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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.

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End of war: happier holidays but uncertain future for workers

posted on December 18, 2010

By Laura Thomas

(First of two articles)

Happy people around the world celebrated the end of World War II in 1945. Meanwhile, workers at shipyards across the country were losing their jobs.

Christmas 1945 was undoubtedly the happiest Americans had known since 1940, the year before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese surrender in August closed the final chapter of World War II and meant the return of loved ones serving overseas and the hope that normal life would resume.

But it was not entirely clear what that would mean for tens of thousands of shipyard workers in California, Oregon and Washington whose lives were irreversibly changed by their trek westward to work for Henry Kaiser. Would their lives ever be normal again?

From a height of 93,000 employees in the Richmond shipyards in 1943, the total spiraled downward in 1945 as the contracts were cancelled, with 40,000 workers in March dropping to 16,000 by the end of September.

In the Northwest, where Kaiser had yards in Portland and Vancouver, Wash., the cutbacks were sudden. From January to December, employment fell from 90,000 to just above 10,000.

After three years of hard-driving work fueled by a strong sense of mission and new experiences, many, especially the women and black workers, were once again jobless and possibly a little disoriented.

Vancouver worker Chauncey Del French describes the last day on the job in November for the paint crews who “took off like so many flushed quail to their locker room…a half-hour later, the ‘painters’ parade’ started up the dock.

“Men and women, arm in arm, sang Auld Lang Syne in the rain. They had their honorable discharge papers and were going to collect their ‘rocking chair money’ and live the life of Riley,” French wrote in his book “Waging War on the Homefront.”

Workers in the Northwest were told to grab farm labor work with 9,000 jobs available picking pole beans. “Highest wages ever received in Oregon by farm workers are being paid out this year,” stated an article in the “Bosn’s Whistle,” the shipyard newsletter, which noted they would be displacing Mexican workers who had been brought in to do the picking during the war.

The Marine Phoenix was the last troopship built in the Kaiser Shipyards in Vancouver, Washington.

Henry Kaiser relentless in pursuing postwar contracts

Meanwhile Kaiser said he “was determined to keep the job level at Richmond shipyards at the highest possible point” as he anticipated rail car and dry dock contracts. He also labored to get repair contracts and to attract work building ships for the Merchant Marine. Despite the major lobbying by Kaiser’s top officials motivated by concern for the workers, the U.S. Maritime Commission closed Richmond’s and Portland’s yards in 1946 and 1947.

No doubt what had Kaiser worried was news in his own press. “Fore ‘n’ Aft,” the newsletter for the Richmond yards, reported a survey of Yard Two workers in December 1944 that showed 63 percent of the out-of-state workers wanted to stay in California.

Yet, in 1945, many started to move to better jobs or – as contracts disappeared and layoffs began amidst some predictions of mass unemployment – started to head home. They also faced loss of the medical care provided by the Permanente Health Plan and the much-touted child care program that Kaiser had helped to start with the Richmond schools.

As the number of health plan enrollees in the shipyards dropped, Kaiser Permanente was invited to provide care for Vallejo residents of eight large wartime public housing dormitories and, in July, its first attempt to extend prepaid medical care to the general public was under way.

But other services that eased the burden of these dislocated workers disappeared rather quickly. Richmond hesitated to step into the breach, with some hoping that cutting back on services and beginning to tear out wartime housing would prompt the workers to leave. And many did leave, but, as it turns out, not for long. 

Next time: Laid-off shipyard worker dilemma: Should I stay or should I go?

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Remembering our KP history to face the future

posted on December 16, 2010

By Tom Debley 

Director of Heritage Resources 

Debley with 1953 Kaiser Manhattan at the dedication of the new Kaiser Foundation Rehabilitation Center in Vallejo February 2010. The center was first established in 1947.

It’s time for me to say farewell after 15 years with Kaiser Permanente.  The last seven years have been as founding director of Heritage Resources, our history program.  But at the end of the day on Dec. 17, I will head off to new adventures in retirement.  

Do not fear, my able colleagues Bryan Culp and Ginny McPartland will carry on the history work in Heritage Resources!  

So what does one say to many friends, colleagues and Kaiser Permanente history buffs other than good-bye?  

For me, I quote the literary great, Robert Penn Warren: “History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.”  

Recently, I was reminded of the importance of this – and a key reason why we maintain a historic archive at Kaiser Permanente.  It came as an inquiry on our History of Total Health Blog from John Herron, a history professor at the University of Missouri, who had read a blog about Rachel Carson and Kaiser Permanente’s environmental history by our intern, Jac Brown.  

Carson’s last public lecture prior to her death was delivered at an October 1963 Kaiser Permanente symposium attended by 1,500 doctors, scientists, medical students and journalists at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.  

Debley is a familiar figure at the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Homefront national park in Richmond. This is from our KP history booth at the annual homefront festival.

This was a year after publication of Carson’s then very controversial book “Silent Spring,” critiqued in 1962 in Time Magazine, which concluded: “Many scientists sympathize with Miss Carson’s love of wildlife, and even with her mystical attachment to the balance of nature. But they fear that her emotional and inaccurate outburst in Silent Spring may do harm by alarming the non-technical public, while doing no good for the things that she loves.”  

