By Mike Scott, mscott@stph.org
It happened, as it turns out, in a driving rainstorm.
Others might trace it to another moment in time, but for Norma Core, it happened on a dreary night in the 1940s as rain washed through the ditches and over the roads of rural St. Tammany Parish.
“A friend of mine broke his leg and had to go to New Orleans for care,” Core remembered in a newspaper interview some 40 years later. “It was raining, and on the horrible little road through the marsh, the ambulance wrecked. My friend lay in the rain with his leg in disarray. They got him to New Orleans, but he died soon after from shock. They didn’t treat him for the effects of lying in the rain in pain.”
It was then that Core made up her mind.
“I decided,” she said, “we must have a hospital.”
It would be years before spade would hit dirt, but for all intents and purposes, it was then and there – in the rain and on the road whose name has long since been forgotten – that St. Tammany Health System was willed into being.
There are, of course, others who proved instrumental in the founding of the hospital. Core, however, would become an early and particularly conspicuous champion of the cause. Eventually, she would also become the sole female member of the very first St. Tammany Parish Hospital Commission.
All these decades later, the institution that Core helped found hardly resembles the humble one-story country hospital set amid the pines at Tyler Street and 11th Avenue back in 1954 – at least, not in a physical sense. Then, it was a 25,000-square-foot, 30-bed facility. With the opening of its newest wing in early 2021, the hospital will include 715,000 square feet of space and nearly 250 patient beds, to say nothing of the health system’s 20-plus satellite locations.
At its heart, though, it’s still very much the community-based hospital Core and others envisioned. And there’s a very good reason for that, according to St. Tammany Health System President and CEO Joan Coffman, whose healthcare career began as a radiologic technologist at the hospital in the early 1980s.
Actually, there are a few thousand good reasons.
“When I think back to what has been fundamental to the success of the organization throughout the tremendous change that has occurred over the last 66 years, it’s the people,” Coffman said. “We really are a community hospital. This hospital has become intertwined into the very fabric of this community. We’re neighbors with many of our patients and their families – or they’re our colleagues.”
In fact, if you’re going to recount the history of St. Tammany Health System with any accuracy, you’ve got to start with that long-treasured community connection.
Oh, and President Harry S. Truman.