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“In turning over to you the keys to this institution, Mr. Hebert, I say:
May you never lock from your door one who needs your help.”
– Police Jury President Fred Mizell, Nov. 28, 1954, at the dedication of St. Tammany Parish Hospital

A history of healing:
The St. Tammany Health System story

STHS 1954 — By Mike Scott, mscott@stph.org

It happened, as it turns out, in a driving rainstorm.

Others might trace it to another moment in time, but for Norma Core, it happened on a dreary night in the 1940s as rain washed through the ditches and over the roads of rural St. Tammany Parish.

“A friend of mine broke his leg and had to go to New Orleans for care,” Core remembered in a newspaper interview some 40 years later. “It was raining, and on the horrible little road through the marsh, the ambulance wrecked. My friend lay in the rain with his leg in disarray. They got him to New Orleans, but he died soon after from shock. They didn’t treat him for the effects of lying in the rain in pain.”

It was then that Core made up her mind.

“I decided,” she said, “we must have a hospital.”

It would be years before spade would hit dirt, but for all intents and purposes, it was then and there – in the rain and on the road whose name has long since been forgotten – that St. Tammany Health System was willed into being.

There are, of course, others who proved instrumental in the founding of the hospital. Core, however, would become an early and particularly conspicuous champion of the cause. Eventually, she would also become the sole female member of the very first St. Tammany Parish Hospital Commission.

All these decades later, the institution that Core helped found hardly resembles the humble one-story country hospital set amid the pines at Tyler Street and 11th Avenue back in 1954 – at least, not in a physical sense. Then, it was a 25,000-square-foot, 30-bed facility. With the opening of its newest wing in early 2021, the hospital will include 715,000 square feet of space and nearly 250 patient beds, to say nothing of the health system’s 20-plus satellite locations.

At its heart, though, it’s still very much the community-based hospital Core and others envisioned. And there’s a very good reason for that, according to St. Tammany Health System President and CEO Joan Coffman, whose healthcare career began as a radiologic technologist at the hospital in the early 1980s.

Actually, there are a few thousand good reasons.

“When I think back to what has been fundamental to the success of the organization throughout the tremendous change that has occurred over the last 66 years, it’s the people,” Coffman said. “We really are a community hospital. This hospital has become intertwined into the very fabric of this community. We’re neighbors with many of our patients and their families – or they’re our colleagues.”

In fact, if you’re going to recount the history of St. Tammany Health System with any accuracy, you’ve got to start with that long-treasured community connection. Oh, and President Harry S. Truman.

Chapter 1: Give ’em health, Harry!

President Harry S. Truman — Even before it became a passion project for Core, the desire to build a hospital in St. Tammany Parish had been bubbling away for decades.

“At long last,” Police Jury President Fred Mizell said at the hospital’s dedication ceremony two days before it opened its doors in late 1954, “we are about to complete a job that is the culmination of a quarter-century of effort on the part of the citizens of this parish.”

For much of that time, however, things proceeded in fits and starts – but mostly fits, and the financial kind.

Namely: Who would pay for said hospital?

Those efforts gained significant traction on Nov. 19, 1945. That’s the day President Harry S. Truman, in an address to Congress, introduced his five-part plan for improving healthcare in the United States. Part one dealt with the lack of adequate medical facilities nationally, and particularly in rural areas such as St. Tammany Parish.

“Inequalities in the distribution of medical personnel are matched by inequalities in hospitals and other health facilities,” Truman said. “Moreover, there are just too few hospitals, clinics and health centers to take proper care of the people of the United States.”

To solve that problem, he called upon Congress to provide federal funding to assist states and municipalities in construction of new hospitals. A year later, Congress responded with the Hospital Survey and Construction Act – popularly known as the Hill-Burton Act, named after U.S. Sens. Harold Burton of Ohio and Lister Hill of Alabama, the bill’s sponsors – which took direct aim at bolstering the nation’s healthcare infrastructure through the awarding of grants.

Earmarked for St. Tammany: $234,000. That would make up more than 60% of the hospital’s eventual $375,000 price tag.

The catch, though, was that the parish had to figure out a way to come up with the rest.

That’s when the women of St. Tammany Parish took over.