Today, of course, Carson’s “Silent Spring” is a classic of the 20th century and she is considered the catalyst for the modern environmental movement.  

Quite naturally, Professor Herron wanted to know why the then vice president, and later president, of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals, Dr. Clifford Keene, invited such a controversial figure to lead off a public service symposium, the theme of which was “Man Against Himself.”  We sent him materials for writings he and other scholars are preparing for the 50th anniversary of the publication of “Silent Spring.”  

And that’s one of two reasons why we have a history program.  One is to share stories of our history with our physicians, staff and communities.  The other is to be here for scholars, museums and others who seek historical insights.  

Debley speaking about his biography of Sidney Garfield, MD, at the Commonwealth Club August 2009. Photo by Joe Paolazzi

I started our Heritage Resources program in 2003.  Professor Herron’s recent question reminded me of the day in 2003 that I first read a one-paragraph item about Rachel Carson’s lecture in a list of “highlights of the year 1963” in an old annual report.  

Immediately, I flagged this event as something around which to begin collecting documents for archival purposes.  Why?  This was a high-water mark that helps illustrate why Kaiser Permanente is a recognized leader in sustainability, because sustainability is important to building healthy communities.  

Today, we have Ms. Carson’s lecture text, copies of the correspondence between her and KP planning for her presentation, and other documentation.  

As a result, we have collected and archived a wide array of historical materials.  A mere handful of these documents illustrate how we stand on the shoulders of other leaders like Rachel Carson:  

  • Founding physician Sidney Garfield was looking for sustainable practices and was recycling in the Great Depression and during and after World War II;
  • It was a Kaiser Industries executive who was among those who founded The League to Save Lake Tahoe in 1957, and coined the phrase seen on bumper stickers and elsewhere to this day: “Keep Tahoe Blue”;
  • Kaiser Steel was pioneering pollution control equipment in the 1950s and 60s – before the modern environmental movement and before the first Earth Day in 1970;
  • In the early 1970s, employees at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Santa Clara, California, formed an Ecology Committee with an objective of teaching employees “ecological common sense”;
  • In the 1980s, employees in Vallejo, California, were honored for reducing energy consumption by half in five years;
  • Today, the efforts continue with Kaiser Permanente adding solar power generation to 15 of our facilities by next summer.  These groundbreaking projects will eliminate purchase and disposal of 40 tons of harmful chemicals and dramatically reduce KP’s use of fossil fuels.

Our commitment to sustainability is but one example of Kaiser Permanente’s mission to improve the health of its members and of the communities in which they live. 

History reminds us, as Robert Penn Warren said, of who we have been, why we are who we are, and where we are headed if we remain true to our values and mission – as individuals and as institutions.

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In Memoriam: Jim McCloud, an original Kaiser Engineer

posted on December 9, 2010

By Tom Debley
Director of Heritage Resources

Sad news has reached us at Kaiser Permanente Heritage Resources that Jim McCloud, a longtime employee and executive in Henry J. Kaiser’s industrial empire died on Dec. 2 at the age of 92 in La Verne, Calif.

Jim McCloud being interviewed for an oral history in 2002.

I remember meeting Mr. McCloud for the first time about a decade ago when I had the privilege to assist him and a number of other former Kaiser executives who raised the money and supported the “Henry J. Kaiser: Think Big” special exhibition at the Oakland Museum, a tribute to Mr. Kaiser, in 2004.

During World War II, Mr. McCloud, right out of Stanford University with a degree in mechanical engineering, went to work at the famous Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, Calif., in 1941. He became outfitting superintendent in Yard No. 3 – today a key site of the Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front National Historical Park.

I will never forget one meeting when he was asked to describe just how frenetic things were when Kaiser workers were building a ship a day during World War II. “Well,” he replied, “if you dropped a quarter on the deck of one of those ships when it was being outfitted, that quarter would be welded to the deck before you could bend over to pick it up.”

Mr. McCloud was proud of the wartime shipbuilding effort in which tens of thousands of workers smashed all production records in the history of shipbuilding.

“None of these accomplishments would have been possible without the native ingenuity and patriotism of the American workers and the strong support of the City of Richmond, which absorbed the greatest percentage growth in population of any wartime center in the nation,” he said at the 1992 dedication of Kaiser Shipyard No. 2 as a historic landmark.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the National Historical Park that honors that important chapter in American history.

To learn more about Mr. McCloud’s experiences on the Home Front, read his Oral History in the collection of the Rosie the Riveter World War II American Home Front Oral History Project, a collaborative program of the Regional Oral History Office at The Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley, the National Park Service, and the City of Richmond.

James F. McCloud was born in West Oakland, Calif., on July 2, 1918. He attended Cole Grammar School, Lowell Junior High School and McClymond’s and St. Mary’s high schools.

It was in the shipyards building Liberty and Victory Ships that he met his wife of 54 years, Geneva Edgar, who died in 1999.

Except for a brief stint with Pacific Bridge Co. in San Francisco he spent his entire working career with Kaiser Industries. Following his work in the shipyards, he moved to the Kaiser-Frazer Willow Run automobile plant in Michigan. In the mid 1950s, he went to Argentina for the formation of Industrias Kaiser Argentina, the automobile plant in Latin America of which he became president.

Mr. McCloud returned to the Kaiser world headquarters at Kaiser Center in Oakland in 1972 and became president of Kaiser Engineers. He retired in 1983.

