THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, March 3, 1995 TAG: 9503020156
SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS PAGE: 08 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY PHYLLIS SPEIDELL, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 151 lines
FROM A 140-BED hospital with 60 employees, Maryview has grown into a medical center incorporating a 276-bed acute care hospital, a 54-bed psychiatric hospital and a 120-bed nursing care center in Bennetts Creek employing more than 1,600 people.
Maryview Medical Center will celebrate its 50th birthday Saturday in a Portsmouth very different from the city whose needs gave birth to the hospital in 1945. Maryview has been at the same High Street location since its dedication on March 4, 1945.
The need for a new medical facility in Portsmouth was critical when World War II brought thousands of shipyard workers and their families here in the early 1940s from throughout Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky and West Virginia. Shipyard employees numbered more than 43,000.
The influx of residents worried a group of local physicians who were concerned that the city's two relatively small Downtown hospitals - King's Daughters Hospital, now Portsmouth General, and Parrish Memorial Hospital - were inadequate to accommodate the needs of a booming population.
A secondary concern was the possibility of an enemy attack on the shipyard and the city, a disaster that would have overwhelmed the existing hospitals.
Dr. Robert McAlpine, a retired surgeon whose father, Dr. Louis A. McAlpine, was on Parrish Memorial's staff, said his father and the other doctors from Parrish Memorial pooled their resources, formed the Waverly Corp. and paid $16,000 for a plot in the Glensheallah section of the city. The group then persuaded the federal government to fund the construction of a 140-bed hospital.
Dr. Robert McAlpine, who served in the Navy during World War II, ``can remember coming home on leave and seeing my father sitting up in bed every night, surrounded by instrument catalogs, picking out instruments for the operating rooms.''
Dr. Harry Cox, a semi-retired pediatrician whose father, Dr. Russell M. Cox, was part of the Waverly Corp., remembers the hospital, known initially as Glensheallah Hospital, was designed as a single-story building, with six long barracks-type wards.
The sprawling building was designed with a single story because no elevators were available during the war, McAlpine recalled.
From his own early days in practice at Maryview, Cox remembers that doctors got plenty of exercise hiking from one ward to another making rounds.
The cost to build and equip the original hospital was $1 million. The Waverly Corp. agreed, when the new hospital was completed, to close the doors to Parrish Memorial but to keep it in a state of readiness until the end of the war.
Two months after the new hospital was dedicated, the war in Europe was over and shortly after that, Japan surrendered.
The federal government offered to sell the hospital to the Waverly Corp., but the price was beyond its means and the responsibility more than it wanted.
``Those doctors were getting older and did not want the responsibility of running the hospital,'' McAlpine said.
The government then turned to the Catholic Church's Diocese of Richmond, which agreed to operate the hospital with the Daughters of Wisdom.
After considering both ``Glensheallah'' and ``Glenmary'' as possible names for the hospital, the Daughters of Wisdom settled on the name ``Maryview'' to honor the Virgin Mary and the Waterview area adjacent to the hospital.
In 1947, the diocese bought the hospital for $85,000.
Margaret Riggins, now a Churchland resident, was one of 30 student nurses at Parrish Memorial transferred to the Maryview Nursing School and was a member of the first graduating class in September 1945.
``The hospital was staffed mostly by students, and our training was almost like an apprenticeship,'' Riggins said, remembering daily 12-hour shifts with just one afternoon a week off, unless the hospital was too busy to grant even that much leave.
In 1971, increasing costs and declining admissions forced Maryview to close its nursing school, which by then had graduated 418 registered nurses.
Mavis Powell joined the government-sponsored cadette nurse corps when she graduated from Cradock High School in 1945. Through the corps, Powell was in the first nursing class to go through all three years at Maryview, graduating as a registered nurse in 1948.
After graduation, Powell spent the next eight years as a pediatric nurse at the hospital. ``We were swamped with patients, especially in obstetrics after the war,'' she said.
Powell shares another tie with Maryview's history because, in later years, she married Dr. Stanley Powell, a family practitioner who, today at 87, is now the only surviving member of the Waverly Corp.
Mavis Powell and Harry Cox were among the doctors and nurses who treated the scores of victims of the polio epidemic when Maryview was designated as a polio treatment center for eastern Virginia and eastern North Carolina during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
``There were no drugs to kill the virus, so our standard treatment was to make the child comfortable and treat the symptoms,'' Cox said. Treatments included iron lungs to ease respiratory difficulty, and hot packs to ease muscular pain.
``It was very tragic,'' Powell said. ``Surprisingly, none of the staff ever came down with polio although we used only routine isolation techniques.''
Eula Stephenson, who will receive a 40-year service award Saturday, has vivid memories of Maryview's early days. When Stephenson, a linen coordinator, first joined the housekeeping staff in 1955, sheets were washed, run through wringers, shaken and then ironed dry on large ironers at the hospital.
``I was 20 when I started and knew everybody there, but there have been so many changes and so much growth since then,'' said Stephenson of Lincoln Gardens.
Over the past four decades that growth has replaced the original buildings with a modern physical plant, the opening of the psychiatric hospital, construction of a 38,000-square-foot medical office building at the High Street location and the nursing care center in Bennetts Creek.
In 1984, Maryview's sponsorship was transferred from the Diocese of Richmond to the Sisters of Bon Secours Health Systems, Inc. in Marriottsville, Md., and the hospital became part of the Bon Secours Health Network.
Maryview's future will differ from its past, said Gary Herbek, the hospital's chief executive officer.
``We will try to develop a broader influence in the region, not just in Portsmouth, by offering services other than at our 3636 High Street site,'' he said. ``We want to be more visible with our physicians, specifically in Chesapeake and Suffolk, and put a greater emphasis on out-patient services and services that promote wellness.'' ILLUSTRATION: ON THE COVER
Margaret Riggins was in the first graduating class of Maryview
Nursing School in September 1945. Dr. Harry Cox was among doctors
and nurses who treated scores of victims of the polio epidemic
during the late 1940s and early '50s. The two stand in the modern
main lobby of the hospital in a picture by staff photographer Mark
Mitchell.
THE BIG BASH
Maryview Medical Center will mark its 50th anniversary with a
celebration open to the public from 2-4 p.m. Saturday at Willett
Hall. The Hurrah Players will present a musical review of Maryview's
50 years as a background to a brief history of the medical center.
Special guests, a reception and door prizes, will round out the
festivities.
Photos courtesy of MARYVIEW MEDICAL CENTER
Although it has undergone several facelifts, Maryview has been at
the same High Street location since its dedication March 4, 1945.
This is the original main entrance.
Known initially as Glensheallah Hospital, it was designed as a
single-story building, with six long barracks-type wards. The
sprawling building was designed this way because no elevators were
available during the war.
Staff photo by MARK MITCHELL
Eula Stephenson, who will receive a 40-year service award Saturday,
has vivid memories of her early days on Maryview's housekeeping
staff.
by CNB