GEORGE WILLIAMS
Administrator, Clinical Lab & Pathology, PCMH

BILL YOUNG
Administrator, Special Medical Services, PCMH

JOHN STALLINGS
Administrator, Pharmacy, PCMH

August 8, 2000

Interviewer: Beth Nelson (Sally Lucido participating)

Beth Nelson: George, let's start out with you telling me about your background.

George Williams: I'm George Williams and I am the Administrator for Clinical Lab & Pathology. I first came to Pitt Memorial as a student from ECU and was among the first medical technology students ever to have come for rotation at Pitt. I later started to work there in 1974. One of the things I remember most, one of the things that was most different about the hospital then and the hospital now, is kind of the way we train and prepare people. I recall that Carroll Jarvis was my boss at the time and Carroll's theory of training you was kind of trial by fire. In those days the Lab closed at 5:00 p.m. and someone was on call all night until 7:00 a.m. the next morning. Well, I remember I started to work on a Monday and Carroll Jarvis put me on call Friday night and you had to know how to do everything and if you didn't it was just a disaster. So, there were a lot of tense moments I guess and a lot of times we were lucky that we didn't injure someone for lack of knowing what to do. In today's world, of course, Joint Commission makes sure you document competency and it wasn't exactly that way back then. I am not saying we didn't deliver good care but it was a whole different process.

Beth Nelson: How many people would have been working in the Lab back then?

George Williams: I guess about thirty or so. I remember we had about sixty doctors on the medical staff and the fascinating thing about that part was when a new person started to work in another department you recognized him immediately. When a new doctor started there was a big buzz that there was a new doctor and you knew every doctor's name and you knew every doctor's face and many of them, if not most of them, knew who you were. You would go into the hospital cafeteria then and there were no strangers unless there was a visitor in there. You knew everybody.

Beth Nelson: This was in 1974 when you came to work at the hospital and you know, the Lab now is so specialized. Certainly that wouldn't have been the case back then. Was everybody a med tech or was there any specialization at all at that point?

George Williams: A bit, but everyone took call which meant which meant that everyone had to know how to do almost every thing. There was one lady who worked in Microbiology all the time and there was one person who worked in the Blood Bank all the time and during that time people kind of had their places where they would work most of the time, but you rotated around based on need or if someone got pregnant or whatever the case. It was very different. Small hospitals now, in the hospitals we are affiliated with, are a bit like we were back then in that they are trained to cover different departments at night and on weekends.

Beth Nelson: Back then, at that point the new hospital would not have been under construction but it was probably about to be built and I guess there was some degree of apprehension because the School of Medicine at that point would have been a new animal. What was the mood among people that you worked with at that point? Did they see it as an opportunity, something exciting, or were they just fearful that a lot of changes were going to be coming down the pike?

George Williams: I remember most of the apprehension was among the medical staff with the prospect of the School of Medicine coming in and their concern about establishing the Affiliation Agreement so that the physicians in private practice had some comfort with what was about to happen. I think that from the employees' perspective as to the School of Medicine, we didn't really know if that was going to be a reality in 1974. Ralph Hall was employed the same year I was as the person who was supposed to build the hospital.

Beth Nelson: At that point I guess a lot of people thought it was a pipe dream that might come into being but then again might not.

George Williams: Well, I think it was a little further down the road before we really knew there was going to be a hospital. Of course, before the hospital had been completed the teaching addition had been added and the reality of the four-year School of Medicine was pretty much on the horizon. I remember Dr. West telling me something once. We started off with a one-year School of Medicine, and then there was a two-year School of Medicine and he told me as soon as they said you have to have a two-year School of Medicine it means we are going to have a four-year School of Medicine. At that time he was saying that medical school students would flunk out in their first year and there would be spaces for these students to occupy but after the second year he told me you didn't have a lot of people leaving the existing School of Medicine so pretty much the writing was on the wall.

Beth Nelson: The Lab in the old hospital would have been how many square feet?

George Williams: Maybe 3,000 with all of it put together. From time to time there would be some problems with drainage.

Beth Nelson: How much square footage is there in the Lab now?