Mr. McCloud volunteered much of his time on behalf of many Oakland nonprofit organizations such as Mercy Care, the Catholic Diocese of Oakland, St. Mary’s College, the University of Santa Clara, Providence Hospital, the Oakland Coliseum and the U.S.S. Potomac Association.

He received a Papal Honor in 1964 and was made a Knight of St. Gregory by Pope Paul VI. He was also a Knight and his wife, Geneva, a Dame of the Order of Malta.

Mr. McCloud is survived by his four sons, Kimball, Kelly, Mark and James; two daughters-in-law, Claire and Marcela; eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Services will be held Saturday, Dec. 11. For information on the services and more about the family of Mr. McCloud, see his obituary at InsideBayArea.com.

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Promise of jobs attracts wartime workers to West Coast shipyards

posted on November 25, 2010

By Ginny McPartland

In the fall of 1942, thousands of New York area workers boarded Kaiser Shipyards recruiting trains in Hoboken, New Jersey, heading for Oregon.  Around the same time, thousands of job seekers were catching trains from the South and the Midwest bound for Richmond, California. Still others uttered a hopeful prayer as they started up their jalopies or farm trucks and headed west. Looking to change their lives for the better, the skilled and unskilled took a chance that the West Coast dream was not an illusion.

They were leaving their hometowns where recovery from the Great Depression was elusive. If they had jobs, the pay was low. Many were deep in debt and saw higher pay in the World War II shipyards as a way to heal their ailing finances. Some were young and saw no future or excitement in their native states.  

Chicago area welders wait for train to Richmond. National Archives photo by Jack Delano.

 Individuals were desperately needed to build ships to help win the war. So it didn’t matter whether you were black or white or Asian or Hispanic – or if you had skills and experience. You could learn on the job, and if you did well, you could improve your position and pay. You didn’t even have to be healthy and strong – and many weren’t. You could seek medical care at the shipyards, and you could purchase the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, affordable comprehensive, prepaid health care for yourself and your family.  

The shipyard life wasn’t all hearts and flowers. Worker housing was inadequate, and communities were overwhelmed with newcomers.  But for many workers, migration to the West Coast opened up a new, optimistic world.  

Mississippi mother of 11 becomes shipyard welder  

Lucille Preston, reared in Clarkesdale, Mississippi (near Memphis, Tennessee), is a case in point. She first went to work on a plantation at age 12 or 13 babysitting for the wealthy owner’s children. Eventually, she cooked for the family every day and served at their elaborate parties. The generous family hosted her wedding when she married a man whose parents worked for the same prominent family.  

When the couple’s six child was on the way, Preston’s husband, Willie, caught the California bug. “My husband just came home one evening and said that there was work in Richmond, California. ‘They’re opening up the Kaiser Shipyard, and I would like to go.’ So I said: ‘Why sure,’ ” Preston told Judith K. Dunning, oral history interviewer for a Bancroft Library project in 1985.*  

Unidentified family awaiting a train in Chicago. National Archives photo by Jack Delano.

Willie sent for Lucille when he got an apartment in the war housing. She set out for Richmond on a train, eight months pregnant, carrying her one-year-old with the other four clinging to her skirt. On the platform, a kind conductor shepherded Lucille and her brood through the crushing crowd onto a car bound for California. From El Paso, Texas, to Richmond, Lucille stood holding the baby while the other children settled at the feet of nearby passengers.  

At Richmond, the Prestons settled in their new home, Lucille gave birth and a month later she was working graveyard at the shipyards and learning how to weld. Willie worked swing shift so the two took turns at parenting.  The couple had five more children over the next decade. After the war, Lucille operated a dress-uniform press at Treasure Island where she worked for 20 years.   

Lucille told Dunning her only regret was that the expense of raising eight sons and three daughters kept her from building her dream house. However, most of her children went to college – one daughter has two master’s degrees –and they all have successful careers.    

Government helps young men launch shipyard careers  

Getting to California from other parts of the country seemed a pipe dream for many would-be welders. Kaiser Shipyard recruiters fronted train fare for many who came across the country with nothing. Workers could pay back the loan when they got their paychecks. For young men 16 to 24, the federal National Youth Administration (NYA), established by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1935, collaborated with the Richmond Kaiser Shipyards to make the impossible dream possible.  

The NYA paid for transportation to California. Once in Richmond, the young men were welcomed at the Richmond War Work Residence Center where they lived in dormitories and received two to four weeks of welder training. The pay for a month was $33.30, minus $22.50 for meals, dental and medical care, work clothes and equipment. After the initial period of “confusion, bewilderment and expense,” the men were placed in shipyard jobs, according to the Richmond Shipyard newsletter “Fore ‘N Aft.” By April 1943, the project had placed 1,500 welders in Richmond yards.  

Diversity reigns in the shipyards  

Throughout the war years, the West Coast shipyards attracted all kinds of people from all over the globe.  There were actors, writers, lawyers, cowboys, farmers, housewives, shopkeepers, and doctors. Some were experienced at building ships and others had never seen one.  

Here’s how the “Fore ‘N Aft” described the work force in April 1944: “We are all kinds of people, as you can tell by listening to us – Texas twang and Brooklyn brogue, down east Yankee and Carolina drawl, along with almost every language on earth from Polish to Swedish, from Syrian to Italian. It takes all kinds of people to build ships, just as it took all kinds to build America. Shoulder to shoulder, we’ll come through together.”  

