Posts Tagged ‘Henry J. Kaiser’

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In Memory of Lena Horne & Launch of the SS George Washington Carver Liberty Ship

posted on May 10, 2010

By Tom Debley
Director of Heritage Resources

Singer Lena Horne prepares to launch the SS George Washington Carver on May 7, 1943 at Kaiser Shipyard No. 1 in Richmond, Calif. This photograph was taken by African American Photographer E. F. Joseph for the Office of War Information.

This week we pay tribute to the great jazz singer Lena Horne, who died Sunday, May 9, at the age of 92.

What’s her connection to Kaiser Permanente? Sixty-seven years ago, on May 7, 1943, Lena Horne broke a bottle of champagne across the bow to launch the SS George Washington Carver, a brand new Liberty ship built in Henry J. Kaiser’s legendary World War II shipyards in Richmond, Calif.

She was proudly representing the more than 7,000 African American shipyard workers — 1,000 of them female “Rosie the Riveters” — and all of whom received their health care from the medical care program that would become Kaiser Permanente after the war.

Their story is part of Kaiser Permanente’s long and proud history of ethnic and cultural diversity.

The SS George Washington Carver was the first Kaiser-built Liberty ship to be named for a famous African American, and many of the men and women who built it were African Americans.

Anna Bland, a burner, is shown at work on the SS George Washington Carver as it was being rushed to completion in the spring of 1943. Photograph by E. F. Joseph for the Office of War Information.

Carver, you will recall, was the scientist, botanist, educator, and inventor who had died only four months earlier in 1943. Who better to christen her on her maiden voyage than one of America’s most admired  and talented African American women?

Also on hand that day was a well-known African American photographer, E. F. Joseph, who recorded the event for the Office of War Information.

The ship was initially assigned by the War Shipping Administration (WSA) to the American South African Line, Inc. for merchant service. But in November 1943 the ship was turned over to the United States Army and converted to the Hospital Ship Dogwood.

In January 1946, the ship was again converted to carry a combination of troops and military dependents as the USAT George Washington Carver before retiring to National Defense Reserve Fleet.  It was sold for scrap in 1964.

Today, the story of these African American workers, the SS George Washington Carver, and its launch by Lena Horne is one of the legacy stories of the Home Front that is part of the history that is shared in the Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, Calif.

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Henry J. Kaiser: America’s No. 1 Civilian Hero

posted on April 13, 2010

By Tom Debley, Director, Heritage Resources

Henry J. Kaiser was featured as "Shipbuilder No. 1" in a 1943 Real Heroes comic book.

Sixty-five years ago this year Henry J. Kaiser emerged on the American scene as the single most popular civilian hero of World War II, which came to an end in 1945.

It was a Roper Poll that spring that reported that—in the words of Stephen B. Adams, author of “Mr. Kaiser goes to Washington”—the American public “believed Kaiser had done more to help the president win the war than any other civilian.”

A Gallup Poll a few months later found Kaiser at the top of the list of people Americans thought should be president—with Kaiser trailing only Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower. It is no surprise, then, that Kaiser was on President Roosevelt’s short list for vice president when he chose Harry Truman in the election of 1944.

Why not Kaiser? One answer comes from Michael Dobrin, guest curator of a special exhibit on Kaiser’s life at the Oakland Museum of California in 2004, who concluded Kaiser was too progressive for Democratic Party leaders.

“…Conservative party insiders—probably sensing coming postwar struggles over civil rights—balked at his overt advocacy of voter education, voters’ rights and support for unions,” Dobrin wrote in The Museum of California Magazine. “His name was dropped from the list.”

The public’s admiration for Henry Kaiser—whose most enduring legacy is co-founding with surgeon Sidney R. Garfield the medical care program that bears his name—lasted up to and beyond the end of his life in 1967. Indeed, he was so beloved that when he died in 1967 mourners flooded his memorial service with more than 20,000 white and red roses – said to be the entire supply of all florists in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was in addition to thousands of orchids and other flora from people in the Hawaiian Islands.

As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in condolences sent to Kaiser’s family, “Henry J. Kaiser embodied in his own career all that has been best in our country’s tradition. His own energy, imagination and determination gave him greatness—and he used that greatness to give unflaggingly for the betterment of his country and his fellow man.”