Chapter 2: Of grassroots and knitting circles

The Women’s Progressive Union of Covington’s announcement — On Oct. 18, 1946, a short, unassuming item was published in the St. Tammany Farmer newspaper in Covington. Not so much a story as an announcement, it was the sort of thing that would be all too easy to overlook unless you were in the habit of reading every single word of every single edition.

If hospitals were issued birth certificates, that brief announcement would be St. Tammany Health System’s.

Addressed to “the citizens of St. Tammany Parish,” it announced that the Women’s Progressive Union – a civic organization for which Core served as president and Aimee Moake was chairwoman – would be dedicating its attention to getting that long-awaited hospital built once and for all.

“We plan to visit every civic, business and educational group in the parish for the purpose of asking the assistance in this movement,” it read. And that’s exactly what they did, mounting a grassroots advocacy campaign targeting everything from the biggest local churches and civic groups to the smallest knitting circles.

The thinking: If they could get the parish’s residents on board with the plan to get a hospital built, local elected officials would have little choice but to line up behind the idea.

They also started a fundraising campaign to help pay for the project. According to a brief history of the hospital tucked away in a faded scrapbook kept by Cecile Hebert – the wife of Oliver Hebert, who would become chairman of the hospital’s first Board of Commissioners – a local resident named Marguerite Weiss had the distinction of not only proposing the fundraising campaign but also of making the first contribution to it. Others would follow Weiss’ lead.

The efforts of the Women’s Progressive Union continued over the next few years. A key make-or-break moment for the project came in March 1951, however, when parish residents were asked to vote up or down on a $175,000 bond issue that, added to already allocated federal funds, would finance construction as well as outfitting of the hospital.

Today, St. Tammany Health System no longer relies on taxpayer money, operating instead as a self-sustaining nonprofit aided by charitable donations to its sister organization, St. Tammany Hospital Foundation. But that initial infusion of seed money from the people of St. Tammany would prove crucial.

That 1951 bond issue was approved, overwhelmingly.

The community had spoken.

Chapter 3: ‘May it always remain open to suffering humanity’

1946 Board of Commissioners — In the beginning, when a site-selection committee was searching for a plot of land on which to build the hospital, committee members figured they’d need 135,000 square feet of space for the hospital and its grounds – or about one-and-a-half city squares.

The new hospital, which would include only 30 patient beds, wouldn’t need nearly that much land, but they had a nagging feeling.

After all, just after voters approved the bond issue to pay for the hospital, they also approved funds to build the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway toll bridge linking the north and south shores of the lake. New subdivisions were also starting to go up in the area. Clearly, western St. Tammany Parish was growing.

“This size was mentioned,” read a newspaper report describing the committee’s detailed invitation for land offers, “because of the possibility of expansion in the future, with the thought that other buildings may be needed at some time.”

If they were aware of just how prescient that thought would end up being, they didn’t have much time to dwell on it. They had a hospital to build.

The site-selection committee settled on a location along a then-wooded stretch of the old Covington-Madisonville Highway, which is today better known as South Tyler Street or Louisiana Highway 21.

Downright quaint when compared to today’s gleaming campus, the original hospital would be a one-story, 25,000-square-foot building designed, appropriately enough, in the shape of a cross – albeit it with one “lazy” arm – by the New Orleans firm of August Perez and Associates.

That’s the same influential firm that would go on to design parts of the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition in New Orleans, the Canal Place office tower, the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, the Piazza d’Italia on Poydras Street and the Shrine on Airline, among numerous other prominent structures in the New Orleans skyline.

Southern Construction of Columbia, Mississippi, was selected as the builder.

One of the first photos of the completed hospital — As designed, the new hospital would boast such modern amenities as air-conditioned operating and delivery rooms, off-street parking and a common patio so mobile patients could grab a few breaths of piney air as they convalesced.

A groundbreaking ceremony was held on the site on May 4, 1953. Oliver Hebert turned the first spade of dirt. Among the collection of dignitaries assembled was Norma Core, by then appointed to serve with Hebert on the hospital’s Board of Commissioners.

On Nov. 28, 1954, almost exactly 19 months after ground was broken, a dedication ceremony was held in front of the nearly completed building. An estimated crowd of 1,000 turned out on what The Times-Picayune described as a “blustery” Sunday afternoon.