*Lucille Preston, “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.  

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Kaiser-built 1954 sports car delights today’s collectors

posted on November 15, 2010
1954 Kaiser-Darrin donated to Oakland Museum by retired KP pediatrician Ed Schoen

By Ginny McPartland

When Henry J. Kaiser went into the car manufacturing business in the late 40s, he had big ideas, as he did in all his ventures.  Unlike his many successful start-ups – the most notable legacy being Kaiser Permanente – his foray into the automotive business seemed a failure at the time. He went on to make a success in producing Jeeps, but the economy sedans (the Henry J), luxury and family cars (Manhattan and Special), and the sporty, two-seater Kaiser-Darrin were no longer manufactured after 1954. The small Kaiser Motors Corporation had lost out to the big three: Ford, General Motors and Chrysler.

The happy part of this story is about the Kaiser-Darrin, which is living a charmed life today in the hands of avid collectors.  Earlier this year, a “supercharged,” red Kaiser-Darrin garnered a handsome $220,000 in a classic-car auction in Scottsdale, Arizona. Other Darrins have sold in recent years for $100,000 to $176,000 at the same auction.

One of the first American sports cars, the Darrin has a fiberglass body, sliding doors that disappear into the fenders, a three-position soft top, bucket seats, and a low center of gravity good for cornering. Only manufactured in 1954, the Kaiser-Darrin came in four classy colors –yellow satin, cream, red and light green. To date, only 80 or so widely scattered examples of the Darrin have escaped the junk heap.

Famed automobile designer-to-the-stars Howard “Dutch” Darrin, an on-and-off Henry Kaiser collaborator, developed the prototype of the fiberglass-body beauty on his own and unveiled it to Henry Kaiser as a fait compli. Henry Kaiser was not pleased. He is reputed to have told Darrin the idea was scatter-brained.  But Kaiser warmed up to the idea when his second wife, Alyce “Ale,” piped up: “Oh Henry, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” 

Kaiser agreed to produce 435 of the stunning vehicle that turned out to vie with the 1954-released Ford Thunderbird and the 1953 and later Chevrolet Corvettes.  These sports cars were America’s answer to British models, such as the Jaguar produced as early as 1948. The Kaiser-Darrin and the Chevy Corvette compete for bragging rights for the first fiberglass body – the Darrin prototype was developed in 1952, and the Chevy Corvette was first shown and produced in 1953.

1954 Kaiser Motors Corporation sales brochure

Fifty to 100 unsold Darrins, touted in the sales brochure as the “the sports car America has been waiting for,” were reportedly left in a forgotten snowy lot in Willow Run, Michigan, during the winter of 1954-1955. Darrin, whose heart was in the Kaiser-Darrin, later bought the abandoned roadsters from Kaiser. He put them in saleable condition and souped up many of them with Cadillac V-8 engines.  A Willys Jeep 6-cyclinder engine was standard in the Darrins produced by Kaiser.

Permanente physicians drive Kaiser cars

The story of the Kaiser automobile intersects early on with the Kaiser Permanente saga.  As a perk of the job, Permanente physicians were given a Kaiser car to drive to work and for their personal use. In the days before 1952, doctors used the company car to make house calls ($5 per visit). The physicians had a choice of vehicles; most chose one of the sedans. But Ed Schoen, MD, a pediatrician who joined KP in 1954, saw the Darrin as an apt ride for a bachelor relocating from Boston to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Schoen had followed fellow resident and friend Cliff Uyeda to San Francisco where Uyeda was a KP pediatrician. Schoen joined KP in Oakland where he worked for 49 years, the longest tenure of any KP doctor. He became chief of pediatrics at the Oakland Medical Center in 1966 and regional director of newborn screening in 1990 before retiring in 2003.

Kaiser-Darrin postage stamp 2005

When the auto manufacturing venture ended in 1955, Kaiser offered to sell the cars to the doctors at bargain prices. The Darrin had originally retailed for $3,600. Schoen got his with 6,000 miles on it for $900. He would drive the unusual sports car exclusively for the next eight years, and he got a lot of attention driving around town. “People used to follow me home from work and ask me, ‘what is it?’” Schoen related. And as a bachelor, Schoen found that girls fancied a ride in the Darrin.

After meeting his wife, Fritzi, who came to the U.S. from Austria in 1958, Schoen took her many places in his cream-colored convertible. “I courted her in that car. . . She liked it,” he said. Ed and Fritzi married in 1960, and it wasn’t long before the Darrin was no longer practical. A daughter, Melissa, was born in 1963, and son Eric came along in 1968.

But Schoen kept the car and drove it to work for many years.  In recent years, he had it restored and preserved it in his garage. He entered it in car shows and won a couple of prizes competing with Ford T-birds and Chevy Corvettes. He also loaned the car for the 50th anniversary of Kaiser Permanente Vallejo and for display during another KP event in Oakland at Mosswood Park. The Darrin was never neglected:  Schoen took it out for a spin almost every weekend.