George Williams: There is about 50,000 gross square feet.

Beth Nelson: In your wildest dreams as you heard people like Leo Jenkins talk about where this place could go and Jack Richardson, Bill Laupus, and all those early leaders, would you have envisioned that this would come to be what it is?

George Williams: I think everyone recognized that the Medical School was going to bring about dramatic change for us but I can't say twenty-five years ago that I could foresee what was about to happen.

Beth Nelson: How old were you in 1974 if you don't mind me asking?

George Williams: I was twenty-two. I look at our Lab now and look at what we do and realize that we are one of the big guys, in fact, we do things that a lot of the other Medical Schools aren't doing. We do drug screens now in classes. There is a test for amphetamines, one test for opiates and other tests. After we have done the screening tests, the next day we actually a confirmation of that. We began to question just last week how many other people were doing that and should be doing that. We called Duke, Chapel Hill and Wake Forest and nobody is doing this except us.

Beth Nelson: What exactly is the significance of that? Is it more sensitive or more accurate?

George Williams: Well, I think that the best word for it right now is probably overkill. It is something that we are going to redress to see if we are going to continue doing that. The message is that as you look around at what a lot of other big places are doing, we are doing the same thing and that didn't used to be the case. I can remember twenty-five years ago about going up to the Lab at N. C. Memorial and just being kind of in awe at all the stuff they were doing that we didn't do and that is not so anymore.

Beth Nelson: Bill, please tell me about your background.

Bill Young: My name is Bill Young and I came to Pitt County Memorial Hospital in September 1 of 1968 and I was wondering why I needed to come in on a holiday. My first day was a holiday and when I walked in the manager of the department told me he was glad I was there and he would see me tomorrow. Just the same experience that George had. It was a short orientation but at the time the department was called Inhalation Therapy and there were two people in the department. The department had just started in late 1967 so the department was not quite a year old when I came. We actually worked during the daytime and were on call for evening shift and night shift for anything that came up It gradually grew into a department that had approximately five people probably three or four years later.

When I joined the department there was the manager and myself. We averaged working sixty to sixty-five hours a week counting working during the day and callbacks. The department was pretty much respirators and we had back in those early days we gave what we called IPPB which is a pressure treatment which is no longer even used anymore. We had four of those respirators that we used for providing the positive pressure treatments.

Over the years we moved from Inhalation Therapy to being called Respiratory Care which included much more than what we were doing as inhalation therapists. Out of the early years grew the Department of Special Medical Services and special medical services one of the first things we took on besides the respiratory was EKGs and I think at the time, if my memory serves me correct, the Lab was doing the EKGs and we took that over from the Lab and then we started a Pulmonary Function Lab and we were having some problems getting EEGs done on a regular basis and Rick Gilstrap at the time asked me if I would take the EEG Department and so we took the EEG Department over and so, all of these departments began to make up Special Medical Services which is the current name of my department and I am the Administrator over that department.

Beth Nelson: How many employees do you have now?

Bill Young: Somewhere around 120. During that timeframe all of the Cardiology Department really started within Special Medical Services. EKG led into doing ECHOs and Holter Monitoring and CATH Labs and all that was under me until it got more than one person could do and Mark Gordon came as Administrator over that Cardiology area and it developed into the Heart Center as it is today.

Beth Nelson: Talk a little bit about what you remember of the old hospital.

Beth Nelson: Was that like a Code Blue?

Bill Young: Yes it was and we called it "Charlie Roger" on the overhead page. They would just call "Charlie Roger" and the location and they would say it three times. I believe we actually at a later date had a person working in the hospital by that name and that is why we changed the name of what we used.

George Williams: We actually changed it when we moved to the new hospital and left Charlie Roger in the old hospital.

Beth Nelson: Bill, you trained at Pitt Community College, didn't you?

Bill Young: I trained at Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem.

Beth Nelson: Why did I think you were an alumnus from PCC? Didn't you get a recognition from them?

Bill Young: I did, for getting the Respiratory Care Program started at PCC and serving on their Long-Range Planning Committee.