Today, of course, his efforts—and the legendary labor of almost a quarter million men and women of all races who worked for him in his West Coast ship building operations—are honored by the Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, Calif., which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.

In addition, the newly renovated Oakland Museum of California will reopen May 1 with its first major redo in nearly 40 years. Its completely new Gallery of California History will include Henry J. Kaiser. According to the museum, the theme of the gallery will be Coming to California—“an idea that evokes not only the arrivals and departures of people throughout human history and their interactions with the inhabitants already here, but also the notion of coming to terms with the influence of California on our individual and collective identities.”

Late last year, Kaiser also was inducted into the California Hall of Fame and is featured in an exhibit at The California Museum  in Sacramento.

Interested in learning more about Henry J. Kaiser? Here are three good books, any one of which you might find in a local library (or for sale online):

“Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West,” Mark S. Foster, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas, 1991.

“Henry J. Kaiser: Western Colossus,” Albert P. Heiner, Halo Books, San Francisco, Calif., 1991.

“Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington, The Rise of a Government Entrepreneur,” Stephen B. Adams, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1997.

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Replacing ‘Sick Care’ with ‘Health Care:’ Dr. Sidney Garfield’s Ideas in the National Reform Dialogue

posted on April 5, 2010

By Tom Debley, Director, Heritage Resources

It was fascinating to me to research and write a book about the life of Kaiser Permanente’s founding physician, Sidney R. Garfield, but it has become even more so to observe how visionary he was in his time as discussion continues in the wake of President Obama’s signature on health care reform.

Dr. Sidney R. Garfield, a surgeon, co-founded prevention-focused Kaiser Permanente with industrialist Henry J. Kaiser.

A month ago, I wrote a blog about Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, who argued in the pages of Business Week that health care needs business models like Kaiser Permanente—health care systems in which doctors and insurers are on the same side of the ledger as the patient. I observed that this was an idea Dr. Garfield put forward as the model for Kaiser Permanente in a speech in Portland, Oregon 65 years ago Sunday (April 4).

This Monday (April 5), I was struck by a quote in an article by Robert Pear in the New York Times.

“We don’t have a health care system in America,” said Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who chairs the Senate health committee. “We have a sick care system. If you get sick, you get care. But precious little is spent to keep people healthy in the first place.”

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, visiting World War II Home Front patient, asked Dr. Sidney R. Garfield to tell her about prevention-focused medical care.

Harkin’s statement is an interesting juxtaposition with an event exactly 67 years earlier—April 5, 1943—when First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited a World War II Kaiser Industries shipyard worker, a woman with a seriously injured left leg, as shipyard manager Edgar F. Kaiser looked on in Vancouver, Washington.

Whatever Mrs. Roosevelt heard about Dr. Garfield’s focus on injury and illness prevention efforts as he built the largest civilian medical care program on the Home Front of World War II, she was immediately intrigued. Returning to the White House, she dictated a note to Dr. Garfield, “I am interested in getting medical care, both preventive and curative, at the least cost to the people. What is your program on the preventive side?”

“Your expression of interest in preventive medicine is rather closely allied with our thoughts for medical care,” Dr. Garfield responded in a letter detailing his ideas.

What Dr. Garfield did on the Home Front is, of course, one of the historical stories told at the Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, Calif.

Dr. Garfield spent his whole professional life on these ideas. It was not easy, but his vision was central to the evolution of Kaiser Permanente as—in Dr. Garfield’s words—a “total health” system of care.

In the first 15 years of toil after World War II, Dr. Garfield’s big frustration was how challenging it was to move from a “sick plan” to a “health plan,” but he never gave up. His big breakthrough came 50 years ago next month, and I will write about that story in a blog in May.

In the meantime, if you are interested in learning more about Dr. Garfield, my book, “The Story of Dr. Sidney R. Garfield: The Visionary Who Turned Sick Care into Health Care,” is available from the publisher, The Permanente Press, as well as from Amazon.com in both book form and on Kindle.

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Harry Bridges and Sidney Garfield: Synergistic Collaboration

posted on March 31, 2010

Harry Bridges at ILWU meeting 1960

By Ginny McPartland
During the Cold War, the average American scorned any ideas that even hinted at socialism. Going against mainstream politics in the 1950s was fraught with danger.