Rarity has its rewards

After owning the car for almost 50 years, Schoen donated his Darrin to the Oakland Museum in 2004 for the Henry J. Kaiser “Thing Big” exhibit. The Darrin was shown along with a 1953 Henry J Corsair Sedan in the ambitious exhibit that covered Kaiser’s amazing life as a 20th century industrialist and co-founder with Sidney R. Garfield, MD, of the Kaiser Permanente health plan. Today, Schoen’s Darrin is in storage awaiting a new venue.

Schoen was interested to learn about the high bids cast for the $220,000 Darrin in the 2010 Barrett-Jackson auction in Scottsdale. “When I donated mine in 2004 to the museum, it was appraised at $60,000 to $75,000,” he related.  He also noted the differences between his car and the one on the auction block. “The original Darrins did not have supercharged engines. Mine just had the 6-cylinder Willys Jeep engine . . . it was not a high performance car.”

To see a Kaiser-Darrin in action, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBtuXBVBPMY

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25 years ago: Georgia native sows seeds of success at home

posted on October 30, 2010

Harper Gaston, MD

By Ginny McPartland

For Harper Gaston, MD, going to Atlanta 25 years ago to start Kaiser Permanente in Georgia was much like going home. A Georgia native and alumnus of Emory University, Gaston was at first reluctant. He had been practicing internal medicine and cardiology at the Hayward Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Northern California for 23 years and had just been elected physician-in-chief.

“I told them: I am planning on retiring to Georgia, but my intent is to serve out my term, about four more years in California,” Gaston said in an interview with Historian Steve Gilford after his retirement in 1993.

However, the pressure to help establish a Georgia Region for Kaiser Permanente was intense. In 1985, Atlanta was the fastest growing city in the U.S. and was rated as the best place to do business in a survey of 400 CEOs. Atlanta was second only to Los Angeles in employer growth. Kaiser Permanente, with a presence in California, Oregon, Hawaii and the Midwest, was anxious to bring its brand of community-based prepaid health care to Atlanta, the hub of the Southeast.

Eventually convinced Atlanta was a good move, Gaston packed up with his wife, Anne Gaston, a Hayward KP pediatrician, and went to Georgia in the summer of 1985. Anne Gaston was also going home; she had come to Northern California from Georgia with her husband to join KP in 1961.
Gaston also took along two key people to start the health care program: Edgar T. Carlson of the Ohio Permanente Region who became Georgia regional manager; and Margaret Jordan, RN, a quality leader in Oakland, as Georgia health plan manager. Ron Hostettler, also from Ohio, came as assistant health plan manager and marketing director; John Blankenship came from Southern California Region as chief financial officer.

Renewing friendships

When Gaston hit the ground in Atlanta, he knew just what to do. He renewed his community contacts and got involved with Emory University, the Medical Association of Georgia, and other local physician organizations. “Knowing the leadership of these places and refurbishing old contacts was a great help. I think you can go home again.”

Louis Sullivan, MD

Gaston also picked several prominent members of the Atlanta community – banker John W. McIntyre; physician Louis Wade Sullivan, dean and director of the Morehouse College of Medicine (later to be appointed secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services); and community leader Laura Jones Hardman – to sit on the KP Georgia board of directors. Bruce Sams, MD, a native Georgian and executive director of the Northern California Permanente Medical Group, was also a key figure on the Georgia board.

As founding medical director, Gaston personally called on many of Atlanta’s physicians in their offices during 1985, the start-up year. He selected the best doctors in all parts of the metro Atlanta, including the black community, and invited them to join the Southeast Permanente Medical Group (TSPMG) to care for KP members. He negotiated contracts with three Atlanta area hospitals for KP inpatient care. “They were exactly the best hospitals in Atlanta, no question about it,” he said.

Early acceptance and rapid growth

KP Georgia’s earliest members were seen starting in October of 1985 at Northlake Medical Office in DeKalb County. Three months later, the Cumberland office was opened and then, another facility was opened near Southwest Community Hospital in the black community. The new region ended the year with 265 members, 25 health plan employees and seven TSPMG employees. Acquiring financially ailing Maxicare and securing the state of Georgia employee account in 1988, the region grew to 100,000 members by 1989.

Georgia KP had set up 10 medical facilities by the end of the 1990s and added another seven in the 2000s. This year, development has accelerated with four new buildings already launched and three more planned. Today, 280 Georgia region physicians and 2,200 staff members care for about a quarter of a million members in 20-plus facilities throughout the 28-county Atlanta metro area.

Emphasis on quality care

From the beginning, Gaston was intent on high quality for Georgia KP members. His efforts paid off.  In 1995, Georgia Kaiser Permanente was one of two health plans in Atlanta to earn the National Committee on Quality Assurance (NCQA) three-year accreditation. In 1998, Newsweek and US News and World Report rated Kaiser Permanente the No. 1 health plan in Georgia. The American Medical Group Association gave the Southeast Permanente Medical Group (TSPMG) its Preeminence Award in 2002.

More accolades were to follow:

  • Special NCQA recognition in 2006 for putting into place programs to solve health disparities for African Americans, Latinos and Asians
  • Atlanta Magazine’s 2008 award to KP as a “Best Place to Work”
  • J.D. Power’s ranking of Georgia KP as highest in customer satisfaction among health plans in the South Atlantic region, 2008
  • US News and World Report top-rated health plan in Georgia, 2008
  • 2010: the NCQA announced in October that KP Georgia has the highest breast cancer screening rate in the country, 91 percent, compared to a 71 percent national average.

