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LAWRENCE DAVENPORT
Past Chairman, Board of Trustees
Pitt County Memorial Hospital

October 17, 2000

Interviewer: Beth Nelson

Beth Nelson: Let's start out with a little bit about your background, your education and how you came to be associated with the hospital.

Lawrence Davenport: Actually I was born and raised in Pitt County here in Pactolus. We are four generations of agriculture in Pactolus. My great grandfather came here right after the Civil War and now, of course, my son is here and that makes the fifth generation so we have a what you might say, a vested interest in the hospital because my family has seen it from the very beginning. Actually, my step-grandmother was a trustee.

Beth Nelson: Is that right, who was that?

Lawrence Davenport: Mrs. J. Paul Davenport, Sr. and on the old hospital plaque her name was Eugenia. She was a trustee when they built the hospital where the County Offices are now. So she was a trustee when they built that hospital and so we have a long history of being involved at the hospital so to speak. She may have been the first woman trustee I never thought about that. She may have been the first woman trustee. Of course my education was here in Pitt County. I went to J. H. Rose High School and then went to N. C. State and graduated with a BS Degree in Agronomy and came back to the farm and then subsequently we went into other businesses like fertilizer and chemicals and farm supplies sales and lawn clearing products and operations and now we have a fertilizer manufacturing plant over in Martin County and we own part interest in a cotton gin over in Martin County. We are involved not just in Pitt County, I love Martin County and think it is a great county and Beaufort County and to a certain extent in Craven County as we have customers in Craven County and since we own a place down at Morehead there we are in Carteret County.

So I really believe that we've got to include the twenty-nine counties in eastern North Carolina. Pitt County Memorial Hospital and the School of Medicine were not put here just for Pitt County people. It was put here to serve eastern North Carolina and I believed that from the very day I went on the board and all the way through and that has got me into trouble sometimes with the local people because naturally Pitt County people have a possessive attitude of Pitt County Memorial Hospital, that is fine, that's great that they have an attitude as it is positive to the hospital and it is positive but I think most people who think of it in that way don't have a feel for what it is for this hospital to represent the whole region. We can't just represent Pitt County; we have got to represent the whole region.

I was asked to go on the board. The county commissioners asked me to serve on the board mainly because, I was told at the time, they needed business type people; people who knew Pitt County, who knew rural areas because that's what we were serving. Mainly it was because of business; they wanted a more business-like approach as they felt like the hospital was too tied to the old public institution ways and that they needed a more business-like approach. They needed people who knew about budgets and spending money and investing money and payrolls and that kind of stuff. I was willing to serve, you know. I had that experience and was willing to give it a shot and directly they were able to put some others on the board like Kelly Barnhill, Bob Spivey and some others who also had that good experience and I think that they put them on at the right time. It was a perfect time because that was the time in 1988 and 1989 that the hospital was beginning to change into more of a business, not just totally a service organization but it had a business side to it and employees are important and their salaries are important and their benefits are important and people make that hospital and you have to be sure that you look out for these people. You have to look after them; you have to look after their families.

All of that plays a part and if they are not happy then you do not have a good hospital. You got to have employee benefits, you got to have hospitalization plans for them, retirement plans, their salaries need to be kept up with the median of the salaries within the state for people who do the same jobs. All of that has to happen for you to keep good people. It was a time when the hospital needed that kind advice and expertise, I thought. Certainly that brought us right along and we grew so fast in those first few years that I was on the board from the time when the hospital could hardly meet the payroll and it was only three or four years before I came on, not that I had anything to do with it particularly, but the business of the hospital began to just take a totally different approach and it began to grow in a totally different direction. It wasn't just growing numbers of patients and beds it was growing in the business area only because, I guess, we were getting more patients and the services were expanded so fast over there and the research and all that they were doing just kept growing, growing and growing.

At the same time you had to grow the business side of the hospital to keep it all going. It pushed us to a point of almost being too big on the patient side and not big enough on the business side to handle it. You had to expand the Financial Department, the Bookkeeping Department and all those numbers of people had to grow and then all of a sudden you're into what do people think of us so therefore you need a department that looks after the public image and how people think the hospital is treating them and all that kind of stuff becomes super important.

Beth Nelson: That's exactly right. When you think about how the hospital has changed, talk about what you remember of the hospital as a child, your earliest recollections of it.

