “multiphasic examination,” and it was initiated when labor leader Harry Bridges of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) demanded it for all members of the union. 

The ILWU members lined up at the waterfront for preventive clinics that included blood and urine screening tests, chest X-ray, electrocardiogram, and other tests to search for chronic disease. Each member also completed a health questionnaire similar to today’s THA. The recording and archiving of test results became the impetus for Kaiser Permanente to acquire its first computers in 1960. 

These records, still accessible today, have supported long-term health research related to heart disease and other chronic diseases. One such study, “Characteristics of Longshoremen Related to Fatal Coronary Heart Disease and Stroke” by Paffenbarger et al., was published in the “American Journal of Public Health,” in 1971. 

Robert Feldman, MD, and Sidney Garfield, MD, confer on the health assessment program launched in the late 1960s.

In the late 1960s, Permanente founding physician Sidney Garfield launched a program called “The Total Health Care Project” to expand the multiphasic programs in Oakland and San Francisco. Garfield and Robert Feldman, MD, hired and trained KP’s first nurse practitioners to run the program that included the use of computerized lab machines that yielded results while the patient was still at the clinic. Their goal was to collect baseline health data that could be used to identify health risks and to prevent disease. 

Today’s iteration of the multiphasic exam is a system of chronic disease screening programs designed to detect symptoms early and identify risk factors. The total health assessment questionnaire challenges participants to scrutinize their lifestyles and work with their doctors to figure ways to head off diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer. 

For me, the THA results are a reminder of what I need to do to stay healthy. I’m also hoping I can improve my sleep by following through with the online insomnia program. But most of all, I feel glad that my co-workers saw fit to get involved for themselves and to raise money to improve the health of others less fortunate. 

*Benefit-eligible Kaiser Permanente employees and physicians may earn the $50 charitable donation by taking the THA by Dec. 31.  Go to the Healthy Workforce site to participate. 

†Click here for more information about Kaiser Permanente’s Community Benefit Program. 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in Latest Blog posts | No Comments »
Printable Version

Mama, Papa and Henry III wait for Santa Claus

posted on December 23, 2010

By Ginny McPartland

Christmas 1956, and the family of Henry J. Kaiser, Jr., was reveling in the beauty of the season and reflecting on its own good fortune and faith.  As they had done the two previous years, the trio – Henry Jr., his wife, Bobbie, and son Henry III, then 4, recorded a holiday album to share their happiness with their friends and the employees of Kaiser Industries.

The album eavesdrops on the young family as they recount stories and sing in anticipation of Santa’s arrival on Christmas Eve. The child, nicknamed Henry Three (aka Henri Trois), vows to stay up to see St. Nick up close. Can he do it? His parents are skeptical.

Mr. and Mrs. Henry J. Kaiser, Jr., alias Mama and Papa to Henry III. Photo courtesy of the Bancroft Library.

Just about seven minutes long, the 1956 recording celebrated San Francisco Bay Area’s newest bay crossing, the Richmond – San Rafael Bridge, the release of a musical classic from “My Fair Lady,” and the talent of young Henry Three who showed his precociousness by reciting a poem in French and then translating it for “Papa” Kaiser.

For me, “Mama” Bobbie Kaiser’s reference to Santa coming from the north to Oakland over the “new Richmond Bridge” rang a bell. As a native of Richmond, I remember taking my last ride on the auto ferry that connected the East Bay with Marin. My parents had a ritual of cramming all eight of us in to our 1950 Ford and driving onto the ferry as a special Sunday outing. That ended in September of 1956 when the bridge opened.

Henry J. Kaiser, Jr., son of industrialist and visionary Henry J. Kaiser, showcased his singing talent by launching into “I Could Have Danced All Night” as Henry Three reiterated his determination to greet Santa whenever the jolly soul showed up at the Kaiser home during the night. The song, which was well known later, had just been published and performed on Broadway in 1956. Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle (actually sung by Marni Nixon) popularized the tune in the 1964 screen version of “My Fair Lady.”

Precocious child grows up

Henry Kaiser III with his guitar at the South Pole in 2001. Photo from the Kaiser Family Foundation Web site.

Henry Three’s Christmas album performance foreshadowed his success as a brilliant student who enrolled at Harvard University at 16 and as an innovative and eclectic musician, research diver, videographer and film producer.

In 2007, Henry Three produced a documentary film about scientists working in Antarctica with famed documentarian Werner Herzog. The movie, “Encounters at the End of the World,” was nominated in 2009 for an Academy Award for Documentary Feature. Kaiser appears briefly in the film and his underwater camera work is showcased in the DVD’s special features.  