Community service a given for KP

Shortly after opening in Georgia, Kaiser Permanente looked for opportunities to offer help to the community. In 1986, Permanente physicians agreed to reinstate recently discontinued hearing and vision screening for financially strapped area schools. Physicians screened 3,600 children in 17 DeKalb County elementary schools and two City of Decatur schools.

Over the years, the scale has only gotten bigger. Georgia region has sponsored the huge, area-wide Kaiser Permanente Corporate Run/Walk and Fitness Program since 2004. In 2005, the Atlanta American Red Cross named KP Georgia the Philanthropist of the Year for its sponsorship of the annual CPR Saturday program. For its 20th anniversary in 2005, KP Georgia gave $1 million to the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta.

To wrap up its quarter of a century, Georgia KP topped itself with a $2.5 million donation for the development of the Eastside section of the Atlanta Beltline trail. The corridor of parks, trails and passenger rail service takes advantage of an old 22-mile railroad right-of-way that loops around the city. KP Georgia has also committed to a $5 million donation to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta for a new hospital.

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Kaiser Permanente’s Commitment to Sustainability

posted on October 20, 2010

by Jacqueline F. Brown 

Kaiser Permanente’s interest in energy conservation and sustainability can be traced back to a time when many considered a concern for the environment to be irrational. However, rather than shy away from this controversy, Clifford Keene, vice president and general manager of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals, placed Kaiser Permanente in the center of it. 

Keene invited naturalist, Rachel Carson, to deliver a public lecture at a celebrated forum after the publication of her widely debated book Silent Spring. Carson delivered the keynote address to a large audience in October 1963 at the Seventh Annual Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and Permanente Medical Group symposium, “Man Against Himself,” held at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Keene stated that the purpose of the symposium was “to examine the propensity and the ability of man to harm man on a grand scale.”

Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring

In her groundbreaking book, Carson warned of an environmental and health apocalypse from the overuse of pesticides and chemical pollutants. Though Carson’s book had been roundly criticized in the national press, Kaiser Permanente leadership demonstrated its willingness to engage her and the concerned public. 

In the early 1970s, employees at the KP Santa Clara Medical Center in Santa Clara, CA formed an Ecology Committee with an objective of teaching employees “ecological common sense.” Santa Clara employees launched an initiative in paper recycling, pushed for carpooling and bike riding, and lobbied county officials for better public transportation.

Santa Clara was not the only Kaiser Foundation medical center to initiate environmentally friendly practices. In 1981, employees at the Kaiser Permanente Vallejo Medical Center in Vallejo, CA earned an award for energy-saving efforts. In just five years, the staff at Vallejo reduced energy consumption by 50 percent, even with the addition of a new floor at the facility.

A view of the solar panel roof-top installation at the new Kaiser Foundation Modesto Hospital

Kaiser Permanente is adding solar panels to 15 facilities in California by the summer of 2011, furthering a solar initiative begun in 2008 when KP opened one of the “greenest” hospitals in the country in Modesto, California. The addition of solar panels to these facilities will eliminate the purchase and disposal of 40 tons of harmful chemicals and drastically reduce Kaiser Permanente’s use of fossil fuels.

Kaiser Permanente also recently announced that it will require its suppliers to provide environmental data for medical equipment and products used in hospitals, medical offices and other facilities. Each supplier is required to use Kaiser Permanente’s Sustainability Scorecard, which asks the supplier to provide information on their company’s environmental commitment, use of potentially harmful chemicals in the products, and information about product and packaging recycling. The Sustainability Scorecards not only ensure that Kaiser Permanente is using green products, but it encourages suppliers to create products that are safe for the environment.

In May, many of Kaiser Permanente’s efforts towards creating a healthy environment were honored as 18 Kaiser facilities across the nation were recognized for their efforts in waste reduction and pollution prevention. The awards were given at CleanMed 2010, a global conference for environmental leaders in health care.

Kaiser Permanente’s recent success in reducing waste and conserving energy can be easily explained through its history. While Carson is now considered the leader of the environmental movement, Kaiser Permanente’s forward-thinking leaders recognized the need to hear her voice when many others would not. It is this future-minded planning that has allowed Kaiser Permanente to implement many successful practices that improve the health of the environment.

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Hawaii: Not your garden variety paradise

posted on October 7, 2010

By Ginny McPartland

To most outsiders, Hawaii is that far-off paradise where people go for that well-deserved rest and recreation. They come back tan and relaxed, and everyone is green with envy. To be sure, the Hawaiian Islands offer plenty for the casual visitor. But to the residents, it isn’t just about gargantuan waves and potent Mai Tai’s.

Hawaiians have to worry about the same things mainlanders worry about: a livelihood, a good future for their children, and quality health care. Lucky for them, taking good care of patients is top of mind for physicians in the Hawaii Permanente Medical Group. On a recent trip to Honolulu, I witnessed their determination first hand.

HPMG President Geoff Sewell MD and Heritage Director Tom Debley discuss KP history during a 50th anniversary event.

Although in a partying mood (they’re celebrating 50 years as a medical group in Hawaii), Permanente doctors focused on issues during a party/seminar in Honolulu. What have they done right in the past five decades? And what do they need to do differently – better – in the future?