An array of local muckety-mucks was also on hand to help with the delivery of the obligatory oratory, as was the Covington High School band, which provided the music. The Rev. Timothy Pugh of St. Peter’s Catholic Church delivered the invocation.

Then, Parish Police Jury President Fred Mizell stepped to the microphone and pulled from his pocket a 385-word speech, typewritten on a single sheet of onionskin.

“At long last we are about to complete a job that is the culmination of a quarter-century of effort on the part of the citizens of this parish,” he started. “A great deal of hard work went into the building of this beautiful, modern hospital, and now we see here the result of all this work. St. Tammany can be proud of its hospital.

“Situated as it is among these tall, stately pine trees, our hospital will bring healing to the body and comfort to the spirit of the afflicted.”

After praising the building, the staff and the assemblage of then-modern medical equipment inside, he went on to urge the community to finish the work they started by actually using the hospital instead of traveling out of parish for their healthcare.

“And now, Mr. Hebert, as president of the St. Tammany Parish Police Jury, I now hand over to you as chairman of the Hospital Board, the key to this fine institution,” Mizell said in closing. “May this key never be used to close it; may it always remain open to suffering humanity.”

The hospital officially opened to patients three days later, on Dec. 1. At 7:30 that morning, it got its first patient: Carl Bougere of Rutland Street in Covington, who had suffered a heart attack. He would survive.

The St. Tammany Farmer newspaper hailed the new facility as “one of the most modern built in Louisiana, contain(ing) besides 30 beautifully decorated and well furnished rooms, private and semi-private, three operating rooms consisting of an emergency, main and delivery operating rooms, an X-ray room, complete in every detail, a nursery equipped with two incubators and seven bassinets, a hot and cold sterilizing department, a modern technical laboratory and superbly equipped kitchen.” Fulfilling Mizell’s wish, locals did, indeed, use the hospital. Did they ever.

Chapter 4: And they’re off …

1954 waiting room — It’s unclear if those original hospital leaders were the celebrating type, but if they were, they didn’t have much time to bask in the accomplishment of finally getting the hospital open. There were patients to be seen, after all.

In its first year of operation, the hospital hosted an average of 16.3 inpatients per day. In all, 1,151 patients received treatment in that time period – 272 through the Emergency Room – and 179 babies were born.

And just like that, the question went from whether Covington was big enough for a hospital to how quickly the hospital could expand to accommodate ever-growing patient counts.

It wasn’t even three years old, in fact, when St. Tammany Parish voters in July 1957 approved another bond issue to pay for a 15-room expansion and assorted renovations. The work was completed in 1958.

Just like the rest of St. Tammany Parish, the hospital has been growing steadily ever since.

By 1968, it expanded again, this time by 61 beds. The ’68 project also gave the facility a second floor.

A $4 million expansion program completed in 1978 saw the addition of 64 more beds, along with an expansion of the Emergency Room; the lab; and administrative, X-ray, physical therapy and respiratory areas.

“I doubt if anyone realized back in 1953, when construction was begun, that our population would increase so rapidly,” Haller Alexius, the hospital’s administrator at the time of the 1978 expansion, said in an interview with The Times-Picayune. “But grow it did, and we at the hospital have tried to meet the demands of that growth.”

That growth would only continue.

STHS pedestrian skybridge — “There were major expansions every 10 years or so for a while there,” said Mike Portie, the health system’s assistant vice president of Support Services – and who, as a 36-year employee of the organization, knows the facility as well as, if not better than, anybody walking its halls.

“Even when it wasn’t expanding, there have been constant renovations, remodels and other projects,” Portie said. “It went to a new level, though, around 1986. That was the beginning of the nonstop rapid growth.”

In 1995, the biggest expansion of the hospital to that point was started. Its centerpiece was a three-story structure to house the hospital’s intensive care unit, adding some 45,000 square feet of space and costing an estimated $8.5 million.

In 2000, a new standard was set again as ground was broken on what the hospital dubbed its New Millennium Project. Completed in 2004, the $45 million project would triple the size of the hospital and add the sun-drenched atrium lobby that visitors know today.

In 2011, in a dramatic aerial maneuver scheduled in the dead of night to reduce the impact on local traffic, an elevated pedestrian skybridge was hoisted by cranes and installed over South Tyler Street to link the hospital to the Charles A. Frederick Jr. Medical Office Complex across the street.

