The Music Cellar’s Jonathan Grusauskas, known professionally as Jonny G, has been holding an online Story Time Jam during the global COVID-19 pandemic for local children while the library is shut down. Photo submitted
Latest News
A Hospital’s History
Mar 06, 2024
When Sharon Hospital was founded in 1909, it was an eight-bed, two-nurse hospital in a rented house on Caulkinstown Road. In its first year, it served 88 patients. By the spring of 1916, thanks to the public-spirited generosity of the community that raised the funds for a building, a 16-bed hospital was officially opened.
The following day Dr. Jerome S. Chaffee, a surgical veteran of the Spanish-American War who was the moving force behind the founding of the hospital, performed an appendectomy in its new emergency room.
Over the years, the hospital underwent more expansion. In a 1969 Lakeville Journal article commemorating Sharon Hospital’s 60th anniversary, its history was described as “written by thousands of dedicated people who founded it, planned its development, staffed its facilities, financed expansion programs and, in many cases, became thankful patients. The article further noted: “A special feeling permeates the whole institution. Letters from appreciative patients and relatives emphasize the fine quality of patient care and the friendly, helpful spirit of everyone involved.”
While Dr. Chaffee is credited with starting Sharon Hospital, the success of the hospital as a cherished community institution that has provided acclaimed care for patients for all these decades is also due to the support from the people in our community. From the beginning, two years after the first patient was treated, a woman’s auxiliary was started, with 40 charter members who made bed linens, provided free meals for special occasions and pinch hit for staff when there was a shortage. The dream of Dr. Chaffee was realized in his lifetime. He died in 1947, and the hospital has grown and been supported decade after decade by an appreciative community. However, in the last two decades, it has changed hands more than once. In 2002 it became the first for-profit hospital in the state. In a 2016 takeover, it again became a nonprofit. Then in 2019, a merger folded seven hospitals, including Sharon Hospital, into Nuvance Health.
Last week, Northwell Health, the largest nonsectarian, nonprofit health care operation in the United States and the largest health care provider in New York state, announced that Nuvance and Northwell would combine. (See Nuvance Health to join Northwell). Pending state and federal approval, Sharon Hospital will join with Northwell, marking yet another significant milestone in the history of our rural hospital.
We can only hope that the leadership at the top of Northwell will preserve what the people of our community have built and supported and fought for over the past century, including the recent citizen campaign to retain labor and delivery services. In that engagement, the people of the state of Connecticut, represented by the Office of Health Strategy (OHS) and its Executive Director Deirdre Gifford, decided the outcome of a hospital request to terminate those services. The decision was not made by a large health care corporation.
In making the announcement last week, Northwell vowed to make significant investments in Nuvance. It would seem the timing is right. On Feb. 20, a little over a week before Northwell’s announcement and citing three principal factors, Nuvance appealed to OHS to reconsider its Final Decision to deny its request to close labor and delivery. “Good cause exists for addressing the degrading conditions for operation of the L&D service in an orderly fashion…before the Hospital experiences unavoidable service suspensions or safety issues,” Nuvance wrote.
Studies by the American Hospital Association point to hospital acquisitions as a way for hospitals to succeed in reducing costs and improving quality of care. Certainly the trend to hospital mergers is evident, affording scale and more standardization of care. Last year, Sharon Hospital was awarded its fourth consecutive 5-Star rating by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, based on patient experience and timely and effective care, among others. We imagine that Dr. Chaffee would be proud.
Keep ReadingShow less
The following excerpts from The Millerton News were com- piled by Kathleen Spahn, Vivian Sukenik, Nancy Vialpando and Rhiannon Leo-Jameson of the NorthEast-Millerton Library.
91 years ago: March 9, 1933
‘About Millerton’: Martin Black has recovered from his recent illness and is able to be out again.
Worthy Pulver, Harry Miller, Malcom Hunter and Thomas Flood were in New York City attending a Chevrolet meeting.
‘Lost’: Large foxhound on Mt. Riga. Blue, speckled brown ears, large collar. Louis Lindsay, Millerton
50 years ago: March 14, 1974
‘Residents Favor Odd-Even System’: Most Millerton citizens polled by The News this week reported that they approved of the odd-even gasoline rationing system in New York […] “It does seem to be working,” said Patricia Ambrose of Irondale. “I’ve had much less trouble getting gas than several months previously. There was less waiting in line.” The basic complaints were the hours the area fueling stations were open and the high price of gasoline.
‘Dairy Goat Club Seeks Princess’: The Progressive Dairy Goat Club is sponsoring a Miss Dairy Goat Princess contest. The Dairy Goat Princess must be between the ages 12-20, talented, single, and have an interest in goats. The prize is a $25 savings bond or a purebred kid goat.