Beth Nelson: At the point you would have trained, I would assume that inhalation therapy would have been a pretty new discipline.

Bill Young: Yes, it was pretty new. The field of inhalation therapy was probably less than ten years old and most programs at that time were hospital-based. The training was done in the hospital.

Beth Nelson: George, you trained at ECU. I didn't ask you this but I need to go back to it. We didn't talk about where you were from or those kinds of things. I was just curious about what this place in 1974 attracted you? Talk a little bit about that. What did you see here that made you want to make a career here? Did you think this might be a stepping stone on your way somewhere else or what?

George Williams: Well, first I came here from school and that is what got me here. I am actually from a little town called Skyland near Asheville. Having stayed here for four years I liked Greenville. I liked the people at Pitt and when I started to work here Rick Gilstrap was one of the people who came over and was trying to recruit us to come to work at Pitt Memorial. So I stayed and after the first year or so here it became apparent that there was going to be a medical school here and they were building a new hospital and there was going to be a new Lab in it, I felt there would be a fair amount of opportunity here.

Beth Nelson: Bill, talk a little about you, what was it that made you want to stay? Did you grow up here?

Bill Young: Well actually I did grow up here. I attended Farmville High School and left high school and went into the Army. I worked as a medic and liked the medical field so I went to school up at Bowman Gray School of Medicine and after I got out of school I worked there for about a year. I was looking to get back closer to home because my wife and her family and my family were local.

Beth Nelson: So, all your work experience except for one year was here except for your Army years.

Bill Young: Yes, basically it has been here. I had been working when I was in high school.

Beth Nelson: What do you remember of the perception of the people that you have interacted when you first came and saw what was getting ready to happen with the school of medicine? You probably saw the fights for the school of medicine and that kind of thing. Was there apprehension?

Bill Young: I think most of the employees, nurses, professional employees seemed to be very excited about the school of medicine and thoughts that it would bring excellent opportunities. Most of the concern that I heard was coming from the medical staff. The private physicians had concern about the academic physicians coming in and being in such a small town they had concern about what that would do to their practice and wondered if there were enough patients to go around. Some were very much in favor of the medical school and some were very much opposed to the medical school. It was sort of a mixed bag of feelings but I think over all when you finally got down to the point of the decision being made we would have the medical school here, it pretty much for the most part was embraced by everyone in the community. That is probably why it has moved along as well as it has and we have done as well as we have with the medical school.

Beth Nelson: Looking back on it now, would you have envisioned that it was going to be the lynch pin that would take us to this level or did you expect to see a more of an incremental type of growth?

Bill Young: Well, I certainly felt the medical school would enhance some of the services that the hospital would offer and that it would probably bring some research to do some innovative things but so far as being able to foresee that it would take us to the point that we are currently at, I think that would be a pretty hard vision to have seen thirty some years ago.

Beth Nelson: I think everybody I have interviewed has said the same thing.

Bill Young: You hope that it will bring you to that but to think that we have come as far as we have come in such a short time, I don't think anybody would have that vision. It is pretty difficult to think that the vision would be as fast and to move as rapidly as it has moved and also to have the physician staff that we currently have.

Beth Nelson: John, please give us some of your background.

John Stallings: I am John Stallings and I am the Pharmacy Administrator. I came here from UNC. I graduated from UNC in 1969 and came here to work. I had previously worked the summer before as an intern. My first two intern experiences were in retail. Jim Blount, who was the first pharmacist here who came in 1967 and he told me I ought to try this and that it was totally different from retail. He was a friend of mine and did his internship here the year before I did in 1967. They got me interested in it so I figured I would give it a try so I came up here in the summer of 1968 and liked it and was working with Jim Blount and everything looked fine with graduation and everything. I was thinking about a career and felt I would really like that so I came down here and talked to Mr. Ward and we came to an agreement and before I actually came on site I had a new boss as Jim Blount took a position in a drugstore and he decided to try that and left and Charles Myers was hired. He was already in practice and he came and we actually came at the same time. We showed up at the same time on June 4, 1969 and started at the same time. He had a license and I didn't get my license until October or the last of September. There was Charles Myers, myself, one half time nurse, which was Rita Durham, and a technician. We had a little small place with the office and operational area, which was about 200 square feet. We had the medication order filling area which was probably 50 square feet, and then we had a still that distilled water in a little room that was probably 80 square feet and then a back room that was just a wash room kind of thing for the bottles and it was about 80 square feet and it was not large. We were right across the hall from the Lab and Xray. A typical day was 7:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Beth Nelson: On your first day were you left alone to manage the Pharmacy?

John Stallings: No, I wasn't licensed and I was an extern and I had to wait and finish my last three months of internship before I could apply for my license. After that it was pretty much that way but I had already been there for six months at that time. We worked Monday through Friday and then a half-day on weekends and then the rest of the time you were on call, either one or the other of us. We eventually spread that time out but we would fill orders during the day and run tickets to the nurses. In the afternoon we washed irrigation bottles for the OR and filled them up with fluid and then either put salt tablets in there or nothing, capped them, put them in the autoclave and ran them. We did all the irrigation fluids for the OR every afternoon. It was really a great experience!

In about two years Charles Myers left and I became the Director and we started to grow a little bit and started doing additional things like, I think the first thing we actually started doing was IV additives. We would mix the IV in the Pharmacy. We started with the kinds of things that everybody seemed to ask for, we kept doing that and started with profiles, kept going with those kind of things and have been going ever since.

Some of the fascinating things are like in the old place the cafeteria was downstairs and you had to walk by the morgue to get to the cafeteria. When I was first there you ate free, as it was included as a benefit. You just went downstairs and you ate. Everybody had that benefit of eating free. Everybody sat down there and like we said, you got to know everybody. Some days you would eat with a bunch of physicians and the next day with nurses. Everybody knew everybody and it was a very small cafeteria. I guess one of the neat things that used to happen was A. C. Whichard was head of the Maintenance Department and he had a metal maintenance shed in the back and quite frequently they had pig pickings down there for lunch. I remember one time I had three or four other directors from areas here and it was a day that A. C. had one of those pig pickings and I took them down to it and we had pig for lunch and it was really good and one of the guys was just really impressed with that and he told everybody he knew that they wouldn't believe this place as they had pig pickings and all that kind of stuff. He was really impressed with Pitt Memorial Hospital.

Beth Nelson: Would the metal building have been in the back of the hospital?

John Stallings: It was kind of wedged between the old side and the new side, I guess. If you drove up from the left front you could see it.

Bill Young: It's still there, if you drive from the old hospital towards the Mental Health Center after you drive by there is a little driveway that goes in, just look right in there and that building still sits there.

John Stallings: Those were the good old days. All of us were right there together, Bill was towards the center and George and I were across from each other and the ED was just a little way down so you knew everything that was going on because everything was so concise. If something interesting came in to Surgery or Xray or the ED or whatever, you knew about it in a few minutes. Of course, they had to bring the patients by on the stretcher from the ED to the OR so you really knew everything that was going on.

Beth Nelson: How many employees do you have now?

John Stallings: 113 employees.

Sally Lucido: I have a question too, what role did Rita Durham play in the Pharmacy?

John Stallings: The original person that provided meds was a nurse, Doris Skinner, so for five or six years after pharmacists took it over we would still find notes and she had notes everywhere and you would keep opening the drawers and finding notes from her saying what to do with such and such things. Her sister was Phyllis Martin who ran the ARC and she ran it for years until Jim Buck came. After that Rita Durham came and helped.

Beth Nelson: Was it typical that hospitals did not have pharmacists at that time?

John Stallings: Right.

Beth Nelson: That seems so incomprehensible to me as pharmacists have been running drug stores in the communities for long before they were in hospitals. Is that true everywhere?

John Stallings: Pretty much so but maybe the bigger cities have had them in hospitals longer as UNC where I trained had them.

Beth Nelson: John, did you grow up here?

John Stallings: I grew up in Hertford, North Carolina, which is in the northeastern part of the state.

Beth Nelson: Talk a little bit about why you chose here. Of all places you could go you could have gone back to Hertford. What about Pitt attracted you? Was it things that you saw here that maybe you didn't think you would find elsewhere?

John Stallings: Well, like I said, I really got interested in it from the first time I came and made the decision that basically I would really like it if I could get a job here and that I would like to come here. I liked the town as I had spent some time here and it was very interesting and something I liked. We got together on it. The negotiations were quite interesting. Mr. Ward and I sat down and he told me what the salary was going to be and I was trying to talk him into just a little bit more than that and he told me if I didn't like it he had several other people who were interested and that was the end of the conversation. I told him that was it. It was tough to negotiate with him.

Beth Nelson: Of course money was tight then. Money was extraordinarily tight.

John Stallings: Everybody at the hospital makes that much money now. There is quite a difference. It was exciting and it was different. Having trained at UNC I knew what the potential was for things to evolve.

Beth Nelson: In 1969 the school of medicine was still in the fighting stage and was certainly not approved. You were coming from UNC and there it was a hot bed of opposition to the school of medicine so they must have considered you an enemy.

John Stallings: No, I was educated up there. It was real hard on me, as I was the only UNC person around. The other guys came from MCV or Duke. On football Saturdays back then we used to play UNC and ECU and it was always tough on me if ECU happened to win as I think they did one time because everybody knew I was a UNC person. I got here and got working liking the city and liking the potential and then when the medical school was announced even greater potential was there and it just seemed like a great opportunity even before that when they announced the building of the new building. Those of us who were here then went out and canvassed the population to get them to vote for the bond issue.

Beth Nelson: Wonderful! Let's talk about that. I need more stuff about that. I will tell you, I have heard stories from some people but not near enough. Talk about how you were received in the community. I am sure that there were people who were concerned about the bond issue. Did they want to listen to a 23-year-old fellow from UNC?

John Stallings: The majority of the people were receptive but there were a lot of people who, just like now, said they were not going to pay anymore taxes. They were just against it. When I got involved with it I was in the Jaycees and the Jaycees supported the hospital and the medical school. We went out as groups and went to people and talked to them and told them how much we really needed this. Most everybody you talked to was willing to listen and felt like it was a good thing and that maybe they could have a nice hospital. The $9 million bond issue was a tremendous amount of money at that time. They could understand the needs of that in that the other hospital was old and you would walk through it and the paint was falling off the ceiling and things like that. Once that was set up and the medical school was looking like a reality, the same thing, the Jaycees got out in the community talking to people about we really did need a medical school here and we talked to everybody we could.

Beth Nelson: This was the Greenville Jaycees. Jack Richardson talked about having at that point been shouted down in the community and there was a lot of opposition in some areas. He talked he talked about sometimes being shouted down and that people at times swore that the hospital would be a "white elephant" and sit empty. Did you experience that or was it more questioning and concern?

John Stallings: Yes, it was more questioning and concern. I never had anybody get really upset, loud or boisterous. They would say they were not supporting anything that would cost them more taxes and that kind of thing or they would sit there and listen and say that it made sense and that they really needed it since any time they wanted to go to something nice they had to go to the Western part of the State or the Central part and that it would really be nice to have something here. The majority that I was around were that way. I do remember Jack Richardson talking about that and that people were very upset about it and not in favor of it. I think the bond issue was very, very close but it passed.

It came about and that was exciting because we were all in dungeons and I know the guy that did the brickwork on the thing and he said it was built like a fort and the walls were a foot thick and it was rustic and it was time to have a nice big pharmacy. Of course, shortly after it was built we outgrew it. We had a lot of space and it looked so nice with all that new equipment, etc. I never was excited about the orange and green and yellow walls but it was nice. The architects said the colors would brighten it up, as they didn't want it to be drab like a hospital.

Beth Nelson: You didn't have any money in the bank back in those days, what are some things that you remember, all of you, about those days when times were tight. Stories of how you stretched to meet the needs within the resources that you had?

John Stallings: Back in the really early days we had very little to do with the budget. It was presented to us and that was about the end of it. We didn't have much say in the budget or its preparation. That eventually changed and it changed before we left the old building. In the very early days it wasn't much.

Beth Nelson: What happened when you needed new equipment? Buck told a cute story and you probably remember it. There was some new piece of xray equipment that he was presenting to the Board for approval along with a new lawn mower, which was a far less expensive piece of equipment than the xray equipment. He came prepared with every bit of information he could come up with to support his xray equipment. When he got to the lawn mower and everybody started listening and somebody asked him what the horsepower was, etc. and everybody had all these questions about the lawn mower. He got approval for the expensive xray equipment but he said they held back on the lawn mower. Also, Hilda Norris told a story about needing bililights for the babies and she saw that Mr. Ward had in his office a really nice lamp that she thought would make a wonderful bililight and so she just went in there and took it and put it in there with the babies and when he found out about it he came up there and laughed but the thought of not having bililights and for us to use an office lamp. Those are things that show just how tight things were at that time.

Bill Young: In the old hospital and even once we moved over to the new hospital we had situations where we would need vents for people to be on and I have actually got in the truck and gone to other hospitals and borrowed them or sent our ambulance to the hospital to borrow them. We needed them to put patients on and we did that right on up even after we were in the new hospital. We moved to the new hospital with only five vents and I had told them that I wouldn't move over with less than ten-I did-and I remember Shelton Dixon and I going and getting vents and having to come back put on a compressor. We borrowed one onetime from Washington and the compressor was bad in it and we brought it back here and put a compressor in it and checked it out and put it on the patient because we didn't have one to put on.

Rick Gilstrap and I got into quite a discussion one time about me sending an ambulance for a vent and he didn't think that I should have sent an ambulance so came to some sort of an agreement and we basically worked out a mechanism where we could send and get vents without sending an ambulance. We have been in those situations even since we have been in the new hospital. Equipment was difficult to get. In our area in the old hospital we used a lot of reusable equipment but it had to be washed, cleaned and reused and you would go out in the morning and do treatments and then you would have to come back in and clean all the equipment so you could go back and use it again.

George Williams: One thing that is really different about the new hospital compared to the old is the way we handle blood and blood products. I can remember many times in the old hospital where we would have a bleeder and they would use all our blood up and we had a rolodex file with all the hospital's employees names with their blood type in it and we would march all these hospital employees to the annex building next to the hospital and we would roll their sleeves up and we would start drawing blood left and right so that we would have enough blood to give whatever patient we had that was bleeding. We did that after we had moved into the new hospital and I can remember Friday afternoon at 5:00 p.m. something like that would happen.

Beth Nelson: Was that in the days before the Red Cross took over blood donations? When you talk about the annex, is that where blood donations were routinely done?

George Williams: No, there was a building over there called the Education Building and there was a room over there and we would go over there and there were two or three cots there and we would start calling hospital employees and bring them over there and draw their blood. In the new hospital when we first moved in there we would go down to the Emergency Department and use some of their exam rooms. Finally the Red Cross took offense with us drawing our own units and we told them if they could supply us with all the blood we need we would stop drawing blood and then they created a sub-center here. We were purchasing blood from the Red Cross but when we would order blood and they would tell us they didn't have any to send us we would draw our own. That was before the HIV virus was around but Hepatitis was around.

Bill Young: Back then it was very frequent we would call them and they would not have it, wasn't it?

George Williams: If you had a big user all it would take was for an aortic aneurysm to come in and the next thing you know is you are drawing units.

Beth Nelson: What kind of salaries did people make back then? What was sort of an annual wage?

Sally Lucido: We were told that the nurses received $8.50 for twelve-hour shifts.

John Stallings: Probably $2.00 or $3.00 an hour would have been the average.
You did get to eat for free.

George Williams: One of the things I remember at the old hospital compared to the new hospital is that everybody used to park behind the hospital in a kind of small area. There were a bunch of old raggedy cars back there, I mean that nobody had a new car. Mr. Richardson might get one every now and then or somebody else but the rest of us were driving a bunch of old heaps. You go into the employees parking lot now and there are a lot of nice new cars in there but not back then.

Beth Nelson: The hospital would have been a major employer at that time but probably not a major salary source. What about Mr. Ward. I want to hear more about him because you know a lot of people who knew him are dead and gone and he is kind of an enigma to me and I am curious about him.

John Stallings: He controlled everything. He handled the alcohol records, he did the payroll records, he signed every check, he signed every purchase order, and everything that was dealing with money he signed off on personally. He had total control.

Bill Young: If you wanted anything like equipment or to do something different, everything went through him. If he said okay it was a done deal.

Beth Nelson: Could you make a case to him? Was he willing to listen?

Bill Young: Oh yes, he was not a real big negotiator but he was fair. I never went to him and laid things out that I didn't feel like he listened. I thought he was a very fair individual.

John Stallings: He had an intercom system in several strategic places throughout the building and he got to talk directly to people without using the phone and it was kind of an unusual setup. He could also listen to others so he was in control. Basically everything went through him and he signed off on everything.

Bill Young: Actually one of the things I didn't realize until after Mr. Ward died. I was going through some records at the Pitt County Wildlife Club and the very first records that we have dated, I think, 1950, Mr. Ward was the President of the Pitt County Wildlife Club and that is the first record we had of anything about Pitt County Wildlife Club. He probably started that club or was one of the early members. I actually have the document with the membership list and officers and I thought that was pretty unique because all the time I worked for Mr. Ward I didn't know that he had an interest in that sort of stuff. It originated to try to get a wildlife resource commission in North Carolina and set some regulations and that was the original intent of it. I thought it was pretty unique.

Beth Nelson: Do you remember Mr. Ward, George?

George Williams: No, Mr. Ward had retired about the time I got there.

John Stallings: I remember Mr. Ward and Walter Dail were very close friends. Walter was ex-mayor of Winterville a long time and he ran Plant Operations at the hospital before A. C. took it over. They were very close and when Mr. Ward retired he organized a group to raise money for Mr. Ward to get presented with as a retirement gift. I also remember somebody had done a doll case and they had dolls of the earlier people that were involved in the hospital and Mr. Ward was in there. There were also some of the physicians, Dr. Adams and some of the ones that were really back in the beginning. They had the little statue of Mr. Ward and they had saved that and collected from the employees $1,000 and that was what the employees gave Mr. Ward for his retirement gift. They had rolled the money up and put it in the sleeve of the doll. That was really neat.

Beth Nelson: $1,000 would have been a lot of money back then. People must have thought a lot of him. Of course, they probably didn't have any kind of retirement in those days.

John Stallings: That's right we really didn't have anything until 1984. That is when the 401K came. There was something but it wasn't much.

Beth Nelson: The night of the tornadoes, the big snowstorm, those are things that people have a lot of vivid memories of. Are there things that you all remember from those events?

Bill Young: The tornadoes when they came through I got called back to the ED and was in there with all our vents and we had everybody we had working. It was a pretty uncomfortable situation because your family is at home and you are here getting reports on the emergency radio that tornadoes are moving from so and so in Greene County this way and they are still going on and it just leaves you real uncomfortable when you have a family at home and you are at work and all of these casualties are coming in. It was a pretty difficult night.

Beth Nelson: My memory is that unlike a lot of things we have prepared for such as hurricanes since you had days of preparation because you knew the hurricane was coming but the tornadoes, at least initially, kind of struck without a whole lot of warning and once they struck you heard reports that they were in other places too. Is that not what you all remember too? It was just sort of like a shot in the night all of a sudden.

Bill Young: They sort of kept coming all night. There were reports all night long of tornadoes coming and there were even some reports of tornadoes coming toward the hospital from Kinston. That was probably more uncomfortable than the hurricanes and snowstorms and stuff like that because not knowing whether they were over or still coming.

George Williams: I remember we tried to call the Medical Examiner on call when we realized we had the first death. The ME was Dr. Stan Harris and for whatever reason Dr. Harris didn't come in and so Dr. Norris and I, and Dr. Norris was fairly new to Greenville at that time, spent that night until early the next morning in the morgue with bodies coming in with no identification on them and working through the night. We had family members coming in to identify their dead relatives. We had eight deaths.

John Stallings: Actually I was on the Executive Staff back at that time and one of the things I was assigned was to set up a temporary morgue down in the Storeroom and I remember that was kind of gruesome trying to put partitions up so we could have the family come down and look and it was down in the halls where everybody was and it was just a bad situation. We just put up screens.

Beth Nelson: If there were eight, did you do that because you thought there might be more than eight coming in or was that just eight more than could be managed in the morgue at that time?

George Williams: First of all we didn't have storage capacity in the morgue itself, refrigerator storage, for all the bodies. All of them were not in there. Secondly, in the morgue the autopsy room is a very sterile environment with a lot of equipment around. It is not the place you want to bring somebody to identify their dead relatives. So what we were trying to do was clean the bodies and prepare them with a shroud/drape and have that person on a gurney in an area where you just had it cordoned off so that other people couldn't see in and so the family members could go in and have that kind of space to identify their loved ones rather than go in an autopsy room if you will, with other stretchers around with bodies on them and all the rest. Back then the morgue was back in that area too at that time off from the loading dock. In order to get into the Morgue you went on the loading dock. Now it is in the Lab.

That night as I remember it, the Emergency Department, you could go in down there and every wall had somebody sitting or leaning up against it and people were wounded and bleeding and dozens of people were trying to stop anybody they could find to ask about family members.

Beth Nelson: My memory is that the ED was under construction at that time. Parts of it were like a MASH unit.

George Williams: We used to have a loading dock and you would back up to the loading dock and unload the ambulances and what happened was the early ambulances backed into the dock and other ambulances would pull in front of them and you had this huge traffic jam out there with the ambulances because of them were trying to come out as others were trying to come in. I am talking about rescue squads. Now you see the way they are set up for traumas to come through. They pull through the loop and they are lining up and they can get out.

Bill Young: I can remember people even coming in the next day.

Beth Nelson: There were 156 people in a three hour period and I can remember looking out the portico where the rescue squads came in and as far as you could see that night there was nothing but red lights flashing. It looked like it went on forever there were so many lined up to come in.

Bill Young: I came in that night and there was a guy standing outside by the ED trying to direct traffic and I don't even know who he was but he had regular clothing and he was a hospital employee and I gave him a flashlight and told him to keep it or he would get killed standing out there trying to direct traffic. Everything was dark, no lights, just dark and I don't even know who he was. He was out there in the intersection.

Beth Nelson: I can remember somebody saying there were 600 people in the cafeteria that night.

John Stallings: Also, it was a much smaller cafeteria than we have now.

Bill Young: That was the worst disaster that I have ever seen in the years that I have been there. The amount of people injured, the number of family members trying to find out where their relatives were, it was pretty chaotic.

Beth Nelson: It was said, and different people have different remembrances of this, but I remember at the time it was said that because we didn't have enough OR rooms and OR staff that some "minor" procedures that couldn't go in the OR were being done in the hallways in the ED with very limited type of anesthesia and in some cases none in some life threatening situations. Do you all remember any of that?

Bill Young: I know we ran completely out of ventilators. We probably had ten at that time.

Beth Nelson: What about getting staff in. I remember that roads were blocked by trees that were down. Did you all have trouble getting staff in?

Bill Young: We were real lucky, we had a lot of staff that lived close enough by where they could get in. Some of our staff was from Washington and places like that and we didn't even try to get them in. We just relied on local staff. It was sort of one of those situations where it doesn't make any difference what you do; you do what you need to do. Respiratory Care would manage airways and bag people also. It was touch and go. Although we lost eight people, there was probably twice that many that were critical.

Beth Nelson: What about blood supply that night? Was that an issue?

George Williams: To tell you the truth, I was in the Morgue so I wasn't real tuned in to what was going on with blood supplies. There were other people there looking after that.

Beth Nelson: You don't remember that being a factor?

George Williams: I do not.

Beth Nelson: How about with the flood was it a factor then?

George Williams: No, with the flood we had a good blood supply. We could fly blood in and out and with hurricanes on the horizon you respond differently.