Lawrence Davenport: Well, I remember in the old hospital over on Johnston Street. I just barely do remember it though, I remember what it looked like and I remember going in there and how it smelled, you know, the smell of alcohol and other cleaning agents and things. I remember being scared to death because every time I went I knew I would get something bad. I would get a shot or something. I remember what the nurses and the doctors looked like and I remember Dr. Irons being there and then, of course, I had very, very few occasions to go there as a child. But I do remember when they built the new hospital on Fifth Street and I guess I was maybe a teenager and I remember my parents and grandparents talking Mr. Moye giving the property and they were friends of his and I remember hearing them talk about that. Of course, with my grandmother being on the board when they built the hospital and it was just as controversial when they built that hospital as it was when they built the next one. There was a segment of people that said we didn't need it and it was only a few months after it was open for business that everybody was so proud of it and it was just the greatest thing and everything was good. My Dad and Dr. Herbert Hadley were good friends, real close friends and he spent a lot of time out here and we heard him talk about what a great thing it was and how much different it was having that facility to go to and how much better patient care people were going to get. Then, it seemed like hardly any time before Dr. Jenkins was talking about building a med school and working on building a new hospital. I don't remember the time period and how long it was after the old hospital opened in 1951 and then the new one opened in 1977 so that is a twenty-six year period and gosh knows that went so fast I don't even remember much of that because I was going to high school and college and not interested in that too much.

Beth Nelson: I think the discussions about the possibility of a school of medicine started in the mid to late sixties and then from what I understand there were a number of physicians in the community who sort of feared the idea of the state telling us how to practice medicine and some of those kinds of issues.

Lawrence Davenport: You know, I came back here in 1965 to live after being in school and graduating and I remember all that going on. I remember reading it in the paper and I remember Dr. Hadley and my Dad discussing it and all the ins and outs and most people outside of those who were in the know, right in the nucleus of the people who were working on getting it done, like the political leadership and the industry leadership and town and county leadership. Most people didn't know a whole lot, only what they read in the paper. I can remember thinking they will never get that done. I had been in Raleigh for five years in school and knew what was going on at Chapel Hill and they said they would never let that happen down here. But, it began to happen and people were just amazed that this was just impossible that we were going to get that done, but you know with Dr. Jenkins being so forceful and having some good leadership at that time. We had good County leadership at that time and, of course, Dr. Jenkins at the university probably being the best leader we have ever had over there and then we had good City leadership at that time.

We had great support from the region. I don't think many people give credit to that like they should. We had great support from down East and Martin County and probably not as much from some of the municipalities like Washington and maybe New Bern and some of them because they thought it was a little bit of a threat maybe but still the political leadership in those counties fell in line and they supported us because they were all East Carolina supporters so to speak.

Beth Nelson: I interviewed Ed Monroe and the same thing came out from him too. He talked about the kinds of support that we had from the region.I think you are right that people don't realize it.

Lawrence Davenport: People don't give enough credit to those who were big supporters for having the fortitude to see it through. They went through some tough times. I know they got blown out and I can imagine the looks and the kinds of conversations they got in halls up there in Raleigh because I have been there and I have had to work on issues with the Legislature. It's tough when nobody is on your side or when you got a few people on your side and a lot of people that are not on your side. When you got to climb that ladder it is a tough job and people can be mean. The Charlotte crowd was dead set against us and there was no doubt about that and man, they had all the power back then. I still say that change in feelings in Raleigh didn't come just from Pitt County it came because of people in Martin, Beaufort and Bertie and all the way to the coast. The support that they gave in Raleigh and maybe in Chapel Hill too, to the point that they were able to put it off. I don't think that even after they were able to put it off that anybody up there felt like it would ever be, you know, any more than something that probably would serve two or three counties down here and they would never hear from it too much and it would never interfere.

They darn sure know who we are now and there are some great things coming out over there because of some mighty good people. There is not any lack of recognition across this State now.

Do you know what the Gold Leaf Foundation is? That is the board that I am on that has to do with the tobacco money and Dr. Bill Friday is Chairman and we have on that board a Wake Forest University trustee who is on that board who is also a trustee over at Bowman Gray; we two have two people from Charlotte on that who are very involved with Carolinas Medical Center. They wanted to start having some meetings not just in Raleigh. They had been having them in Raleigh and Winston-Salem and so I spoke right up and told them I would love to have them come to Greenville. I told them bring it to Greenville and I would set up the meeting place and all that kind of stuff and Dr. Friday told me that I could have it in June. I told him okay that was fine and I immediately called Dave and I told him that I had to have this meeting in the Board Room at the hospital. I told him I had to show this place off and we had to show these people who we are down here because there were only three people on the board out of fifteen who even know where it is. So we did that and I had them out at the farm for social things the night before and then we had an all day meeting in the Board Room at the hospital.

We had Dr. Chitwood come in and we had Dr. Burlingham from the med school and then Dr. Eakin came and had lunch with us and Dr. Hallock and, of course, Dave came in and made some presentations. I'll tell you when those people left there they just couldn't believe it. The lady who is on the board at Wake Forest told me later that she went back and told her people that she would tell them one thing and that was if she ever had a heart problem she was going to Greenville. Dr. Friday was just completely taken. He hadn't been here since way back.

I think that once we get people down here and show them and let our people talk to them and let them see what Chitwood is doing; I mean it is absolutely amazing what the guy is doing. So coming from that, I don't know if you say it, but we had Dr. Chitwood and Dave on Dr. Friday's show and all of that was put together when I agreed to have it down here I told him that I wanted him to bring them on his show and he said okay that it was fine and it just worked out that he was able to do both of those shows while he was here. He taped them while he was here for that meeting.

Beth Nelson: I came over when they were doing that and I didn't realize that it was going on at the same time.

Lawrence Davenport: Yes, he coordinated all of that. He came in a day early and they did the show, they taped on the day that we had the little social out here that night and then the next day we were in our meeting all day at the hospital. I mean everybody, and all the members were here, and the chap from North Carolina Central was here, the CEO of Centura Bank was on that board and he was here, the guy from Charlotte who is an international lawyer and speaks fluent German. I mean, these people had never had any reason to come to Greenville and they were very, very impressed with what we have got here. We just don't show it off enough.

That is why our promotional department is really important. I mean this whole business is about people, grants, money, you don't want to talk about health care being money but it is money and you have to coordinate every bit of it for it to work. That's why it takes a Board of Trustees that touch lots of different areas. I think they have done very well about spreading that out so far. We have had some mighty good folks who have served on that board and I have never seen anybody go off of that board that I know of that wasn't completely dedicated, understood and backed the hospital. As a matter of fact, the guy from Nags Head, Bobby Owens, his son, is on that board with me and he told me that after Bobby went on the board a couple of months later he said he didn't know what we did to those people down there but his daddy was completely brain washed. He said that all he talks about is Pitt County Memorial Hospital and how great it was and it was the finest thing he had ever seen. You know, we do have something to be proud of.

Beth Nelson: Yes, we certainly do and it has come a long way. I have always been loyal to the hospital but when you talk to people like yourself you see a what it means to the community.

Lawrence Davenport: I have a good friend that I was in school with at State and he lives in Raleigh now and has a daughter who lives in Rocky Mount. There was an accident and his grandson was hurt in a wreck or something and anyway it wound up that they had to send him over here from the Rocky Mount hospital and, of course, they said they had to get them to Rex or they had to get him to Duke and it was a life-threatening situation. They were convinced that they didn't have time and they could get him to Greenville but there was not a vehicle available to get him to Rex or to Duke right then but they could get him to Greenville and be there in thirty minutes and were told they were assured that Greenville could take care of him. He has told me several times since then that The Lord was looking after us because he sent us to the right place. He told me he had never in his life been so well treated and they were just tickled to death that they were able to come here rather than go back to the Triangle. He thought it was just the greatest place in the world.

You hear that all the time and we hear people complain too. If you are going to have a hospital you are going to have people who are not happy and you are always going to have that but overwhelmingly so far we have been on the other side.

Beth Nelson: Talk a little bit about the folklore that you know. Wayne has access to a lot of public documents of meetings, old newspaper articles, articles particularly about privatization.

Lawrence Davenport: I remember Dave sitting in that same chair you are sitting in on two different occasions around 5:00 p.m. or 6:00 p.m. or 7:00 p.m. after I had been out on the farm all day and he would call me and ask me if I was going to be in and I would tell him yes and he would say he was coming out here. We did that weekly. I didn't always when I was Chairman go to the hospital and sit in his office. He spent a lot of time out here riding around in my truck with me or whatever. If I were busy on the farm he would just ride with me sometimes and we would talk over these issues and things. I do remember two times in particular when we were in the heat of the privatization issue and he was sitting right here and said that he had been thinking about this and that there was too much blood being spilled and we were making too many enemies and that we were just going to have to abandon this. He said that we just had to give it up and asked me what I thought.

I told him nope. There was no way because we have gone too far to give up and we are not giving up now. I told him we were going to see this thing through. If it killed me we were going to see this thing through. He said he just wanted to be sure that I was still on and I told him not to worry that I was with him all the way and we are going to win and we just had to hold on. We just had to give them time as we had the right people supporting us and we were going to make it. Many times we went through that.

Beth Nelson: Looking back on it, what do you think turned the tide. It seemed to me that all was lost a number of times. It looked like the commissioners had slammed the door.

Lawrence Davenport: I always knew we had five. I knew from beginning to end we had five people, five votes out of nine. Those five never wavered. All day they kept telling me that if this thing fails, I am going on what you are telling me and I am depending on it, and if we see this thing going down the tubes you better let them know quick because all my political career has been placed on this and they were going on what we were telling them. We knew who they were or we knew they were going to stick by us all the way no matter what but they were not as vocal as the other four. The other four were just extremely vocal and just raked us over the coals. I knew we had those five and I knew they wouldn't change on me. We had a couple of them that disappointed me and the other four I was very disappointed in the fact that they didn't support us. I knew there were five and I kept telling Dave that we were going to win it if the time doesn't run out on us.

Beth Nelson: What do you mean by time running out on us?

Lawrence Davenport: Well, I knew the election was coming up and we were probably going to lose one or two of them and I knew we had to have that vote before the new people were put into office. I knew we had to keep the pressure on to get them to have that vote and the five of them knew that too. They knew that they had to get that done before the elections so they were persistent and let me tell you, those five people took a lot of heat. I mean they got ugly phone calls, they got ugly remarks made about them by some of the commissioners and it was a bad time. I can remember thinking if this thing goes bad I will have to move to Brazil. I thought that there is no way I would be able to survive if this thing goes bad. You know what, it has grown so far beyond my wildest expectations. It is just five times better now then we dreamed it could be.

Beth Nelson: How do you mean?

Lawrence Davenport: We kept harping on the fact that our investments were going to be better, that our business side of it was going to be better, that our patient care was going to be better, that our relationship with the medical school was going to be better, that we would grow and that it would give us a chance to do things that we couldn't do under the old system and all that. Every one of those things has come true. It is just unbelievable we are up like fifty percent in total volume, I mean the hospital is just exploding when other hospitals all over the country are closing floors and wings and having trouble with HMOs and at the time we couldn't even deal with an HMO and now, we have got the upper hand on them because of this and they readily admit it.

It is amazing the comments I get from people when I run in to the Bill Fridays and the Legislators like Jim Black, Speaker of the House, and the Marc Basnights and all of them seem very interested in what is going on down here. Every bit of that is directly related to the fact that we were able to make that change when others have not been able to swing it. I have heard Bill Friday refer to it several times in our Gold Leaf meetings. He said to ask me about getting something done and what it means. He said we pulled off something down here and it has meant more to eastern North Carolina than probably all this money that they had.

Beth Nelson: Isn't that interesting. That carries a lot of weight coming from Bill Friday.

Lawrence Davenport: It sure does. He is a man that knows.

Lawrence Davenport: Well, the one way we did it and I didn't go to the commissioners' meetings much and that was a mistake when I look back. I actually felt like some of those good friends probably don't consider me a friend any more. They felt like I was wrong and that I should have taken their cause and that I should never have started this.

Looking back on things I can see mistakes we made. We made a big mistake probably may a year or eighteen months before we decided to go for it. We had a chance in a meeting with the county commissioners to help them with a project that they wanted to do with the school system. They needed some money and they wanted the hospital to help them out because they thought we had all this money. Of course we really didn't have all this money. We had money and we had the most money the hospital had ever had but it was pretty much already designated for this expansion and the Heart Center we were worried to death that we were overextending the hospital with all this growth. But we felt like it would work. I mean when you put it on paper it looked like it would work just like all of us do in our businesses and it had to work. We didn't have a lot of extra money but we had this opportunity to help them with a project they were working on and we didn't do it. We didn't feel like the money could be taken from the hospital and put in the education system in Pitt County because we felt that, even though Pitt County owned it, the hospital served a bigger area and if we put money in one school system we would have to put it in all of them, all over the whole east. So we really didn't pursue that far enough and listen to it hard enough and I think if we had at least tried to work with them and pacify them a little bit that we would have saved two of those people that were so violently opposed to it.

So we missed an opportunity there. We probably could have, if we had been smart, we could have done both. We could have helped them because we were under them many years. We could have helped them at a time when they needed it and then we could have preserved their support for a time when we needed it. We could have alerted them what we were thinking. The problem was at that time we had not made up our own minds if this private not-for-profit was going to work. Although it had been on the books for a long time in other hospitals and it worked great, we weren't sure that it would work for us. We were still in the learning stage. Dave was two years ahead of us. He felt like it would work but he had been in the business a long time and we had new people on the board. Kelly was Chairman at that time and talked about it a lot just he and I, and we felt like that at some point in time we were going to have to face that problem. We had to make a change as there was no way that this hospital could have remained in the government structure that it was in; it had to step out of the box and it had to go ahead and take on the region. We knew that had to happen or we were going to box ourselves in and we were going to stop right where we were. So we knew it had to happen and we weren't smart enough to see that it was going to happen as quick as it did and so we missed a good opportunity.

Your question about losing some friends, to be honest with you, I don't feel like I am really even welcome at county commissioner meetings right now. Another mistake we made was when I became Chairman or even when Kelly was Chairman, we should have initiated a policy since both of us were Pitt County boys, and that was the first time we have had somebody from Pitt County as Chairman in probably seven or eight years because Bob Spivey and Bob Harrington were both out-of-county people. They were medical school people.

Beth Nelson: But Bob Harrington lived in Greenville.

Lawrence Davenport: He lived in Greenville but he was a UNC Board of Governors appointee. I think the commissioners were anxious to get it back into Pitt County folks and Kelly was the first one and then me. What we should have done is we should have gone to the county commissioners meetings at least once a month and reported to them. We would have brought it along very slowly and gotten a good rapport with them at those meetings and maybe some of our opponents who were always at the commissioners meeting would have not been so violent. We missed an opportunity there too.

Beth Nelson: Looking back on it though, having gone back and seen some of the minutes and some of the newspaper articles, I have a sense that it was being done. Maybe you weren't always there but Dave or somebody from his shop would go over quite often. There were some times when you spoke at commissioners meetings, I guess that what you are saying is that you should have gone more often.

Lawrence Davenport: What we saw happening and didn't react to quick enough was that there became a little resentment there of what the hospital was accomplishing. We were getting too big for our britches and we were not paying proper respect to the County, I guess is the right way of putting it. Some people were getting a little bit irritated and they were not responding to Dave as they had in the past and they were beginning to kind of pick him apart a little bit at the meetings and getting what I thought was a little bit rough needlessly. They were saying things that they didn't need to say. That was the point where Kelly and I should have stepped up and told Dave that he didn't need to stand up there and take that and that he needed to let us do this. We were the ones that needed to be over there. We should have told him to just cool it and give us the information and let us do the reporting to them and we didn't do that.

Beth Nelson: Did Kelly feel the same way?

Yes, a little bit. He didn't want to do it at the time and I didn't either but we should have done it. He could have had a tremendous effect on them, tremendous effect. They would not have responded to him in the way that they were responding to Dave or to Kathy Barger or to the people that were reporting to them. I don't think they would have with me either if we had done it early enough. Instead of doing that we told Dave that maybe it was best not to go to the commissioners meetings anymore, and so we didn't. We went when they called us when there was a problem or when the heat was coming on too strong then we would go over there and try to smooth it over or at least answer their questions. By that time the hostility was already there and they would never, you could answer the questions over and over, but they never heard the answer. They wouldn't listen.

I told David Brody six months before he became Chairman and I told Dave that the best thing for us to do in last six months that we were going to have push hard to get this vote was to let me take all the load, let me take all the criticism, let it look like it was my deal pushing just as hard as I could. Then once we got it done it wasn't going to be but another month or two before I was going to be off the Board, my Chairmanship would be over and that would be the end of my board tenure, and the best thing for me to do then was to leave the hospital and come back out here and not go back, not go to the board meetings, not have anything to do with it; not mention my name over there, let me carry those wounds home with me and deal with them out there and let our new Chairman come in with a whole new attitude, a whole new program; I mean, we got it done, its done, go on about your business like you would have done like there had never been a controversy and just go for it. Just take over and go for it. So that's why I haven't been involved. I think that has helped some. I really do feel like it helped David because it made him have a different relationship with some of those commissioners. They still blame it on me to this day, Eugene still says that I am the man that gave the hospital away. He makes that statement all the time.

Beth Nelson: He is an interesting person. You know Jack Richardson told me a long time ago when we were fighting some issue remember Eugene represents a whole world of people out there who believe he's right. He represents a perspective that we almost forget about in Pitt County. He represents a lot of people in the county and their interests. You might disagree with Eugene but he represents those folks.

Lawrence Davenport: I had a good relationship with Eugene when I went on the board and he was one of my biggest supporters. We have always gotten along very well even though we don't always agree completely on things. My kids know his kids and they went to high school together and that kind of stuff and have always been good friends. I have known him forever but when we got on the opposite sides of this particular issue he took it personally.

Beth Nelson: A couple of people mentioned to me that they felt like Ed Bright pretty much sacrificed his political career, and you know obviously he didn't get re-elected, but a lot of people feel like the hospital vote was his undoing. Do you feel that way?

Lawrence Davenport: Yes, it was a fairly big factor and I admire Ed Bright in that he knew when he voted that final vote, he knew that it might be the end of his political career. He still stuck with it and did what he knew was right and there is no finer gentleman ever been in this county than Dr. Bright. He is a smart, very intelligent man. He came from Beaufort County, pulled up his own bootstraps and made a career in education and everything, just a super guy.

Beth Nelson: We want to try to do a vignette about him because as a lot of people have the feeling that he took the brunt of it all.

Lawrence Davenport: He caught the brunt of it because he was in the wrong place at that time. We had some people over there out of his District that were violently opposed to it and they got out and worked against him. I have to say to you that I think Dr. Bright probably misread what was happening and waited too late to try to counteract that. I think he could have won that election if he had gotten out and really worked hard, I just don't think he thought until the last minute that he had a chance of being beaten and all of a sudden it was too late. The tide had all changed. I have had people from over there say that he didn't come and ask them to support him at that time and that he had always asked them before and he didn't ask me that time. I didn't feel like that it was all hospital, it just made him vulnerable. I am sure he held back from going to certain meetings and things where he knew people were going to jump all over him and it was going to be a bad time and that kind of stuff.

I will say this that in that whole process there was nobody to ask more penetrating questions or anybody who understood it anymore than Dr. Bright did. He understood it completely and he had it in his mind and he had weighed the possibilities of the bad against the possibilities of the good, probably more than anybody else. He understood what was getting ready to happen and once he made up his mind he stuck with it no matter what.

That's what happens when you win big battles, you don't win unless you have people like that. The people who have the most Dr. Brights on their side always win and that is how we get where we are. That is how Leo Jenkins got the medical school. When you have people like that who stand up and were counted and they stood their ground and they didn't back up and the Ed Monroes and at that time the Charles Gaskins and the Horton Roundtrees and the Sam Bundys and the Vernon Whites and all those people stood up and just would not back down and that is why we got the medical school. Here we come twenty-five years later with another issue just almost as big as the original one of getting the medical school, here we come with this issue of making a change in the government structure with the effects of it so far reaching. It is an issue that in time will be competitive with the original medical school issue.

Beth Nelson: Jim Hallock made a very similar point and he said that the significance of it is probably not appreciated now but it would be in fifteen or twenty years.

Lawrence Davenport: It took me five years to be completely convinced that it was the right thing to do. When Dave first mentioned it or when I first heard about it I said it would never happen, that we could not do that. I felt we would never it take it out of the control of Pitt County.

Beth Nelson: It was not so much you were opposed to the concept, more that you felt like it was undoable.

Lawrence Davenport: I thought it was undoable and I wasn't sure that it was what we needed to do. I don't think any of us were. We started off with a negative feeling. But as we began to educate ourselves with what that statute meant and then over a five-year period as we began to have more requests from the twenty-nine counties in the area, as I began to realize that this medical center was going to have to play on the State level, and we couldn't sit down here and be just Pitt County Hospital anymore, that if we were going to knock heads with the Duke, Chapel Hill, Rex, Carolinas Medical Center and Bowman Gray and all of those that we just couldn't sit here and that we were going to have to step out of that box and we couldn't step out of that box financially if we didn't make this change. My expertise, if I had any, to offer to the board was on the financial side. It was on the business side, not on the clinical. I had not a clue how to treat a patient. As I looked at the financial side and what we were going to have to do when we stepped out of that box to compete in a health system that was getting ready to change to HMOs and PPOs with the private doctors and the medical school doctors and the private doctors in the region, some of them going broke and some of them going away that we were going to have to pick up some of the practices and that we couldn't leave a Bertie County out there by themselves and just let those people lose their hospital. They didn't have any facilities and when you looked at all of that you realized that we were going to have to carry the financial burden of that. There was just no other way. All of a sudden the pieces began to come together. The Legislature drew up this statute and it was almost like the Constitution, they didn't even know what they were doing. They drew the Statute up and it was just a stroke of luck that the words wound up just like they did.