25 years ago: March 11, 1999
‘Cub Scouts Display Craft, Sportsmanship’: The Millerton Cub Scout Pack 43 recently completed a family event. The youngsters built their own cars and spaceships, and then raced them […] The winners of the competitions were as follows: Den 1: (Space Derby) Larry Watson, Stephen Bradley and Charlie Porteus. Den 2: (Pinewood Derby) Rich Katan, Dustin Smith and Andrew Watson. Den 3: (Pinewood Derby) Nicholas Carlin, Richard Peek and Patrick McCaffery.
‘Three Plots Proposed for Historic District’: Three properties in the town of North East have been proposed for listing in the New York State Register of Historic Places. They are: The Dakin-Coleman Farm on Coleman Station Road, the Thomas N. Wheeler Farm on Indian Lake Road at Mill Road, and the Oliver Barrett House on Regan Road […] the properties will be considered by the state review board.
‘Residents Decry Lack of Town Support for Rec Programs’: A large contingent of parents appeared at the March 8 joint meeting between the village of Millerton and town of North East to support the formation of a joint recreation commission between the town and village. “The parents feel the board is dragging its feet,” said Joe Matteo, president of the Millerton Minor League. “We request it be done in a more expedited fashion.” […] “Financial sponsorship of the minor and softball teams over the past three years has come solely from the generosity of the merchants of Millerton and North East,” he stated. “No funding whatsoever has come from the village of Millerton or town of North East.”
Keep ReadingShow less
‘Greatest president we never had’
Mar 06, 2024
‘Greatest president we never had’
Basic Books
“How do you ‘do justice?’ How do you balance idealism with pragmatism?” asked James Traub, elucidating a key theme of his latest book, “True Believer: Hubert Humphrey’s Quest for a More Just America.”
Traub, a journalist, professor at NYU Abu Dhabi and Sharon resident, will be speaking about the book at the Hotchkiss Library of Sharon on Sunday, March 10 at 4 p.m.
“True Believer” follows Humphrey, a pharmacist’s son with more hours in the day than Beyoncé, from his idyllic childhood in Doland, South Dakota, through his remarkable political career as chairman of the liberal, anti-communist Americans for Democratic Action (expunger of the Communist elements in Minnesota’s Democratic and labor machines), Mayor of Minneapolis (destroyer of organized crime and obstructer of government corruption), Senator for Minnesota (champion of labor and liberalism,, anti-communism, Soviet containment, foreign aid, nuclear nonproliferation and civil rights), Vice President to Lyndon Johnson (enforcer of the Civil Rights Act and, distressingly, a mouthpiece for Johnson’s position in Vietnam), presidential candidate for the United States. In his last decade Humphrey served as a Democratic “elder statesman” — a powerful advocate for disarmament, foreign aid, civil rights, employment opportunity, housing opportunity, “law and order and justice,” people with disabilities, the aging, for labor, and pretty much everyone else).
“The question I always begin with is, why should anybody who didn’t live through that moment read this book?” said Traub, a journalist who has written eight books, on affairs foreign and domestic, as well as writing for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Foreign Affairs and others, and authors his own ominously-titled Substack, “A Democracy, If You Can Keep It.”
“[Humphrey’s] brand of pragmatic, incremental, melioristic idealism is really important,” said Traub. “Biden, too, is a meliorist who is blamed for timidity on the left—he too suffers from the sense among so many progressives that he’s failed their high hopes,” as Humphrey did. “So those lessons, to me, are both perennial and particularly relevant to our moment.”
Humphrey was an idealist, but he was also a legislator, a statesman in a sense that seems almost archaic today. In the name of progress, he encouraged his colleagues not just to accept “half a loaf,” but, at times, to content themselves with crumbs. He believed that incremental change could lead to real change, and during his lifetime, that was true.
Reading True Believer as a millennial, I was also fascinated by another central theme of Humphrey’s story: the role that race has played in the undoing of the American liberal consensus, which governed the country’s politics from FDR’s election in 1932, through Dwight Eisenhower’s Republican administration, until the “law and order” election of Richard Nixon in 1968.
According to Traub, it was Humphrey who succeeded in making Civil Rights a central tenet of the Democratic Party in 1948, and who, after a solid two decades of arm-twisting, politicking, speechifying and, above all, talking — more or less nonstop — finally succeeded in passing the Civil Rights Act in 1964. This month marks the sixtieth anniversary of the introduction of the watershed legislation.
The Civil Rights Act, “perhaps the most important piece of legislation” to come out of the 20th century, said Traub, “was both the apogee” of the nation’s liberal ideal and, in a sense, its undoing: Once Black Americans had been legally elevated to equal footing with their white compatriots, white labor began to vote conservative for the first time in the country’s history.
“Anybody who writes about history sees profound patterns in human life and in human society, which are constantly recurring,” said Traub. “If you’re thinking about the nature of power, and how certain people wind up in power, that’s a perennial question.”
Keep ReadingShow less
loading