Overcoming a tough situation

The Hawaii Permanente Medical Group staffed the second launching of Kaiser Permanente in Hawaii. In 1958, Henry J. Kaiser had built a 143-bed hospital in Waikiki and had hired a group of doctors who had other interests as well. In 1960, Kaiser realized that the doctors needed to serve the KP membership exclusively for the partnership to work. He then asked The Permanente Medical Group in California to help set up a new group.  Headed by Phillip Chu, MD, the reconfigured medical group began providing for Hawaii members in August of 1960. 

The 1960s was a difficult time for Permanente physicians, indeed for all group practice doctors. Across the country, traditional medical societies resisted prepaid group practice claiming it was “unethical” and denied patients choice of physicians. The hostile physicians denied hospital privileges and medical society membership to group practice physicians, and at times labeled the new care delivery method as “socialist” and its product “inferior.”

Undaunted, the Hawaii Permanente physicians persevered. They set out to prove their detractors wrong.  In 1969, the Hawaii region participated in a study conducted by the Hawaii Medical Association and the University of Michigan that showed KP hospital care to be above average in the state. Later, in 1977, the results of a University of Michigan quality of care study showed Hawaii Permanente Medical Group doctors to be well above the average among Hawaiian physicians. A total of 454 Oahu physicians in 18 specialties, including 42 Permanente physicians, participated in the study.

Quality a major focus

As early as 1969, the Hawaii region had established its own ongoing medical audit system. In 1971, the region received a federal grant to set up an experimental four-year program to monitor inpatient care. Later, Hawaii medical staff developed methods for monitoring outpatient care for all the Kaiser Permanente regions.

Not only was the Hawaii staff distinguishing itself in quality of care, but they were also participating in government programs to reach out and help the poor of its communities. The group participated in a federal Medicaid program in 1971 to care for 500 indigent families on Oahu and later expanded the program to Maui. Other community outreach programs followed.

Perhaps the ultimate community outreach program was launched in Hawaii last year when Kaiser Permanente started a high-tech mobile service on the Big Island. The 500-square-foot exam unit on wheels brings care and preventive screenings to thousands of KP members and to the uninsured in the community.  The van is equipped with digital mammography equipment and is connected to Kaiser Permanente’s comprehensive electronic health record system.

Doing fine now, thank you very much

Fifty years after its founding, Kaiser Permanente Hawaii is thriving. With 430 physicians, 4,400 employees, almost 224,000 members, 278 critical care hospital beds, and 17 outpatient clinics on three islands, the region has established itself as an organization bent on excellence and community service. In the past year, Kaiser Permanente Hawaii has received these designations:

– Highest-rated private health insurance plan in Hawaii (National Committee on Quality Assurance, NCQA, 2009)

–Number 1 Medicaid plan in the nation (US. News & World Report, 2010)

–Highest-rated health plan in the U.S. for breast cancer screening (NCQA, 2009)

–Highest accreditation rating of “excellence of quality and service (NCQA, 2009). Hawaii has earned this rating every year since the NCQA began rating health plans in 1999.

Henry J. Kaiser’s big Hawaii plans honored

View an early Hawaii KP patient could wake to.

Henry Kaiser’s flamboyant entrée into the Hawaii health care scene in 1958 eventually dovetailed beautifully into the Hawaii Permanente Medical Group’s plans. In celebrating its jubilee, the group staged a key event at the Hawaii Prince Hotel on Waikiki, the site of Kaiser’s first Hawaii hospital. Located adjacent to the Ala Wai Boat Harbor, Kaiser Permanente’s early patients awoke to beautiful tropical sunrises and drifted off to dramatic sunsets.

In 1986, the old hospital was blown up in a public spectacle that became part of an episode of the celebrated television series of the time, “Magnum, P. I.” starring Tom Selleck. The implosion made way for the new hotel, and Kaiser Permanente built a new, modern hospital on Moanalua Road north of Honolulu. This is the site of the Hawaii region Moanalua Medical Center and Clinic where construction is under way to expand and improve services.

Front view of the Hawaiian Village hotel built by Henry J. Kaiser in 1955

Meanwhile, just around the corner in Waikiki, Henry J. Kaiser had built his Kaiser Hawaiian Village, a uniquely designed resort that is now the Hilton Hawaiian Village. Kaiser showed his respect for the indigenous population by designing the villages to represent  the culture of the hotel’s surroundings. He employed Hawaiian Samoans to come to the resort site and hand-build the guest cottages. These craftsmen actually wove coconut fronds into thatching. To honor Henry Kaiser, the resort has created museum-like public displays telling the story of his Hawaiian feats.

Today, the Hilton resort also hosts the Bishop Museum Collection, a satellite museum that gives visitors a taste of the original Hawaii. The main Bishop Museum, recently restored and with a new science building, is the largest museum in the state and the premier natural and cultural history institution in the Pacific. The museum is located in Honolulu off the beaten tourist path.

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Wartime shipyard child care centers set standards for future

posted on September 29, 2010

Naptime for Kaiser kids

By Ginny McPartland
Child care at the workplace was a brand new phenomenon in World War II. The government-subsidized Kaiser West Coast Shipyards nursery schools, which enrolled more than 7,000 offspring of women war workers, offered the perfect opportunity to test theories of the then-fledgling field of child development.