In 2014, the health system entered into a strategic partnership with Ochsner Health, further expanding its reach and creating the most comprehensive, integrated health system in St. Tammany Parish history.

In 2016, the hospital renovated and greatly expanded its Emergency Department, which to this day includes the region’s only Pediatric Emergency Department.

Most recently, in 2019 and 2020, a new four-story expansion rose over the sprawling hospital campus, making room for it to turn every one of its patient rooms into a private room for the first time in its history. Containing more than five times the square footage of the original 25,000-square-foot hospital building, it pushed the hospital to nearly three-quarters of a million square feet of enclosed space.

For now.

Chapter 5: Tomorrow at St. Tammany Health System

newspaper editorial cartoon — Those hoping to clap eyes on traces of the original building from 1954 are out of luck. None of that structure exists any longer.

“None. Zero. It’s all gone,” Portie said.

For the record, its lobby faced Tyler Street and was located roughly in the area of the outdoor fountain and Employee Brick Pathway outside today’s hospital chapel, just northwest of the current hospital’s main entrance. If you sit on one of the park benches near the water’s edge, you’ll be sitting right about where patients in 1954 would have waited to be seen by a doctor or nurse.

The two-story building that went up as part of the 1968 expansion is still in use; it’s the oldest existing part of today’s hospital facility, although few people likely realize how old it is without being told. It’s been renovated and modernized multiple times, Portie said, always with an eye toward blending it seamlessly with the rest of the hospital.

Today, it houses the hospital’s Radiology Department, among other departments.

But even if everything else has changed since the hospital first rose along Tyler Street, one thing definitely hasn’t: its commitment to the people of St. Tammany Parish.

“Even from that very first origin story of Mrs. Core wanting to have family and friends taken care of locally so they didn’t have to drive across the lake, that’s really become the driving force behind the hospital,” said Dr. Patrick Torcson, St. Tammany Health System’s chief medical officer. “The growth of the structure has been done to accommodate the breadth of the services that we need to take care of an expanded population.”

That willingness to invest in the hospital is a credit to the foresight of the hospital’s governing body and leadership over the years, Torcson said. But, he added, credit is also owed to the countless anonymous staffers who have worked diligently to make sure that, as big as the hospital gets, it doesn’t lose that community connection.

“Everybody here is somebody’s neighbor, friend, sister-in-law, brother-in-law,” Torcson said. “It really is a very well-connected community. I think that’s very different from a big-city medical center. We really are caring for our friends, families and neighbors. We see that every day, and I think that contributes to the overall success we have achieved.”

He continued: “It’s truly a symbiotic relationship between the hospital and the community. I think that’s the special sauce. There’s no detachment. This is not an interloping corporate initiative. This is very much an organic part of this community in terms of its growth and role in the community.”

From what he sees of the hospital’s current decision makers, Torcson said the health system is poised to continue its growth over the next 10 or 20 years. Just like the growth it has experienced since 1954, that will likely include expansion of its physical footprint, he said, but it will also mean the continued addition of innovative new services and equipment to benefit the ever-growing community it serves.

As evidence of that commitment, he pointed to the recent investments the health system has made in robotic-assisted surgery, in digital disease management, in cancer care and other clinical areas.

For her part, Coffman said she also sees an opportunity to expand the use of video visits and other in-home healthcare options that began growing exponentially in popularity among local residents with the onset of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

Once more, that vision – which started by listening to what the community wanted and then delivering it – dovetails neatly with the mission that has guided the hospital since that tragic rainy night all those decades ago.

“I think what St. Tammany has done extraordinarily well, going back to its roots nearly seven decades ago, is connecting with and hearing the voice of the community,” Coffman said. “Institutionally, there’s a history of listening to our community constituents and reacting and responding to what they’re telling us what the needs truly are.

“When you look back at what was here even in the early '80s when I started here, it was an unassuming two-story hospital with a very small footprint. You really didn’t know unless you saw the signage that it was a hospital. Now, today, not only do we have the extraordinary new wing coming online, but we have a much bigger footprint out in the community, because we wanted to make sure over time that we were able to truly meet the needs where they are.

“And I think we’ve done a great job of that over the years.”

Mike Scott can be reached at mscott@stph.org.

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