Henry J. Kaiser and Sidney Garfield, MD, took their licks from the conservative medical establishment for their nontraditional ideas of health care. They were called “socialist” even though both were adamantly opposed to “socialized medicine.”  

Their contemporary– and sometimes collaborator — militant labor leader Harry Bridges was accused of being a communist, which he was not, as he fought hard and dangerously for bargaining power for dock workers.  

Marking the 20th anniversary of Bridges’s death this month brings to mind the groundbreaking 20th century achievements of these working class heroes. Despite the opposition, they didn’t back down.  

For Harry Bridges, elevating the worker to the bargaining table was a lifetime passion. His heart was with the “working stiff” who was considered almost like property of the employer before unions. “The basic thing about this lousy capitalist system,” Bridges declared, “is that the workers create the wealth, but those who own it, the rich, keep getting richer and the poor get poorer.” 

Born in Australia in 1900, Bridges was inspired by Jack London’s books to go to sea. He jumped ship on his first job because he disagreed with the skipper on the treatment of the seaman. He landed in San Francisco and soon began to organize the waterfront workers.  

His work culminated in 1934 in the San Francisco dock workers strike that resulted in the death of two men, casualties of police bullets. Union members refused to work until they could negotiate higher wages and a method of getting work on the docks without having to pay a kickback. The strikers won and Harry Bridges was set for 40 years as the president of the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) starting in 1937.  

“A Working Class Hero Is Something to Be” — John Lennon

By 1950, the ILWU had become a strong advocate for its members, and its leadership worked to spread unionism to other industries. The ILWU pioneered health and welfare benefits for its members. 

Enter Sidney Garfield: 
After the War when the Richmond shipyards closed, Kaiser and the Permanente doctors were ready, willing and able to take care of people. Both men had track records of providing affordable care to the working man. The health plan had been opened up to the public in 1945 but the enrollment was small. 

Enter Harry Bridges: 
It was a marriage with great potential. Bridges needed a health plan for his members and Henry Kaiser needed health plan members. Instant symbiosis.
  

In many ways, the goals of the two organizations converged. Bridges wanted all of his workers to have a health assessment and screenings to prevent disease. Kaiser Permanente’s Garfield saw how to accomplish the “multiphasic” examinations for all twenty thousand workers and later set up a way of collecting the results, at first on paper, and then in KP’s pioneering computerization of medical records. In effect, the ILWU members were guinea pigs for what has grown and expanded into KP’s electronic medical records prowess.  

Young Harry Bridges aboard ship about 1920.

Along the way, Bridges helped Kaiser Permanente by writing editorials in the ILWU newsletter supporting the health plan physicians. In 1953 Bridges assailed the San Pedro Community Hospital in Los Angeles for refusing privileges to KP doctors. In 1954, he criticized the American Medical Association for trying to block group medicine. “Group medicine is here to stay,” he wrote. 

In turn, Permanente physicians at times provided medical care on credit for striking ILWU members. Henry Kaiser was in favor of unions. In 1954, Kaiser said problems can be averted “simply by genuine recognition that the right of collective bargaining . . . is sound, essential human relations. I agreed a long time ago that unions are here to stay.” 

In 1965, Kaiser received the AFL-CIO’s highest honor for his achievements in voluntary medical care, housing and labor relations. Previous winners included former President Harry Truman and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.  

To view Arlo Guthrie’s tribute to Harry Bridges on Youtube: http://tinyurl.com/y87jt34
 

Top photograph by Otto Hagel, from Men and Machines, 1963; reproduced by permission of the Center for Creative Photography; © 1998 The University of Arizona Foundation
Ship photo courtesy of ILWU Archives, Anne Rand Research Library, International Longshore and Warehouse Union, San Francisco

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Climb the gangplank to learn about World War II’s social legacy

posted on March 13, 2010

Photo courtesy of Red Oak Victory

By Ginny McPartland
If you grew up in the Bay Area, or anywhere in America for that matter, you’re missing the boat if you haven’t been out to experience the Red Oak Victory ship docked on the Richmond waterfront. Granted it’s difficult to find, and in fact, you may never have heard of it. Not to worry, most people haven’t yet visited the Rosie the Riveter National Park where the ship is found.