The Baby Boomer Henry Kaiser has an impressive discography and is well known as a gifted musician and composer. Wikipedia has this to say about him: “Recording and performing prolifically in many styles of music, Kaiser is a fixture on the San Francisco music scene. He is considered a member of the ‘first generation’ of American free improvisers.”

Happy holidays, and enjoy this excerpt of the Kaiser 1956 album. Kaiser_Christmas_1956

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in Latest Blog posts | No Comments »
Printable Version

Laid-off shipyard workers dilemma: Should I stay or should I go?

posted on December 22, 2010

By Laura Thomas    

(Second of two articles)     

Lon Van Brunt Kaiser Richmond Shipyard worker 1945 from "Fore 'N Aft" newsletter

As the holiday season of 1945 approached, Kaiser shipyard workers faced an uncertain future on the West Coast. Interviews with workers in the “Fore ‘n’ Aft,” the Richmond shipyard newsletter, reflected some anxiety: “What do I think about the end of the war?” said laborer Lon Van Brunt. “Let’s study about that: I look for it to be hard times.”  

The local press reports, often tinged with sentimental hope, insisted that the Dust Bowl migrants were tossing mattresses back on their cars, packing up pots and pans and leaving wartime housing in droves.  

“Many couldn’t wait to get ‘back home’ after the war, but they found they didn’t like it back there anymore,” said native Richmond resident Marguerite Clausen in 1985 in an interview conducted with Judith Dunning for the Bancroft Library’s Regional Oral History Office. “They turned around and came back again. And they brought all their families with them.” *

Bernice Rarick, Portland shipyard worker, 1945, from "Bosn's Whistle" newsletter

Bernice Rarick, a Portland worker reflected that ambivalence when she told the “Bosn’s Whistle,” the northwest Kaiser shipyard newsletter, she was going right back to her ranch in Idaho yet wondered, “It doesn’t seem possible that everyone can go back to normal living again.”    

Transplants try to find their place    

The women were the first to go despite the fact that some 70 percent in a December 1944 Yard Two survey said they wanted to work. Black migrant workers also struggled to find new employment with the unemployment rate for black men in 1948 about 15 percent, three times the state average.    

“News came over that the contracts were cancelled, and that was it,” recalled Margaret Cathey who came from Iowa and worked as a welder. “You didn’t get two weeks notice or anything like that, no. You were just finished.” She was lucky because she found a job with the telephone company, anxious to hire women operators.    

A welder at the Kaiser shipyards, Willie Stokes earned $10 a day but, after the war, was only able to find unskilled labor at $6 and was unemployed by 1947. “One day you are an essential worker in a vital industry and the next you were a surplus unskilled laborer essential to no one,” he said in an article, “Willie Stokes at the Golden Gate,” by Cy W. Record published in “The Crisis Magazine,” June 1949.    

It took a while for many ex-shipyard workers to find their footing. In an article in “Salute Magazine” in June 1946, writer William Hogan called Richmond, “hangover town” because so many were still living there or had returned in hopes of finding work.    

Mostly from rural areas with ways that seemed backward, these workers and their families had been lifted out of poverty working for Henry Kaiser and were destined to prove themselves, especially to long-time Richmond residents.    

The Richmond Field Hospital continued to serve Permanente patients after the shipyards closed in 1946.

“I said, ‘Well, here these people are. They’re not going to leave here. This is Mecca,’ ” recalled Clifford Metz, a former Richmond school official who had insisted the notion that the migrants would go back was an illusion.    

“I think we went down maybe ten or fifteen thousand people in a short time. Most of them, well, they had learned that they liked it here. Some of them, with the money they had, they could invest. They were not unintelligent people.”    

Selena Foster, who came from Fort Worth, Texas, in early 1944, and her husband, Marvin, were among those with that precise idea.  “My husband said to me, ‘We have no home to go back to.’ We had a little money and we found property was fairly reasonable if you could find something to buy,” she said in 1992.    

The Fosters did make a trip back to East Texas in a shiny new car that made quite an impression on their family, but they returned to Richmond and within months had bought a home on Hoffman Boulevard and 29th Street, one of the first African-American families to do so after the war.    

The uncertainty of that holiday period 65 years ago was soon eased by a postwar economic boom in both the Bay Area and the Northwest. The upturn raised the fortunes of many who arrived back then with little but hope. Over the decades they have become woven inextricably into the cultural fabric of both regions.    

*Marguerite Clausen, “A World War II Journey: From Clarkesdale, Mississippi, to Richmond, California, 1942,” an oral history conducted in 1985 by Judith K. Dunning, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1992.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in Latest Blog posts | No Comments »
Printable Version

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »