See also Vignette

JACK W. RICHARDSON
Retired President & CEO
Pitt County Memorial Hospital

May 22, 2000 and May 23, 2000

Interviewer: Beth Nelson
Also participating: Sally Lucido and Lily Richardson

Beth Nelson: Talk a little bit about your background, how you came to be associated with the hospital and your background from eastern North Carolina.

Jack Richardson: I grew up in Rocky Mount, North Carolina and went off in the service and came back and worked in Durham, North Carolina in a partnership in a paint and hardware company with my brother and my father for a number of years. Lily and I decided it was time to go back to school and pursue a vocation and went to Richmond to the Medical College of Virginia and I did an administrative residency in Roanoke, Virginia. While there I was about to graduate and I found out there was a job in Greenville, North Carolina, which was close to my home. My father was having health problems, had been in the hospital for a heart attack several times, and it seemed like a good opportunity. I had another opportunity in Norfolk, Virginia, but pursued Greenville. I had my first interview there on April 5, 1966 and at that morning meeting which was about 10:00 a.m., Mr. Ward was there and Betty Coburn, who was the nursing supervisor that day, came in and said to Mr. Ward "we don't have anybody to cover the operating room". Most people would have got up and left when they heard those words but I was kind of intrigued by it and later on after I had left, I got a phone call on May 17 in Roanoke, Virginia from the Board of Trustees at Pitt offering me the job. I took the job and began working.

Beth Nelson: Who were some of the people you interviewed with?

Jack Richardson: Wilton Duke was there, Kenneth Dews, Jesse Moye, as Chairman of the Board at that particular time. I don't remember some of the others. I also think W.W. Wooten was there also from Falkland.

Beth Nelson: I remember that Kenneth Dews or somebody mentioned that when they first met you that one thing that impressed the Committee that interviewed you was the fact that you brought Lily along.

Jack Richardson: That's right, I wanted them to see the whole family.

Beth Nelson: Also, the fact that you were doing that made them feel like you were a serious candidate and that you were mature, responsible person.

Jack Richardson: That was it. We met with them within a week or so before the Board meeting and then went back to Roanoke. They called me on my birthday, I remember that date.

Beth Nelson: Do you remember what your first salary was?

Jack Richardson: $7,800, I believe. Back in those days that was a fair salary.

Beth Nelson: Talk a little bit about what you saw when you came to Greenville. Of course, you were familiar with the community because you were from Rocky Mount but certainly the medical complex which you envisioned and created in Greenville was many, many years down the road. What did you see when you came?

Jack Richardson: We saw the old building which sat on a hill and as you approached it from Rocky Mount it was a prominent structure because it was about the only thing at that end of town. We came in and one of the things we were looking for was eastern North Carolina barbecue and there was a place over by the river which is no longer there and we stopped because we had the children and the moving van was on its way. We went in and got us a barbecue dinner. We hadn't had any eastern North Carolina barbecue in a long time. Then we waited for the van to come and the first thing we wanted to do was go to the beach. The van got there on a Friday, we unloaded, went to the bank and opened a bank account. The people didn't know me from anybody. I cashed a check and we went to the beach for the weekend. We went to Atlantic Beach.

Lily Richardson: One of the things he did on the way down, he stopped the car and I asked him what he was doing and he got out and he kissed the ground.

Jack Richardson: When we crossed the Virginia/North Carolina boarder, I was glad to be back in tarheel country. She didn't take a picture though!

Beth Nelson: What intrigued you about what Greenville had to offer? Community wise and career opportunity wise, certainly being close to family was a big consideration.

Jack Richardson: When I came the Board of Trustees said that Mr. Ward was getting ready for retirement and they wanted to groom someone to be the CEO of the hospital. After I had been there about two or three weeks, Ed Clements, an OB/GYN doctor, had a social gathering at his home and he invited Lily and I to come and ten new doctors came that year. Dr. Bernard Vick came, I remember him as one, and Dr. Bowman, and Dr. John Winstead had returned to practice about that time, maybe Bill Fore was there. Ed had just invited everyone to his house so we would get to meet the people in the medical community at that time, it was really informal, but they were excited about the possibility that they would have a medical school in eastern North Carolina. That was in 1966. The fact that the medical staff at that point in time was excited about that led you to think that they were ambitious and they had some goals that were above the usual for eastern North Carolina.

Beth Nelson: I think back then the medical school was sort of a two-edge sword I guess from your perspective, certainly you were coming into a community hospital but certainly as a young man there was the opportunity of being a part of a grand vision and to be able to help to make that occur.

Jack Richardson: We were so busy with day to day things that a lot of time was not spent thinking about that. We had nursing shortages, we had money shortages, space shortages. In fact, up until that summer when those ten new doctors came to Greenville the hospital's average census per day had been only 155 patients. In that year with those new doctors coming to town, we went to 188, which meant in that old hospital we had people in the halls. In fact, the hospital where I had worked in Roanoke, Virginia had bought portable screens to set up patient rooms in the halls. We ordered some of those and it did create quite a confusion, not only with the nursing staff and others and the people who had to push the meal carts. The traffic congestion was just horrendous but we had so many people wanting to get in the hospital that we had to put them in the halls and we had to restrict visiting because the people didn't have much privacy in those little cubicles.

Medicare came in 1966 and our medical staff took the lead in eastern North Carolina by not discouraging Medicare. In other words, they signed on early on and they took assignments for other doctors in other communities in eastern North Carolina who did not take assignments and people found out about that very quickly and that led to the development a whole lot because that went on for years. People would come from far and wide because they knew they could get coverage. It was little things like that, which you don't think about at the time but the fact that we were so busy and scrambling around trying to meet the needs that were there. Even when we started talking about building of a new hospital there was a lot resistance, as you know. The Bond issue didn't pass but by 51%. It was right down to the wire.

Beth Nelson: Let's go back to your background. You came as Assistant Administrator and tell me when it was that you became the Administrator after Mr. Ward retired.

Jack Richardson: Well, Mr. Ward and I had jobs as co-administrator in the beginning of 1971 and that's when I took over the responsibilities for building the new hospital and he stayed there until the summer of 1971 and formally retired. Rick Gilstrap came on as my first assistant and then we took joint control of all the administrative functions both in the old hospital and the new hospital.

Beth Nelson: Was it then that you took the title of President?

Jack Richardson: Well, I had so many titles. I started off as Administrator and then at one time I think I was General Director, and then it evolved into President. Title changes were going on in the industry.

Beth Nelson: So you were President and/or Administrator for how many years?

Jack Richardson: From 1971 until I retired in October of 1989. You know the story that I told everybody. When I used to go to national meetings and have a chance to talk about all that had happened in Greenville and a lot of my colleagues were having to move around, particularly in the 80's there was a lot of confusion, the census was dropping off in some hospitals and I used to have fun in little gatherings. I would tell them that I lived in a town of about 40,000 people and I have been the CEO of a 200-bed, 300-bed, 400-bed, 500-bed, and now almost 600-bed hospital and had never moved out of the town. They wanted to know where that was!

Beth Nelson: Talk about your family background, we talked a little about your education, meeting Lily, having two children.

Jack Richardson: When we were living in Durham, Lily and I met and she was a nurse at the VA hospital in Durham and we met there. We were married and had two children there and the hospital over in Durham was Watts Hospital back in those days. By the way, the hospital I was born in at Rocky Mount is no longer there either. In fact it is now an empty lot. They got the new hospital in Rocky Mount just before we opened up. Our son went to the first grade the year I went back to college so he and I started school together and we were in Richmond about three years and Lily worked at the VA hospital there in various shifts. Sometimes she worked the midnight shift, sometime the afternoon shift because I worked some at the Medical College of Virginia and we had to organize our activities so that one of us could always be with the children.

We didn't feel comfortable not having one of us there, as we didn't feel comfortable with baby sitters and what have you. It was kind of stressful. I would come to the door and she would come in from work and we would pass and I would go to school and she would be there with the children and then late in the afternoon we would pass again as she went to work and I was there with the children. It was an interesting time for both of us.

Beth Nelson: I imagine that would have been a challenging time in your life trying to hold body and soul together.

Jack Richardson: You don't want to do it again-once is enough! When you are young you can get through anything.

Lily Richardson: It was kind of fun. When you are young you just don't think about it being anything other than investment in your career. I enjoyed my work and one of us was always with the children.

Jack Richardson: When we did my administrative residency for a year in Roanoke, Lily was able to stay home with the kids most of the time which helped out because I was in the hospital from early in the morning until late at night. My preceptor there was a workaholic and he expected you to come and didn't care when you went home.

Beth Nelson: And now, you all have grandchildren.

Jack Richardson: Oh yes, four. Christen is the oldest, she was thirteen last fall, then we have two that are eight years old, a boy and a girl, and then one boy who is six. We are proud of them and they are a joy to us.

Beth Nelson: Talk a little about your years in retirement. Once you left Greenville you became nomads and checked out the whole world.

Jack Richardson: Lily and I had always talked about traveling and were really interested in it. We bought us a small motor home in 1985 and we took some small trips because we didn't have much time-weekends and things of that nature. We decided we would like to come to Florida for a winter the year 1990. Our daughter moved into our home in Greenville and we left about the middle of January and came down and spent most of the winter in Florida down in the Keys and just traveling around. We really got excited talking to other people who had motor homes who were traveling all over the country.

On our way back to North Carolina in April we stopped in Savannah, Georgia and bought us a 34 ft. Pace Arrow motor home and we got some business taken care of and loose ends taken care of and we left in the latter part of April and started for California. I think I had my birthday party in Hot Springs, Arkansas. As went across the country. It took us about thirty days as we were not in a hurry. We got to California and we had thought we might go to Alaska but when we got to California we saw how far it was to Alaska so we said we were not going to do that and that we were just going to take our time so we spent the whole month of July on the Oregon coast and had more fun because it was cool. I sent cards home because I knew it was 90 degrees in North Carolina and it was so cold at night we had to have sweaters or jackets on and I kidded the people in Oregon. I told them that I lived 75 miles from the ocean and I had to drive through several swamps to get to the ocean and told them if I was not careful walking around there I could step off a cliff and be in the ocean.

We loved it and consequently we spent the next eight years traveling all 48 states. We got to where we learned a whole lot of history about our country. We really enjoyed it. We spent our winters down here in Florida and then we would take off in the spring. Our children were so supportive and they enjoyed hearing from us and hearing what we were doing. It was just a great opportunity while our health was good. I was talking earlier about all the scrapbooks. We kept a diary every day so we have a record and we can open up the diary here some mornings and ask where were we on such and such a day and almost relive the experience all over again.

Beth Nelson: Then after that, I think you said it was three years ago, you came here to put down some permanent roots?

Jack Richardson: Yes, we had been looking all over this part of Florida and friends of ours were looking with us and that's when we found this location. We both wanted to put our roots in one place and they were building these buildings so we moved in here and now it is our permanent location. We moved our residency here, we set up housekeeping here, but we are still going back and forth to North Carolina to visit family. We do have a few plans for a few more trips. We sold our motor home. A friend of ours who we had met in Oregon in that year I was telling you about bought our motor home from us.

Beth Nelson: Let's talk a little bit about what the hospital has meant to Greenville, Pitt County and the region.

Jack Richardson: There are many times I have said that if the need had not been in eastern North Carolina, then the hospital and the medical school would not be there. But after I had been there a little while and attended some study sessions and really learned the statistics of the health needs of eastern North Carolina, it became obvious that there was really a need for services little by little we would add on services. Ira Hardy came as the first neurosurgeon in eastern North Carolina and I can remember riding and visiting in Aurora and stopping for gas and the guy found out I was from Greenville and he said that is where that Dr. Ira Hardy is and he saved my wife's life. She had a terrible stroke or something of that nature. I forget the details but it was those kinds of services that little by little came on line. Dr. Steven White was not the first ophthalmologist but he was the first ophthalmologist to look at the region and accept patients from a long distance off and take care of people's needs who were referred to him by state agencies and what have you and little by little as these doctors began to build their referral patterns and gain the confidence of other doctors, because they really were not a threat to other communities because there was no such service.

I can remember some of my colleagues in the some of the communities asked how we were going to be able to afford to have a neurosurgeon in Greenville. As you know, Ira was not there more than two years before he had a partner and he was fighting like everybody else to get bed space, operating room time, and we really had a time.

But even today, I just noticed in your latest newspaper, there are still challenges for finding patient's rooms. We never had enough rooms. The demand has been there and it is just obvious or the place wouldn't be so viable.

Beth Nelson: What about from an economic standpoint?

Jack Richardson: It made a tremendous impact on Pitt County. Little by little as you saw the payroll grow and as you saw the medical school come on line, I don't know what the latest figures are, but I have heard that it is one-third of the economy of Pitt County as all of the parts and parcels of what is involved in the medical school and the service areas. You can just imagine what that meant to young people growing up in Pitt County and the surrounding areas-the job opportunities that were there. Pitt Community College and the other community colleges, as well as ECU allied health programs, just provided opportunities for young people to know that there was going to be a job in eastern North Carolina. People didn't have jobs in eastern North Carolina. A lot of people left eastern North Carolina.

Beth Nelson: What do you think drew patients to Ira Hardy and doctors like that? Certainly it was the availability of specialties that had not been available before that. But somebody like Ira Hardy came here and really took on something of a risk at that time to offer such an esoteric service that fortunately for him it was very successful. But it could have gone the other way.

Jack Richardson: I think there was a commitment to patients. Ira used to ride on the ambulances with the rescue squad team to help them to understand what it is they needed to do when they were bringing in patients. He was there night and day and he never turned anybody away, he was always available. In fact, some of his colleagues were concerned that he was working too hard but really did work hard those two years. You saw that over and over again. He just worked hard to make it possible for people to get care. From the administrative point of view it kind of ticked us from time to time. Resources were not available, nurses were not available and I used to kid some of the nurses that I was going to get me a striped shirt and a whistle to referee some of the sessions between them because we had the tensions that go with that kind of strain.

Beth Nelson: Let's talk about some of the facts or events or vignettes that you recall, things that stick out in your mind looking back on it today.

Jack Richardson: Well, one of the things that struck me a little bit when I first came there was Dr. Bruce Mumford, who was Chief of Staff when I first arrived at the hospital, Mr. Ward was giving me a tour of the grounds. We were in the doctor's parking lot and Dr. Mumford came out and I was introduced to him and Dr. Mumford said to me he would offer for me to go to the medical staff meeting tomorrow night. I told him that I would be happy to come. Mr. Ward did not attend medical staff meetings and there were administrators in those days that did not have very good relationships with some of the doctors, particularly in groups. They worked better with them on a one on one basis. Mr. Ward told me that I didn't have to go to those medical staff meetings but in my training where I had been before we had attended all medical staff meetings. I started going the next night and I shall never forget the kidding that I got when I showed up in the meeting. Dr. Mumford introduced me and I stood up and I told them I was glad to be there and then one of the doctor's asked me if I had anything to say and I told them that I had better not say anything yet. There were only 32 physicians practicing medicine. They were all real busy and of course, that was the year that ten doctors came and that was the first time that some of those doctors had partners in their practice. They had been solo up until that time.

Beth Nelson: The thirty-two acting physicians had access to how many beds?

Jack Richardson: There was only 206 beds but you have to remember it is not like in our hospital now where most rooms are private. We only had 60 private rooms in the whole hospital and many of those did not have toilets in them. People had to go down the hall to a toilet or take a shower. I don't think any of the semi-private rooms and four-bed wards had toilets in them. The accommodations were nothing then, as there were no televisions in the room and very few rooms had telephones then. The accommodations then were minimal.

Beth Nelson: What do you think would have been the hospital's revenue at that time?

Jack Richardson: I don't have those figures readily available but it was less than $1 million. Yes, as far as employees, minimum wage law had not taken effect and a lot of the employees were getting .75 an hour. Nurses were getting around $300 a month and it was just 1966 or l967 when they phased in the minimum wage law and we had three to five years to transition through that period. It was such a tremendous impact on the hospital as we jumped to $1.00, $1.15, and $1.30. I think it was .15 an hour in increments until it got up to $1.65 or something at that point in time and that really hit the hospital hard. It is hard to recognize this now when you think back. I think it was in the 80s when we got to where nurses made $10,000 a year. We made strides, tremendous strides.

It seems like funding was always a challenge. Staffing was always a challenge; beds were always a challenge. We were fortunate in the recruiting of physicians. Administrators would come to me from surrounding hospitals and ask me how we were getting doctors and I would tell them that doctors recruit doctors and they ask hospital administrators to assist but if the medical community is not open to recruiting new doctors into your town it makes it difficult in getting doctors. I told them they were trained with equipment they used to using and if you don't have it in your hospital when they come they can't practice medicine, so you have to make those commitments to technology to keep up with medicine. Some of them just were not able to cross that bridge.

Beth Nelson: When I think about it, you were probably in a way looking at things more progressively than your counterparts in other hospitals if they were not aware of how. It is kind of the "old boy network" of recruiting each other.

Jack Richardson: Our doctors used to have Saturday morning conferences for doctors and they had presentations and lectures. Each doctor had a responsibility and it started around 7:30 a.m. or 8:00 a.m. I was invited to attend and I did on a regular basis and was there almost every Saturday morning for those conferences and I learned a great deal about how doctors reacted and what their needs were and it was an education for me which I took advantage of because I felt that it did give me an extra insight in some of the things that were necessary. Other administrators probably just did not understand. It was pretty unusual at that time to have these meetings but Greenville was really spurring the thing and our doctors were committed. At that time we had taken on a lot of new specialties so every time a new specialty came to town he was able to present to his colleagues so they could understand what he could do. I remember when Billy Jones came, the first dermatologist who came to practice at the hospital, he told me that he thought it would take him two years. Later he told me it didn't even take him six months before his practice was going because they understood what he could take care of.

We were always playing catch up at the hospital because we never could get ahead of the curve. Our budgets were strained.

When we moved in the new hospital the first year our budget was about $20 million. The hospital had cost about $20 million to build and I had been warned by the architect in the building process that it was going to cost us almost as much to operate the hospital the first year as what it cost to build it. I thought he couldn't be serious and good gracious, sure enough when we got ready to move from the old hospital, we had six months in the old hospital and six months in the new hospital and when I prepared that budget we showed some of it. The next year was the full year and I can remember showing it to Charles Gaskins and he told me I was out of my mind.

Listen, not only did the community go through a transition but the Board members went through a tremendous education during those periods of time. Each year there were tremendous increases in the total operating costs and the cost per day was not so much but the budget was going at 30% and 40% increments because of all the new technology and all the new demands and all the new beds and all the new square footage that had to be compiled and put in there. That was just awesome for them.

Beth Nelson: I remember some of Buck's stories. Buck said he presented to the Board one day about the need for a piece of x-ray equipment that was fairly expensive and at the same meeting had to present about the need for a lawn mower. He was fired up with all the details about the x-ray equipment thinking that would draw a lot of lightening rod criticism and they heard all that but then they started asking him questions about the lawn mower and everybody wanted to know about the horsepower, about the warranty, and all the details and he had to go back and bone up on that. They wouldn't let him buy the lawn mower.

Jack Richardson: David Brody's uncle was one our first Board members from Kinston. Leo Brody. He was Chairman of the Finance Committee and it was a pleasure to work with Mr. Brody because you could present to him the total picture and he could see it and then when the time came Mr. Brody said it made sense to him and the discussion was ended. If it made sense to him everybody would not question Mr. Brody. He was an excellent Board member and a nice gentleman too. We were really fortunate to have leadership, not only regionally, but also locally and people that could make these leaps with us. There were a few that didn't go as fast as others but if we hadn't had the leadership available to us it would have never happened. Many little things could have tripped us all along the way. Harry Leslie and Charles Gaskins worked so well we named the Gaskins-Leslie Building after them because it was so typical. One was a republican and one was a democrat but they just worked hand in glove so well. Of course, you cannot say enough about either one of them. Wilton Duke-I remember one of his famous phrases when he would tell me that there were three sides to every story there's your side, my side, and the right side and he brought that logic to meeting after meeting after meeting. He and Kenneth Dews were quite a team.

Beth Nelson: Do you want to look at your list and see if there are any vignettes that you want to bring out? You told stories that I told a thousand times myself so I remember particularly about how you said you would go to a public hearing and there was so much opposition about the new hospital and the people would shout you down and they would tell you that you were going to build a "white elephant" that would never be used and would be just a drag on the county and then the vote ended up passing by twelve votes.

Jack Richardson: It was 51% of the county of however many people voted. One of the things I remember was when the Board began to talk about expanding the hospital, I'm not sure of the exact timeframe but you can research this. I think it was in 1968 or thereabouts. There was discussion of what are we going to do, how are we going to get support for this. One evening in a meeting at the hospital the Executive Committee said that we needed to form a Citizen's Committee to generate interest in the community. Maybe it was in 1969, I can't remember, but sitting around the table they said they knew just the man that we ought to get to lead this because he is well respected in the community and people just think the world of him. So they called Dr. Joe Pou at home. Joe at that time worked for Wachovia Bank and he worked with farmers and with the Extension Service at N.C. State University and circled all of eastern North Carolina giving farmers advice. His background was in agriculture. Joe accepted the responsibility and put together this team of people to go around. Joe came to see me and I was just the Assistant Administrator at that time but I was kind of involved in the planning process and he told me he would go to these meetings with one understanding and that was that I would go with him to answer the questions. From time to time we would get into a hornet's nest and I won't call the communities because they probably don't want to be identified. But some communities in the county were a stronger force than others and we did get in some real hot places because people have a concern about their health care costs, they have a concern about their taxes and this was just not a popular thing to discuss. At that time you might be interested to know that the hospital had a tax levy that it used to get from the county to operate the hospital every year. That was a point of contention in not only the community but also some of the county commissioners. I can tell you this story because
it was a long time ago. I was invited down to the commissioners office and the bond issue had passed and we were in the planning process and I had just assumed responsibility for signing the checks and taking care of the money, and I was called on by Bob Martin and I don't know if he was chairman then but he was always a strong member of the Board of Commissioners and he told me he didn't see any reason why we have to have a subsidy to sustain that hospital. It seemed like to him it ought to be paying its own way. They extracted from me a promise that I would never ask for any more money. I never asked for any more money the whole time I was there. They rented the tobacco allotments to help pay off some of the $9 million on the bond issue. We chipped in money along the way to also pay it off. We never asked for any operating money from the county ever again. I was kind of proud of that.

I never turned away patients. I told colleagues of mine since I retired that one of the things I really felt good about is I worked in a hospital that took care of a lot of people that didn't have the money to take care of themselves and that we never turned patients away at Pitt County Memorial Hospital.

Beth Nelson: A lot of hospitals used Greenville as sort of dumping grounds over time. What kind of things were people concerned about that came out in public hearings, certainly about taxes and about the cost, but was there a sense of Greenville being just a small country town and it didn't make sense to have a medical school or a big fancy hospital.

Jack Richardson: At that time a lot of people could remember that the old hospital was not very old. It had been built in 1951 and it had been expanded a few years later so it didn't have a whole lot of year's age on it. People said we had a hospital. Why do we have to build a new hospital?

Our consultants had studied all around the edges and they had come to the conclusion that if we even expanded one more time there wouldn't be enough there for the idea of a medical school. That's when we began to look at the 100 acres and the need to have the 100 acres for a new facility. There were a lot of people who were skeptical about it and one of the things that happened that was just a matter of fact in the fringes of our county, the southern fringe, the northern fringe, the western fringe. Many of those people went to other towns for their medical care. Some went to Rocky Mount, some went to Tarboro and some went to Wilson and some went to Kinston. They didn't have to pay the taxes because they were from Pitt County. You even had some of the doctors in those fringe areas who were not particularly interested in having the services because they referred their patients to these other hospitals. I never will forget that Wilton asked me over to his Baptist Church in Farmville one Sunday night to talk to the ladies of the church and I thought we were doing pretty good until the question and answer time came and a lady stood up and asked why did everything have to be in Greenville. They had wanted us to build a hospital in Farmville but there was no way we could operate and make something like that possible. I told Wilton later that he didn't tell me I was going to get crossfire in a church of all places. Wilton was a real big brother to me.

Beth Nelson: Wilton strikes me as a person who was quiet in his advice, calm and reasonable.

Jack Richardson: He would call around lunch time and would ask me where I was going for lunch and I would tell him I was going to be right at the hospital and he said he was coming over to get me and get me out of that place for an hour or so. He would come get me and take me out.

Beth Nelson: Talk a little about dealings with the Medical Care Commission.

Jack Richardson: There were two or three people at the Medical Care Commission that from the very beginning were very helpful in our expansion plans. Even knowing the political things that were going on in the Legislature for the medical school and knew that it was going to create some problems for them to come out and support our efforts. Conrad Taylor was one. There are three names but I am drawing a block on the other two. We went up there and did talk to them and they told us we would be foolish to try to expand the hospital and that we needed to go with a new one. The thing about it was that was the trend at that time. Rocky Mount had done the same thing and had abandoned their old hospital and built a new hospital. Kinston had abandoned their old hospital and built a new hospital, Goldsboro had abandoned their old hospital and built a new hospital and Wilson had abandoned two old hospitals and built a new hospital. It was a thing that was happening, codes were changing, fire regulations were changing and they knew that to bring these old buildings up to code would cost so much more than to go ahead and try to build a new building. We didn't get many funds from them. We had to borrow the money. They had made plans and there was about a $2 million HEW guaranteed grant but we had to pay that back. We did get $2 million from the Legislature to help build the Rehab Center and then we got some other small grants around the edges. Most of the grant money had dried up.

Beth Nelson: It wasn't going to Wilson.

Jack Richardson: No, Wilson was under the AHEC System.

Beth Nelson: I am amazed about how well you know these names. I am thinking of a fellow who was very well respected in the State and I guess he was the one who pretty much turned you all in the direction. I remember Buck or somebody saying that you all kind of went out to your car and looked at each other and asked what had we gotten ourselves into now.

Jack Richardson: The original concepts and the original plans were to just add a few beds. Twenty-five or thirty beds but the more we studied it the more difficult it became.

Beth Nelson: Wasn't there some problem with the elevation? Apparently the new part and the old part were not going to match up or something like that was an architectural issue that had to be worked around?

Jack Richardson: There was such a demand for space and anything we could explore always the dollar signs went up and people were concerned and finally after a couple or three years was when the concept of a new hospital finally was born.

Sally Lucido: I remember something you were pretty proud of and that was when they brought in the new helicopter. We were over in the GLC and that just fascinated you.

Jack Richardson: Yes it did. We were over there and we could see them land. There were not but three helicopter services in the whole state. There was one at Duke, one at Chapel Hill and maybe one in Charlotte.

Beth Nelson: I think Duke was first and we were second.

Jack Richardson: It was some activity at that time.

Beth Nelson: When the crash occurred I remember a quote you used. There was a big cry that we didn't need to be in this service, that we might need to back off. But you said that if a part of the building down the hall burned down we would rebuild it and continue the service and EastCare is no different I thought that was a very courageous thing for you because it was a political quagmire.

Jack Richardson: It was always because it was hard to justify it financially.

Sally Lucido: Well, just last week we got our second helicopter.

Jack Richardson: Yes, I noticed that. I saw it in the paper. I tapped into it on the Internet.

Beth Nelson: Let's talk about the tornadoes. You were in the thick of all that at that point.

Jack Richardson: Even though that was quite a time and the death toll was so high and it wreaked a lot of havoc over eastern North Carolina, particularly in our area, I think that I find from a stress standpoint, the biggest problems we had were from snowstorms. When we couldn't get employees to the hospital and we had to keep the ones that were there to spend the night and eat and not let them go home and keep them there for two or three days and get four wheel drive people to volunteer and haul them. I had to walk from my house in Cherry Oaks all the way over to the New Bern highway because I couldn't get my car out of the garage and I saw a four wheel drive coming down the road and I got on the running board and went from there and he took me all the way down to the middle of town and I walked the rest of the way to the hospital. I didn't finally get there until 11:00 a.m.

Sally Lucido: The story that has gone around about that for years is that you had walked over to the New Bern Highway and rode a snow plow in to work.

Jack Richardson: It was a four wheel drive Jeep and there were people hanging on the sides and sitting on the roof and there was just room enough for me to hang on one side. When I got there it was no time at all before the television reporter came in. Some young lady who was new in our community, didn't know much about our community and opened up by saying they wanted to talk about the effects of the snow and the first shot when they opened up they said isn't it criminal the way you are trying to run this hospital without enough staff to take care of the patients. That was the lead in. I told them it would be criminal if we were to turn them out in the cold. I never will forget that. People slept in the Rehab Center too.

Sally Lucido: I remember I went to the Rehab Center and babysat for employees' children. They couldn't find anyone to do it. Can you imagine that? I spent about five hours there one morning.

Jack Richardson: Those were trying times because it was the only time I can remember we closed surgery. I think that happened on a weekend and when Monday morning came we didn't have enough staff. We didn't know when we would get the next shipment of supplies because eastern North Carolina was down, we didn't know when we would get food or IV fluids or anything because of the snowstorm. I got a phone call and was told they didn't have anybody to staff surgery and so I called Billy Bost and told him we didn't have a choice right now and I got burned by several surgeons but I won't call any names. They asked me what I meant by closing the operating room. They were already there and the patients were in the beds and they were ready to operate but we didn't have the backup to take care of them so we stayed closed I think one day before we had things in order to open up the next day.

Some of our medical staff leaders and Chiefs of Staff, which I had close rapport with, Billy Bost; he was Chief of Staff right after Jack Welch. Jack Welch was our Chief of Staff when we moved into the new hospital and we went through six months of shakedown where things didn't seem to work half of the time and Jack Welch was just standing there taking shots from the medical staff with me. He would tell them to just settle down that they should be glad to be here. Those were the kind of things that you remember for a long time. I understand that Jack has just retired. I'm sorry I couldn't get to the retirement party.

Another Chief of Staff that helped me a great deal from a learning perspective was Tom O'Brien. You remember, Tom was our first Chief of Staff as a medical school representative. Tom just had communication skills that were outstanding. He taught me so much about the interrelationships between the medical staff and I always made it a practice to take the Chiefs of Staff to state and regional meetings of the North Carolina Hospital Association and the American Hospital Association. Tom at those meetings in the question and answer sessions would get up and address important issues so succinctly and bring a focus. I used to get compliments back from taking people like him to those meetings and people understood more about what was happening in Greenville. Sometimes there were five hundred people and Tom would stand up and explain something just as clearly and address the points that were medical concerns.

Beth Nelson: I'm trying to remember when Tom O'Brien was Chief of Staff. What was his role with the medical school?

Jack Richardson: Internal Medicine was his specialty. Not only was he a good medical staff member he was just a nice fellow, very nice. I remember a lot of his contributions.

Eric Fearrington is another. Eric and I and Wilton Duke had to go to Chicago before we moved out of the old hospital. We had a Joint Commission survey and they denied our accreditation and Eric and Wilton and I got up early one morning and drove to Raleigh and caught an 8:00 a.m. flight to Chicago. The Joint Commission on Accreditation at that time was in the Hancock Building about halfway up, you know, it is about one hundred floors. We got there and we had two briefcases full of papers. We went through that interrogation and crossfire and Eric did his job as Medical Staff, I held up my side as Administration and Wilton was there because he had to represent the Board of Trustees. He told us when we got there to not ask him to do anything, that we needed to do all the work, because he was there because he was supposed to be. We flew back home that night and got home at midnight, I reckon. A one-day trip to Chicago and back. Of course, as a result of that and some effort from other people, we got that decision reversed.

Beth Nelson: I am interested in more about Eric Fearrington. I think he is in an interesting situation because of his opposition to the school of medicine early on and now having gone with the school of medicine.

Jack Richardson: Eric has never been non-controversial ever since I first met him. The first time I ever saw him was at a Board meeting where he was telling the Board of Trustees that they didn't have enough coverage for the emergency room. He got up and just berated the situation. After he got it straightened out, they told him they were not going to let him go to anymore Board meetings. He made every Board member madder than heck. This was during the period that he was Chief of Staff. This was a year before we moved into the new hospital-it must be about 1974 or 1975. Eric was a good Chief of Staff from the point of view that he wanted everything done just right. He got on his own doctors when they didn't do the things they were supposed to do and he felt like in all sincerity he had to represent members of the medical staff who were skeptical about what the medical school was going to do to the private practice. He challenged the people at the medical school. He was just that kind of guy; he just challenged all the time. When it came time to represent the hospital, he was always there.

Beth Nelson: Let's talk more about Eric Fearrington, particularly his early opposition to the school of medicine.

Jack Richardson: Dr. Fearrington was a very intense gentleman and he also was a good Chief of Staff in that he whipped the medical staff records into shape. He had them do the kind of things they were supposed to do and he kept us in good line with accreditation. He was very diligent and he challenged representatives of the medical school on behalf of some of the doctors who were not as enamored with the idea of the medical school taking control. There has always been a balance and some of the doctors have been better dealing with the balance than others but during that particular period of time everything was in a state of flux. It was all new and there was a concern on the part of a lot of the doctors that they wanted to get paid for their teaching time; the time that they were going to dedicate to students because they knew that the medical faculty was expected to do that as part of their compensation. I think he was kind of championing the other doctors who had at that time some concern about getting some compensation in some fashion through their status at the medical school, being listed in the medical school academic faculty. So, that was a period of time early on when it was kind of a tough go to negotiate some of those and Eric was always tough kind of negotiator. He didn't give ground much but he has proved to be a real asset to everybody. The medical students were pleased when he was teaching. He was always a good instructor. He was a good Chief of Staff from my perspective.

Beth Nelson: Talk a little bit about Mr. Ward. You worked with him probably more closely than just about anybody I can think of.

Jack Richardson: We came from two different perspectives. Mr. Ward had been a school administrator and had been the principal of a school in Ayden. In the old part of the hospital when he was encouraged by the doctors, his main responsibility over there. In the original hospital, he told me that they had employed him to collect bills, to do purchasing and take care of housekeeping and dietary functions. That was his primary responsibility. They had a nursing director that was responsible for the nurses and she had her own domain. That was pretty much his entrée into the hospital administrative setting where I went to a Masters Degree Program and had an internship in a 400+ bed hospital where I could see things from a totally different perspective. A strong administrator who had a handle on things who was almost a dictator. This was when I was in Roanoke. So that was kind of what I saw and the minute I came to Greenville I saw this other role model, so to speak. I went through some tough times. I had been there about three years and I'm going to tell you this about Ed Monroe. Ed Monroe is an unsung hero at the medical complex I am so pleased to see that he is now Chairman of the Board because I think he is the first medical doctor who has ever been Chairman of the Board of Trustees, although he hasn't practiced medicine in a long time. That is very deserving for him to get that recognition.

I began to cast my eye around because several of my administrator friends had jobs coming open after I had been in Greenville for about three years and so I did seek a few of them to explore the possibility of moving away. Evidently, somehow, Ed must have heard about it and he came to see me and told me he didn't want me going around looking for a job anywhere else until I talked to some of them first.

Ed Waldrop was Chairman of the Board then and Ed is another person that you need to give a lot of credit to because Ed really got the new hospital concept moving. When he took over as Chairman of the Board that was a target to get a new hospital. He was a good Board Chairman so between Ed Waldrop and Ed Monroe and several other of my friends in the community they encouraged me to stick it out and they said when we get the new hospital going we will have a real track that we can think about. At one point in time it didn't look like it would come together so good but through their encouragement I hung through.

You can think of so many friends that were so key at certain times. The support for the hospital and for me personally was just great. We went through some tough times and that's when your friends mean the most to you when you seem to be going in the wrong direction and can't see the light at the end of the tunnel. The forest and the trees overwhelm you.

Beth Nelson: Let's go back to Ed Waldrop. Talk a little about his leadership, some of the things that he did to make things come together.

Jack Richardson: Well, Ed, first he had a real respect for the medical staff. He had a lot of friends on the medical staff and he seemed to be able to understand what it was that they wanted to do. Ed had a background in the military and was very smart. He had a background with the Utilities Commission. He had been on that Board and he was real smart. When he came to the Board the hospital at that time did not have a budget. Mr. Ward did not believe in a budget and Ed said there was no way you could not have a budget for a hospital. Of course, I knew that you could. This is not to take anything away from Mr. Ward. He was just not trained in that area. Ed was on me constantly telling me he wanted me to develop a budget and I did put together a rough cash flow budget but I didn't have any control as to how the money was spent because that was not my decision area and all I could do was to develop some projections. That was one of the first things the Board asked me to do when I became Administrator. Rick Gilstrap and I put together a budget real quick.

Later on Warren McRoy came and he was our first Chief Financial Officer and Warren had been a Blue Cross auditor and went around the state doing Medicare audits for hospitals. When we started with the medical school there were a lot of unknowns relative to reimbursement as to how the medical school and the hospital were interrelated and sharing expenses and other factors. So, we hired Warren and just about the time, he and Dave McRae, Ralph Hall all came to work almost along about the same time and so Warren knew the inside of how the Medicare system worked and after Warren came to work for us about a year later they passed a law that you couldn't hire a Medicare auditor to come to work for a hospital. We got him just in time. He provided a lot of service to the hospital during those years. Of course it grew more and he got interested in other things. He fit in there during that period of years when the medical school was just budding out and we had so many unknown questions. He and I used to and sit with the President of Blue Cross and some of his financial people and try to negotiate how we were going to do this and how we were going to do that and get our budgets approved. Those were tedious days during that particular time.

Beth Nelson: What about Bill Laupus?

Jack Richardson: Bill Laupus when he came to town, he took me under his wing and my knowledge of medical schools and all the political ramifications was almost nothing and he mentored me through that whole process and his ease of manner even when he was a little wired on occasion, he still knew how to say things in the right way and he knew how to say things at Board meetings.

One thing that he told me early on and we used to meet on a weekly basis, he told me that he didn't want any surprises. Nobody likes surprises and we kind of had a pact that we didn't have any surprises for each other. We had good meetings, we had open meetings, we had some discussions where sometimes he didn't agree with me and I didn't agree with him but we tried to find a common ground and he just was a man for the time. There was no doubt about it. No telling what might have happened if Bill Laupus hadn't come along. You can't say enough and if you talk to a hundred people they will say the same.

Bill Laupus and Harry Leslie met and talked and Harry had a vision and he could understand. Harry had been involved in big business. I never will forget, I tried to get Harry appointed to our Board but he was a Republican and in those days if you were a Republican you didn't get appointed. When the medical school came on line and they appointed Harry Leslie as our first from the school, and the second year he was there he was Chairman of the Board and was Chairman for seven years. I'm telling you when he was Chairman he spoiled me and Sally both. Not only was he a good Chairman but he was a good friend. I said my prayers many a night for Harry Leslie.

Beth Nelson: Talk about Kenneth Dews.

Jack Richardson: Well, Kenneth used to come to my office and Kenneth was a very sensitive person. He cared about people and I think that sometimes he maybe got a little bit too much involved in things down in the woodwork so to speak. He did that because he was concerned about people. He carried a lot of concerns and worried about them.

I know he worried about paying the bills. When we first started sticking a little money away, I hadn't been at the hospital too long when we developed our cash flow schedule, and it was obvious that hospital bills didn't get processed very good at our reimbursement units in December, January and February. Why it was we are not sure. The doctors were paid on a cash flow basis and some speculation was that they would hold their claims until the first of the year and turn them all loose. Our claims couldn't be filed until everybody's claims were in. So we always had a financial drop in December, January and February so I convinced the Board that we should start developing a reserve account when the cash flow was moving and so we started putting money in CDs for six or eight months of the year so that we would basically be able to meet payroll because payroll was our biggest expense. I hadn't been the Administrator but for three or four months so it was probably in July or August that we began to develop a cash balance, we had some money in the bank. Charlie Gaskins came to see me one day, Charles was another big brother, and he asked me if we were paying all our bills and I said certainly and he wondered why we had money in the bank and wondered what was wrong!

Beth Nelson: There was one story that Kenneth tells and you can probably tell us more about it-it was one Saturday that the air handling system went out in the old hospital and that the company you called to come and do the repair work were concerned that they might not be paid in a timely manner and they said they weren't going to come because of that and Kenneth Dews said he would stand for it. Is that true?

Jack Richardson: Yes, it's true. Kenneth and I spent the weekend on the roof. We had an air handling unit go bad in the operating room. That's when Ira Hardy was here.

Beth Nelson: I understand that Ira was the one jumping up and down and said he had to have the OR so because of his influence, you didn't have any choice but to go ahead and fix it.

Jack Richardson: Oh yes and we finally made the commitment and these people were to work over the weekend and they started late Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, Kenneth was there and I was there, and they started working up on the roof at that time at the old hospital. We had put these air conditioning units up on the roof for the air handling part of it and I went down to the usual 8:00 a.m. meeting of the medical staff, the Saturday morning conference, and I remember a couple of doctors came in and told me there was nobody there in the operating room working and I told them I had just come from the roof up there. They aren't working from the inside they are working on the outside! They were in a pure uproar thinking there was nobody there working. I said that Kenneth Dews was on the roof and they were on the outside, not on the inside. It cost $20,000 and that was a lot of money in those days. They finally finished it up on Monday or something like that and we finally got it back on line the following week. Kenneth was always there for us.

Beth Nelson: What about Charles Gaskins? You alluded to him a few minutes ago. Talk a little bit about him.

Jack Richardson: Charles was there during some times when little things could have popped into big things. He, Harry Leslie, Bill Laupus and several others would always keep the lid on until things settled out some. He was a steady influence. You didn't push Charles around. He was a strong person even though he was quiet and always friendly but he was a very strong gentleman. He had a way about him. I can remember several times when he came and let it be known how things were supposed to be. He was a real committed person. He and Bill Speight were brothers in action.

When the bids came in for the new hospital back in 1973 or 1974 or about that time, they were almost $2 million over the money that was available to us because you can't commit to a project, a county bid, until you have cash in hand. I remember that they opened the bids down at the old courthouse and I felt like all the wind had been taken. I remember Bill Speight telling me afterwards that it was the only time he had ever seen me when I didn't have a smile on my face. One or two days after that they called me and said they wanted to have a breakfast meeting over at the Holiday Inn and Charles Gaskins and Reginald Gray and Bill Speight met with me for breakfast and they just made it a clear point to me and said we were going to build that hospital. They said they didn't care what it was but they were going to find a way to build the new hospital. Ralph Hall might have been there also and they told me to start negotiating with the contractors to see what you can do to take out of the cost that maybe we can add back in at a later point in time but we have to get that hospital under contract. So, we went to The Duke Endowment because they were giving us some money and they wanted to cut back on the square footage. We made it very clear to them that square footage was a minimum and we could not shrink it. So, Ralph and the architects and the contractors began to take out insulation, just anything they could find and some of it they knew they would have to put back later maybe in change orders to get that thing under contract.

Of course, the commissioners knew they had money invested. At that particular time interest rates went up so that the money they had in hand it earned pretty good returns before they had to turn it loose on the contracts. I think they earned over $1 million in interest during that period of construction. Reginald Gray who was the county manager was always a friend of the hospital and he helped me many times with various things. He used to tell me when I went over to the commissioners meetings what was the way I should do things since he had to work with them all the time, he knew. He said that he had never seen Bill Speight recommend a thing to those commissioners that they didn't agree with because they respected Bill.

Beth Nelson: Talk a little bit more about Bill Speight.

Jack Richardson: Bill Speight was another Nash County boy and that is where I was born, in Nash County. He and I used to kid about that. Bill was raised in Spring Hope, North Carolina and used to kid me a little bit about being from Nash County. Bill was another one of my big brothers. He used to come over to see me from time to time. But he loved the hospital and the medical school. Right down to the last turn, a group of us went up to meet with Bill Friday and the Board of Governors. This was a select committee. Dave Whichard was on it, to talk about the creation and what needed to be done. I never will forget that Bill Friday was at that meeting and I think maybe there were two carloads from Greenville. I know there was Bill Laupus, Wilton Duke, Charles Gaskins and myself and Dave Whichard met us there. Bill Friday came to the meeting. He had one or two members of his Board with him and he opened up the meeting and said if we were going to have a medical school in eastern North Carolina, it is going to be a first class medical school. That set the tone for the meeting and the big sticking point was what was going to be the percentage of Board representation. The medical staff was pushing for 33% from Chapel Hill and they were pushing for 50% and it was at that select committee meeting that they came up with the 40-60% decision and that, of course, has stood over the years. That was a key meeting and I was privileged to be there. Bill Friday said if we were going to have a medical school that it was going to be a good one. He was true to that commitment.

Beth Nelson: Speaking of Bill Friday, some people are less complimentary to him I guess because he was a "Johnny come lately" in terms of supporting the school of medicine.

Jack Richardson: That's right. His Board was against it and as a result, he was the spokesman for his Board and it was only in the last stages of the negotiations that he came around. Once he saw what his Board wanted, he supported his Board.

Beth Nelson: Ed Monroe mentioned that it was interesting that the Affiliation Agreement was worked out over a course of six months or so.

Jack Richardson: We worked on it in medical staff meetings and night after night after night with the committee that was assigned responsibility. Every word was picked and picked and picked and we sat there night after night and then somebody would throw the "red herring" up and suggest having a separate hospital. We took a break one night, I never will forget it and we had been sitting there for hours, and Ed Monroe came in my office and someone asked him if he didn't get tired of hearing about that second hospital and he said that somebody ought to say that there isn't going to be a second hospital. I took his command to heart and went back into the meeting and when they started again about the second hospital and I told them that we ought to just quit talking about the concept of a second hospital as it wasn't going to happen and we don't have to talk about it. If we had gone into two hospitals what we see there today would not be there. I know a lot of people on both sides, a lot of medical school people wanted a second hospital, but that was just not going to work in eastern North Carolina with the scarcity of people and everything else. The infusion of money was used for technology at a time when money was kind of scarce.

Beth Nelson: What about Don Tucker? Some people have said he was supportive of the school of medicine and other people said he was not and I was just curious about your perspective.

Jack Richardson: Don was off and on with the issues of this. He was on our Board for a short period of time. He served one term as a Board member and I think he was the first doctor to serve on our Board. I think John Wooten was the second. Don was kind of a controversial person. People couldn't read him. He was my doctor and we had some straightforward discussions and he always let you know where he stood. I didn't think he ever had a lot of political impact on his other colleagues for whatever reason. He was a good doctor.

Continuation of Interview with Jack W. Richardson - May 23, 2000

Beth Nelson: Let's talk about Andrew Best and his role.

Jack Richardson: Dr. Best, as you know, was our first black physician in Greenville and on our medical staff and had a very active practice with quite a few patients in the hospital. Early on in our process of getting approval for the new hospital, we had to meet a lot of HEW guidelines related to our workforce and they wanted to know the makeup of our medical staff. I received a phone call from Atlanta after I had made the trip there and hand delivered some of our documents for our application for a $2 million grant through them. They wanted to know why we didn't have any black physicians on the medical staff and I told them about Dr. Best and that he was the only doctor that had his practice in the community and suggested that maybe they call him and talk to him and Dr. Best came in my office and I made him aware of the call and I told him we needed his support to have them understand our situation in Greenville. I said that a lot of communities here in eastern North Carolina did not have a black physician. Some of them had a few but some didn't have any at all. Dr. Best made contact with them and helped them understand the climate and what was going on in Greenville and the fact that we had a sizeable black population in the hospital meant that all the doctors were helping take care of the black community. In fact, over the years my experience was that we had tremendous support from the black community. He did play a key role right at that given time when we were in an application process and we had to make sure all the Ts were crossed and all the Is were dotted. He has always been a good levelheaded gentleman to work with. He really played a key role right at that time.

Beth Nelson: I understand he was a member of the Board of Governors and used his influence there.

Jack Richardson: I had heard that, yes.

Beth Nelson: Was that before your time?

Jack Richardson: No, that was along about then. Dr. Best was very active in the community totally. His medical practice was big but he what some people thought were too many irons in the fire and at that time some doctors would cover for him because he was busy doing other things. I think some people criticized him but I don't think they were aware of his total role that he played.

Beth Nelson: Let's talk about Leo Jenkins. What was his status relative to your tenure there?

Jack Richardson: He was there when I came and I think one of the key events, at least in my perspective, they had a conference over at East Carolina and they were talking about the New East and the development of eastern North Carolina. Dr. Jenkins was the keynote speaker and I remember there was a lot of concern and a lot of people in eastern North Carolina were kind of paranoid about the fact that maybe they had been left out of so many things. Dr. Jenkins was a very forceful personality and I remember him getting up on the platform and started off immediately saying we should not feel like we are second class citizens because we live in eastern North Carolina. He said we had a fine educational institution where people can come and get their degrees and go on in their professional lives and his whole tenure there was kind of inspiring from the point of view. For me, I hadn't been Greenville over a year or two at the time, it was kind of inspirational to hear that having been in eastern North Carolina, moved and then had come back at that point in time. I always remembered at that a keynote address.

On another occasion when I was actively involved in the North Carolina Hospital Association, one year I was Chairman of a committee that had to do with financial affairs for the Association and basically we went and met with third party carriers, the insurance companies and what have you on a quarterly basis to discuss our concerns about filing claims and procedures in the hospital. That is the year we had a meeting in Raleigh where we invited people from hospital offices and doctors offices to come to a clinic for two days. I was Chairman during that period and responsible for putting the meeting together. We met in downtown Raleigh and I asked Dr. Jenkins if he would come and be our keynote speaker. Of course he was always glad to go somewhere make a speech and I didn't share too much of what he would talk about with my colleagues who were from the western part of the state because some of them were not too excited about having a medical school in eastern North Carolina. So Dr. Jenkins took the podium and immediately started championing the East Carolina School of Medicine and all its allied health programs and he went at it full barrel like he does and some of the people in the audience were a little put off by it but I know it made a good smash in the News & Observer the next day so we got pretty good coverage on that. He was always up to the task. He was looking for the opportunity to push forward his agenda and many a time and I am sure Ed Monroe will tell you this, he had Ed Monroe write his speeches for him that he delivered around the countryside.

Beth Nelson: Some people have said, I think it may have been Wally Wooles, maybe Ed too, that said that because Leo was not from among us, because he was not a good southern boy, he was that, not as persuasive as he might have been using the same words with our language and that sometimes they had to tell him not to go to Raleigh.

Jack Richardson: Not only was he from New Jersey, but he was also a Marine.

Beth Nelson: Do you remember him being sort of that way, sort of abrasive?

Jack Richardson: He could be very direct but I always found him to be most supportive of the things that we were trying to get done. I remember one time after we opened up the hospital and after the medical school was on line and when he was about to retirement stage, maybe he was retired, I saw him in the grocery store one day. He looked up and asked me if I was minding the store like I should. He was quite a fellow. He had a tremendous impact at that period of time, not only with what happened at the university but with the hospital also. Like I said earlier, he built two universities-the one at Charlotte because they had to appropriate money in Charlotte at the same time they did in Greenville. He didn't get credit for but one of them but I think he helped develop two.

Beth Nelson: Probably the Charlotte people wouldn't give any credence to that and wouldn't think he had anything to do with that.

Jack Richardson: Some people I hit with that occasionally and they laugh.

Beth Nelson: Let's go back to Charlotte. We talked a little about that last night with the perspective of the folks in Charlotte who were rather opposed to it. I have heard two different versions. One being that they were opposed to there being a university at ECU but then also they were opposed to there being another medical school anywhere in the state. They didn't even want it in Charlotte.

Jack Richardson: Yes, they were strong supporters of the medical school in Chapel Hill and they were like a lot of people. They didn't feel like the state should have more resources for another medical school which was an expensive undertaking and so they didn't warm up to it at all. I had friends who were CEOs at the hospital in Charlotte. When I was in their territory they didn't mind giving me a little shot about all that rabblerousing in the east. When I would go to meetings the Duke Endowment held in Charlotte, educational meetings of various kinds, it was not unusual for me to come out of a meeting and a television camera would be set up at the door. I walked through the door and they asked if I was from Greenville where they are trying to build that medical school. I would have to bring them up-to-date. They would want to know the status of things and I would tell them from my perspective how things were going. I always didn't leave off the fact that you would go where the need is. If the need had not been in eastern North Carolina we wouldn't be there.

Beth Nelson: So when you came to Greenville you probably had no clue that you were going to be getting into the controversy?

Jack Richardson: Not really. I would just hear a little conversation every now and then but it was far from being a battleground at that time. It was just kind of a concept that people drifted around and kind of passed off. We were developing long range plans in five-year increments and we were wearing them out in two years and developing another. It just goes that fast. Of course healthcare was changing a great deal too. At that particular time that the medical school came on line there was a national concern about the shortages of doctors so schools were being started, not only in North Carolina, but in other states and we just happened to get into that wave at that particular time which was the right time that you could get support.

Beth Nelson: A couple of people have mentioned that our hospital has been fortunate and I guess the school of medicine too, but particularly the hospital, in its existence has had really had only three administrators in. They say the typical tenure of hospital administrators is three to five years and they get booted out and that kind of thing and I think it's a very delicate balancing act that people don't appreciate. Talk a little bit about that as to the ability of Greenville to attract and retain.

Jack Richardson: One of the things that was key to that is the Board asked me when I came there the fact that I was from eastern North Carolina was I going to live in Greenville or was I going to live in Rocky Mount. I told them I wouldn't think of living in Rocky Mount and working in Greenville. That allayed their concerns. They thought at first that since my home was in Rocky Mount that I was going to live in Rocky Mount and drive back and forth to Greenville. We have had employees that actually did that; they lived in Kinston and a lot of eastern North Carolina towns and drove to work every day. I let them know right then that I had planned to come there and stay there. When you are quite involved in a small community you have a chance to know the community and be involved in the community. You develop a relationship where people felt like you were a part of the community.

One of the things that Sally can attest to a little bit is that one of the things that I have tried early on is that I answered my own telephone. People would call me and they would have a problem at the hospital and I would see people in social gatherings, civic clubs, Chamber of Commerce, and I always would encourage them that if they had a problem at the hospital they needed to give me a call. Not that I would personally take care of it for them but I would be able to at least follow up. So, a lot of people would see the hospital as this giant thing over there and would always hear about bureaucracy and that you can't get anybody to do anything. I tried to dispel that with a personal approach and I think that permeated our whole administrative group that they tried to be out in the community and involved in the community. Then there was a trust relationship that built up within the community and people called me when they had a problem with their hospital bill or they would have a problem with something else and I would tell them to put it out of their mind. I would get back to them very quickly. Or sometimes they would have a bill sometime that concerned Medicare and it took a long time to clear out some of those things and they would come to my office and I would have somebody from the Business Office come in and meet with them and go through it and then they would have a phone number and a name and it would kind of relieve their anxiety somewhat. That personal touch was a concern that I had as we grew so fast that we would lose our personal touch not only with the patients and our employees but also with the community. I guess Sally coined the phrase that Mr. Richardson was managing by walking around. I spent an awful lot of time walking around in the hospital, not only talking to employees and doctors but when I could I talked with patients and families of the patients and have them understand.

Buck Sitterson and I were in a meeting one time right after we had first put in paid parking, which was not a very popular event in eastern North Carolina. When we moved into the new hospital we decided to put in paid parking. People used to come to my office and I spent an awful lot of time fielding complaints about paid parking. One day a lady from over around Williamston came into my office and Buck happened to be in my office at the time and she said that now that this hospital and medical school has grown so big we got all these foreigners coming into eastern North Carolina telling us what we ought to be doing. I kind of kidded and said to her to relieve some of the tension that I would tell her that I was from Rocky Mount and Buck there is from over in Windsor, I don't know how much of eastern Carolina do you want. After talking to me for a few minutes and I tried to explain to her why we had gone to paid parking she finally got a little disgusted and said that she was wasting her time sitting there talking to us and that her meter was running out there in the parking lot and she got up and left. That was just one of the many kinds of things that we tried to deal with in our communications with our community.

Beth Nelson: I also remember hearing that you did spend a lot of time walking around spent a lot of time visiting patients and it seems like you really made an effort to devote a good bit of your personal time and your work time to spend some time with patients and stay on that side of things. Would you talk a little bit about that?

Jack Richardson: Well that is why I had to work on Saturdays. The paperwork would build up on my desk and I would have to come back and clear it out on Saturday. I felt like it was real important not only I was trained that way when I did my administrative residency as each day we were encouraged to go around and visit with patients and find out what was going on in the hospital. In Roanoke we had television in the rooms and one thing that would cause more complaints than anything else was if the television went out in the room you heard more about it than if something else was not going on. That just seems to be a key element as we grew and more and more people came from away from Greenville. Originally we had about 40% of our patients from outside of Greenville, then it was 50% of our patients coming from outside of Greenville, and the people from Greenville felt put upon because everybody had trouble getting a room whether they were from out of Greenville or in Greenville, Pitt County. You may remember that when we originally moved into the new hospital we had these big rooms on the end of the halls that were designed to be extra nice private rooms. Well, we weren't in the hospital any time before we had to double them up and make them semi-private rooms because we didn't have enough room but they were originally designed to be a big room with a couch and a place for family to stay with a patient and that went out the window almost the first or second week we moved in because we didn't have enough beds to take care of patients.

Beth Nelson: I had never heard that. I had never realized that was the intent. I remember we had some semi-private rooms scattered around.

Jack Richardson: That was it. They were originally designed by the architects as a large private room where family could stay but it didn't last. We had right many complaints from the people who would be put in those rooms. There were not many of them in the whole hospital.

Beth Nelson: Let's talk about the slogan that became credited to you over the years about your smile.

Jack Richardson: I used to open the orientation class when I met with all new employees, I think at that time we were having them every other Monday as we were hiring new employees. I had a little sign in the room that said "Your Smile Might be One of the Most Pleasant Things that Happens to a Patient Today" or something to that effect. I think that really was followed up by the "People Care More Here" logo and slogan. People understood that it was a very important part. Even when we were in the old hospital I couldn't tell whether I was being chastised or whether I was being complimented, a couple of the doctors used to tell me that I always walked around with a friendly greeting like you are happy. I told them you should be happy, you are taking care of all these people who need to be taken care of. I thought it was so important to show a pleasant countenance because we had a lot of wars going on between people and what have you and this was before the time, and of course in the 80s hospitals matured to the point that they began to understand that more on a national scale and now hospitals you go in everywhere, people are courteous. But before that time a lot of people that had been trained in hospitals had been trained as technical people and the role models for doctors a lot of times, sometimes doctors were not the most pleasant people in the environment for various reasons, and so that just kind of took on the aura of arrogance. I was happy to see that it not only happened in our community but it has prevailed in the health care system. There were big, big efforts made in the 80s in hospitals all over the country to do something about that.

Beth Nelson: The growth and development of our medical center has been a positive thing in Greenville and Pitt County and I know some of your counterparts in some of the hospitals around us haven't seen it as being quite such a positive thing. Talk a little bit about how you helped deal with that evolution, the relationships that you had through your District VI contacts.

Jack Richardson: We would go to other hospitals for meetings at various times and I had been very active in the North Carolina Hospital Association so I knew administrators on a personal basis all over the state, not only in eastern North Carolina. I developed a pretty good credibility, I thought, and we would visit the hospitals and tell them if they had a complaint about our hospital that our administrative staff meets every Monday morning at 7:00 a.m. for breakfast. I gave them the telephone number of the room that we met in every Monday morning which was next to the cafeteria and used to be the old Board Room, and I told them to call us and let us know so that we can deal with it immediately. Once in awhile we would get a call or I would get a call later in my office that something that was not right, but I think they at least personally understood that we were trying to help. A lot of heat that they would get was from their Board members because the census was not like it should be. It was from the medical staff who felt like the patients were leaving and coming to our community instead of staying at home where they felt like they belonged.

We did go around to Belhaven and help them through some trying times. They were having a hard time getting doctors down there. I met with their Board almost on a monthly basis for almost two years in an effort to help. We did help them with an administrator and some nursing support. That was early on before we got to the place where we could really do some substantial things. I would take a carload of Board members, medical staff members, a County Commissioner, and we would meet with their Boards in an effort to try talk to them one on one in small sessions. We had kind of an organized effort, whenever there was a meeting anywhere in the Eastern part of the state, we would carry a few people from the hospital besides our administrators and have them talk on a one on one basis with commissioners and trustees and other people. We talked about how to bridge the gap because it was of quite a concern, particularly during the period in the 80s when census was beginning to shrink nationwide and some people were concerned that the hospital was going to close. That was in the papers and was in a lot of the North Carolina literature that we had. I remember telling our administrative staff during that period of time. I told them not to think they were going to have to worry about this hospital closing ever.

Beth Nelson: How were we perceived, by the other academic medical centers? I know that certainly we were perceived as taking away some of the resources that would have been earmarked for Chapel Hill.

Jack Richardson: I never got a great deal of animosity from other people that I have dealt with. Some kind of chided a little bit as to who did we think we were down here but most of them were professionals and if anything, I received a lot of support from people at Duke. I was invited to conferences there and everyone was always great there. The same thing in Chapel Hill, Bowman Gray, I knew the administrators over there. I never did have any personal problems, although I knew there were political overtones in those areas, but I always felt comfortable in those places. People seemed to be very cordial.

Beth Nelson: I just thought of one thing Buck told us about. Back in the days before we did a wage assessment and all those kinds of things to find out what we should pay nurses, you and the other CEOs of the hospitals in the East would get together over dinner and would sit around and talk about what you were going to pay nurses this year and you all would agree on an increase so that nobody would be paying more than anybody else because of the competitiveness. Then you all would swap off on who was going to be the one to announce it that year so that the burden didn't fall too much on anyone.

Jack Richardson: Well, we wouldn't agree. We would discuss it. We got the burden a lot of times because they knew we were in the crunch and we were leading the pack. They could always blame me and I used to kid about it and told them to tell their Board members they had to keep up with Greenville. I was used as a scapegoat quite a few times.

Beth Nelson: One thing you talked about over dinner last night was the Asheboro story.

Jack Richardson: Well we can go into a little comedy now. Warren McRoy, who had quite a sense of humor was our Chief Financial Officer and along about the time that the Rehab Center became a reality in the Legislature, I think in the same year they passed an Appropriation for the City of Asheboro and Warren used to kid and say in some of our administrative meetings that when the Legislature passed that they got the zoo in Asheboro and we got Dave McRae in Greenville! That being said, as you know we had a lot of humor among our administrative staff and we encouraged that because there was a lot of tension we had to deal with. Dave has shown tremendous growth over the years.

When Fred Brown came on and I recruited him as second in position, Dave was really wanting that job and I had a meeting with Dave and he had been basically in the Rehab Center and had really not had much time in the acute care hospital setting. I suggested to him then that what he needed to do was to have more time in the acute care setting. I told him one of the best ways for him to do that was to get involved with the operating room and surgical staff. Dave made that transition. His father was a surgeon. Dave had some medical background and he understood the needs of the doctors and their concerns and so for a couple of years while Fred was there, and Fred was with us maybe for three years, Dave grew really well. So when Fred left it was just a natural that Dave could step into that number two spot.

One of the things we tried to establish early on in our management staff was I didn't want any "yes" men around me and we had weekly breakfast on Monday morning but we also had administrative meetings on Thursdays for lunch and afterwards and I tried to encourage people that if they had something that needed to be said to say it to the group and not go out of the office and fuss about it later. I wanted them to talk among themselves so that we didn't create schisms at least among the administrative staff. I think Dave, one of his real strengths was to follow up and be sure that it was the standard for us because some of the folks when things didn't go their way they would have a tendency to sulk a little bit and Dave would work on them to get them in accord so they didn't do damage to each other. That is certainly one of Dave's great strengths.

Things over there now are just even hard for me to perceive and understand, particularly with all the new corporate development that has gone on. Dave had a good feel for that from early on. He did a lot of reading in that area and went to seminars and he was just the man for the hour. The fact that we had three administrators I think that filled niches at appropriate times and mine was when we kind of exploded all at one time. One of the concerns I had was that people didn't get too rigid and freeze up on us because what it was this week was not what it was going to be two weeks from now and certainly what we did this year was not going to be next year. I used every technique that I could develop or impress upon the rest of them was to stay in a growth mode and we grew a lot of department heads and managers who are there now who have come a long way. When I look back on that it is a real satisfaction to think you were able to have a position in management and see managers grow right in front of your eyes. That is a real satisfaction. Dave always mentored people to keep them growing.

Beth Nelson: How do you think you were able to survive all the firestorms that were going on around you?

Jack Richardson: I prayed a lot. Somebody gave me a little book of prayers. Every now and then I still look at it. I kept that on top of my desk and I don't want to preach to you but the Lord helps us during trying times. I used to teach Sunday school and one thing I used to tell Sunday school class is that Christians ought to be the strongest people around because they get more help than most anybody else. I believe that. That's a philosophy that I have carried with me.

Beth Nelson: In addition to that, and certainly that worked, there was a lot of controversy going all around you and it would have been very easy for you to have been the scapegoat in the midst of all of that.

Jack Richardson: There were a couple of times. We had several tricky involvement's while Bill was around, and what his favorite saying was he would say we would have to all get in the room and call the roll and what that meant was that everybody was going to have to address the problem and speak to the problem and nothing else. We had some issues with disciplining the medical staff and he said that the medical staff was going to have to come to the table because that was a medical staff issue. We had a couple of doctors who wanted to sue us because we restricted their service at the hospital for various reasons. He always said we have to call the roll and get them all in the room.

Harry Leslie was great at that too. Somebody would come to him with a complaint about something that he thought was substantial in their minds even though they had the wrong information and Harry would bring them into my office and he and I would get the facts and go over it. You just have to pursue things and stay with that approach honestly. If people feel like you are dealing with them in an honest fashion even though they don't agree with you but at least we could come to some kind of an understanding to disagree and go on about our business. Sometimes they knew less about it than they thought they knew about it.

I remember Dr. Pories one time was concerned about the rates charged in the operating room because when the third party payers paid the bills they didn't only look at the hospital charge. They looked at the surgeon's charge so we were being competitive and he had a legitimate concern. I told him that I would be happy to meet with the surgical staff. They had an early morning meeting I think every Wednesday and I met with them usually when they had those meetings. The whole room was full of surgeons when they heard that I was going to be there to talk about rates. I tried to take them through the Medicare reimbursement process and how it worked and how you got reimbursed for their services in the hospital. We must have talked from an hour to an hour and a half and that's the last thing that surgeons want to listen to is administrative jargon and how things work bureaucratically. They stuck with it for a right good while and after it was all over they didn't agree with me but they said that if that was the way it was going to be they guessed they would have to live with it. We had meetings like that at the hospital. We had open forums. I remember one time about the hospital opening an urgent care center when that was the big thing. We had a meeting with all the doctors one night and Dr. Laupus and I were there and I tried to explain to them the logics why I didn't think the hospital ought to get into the private practice of medicine and open up urgent care centers at that particular point in time. After we got through I remember Bill Laupus told me that at least I was honest to them but I don't think anybody agreed with you. That carries a lot of weight with the people, not being afraid to address an issue.

You know, we had the big thing with the Charter Hospital coming to town. The Chamber of Commerce had some strong people who wanted to support this and I met with groups of people and Dr. Laupus and I went to meetings with the Chamber, the City Council, the County Commissioners, all kinds of people, to explain to them why we couldn't support Charter opening a psychiatric center in our community. We thought it was not in the best interest of the medical school, the community at large, and that thing dragged on for almost a year, I guess. Finally Charter just finally gave up and they ran out of gas and went somewhere else. That could have been a disaster in our community.

Beth Nelson: We did some things to my way of thinking as breaking the mold in your tenure. I remember there had been a couple of different times related to the shortage of beds. Talk a little about the decision to rent the Holiday Inn and some of that kind of thing.

Jack Richardson: Back before we moved out of the old hospital the first thing that was coming of age was ambulatory surgery. We took the medical staff lounge in the old hospital which was right behind the emergency room and we bought six modules and the medical staff approved to give up its medical staff lounge and make that an ambulatory surgery unit. We were bringing people through the emergency room. They would get ambulatory surgery and go home in the evening because we had nursing staff right there in the emergency room that gave care. That was only going on in about one or two hospitals in the whole state and we had to go to Blue Cross and get approval for that. I brought the medical staff lounge into the old nurses' home, which was out behind the hospital to serve a need that was there. Of course then in the evenings when the surgical patients had gone home they had a need for emergency room patients. The Holiday Inn concept, I'm trying to remember but it seemed like to me that we were already in the new hospital, which was full, and we were building the West Bed Tower. I went to the Medical Care Commission because they were setting up ambulatory overnight care centers around the state. They had one at Duke and I know they had one in Richmond at the Medical College of Virginia. They gave us approval and people were building a new section on the Holiday Inn and I was able to talk with those people about taking the first floor on one of those new wings and giving them a one-year lease for that space. We got it approved by the Medical Care Commission, we got it approved through the CON process, and we got it approved through Blue Cross. The object was that we have these patients and can't put them in the hospital for a less rate and they accepted that readily.

So, we did that, I think, on two different occasions when we had some expansion going on. Now, ambulatory surgery you can go home. But it used to be the kept them and the doctors didn't feel comfortable letting them go home and wanted to keep them for one more night and see how they made out. That was a new concept. We had a bus that went back and forth over there. I did get a call from the manager of the Holiday Inn once that somebody had done something they were not supposed to do over there and they were in the dining room. We worked with them.

