"There were whole families that worked there. "When you walked in the front door, I was the first person you saw."Įventually she became a receptionist and clerk.Įven though the facility no longer treated tuberculosis, it was still a very a family-friendly place to work, said Lonskey, who met her husband - then the director of recreational therapy - at the hospital. "I started as the switchboard operator," Lonesky said.
Howell resident Deb Lonskey also worked at the hospital in its final years, from 1972 to 1982. "I guess what I liked most was the patients," she added. "I thought the people that were working there were very nice. With its new purpose, the facility reined in its sprawling campus-like design to a more hospital-focused setting.ĭespite the change in the facility's mission, employees still enjoyed the experience. In 1958, the state began accepting mentally ill patients, and in 1961 the facility ceased treating tuberculosis patients and became known as Howell State Hospital.Ī decade later, the name changed again to the Hillcrest Center, and the remainder of its years in operation served the developmentally disabled. "A lot of the patients weren't used to getting drugs." Before that, it was just kind of rest," Henderson said. The pharmaceutical approach was a far cry from the rest-and-relaxation treatment that had been used at the sanatorium up to that point. Yet advancements in the treatment of the bacterial disease through vaccines and antibiotics brought a 70 percent reduction in tuberculosis-related deaths, and many people began being treated on an outpatient basis. The tuberculosis patients included men, women and children, she said. Lots of people from the same families worked there." Then I became the supervisor of the aides," she said.
Howell-area resident Carolyn Henderson worked at the site from 1955 to 1981, and she saw the facility transition from a treatment center for tuberculosis to a hospital for the developmentally disabled. A lot of the workers lived there, and their kids grew up there." The doctors lived on the grounds and were on call all of the time. "I had relatives who were there, so I had been up there (before I was an employee).
When it was there for the TB patients, it was like a little city," Wilkinson said. The 94-year-old Howell resident worked at the sanatorium for 28 years, starting in the 1960s as a medical librarian and eventually serving as the secretary to the facility's superintendent.
0 kommentar(er)
