In keeping with social conventions of the day, she was known as Mrs. Oliver Hebert, wife of the man who would become the inaugural chairman of the Board of Commissioners of St. Tammany Parish Hospital.
She had a name of her own, though. It was Cecile Warren Hebert, and while Oliver was toiling behind the scenes with numerous others to get a hospital built in St. Tammany Parish, Cecile was hard at work chronicling those efforts. Her tool of choice: A pair of scissors, a roll of clear tape and a scrapbook filled with empty pages.
That now-filled scrapbook, tattered but intact, gets the spotlight in today’s “70 by 70” series.
Installment No. 6: The scrapbooking historian
Today’s artifact: A scrapbook kept by Cecile Hebert chronicling the early history of St. Tammany Parish Hospital.
Why it is significant: When a group of local residents banded together in the 1940s to bring a hospital to St. Tammany Parish, they were basically figuring things out as they went along. After all, none had built a community hospital before.
But Cecile Hebert apparently knew at least one thing: Their work was important. So, starting in 1951 – two years before ground was broken and three years before the hospital was complete – she began chronicling the effort, collecting photos, newspaper clippings, invitations, letters and even a telegram, for her St. Tammany Parish Hospital scrapbook.
Once the hospital opened, she kept on clipping and preserving items related to the hospital’s history as well as that of the all-volunteer St. Tammany Hospital Guild (of which she was a longtime member).
She kept clipping after the death of Oliver Hebert in May 1968. And she kept clipping through the hospital’s 25th anniversary in 1979.
Cecile Hebert died in 1990 at age 92, but she left a cherished legacy in those lovingly composed scrapbook pages, which are treated at the hospital today with all the reverence and appreciation one might expect.
If the 1946 newspaper article we featured last week is, as we said then, St. Tammany Parish Hospital’s birth certificate, then Hebert’s scrapbook is its baby book – and as complete a history of the hospital’s first quarter-century as anyone could have asked for.
Scroll down for a glimpse at some of its pages.
Do you have a St. Tammany Parish Hospital story or artifact to share? We’d love to hear about it! Email us at CommDept@stph.org.
Next week – Installment No. 7: Read all about it!
Last week – Installment No. 5: A cause is born