Beth Nelson: I think the thing that seemed unusual was the fact that it was being put in the Holiday Inn.

Jack Richardson: It was close to the hospital and was the only thing out there at that point in time. Now they have places all over but that was right at our front door.

Beth Nelson: That was sort of seen as a stopgap.

Jack Richardson: We didn't expect for it to be a long-term service. In fact, that was the understanding from the Medical Care Commission. After they finished building it they made us go in and Ralph took a crew of his people and we had to modify that whole section of the Holiday Inn to come up to codes that the Medical Care Commission required for patient care.

Beth Nelson: And yet still the State Medical Facility Plan called for no need for any new beds.

Jack Richardson: When I used to walk through the door they would say to me, not you again! We just spent hours upon hours in meetings with the CON people. When Dave put in a CON and he asked me to write a letter of support I would write a letter of support. I would find out when the CON was going to be presented and I would go to a lot of these meetings with him. I would go to the meeting and coming through the door the first thing they would say even though I was coming there to help or maybe support what they were trying to do, they would tell me was that they hoped I wasn't coming to be against them or your not coming to bring another CON. You talked to me earlier about how we tried to gain support. We tried to support our neighbor hospitals because we knew they were trying to meet the needs in their community and we never saw them really as a threat to the future of the hospital or the medical school. I made repeated visits when they had CONs on the table, to write letters of support, be sure that they had those letters in hand.

Beth Nelson: You said the segregation types of issues were prior to your time. Do you remember hearing stories?

Jack Richardson: No, I don't. All of that occurred when I was in Roanoke in 1965 and that was taking place and even though it was not accepted by a lot of people for a long time. In our old hospital we had a lot of four-bed wards and two-bed rooms and very few private rooms. There was a lot of demand for those private rooms for various reasons because people were concerned and we had a visitor problem. We had so little space and people were crowding into the hospital. Other than that, I don't remember that being a high concern when I was there. We did a lot of things to try to encourage black managers but there just were not many people who were qualified and we had to recruit from outside the community. Early on they were just not available.

Beth Nelson: We talked about some of the obstacles the hospital had to overcome over the years, can you think anything else that we might have missed. We talked about the nursing shortage and the fact that money was always tight.

Jack Richardson: I think that the biggest challenge was really being sure that we got quality nursing and allied health personnel because we seemed to be behind the curve constantly in that area. I am just amazed that in the later part of the 80s we seemed to be filling those gaps.

Beth Nelson: When we were trying to recruit people to the hospital and school of medicine, what do you recall as some of the things that kept people from wanting to move here from other places? Was this just part of the national shortage? I have heard some people say that eastern North Carolina at that time was not perceived as being the Mecca of places to move.

Jack Richardson: Some people could not understand a small community and some of them came from fairly large places and they just didn't think there would be much future in a small community. I think they had other concerns about schools and things of that nature that people generally think about. People who were more concerned about that than anybody were doctors and their wives about bringing their families to a small community without resources and they continued to come because people in the community were trying to solve some of the problems.

Beth Nelson: Give me some reasons for the hospital's success.

Jack Richardson: I guess being at the right place at the right time helps, but I also think honesty and good leadership, people with a vision and determination. People taking pride in what they are doing, I know that kept a lot of our department managers energized because they were part of the growing process and that always kept them feeling like they were on the front end of their profession.

Beth Nelson: A lot of people have talked about the perspective that the hospital during most of your era was one of a mindset to pay as you go as opposed to taking on much debt.

Jack Richardson: Well, we didn't have any other options because at that period of time debt was just not an acceptable option to us. The commissioners would have had to approve any sizeable debt and they were not in line for that approach. We were really on a pay as you go basis and it was only as I was leaving that they changed some laws where they made it possible for us to have revenue bonds and things of that nature.

Beth Nelson: If that possibility had been open to you that we could have taken on debt earlier on, would that have been something you would want?

Jack Richardson: Well you know, we would have had qualified people. Kathy came on line, Kathy Barger, and she understood that arena but prior to that time we really didn't have the sophisticated financial expertise to address those kinds of issues. It was something that we kind of grew into because there wasn't much of that going on in any hospitals anywhere in the country except in the private sector. They were selling bonds and they were on the stock exchange and that is where they would get their capital. We attended a lot of meetings to talk about that but the laws of North Carolina just didn't make that a good solution at that point in time.

Beth Nelson: Talk a little bit about the privatization you have kept up with certainly from a distance. From your perspective do you see that as having been a positive thing?

Jack Richardson: Yes, I was asked to correspond to the commissioners during that time and I tried to write a generalized letter to all the commissioners who I knew. I knew it was a new concept but it was a concept that we knew was valid not only in North Carolina but all over the country with respect to new changes in the health care environment. Even though I wasn't really in touch with it I knew they had passed laws in North Carolina making it possible. There was a lot of misunderstanding and I wasn't close enough to it to know all the details. I'm glad they made it.

Beth Nelson: Then you agreed that it was right for us?

Jack Richardson: Of course, it was almost imperative

Beth Nelson: Challenges for the future?

Jack Richardson: You will have to ask the people closer to it because my concerns now are good health, good family and good grandchildren. I really don't worry about the future of the medical center because I just feel like it is in good hands and I know that it will grow on its own from here on out as long as it has good leadership and they certainly have it in place at this time.

Beth Nelson: Let's go back to your involvement in getting approval for the 143-bed expansion, the state's concerns about whether we would have enough patients to make it viable.

Jack Richardson: Yes, and that was also occurring at a time when census was turning down in similar hospitals and utilizations were down in a lot of hospitals statewide. One of the things I could always stand on when I was standing before those people is we never let our length of stay screw us. When we were in the old hospital we had one of the lowest lengths of stay of any hospital around and so when we went to talk about the need they couldn't hit us with the fact, and some of the hospitals in eastern North Carolina have lengths of stay that were just out of bounds, and we never got tagged with that I was able to stand forth and really shout with real strength and conviction that we had a good track record and we worked hard at keeping that track record. Our doctors did a super job with utilization review and being sure that patients didn't stay in the hospital unnecessarily. Sometimes we didn't have anywhere to send them but still made some effort to send them somewhere and as you know we had teams going into nursing homes trying to find beds and trying to find people to go and help pave the way for that. There was just apprehension about personnel, resources and a lot of people just didn't want us to grow. They said to shut us down that we had gone far enough so we just had to keep whacking away at it and knew that we had legal standing under the academic medical center exemption and we just kept filing away and meeting all the deadlines and speaking with them and people got a little hostile around the edges from time to time. We just followed the techniques that we were supposed to follow in that process even though people tried to shout us down once in awhile. That was the last big battle that I got through when I was kind of ready to retire after that.

Beth Nelson: I remember it being said that at times it looked like it might not go our way that CON. Did Jim Hunt get in the middle of that?

Jack Richardson: I don't know all the last techniques but Jim Hunt was always supportive of our medical center. He didn't like to have to be in it too much. He was natural for the political process. In fact, we knew that we had to go through all the steps before it could get to that level so we took care to be sure all the bases were covered.

Beth Nelson: It was interesting that he became the keynote speaker when we opened.

Jack Richardson: That's right and proud to have been there. He came to Greenville and met at the Country Club with the Gifts Committee. When he was Lt. Governor he gave a rousing speech about supporting the Greenville medical center. He was a boy brought up in Wilson, which was one of our blocks between Raleigh and Greenville.

Beth Nelson: A lot of people said that Wilson really had suffered from a lack of leadership over there. They just never quite made it.

Jack Richardson: They have kind of a divided medical staff community. I have had several friends who have been administrators over there.

Our medical staff, you can't say enough about the support of the medical staff. It accepted the challenges of growth, it accepted the challenges that the medical school brought, and even with all the frustrations that were involved, they never lost sight of what the goal was. There is always a certain amount of people on the periphery of a situation that are shooting at you but their leaders stayed the course and made it through some tough times.

Bill Laupus, you just cannot give him enough credit for helping and monitoring that whole process. They had confidence and trust in him. Jim Hallock is the same role. I only worked with Jim a short time. I told Jim when he first came to eastern North Carolina that I was going to take him to every hospital in eastern North Carolina and let you meet every administrator so when you talk about various things in eastern North Carolina you will know a little bit and you can say I have been there. I set up a schedule and called all these administrators and Jim and I took several days out of our work schedule and we would get up early in the morning and ride a whole circuit and get as many hospital in one day as we could. We would schedule lunch for some of them and some of them we could meet in between lunch and supper and breakfast. I think he saw that as a good opportunity to at least touch base and be on a first name basis with some of these people in some of these various communities.

I got a chance to know Jim through that process because there are a lot of rural roads in eastern North Carolina and we would drive through some of the back roads. He got a chance to see some farm country. He wanted to know how I knew my way around so well and I told him I grew up back in these back roads.

Beth Nelson: Talk a little about Vernon White.

Jack Richardson: All I know about Vernon is when I was the Chairman of the Hospital Association Vernon was in the Senate and we were going back and forth right much during those days and I always remember him as being very cordial and friendly toward the hospital. Vernon was a nice guy who represented our community well.

Beth Nelson: About Stuart Carr, who is he?

Jack Richardson: Carr was the original architect of the old hospital. His daughter worked for Warren McRoy in the Finance Office and she married a resident at the medical school and they lived over around Williamston somewhere when he first went into practice. His wife's name was Julia Carr Day. He had designed the Hill Burton hospital, the old hospital.

Beth Nelson: Talk a little about Bryant Aldridge.

Jack Richardson: Rocky Mount and Bryant in particular were Duke people. Bryant played football for Duke and he grew up in Kinston. Early on in the development, Freeman-White Associates built that hospital and it was through Bryant that they came to Greenville and made a presentation at the Country Club and Bryant came over and introduced them and we had one of our first architectural presentations about what the hospital was going to be like and what we could expect. At that point in time Bryant was very helpful, in fact, Bryant has been a friend of mine for years but I can remember him not being friendly about the medical center. They were strong Duke doctors over there. They sent their patients to Duke. That was their preference.