In 1943, Henry J. Kaiser invited key figures in child development studies to his shipyards to set up ideal facilities and programs so workers could build ships without worrying about the safety and health of their children. These model child care centers at the Kaiser shipyards in Richmond, California, and Portland, Oregon, yielded valuable research results that helped fuel the study of early childhood education for decades after the war.

Catherine Landreth, PhD, of the University of California, Berkeley, set up the Richmond schools program. Lois Meek Stolz, PhD, a child development researcher and author from Columbia University and UC Berkeley, set up the Portland centers. James L. Hymes, Jr., a student of Stolz at Columbia, served as manager of the Portland centers.

Stolz and Landreth continued to exert influence on the child development world until the end of their lives. But it was Hymes, just 30 at war’s end, who would become a prodigious contributor to the child development literature for the next five decades. His work is often quoted today. One such quote reflects lessons from the home front: “Every day-care center, whether it knows it or not, is a school. The choice is never between custodial care and education. The choice is between unplanned and planned education, between conscious and unconscious education, between bad education and good education.”

Early Hymes work discovered this summer

Recently, my colleagues and I unearthed the final report of the two Portland Kaiser wartime child development centers, along with a series of seven pamphlets written for postwar child care providers. We found these documents, mainly written by Hymes, in the Institute of Governmental Studies Library in the basement of UCB’s Moses Hall. They were originally filed in 1946 in the Library for Economic Research at Berkeley.

The series of pamphlets includes: 1) A Social Philosophy from Nursery School Teaching; 2) Must Nursery Teachers Plan? 3) Who Will Need a Post-War Nursery School? 4) Meeting Needs: The War Nursery Approach; 5) The Role of the Nutritionist; 6) Large Groups in Nursery School; 7) Should Children Under Two Be in the Nursery School? Two unnumbered pamphlets titled “Toys to Make” and “Recipes for Foods for Children” were also mentioned in the report but copies are not available in the library. Teachers bought a total of 2,582 pamphlets at 15 cents each, according to the report dated December 1945.

Pamphlets offer nuggets

The pamphlet titled “Should Children Under Two Be in Nursery School?” addressed an issue the child care centers were forced to face head-on during the war. Generally, nursery schools did not take children under 2 because experiments had shown the younger children did not thrive in group settings. But the demand for care for infants was too high in the shipyards to ignore. They agreed to accept children as young as 18 months, and in Oregon alone the centers enrolled 904 children 18 to 24 months of age.

“We therefore set out to plan a program which would include among other things: Provision for close and continuous relation of each child with one adult who would be responsible for him especially during eating, toileting and sleeping and during any time of emotional stress when he needed ‘mothering,’ ” wrote Stolz and Hymes.

Good food for good health

Another key wartime lesson: “Food influences behavior. Small children…have pounded into us in unforgettable ways that hungry people are irritable; that they fight more; that they cry easily; that they become destructive…Some children we have seen, hungrier still, have told us that hunger can make people placid, inactive, lethargic,” Hymes wrote. In pamphlet 5, Miriam Lowenberg, chief nutritionist, discussed the crucial link between food and good health: “The (nursery school) nutritionist (helps) teachers … bring the child who needs medical care to the attention of a visiting nurse or doctor.”

The final report discussed other crucial issues such as: the need for child care services after the war for low-income women, costs of the child care operation including nourishing meals, methods of recruiting and retaining qualified teachers, nurses and counselors, providing weekly onsite professional development, and offering opportunities for staff to participate in policy decisions. Attempts to maintain a 10:1 child-to-teacher ratio for the children over 2 and a 5:1 ratio for the infants 18 to 24 months were mostly successful, the authors reported.

Kaiser experts shine on after war

After the war ended, Hymes gained national recognition as an author. Among his earliest best-selling booklets was “A Pound of Prevention” in 1947, which advised first-grade teachers on how to handle difficult “war babies.” He wrote that the “crybabies, whiners and bullies” were still suffering from the disruption of war. Hymes also wrote “How to Tell Your Child About Sex” (1949), “Behavior and Misbehavior: A Teacher’s Guide to Discipline” (1957), “Teaching the Child Under Six” (1968), and “Twenty Years in Review: A Look at Early Childhood Education 1971-1990.”

Hymes served in the Lyndon Johnson administration on the National Planning Committee for Head Start. He and Catherine Landreth both were instrumental in the development of the educational program for low-income children. Landreth was also known for her groundbreaking research in social perception. One of her studies found that children learn racial prejudice from their parents as early as three years old. She wrote three books that were influential in shaping early childhood education: “Education of the Young Child” (with Katherine H. Read), 1942; “The Psychology of Early Childhood,” 1958; and “Preschool Learning and Teaching,” 1972.

After the war, Stolz published “Father Relations of War-Born Children,” a study of how father-child relationships were affected by a father’s absence for war duty (1954); “Our changing understanding of young children’s fears, 1920-1960” (1964), among other related works.

To learn more about the legacy of child care in the World War II Kaiser Shipyards, visit the Home Front festival Saturday, Oct.2, at the Craneway Pavilion on the Richmond waterfront. Kaiser Permanente Heritage Resources is collaborating with Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park to tell the story of the wartime child care centers.

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