The Red Oak Victory, built in the Kaiser Richmond shipyards in 1944, is a huge hulk of seaworthy steel that embodies a million stories pertinent to our society’s past. The ammunition ship, saved from scrap in 1998 by the Richmond Museum of History, serves as the chief artifact of the home front city’s museum collection. Volunteers have renovated much of the ship, which carried essential cargo for battles in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. www.ssredoakvictory.com

Richmond, and other Bay Area shipyards, figured fantastically in WWII home front America. The Bay Area was radically changed forever by the phenomenal influx of 200,000 shipyard workers and their families from around the nation. Every type of individual was represented in the newly configured social structure of California.

The legacy of World War II’s sociological impact is fully explored and documented in books and other items in the Red Oak’s museum gift shop. Notable examples are: “To Place Our Deeds” by Shirley Ann Wilson Moore; and “World War II Shipyards by the Bay” by Nicholas A. Veronico.

Red Oak mast

Just a few changes nudged by the war: Women working with men in industrial settings for equal pay; blacks and minorities working with whites for comparable pay; the emergence of professional child care centers; employment for the disabled; and affordable prepaid preventive health care provided by employers.
The medical care program started in the wartime shipyards lives on as Kaiser Permanente and is well documented in Tom Debley’s book “Dr. Sidney R. Garfield: The Visionary Who Turned Sick Care into Health Care,” published in 2009 by Permanente Press.

Changes in the status of women and minorities largely reverted after the war, but the seeds were deeply planted for the civil rights and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s.

Now for my confession: I grew up in Richmond, and I had never seen the shipyards or the Red Oak Victory until recently. My first visit to the floating museum was only a few weeks ago. Bay Area Historian Steve Gilford, a director on the museum board, gave me two tours of Shipyard 3 and the Red Oak. My eyes were opened to the treasure that is preserved in the depths of this honey-combed hunk of war grey welded and riveted steel.

The ship experience starts with a climb up the gangplank, a portable, suspended aluminum staircase to the main deck. From there, you step over the raised rims of the hatchways and navigate steel ladders to the various compartments of the midship house and the deckhouse. Down from the main deck you’ll find the museum, gift shop, and meeting room in a cleaned-up cargo hold.

Industrial mixer for batter

Ship's galley griddle ready for pancakes

One cheery way to introduce yourself to the historic waterfront is to partake of the $6 pancake breakfast offered on the Red Oak Victory once a month from April to October. The first one for 2010 is April 11.

To get to the Red Oak Victory, take I80 to 580 West. Stay on the freeway past the Rosie the Riveter park exit and take Canal Boulevard instead. Follow Canal all the way to the bay and wind your way through the industrial area to Berth 6A.

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Henry & Bess Kaiser: ‘Unabashedly Sentimental’ Valentine’s Day Story

posted on February 12, 2010
By Tom Debley

Bess & Henry Kaiser

Thinking about sweethearts across America expressing their love this Valentine’s Day weekend, my attention was drawn to almost 200 newly acquired recordings in our Kaiser Permanente Heritage Archive.  One recording qualifies as a “singing Valentine” from Henry J. Kaiser to his wife, Bess, as World War II drew to a close 65 years ago.

First, the backdrop.

Bess Kaiser, with Henry, prepares to launch one of her husband's ships. Sons Henry Jr., left, and Edgar look on

One has to understand that the Kaisers—along with their sons Edgar and Henry Jr.—were “unabashed sentimentalists,” as Kaiser biographer Albert P. Heiner has recalled.   “They showed their affection for each other by effusive words of love they so often expressed.  And by unhesitatingly putting their arms around each on a regular basis.”

Henry Kaiser called Bess “mother” in private and public.  This struck a cord within the Kaiser organization, and she became widely known among Kaiser’s employees as “Mother Kaiser.”

In October 1945, this sentiment was reflected at a banquet honoring “Mother Kaiser” with a song from a group of Kaiser singers in a rendition of  “Let Us Call You Sweetheart.”  Based, of course, on “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” this popular song dates from 1910—three years after the marriage of Henry and Bess.  It became a lifelong favorite of the couple.

If you take a listen to the song, you will hear the singers invite the audience to join in.  Listen especially to the end when Henry Kaiser—a little off key—joins in an unabashedly sentimental solo.

A second recording at the banquet was a humorous takeoff of the 1892 classic “Bicycle Built for Two.” Here are the changed lyrics:

Bessie, Bessie,
Give me your answer do!
I’m half crazy
All for the love of you!
It won’t be a stylish marriage,
We can’t afford a carriage,
But you’ll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two.

Henry, Henry, here is your answer dear.
I can’t cycle. It makes me feel so queer.
If you can’t afford a carriage,
Call off your bloomin’ marriage,
For I’ll be blown if I’ll be ‘tow’n’
On a bicycle built for two.

Henry, of course, provided much more for Bess than “a bicycle built for two.”

Bess & Henry J. Kaiser in 1946

As one of the 20th Century’s most successful industrialists, Henry Kaiser also built several lines of automobiles. Kaiser’s love for Bess and for automobiles is illustrated in one of the photographs reproduced here. It is an image from our history archive that shows Henry and Bess playfully taking a spin in a door-less small truck in 1946 at a Kaiser industrial plant in Trentwood, Washington.

Henry and Bess Kaiser’s lasting legacy, of course, is Kaiser Permanente.  In 1942, they formed the Permanente Foundation Health Plan, a charitable trust, to serve the health care needs of 200,000 Kaiser employes on the Home Front of World War II.  It was Bess who picked the name.  The couple had a retreat along the bank of Permanente Creek south of San Francisco that she found beautiful and calming.  Read more about that in “Search for the Source of the Permanente” by our senior consulting historian, Steve Gilford.

Let me close with special thanks to collector Ron Gorremans of Lincoln City, Oregon, from whom the Kaiser Permanente Heritage Archive acquired these World War II era recordings.  The audio clips are from master recordings of 118 ship launches during the war from Henry Kaiser’s Swan Island Shipyard in Portland, Oregon.  They are currently being digitized.  When that is complete, we will deposit the originals in a permanent preservation archive as well as make the digital copies available to the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park for use in its interpretive program.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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Myth Buster: Henry J. Kaiser and the Jeep

posted on February 3, 2010
By Tom Debley
Director, Heritage Resources, Kaiser Permanente

Kaiser at wheel of a Jeep

Many people think Henry J. Kaiser’s foray into the automobile business after World War II was a failure when his Kaiser automobiles disappeared from America’s roads after only a few years. If you are one of them, think again. Indeed, if you drive a Jeep or the next time you are sitting at a traffic light next to a Jeep, think Henry Kaiser.

The Jeep was Kaiser’s most successful automobile venture when, in 1953, he bought Toledo-based Willys Overland, maker of the Jeep that became world-famous with its service in World War II.

Willys Overland was the maker of engines for Kaiser’s “Henry J,” America’s first compact car. Kaiser had entered automotive manufacturing in 1946, but by 1953 he was losing money.  So when he bought Willys Overland that year for about $70 million in the biggest auto merger in history to date, some argued he was throwing good money after bad.

Kaiser Pink Jeep Surrey was a line of Jeeps in the 1960s

Not the case. As Patrick R. Foster concludes in his book “The Story of Jeep” (Krause Publications, Iola, WI, 1998), “There were several reasons why Kaiser wanted Willys, but the biggest was pride. Henry Kaiser had never failed at anything he tried, but it appeared that the auto business would break that streak.”

What followed was an all-out marketing campaign to capitalize on the public’s fascination with the Jeep. Kaiser’s faith in the Jeep began paying off.  Annual sales volume topped $160 million within two years, with a profit approaching $5 million. It was the first profit for Kaiser’s car manufacturing since 1948.

Designers at work at Kaiser Jeep Corp. in the 1950s.

By 1966, Kaiser Jeep Corp. was building sports and compact cars, stationwagons, and the Jeep Wagoneer, which some say was America’s first SUV. Where there had been one plant in Toledo, manufacture of the Jeep had spread to 32 other countries by the time of Kaiser’s death in 1967.

Five years after Kaiser died, Kaiser Jeep Corp. was sold in 1972 to American Motors. A few years later, Renault Company of France bought American Motors.

In 1987 Chrysler Corporation bought American Motors from Renault for the sole purpose of getting the rights to manufacture the Jeep. Lee lacocca, like Henry Kaiser before him, capitalized on America’s love for the ubiquitous, ‘go-anywhere’ Jeep. 

So while Henry Kaiser is mostly remembered today for co-founding Kaiser Permanente, you can also thank him for making the Jeep a popular American car around the world.

(Photos: The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley and the Kaiser Permanente Heritage Archive)  

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Kaiser Permanente’s Historical Role in Rehabilitation Medicine

posted on January 23, 2010

By Tom Debley
Director, Heritage Resources, Kaiser Permanente

Since the late 1940s, the Kaiser Foundation Rehabilitation Center (KFRC) in Vallejo, California has treated thousands of patients with acquired neurological disorders, trauma, and neuromuscular and orthopedic conditions. This inpatient rehabilitation hospital and outpatient center also is Kaiser Permanente’s Center of Excellence for people with disabilities.

Less known is the role industrialist Henry J. Kaiser played in its inception, thereby establishing himself as a national philanthropic leader in helping establish the field of rehabilitation medicine.  Recognition for that historic accomplishment is remedied in a new book by Richard Verville titled “War, Politics, and Philanthropy: The History of Rehabilitation Medicine” (University Press of America, 2009).

Verville describes the birth of this field in part out of the need to treat soldiers who suffered combat injuries in World Wars I and II.  He traces its evolution to the present.  In his chapter “The Immediate Postwar Years,” he covers Henry Kaiser, Dr. Sidney R. Garfield and Dr. Herman Kabat in the formation of the Kabat-Kaiser Institute in 1946 – today’s KFRC.   Anyone interested can view our 11-minute video  The Power of Science and the Human Spirit  about the history of KFRC and get the full story in the context of American medical history in Verville’s book.

To sum up the historic role of Henry J. Kaiser, Verville places him in a pantheon of important leaders that includes President Franklin D. Roosevelt in setting the stage for the growth of rehabilitation medicine after World War II:  “Kaiser thus took his place along with Bernard Baruch, Jeremiah and Samuel Milbank, and FDR as philanthropists who assisted in the early development of the medical rehabilitation facility movement in the private sector. Without their initiative and willingness to back new methods in health care, the eventual growth of rehabilitation medicine might never have occurred.” (Emphasis added.)
 
To be sure, as Verville points out, the trigger for Henry Kaiser’s actions was news in 1945 that his son, Henry J. Kaiser Jr., had multiple sclerosis. When the elder Kaiser learned that Kabat, a neurophysiologist and clinical neurologist, was achieving success in treating multiple sclerosis and paralytic poliomyelitis, he asked Kaiser Permanente founding physician Sidney R. Garfield to meet with Dr. Kabat.  “He had people walking who hadn’t walked for years,” Garfield recalled.  The Kabat-Kaiser Institute was born.

Not covered in this book is the fact that Kaiser already had experience with addressing the needs of people with disabilities on the Home Front of World War II.

An early Permanente physician, Clifford Kuh, a specialist in industrial medicine, did research in the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, Calif., looking at workers for their capabilities despite their physical disabilities rather than viewing them as “handicapped” and incapable. It was a visionary’s viewpoint that did not become prevalent for another 30 years with the rise of the Disability Rights Movement of the 1970s and subsequent Independent Living Movement.

The importance of Dr. Kuh’s work was recognized immediately, however.  In reporting on it, the New York Times (May 21, 1944) quoted William K. Hopkins, regional director the War Manpower Commission, which collaborated on the study.  Hopkins called it “pioneering” work that would prove “invaluable in the post-war period” with service men and women who would return to the civilian workforce with disabling injuries.

As a charitable trust, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan (then “Permanente Foundation”) provided funds in 1944 to distribute the research results nationwide as a public service so that communities across the country could use it help assimilate disabled veterans into the postwar workforce.

(The Kaiser Permanente Heritage Resources program offers special thanks to its history colleague Dr. Elizabeth Sandel, chief of physical medicine and rehabilitation at KFRC today who Verville notes reviewed an early draft of his book and provided him with historical material on the history of The Permanente Medical Group and Henry J. Kaiser.)

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