Giving Birth to a Hospital

Health Care in Vero Beach Is Indebted to a Nurse From the Midwest

by Mary Beth Vallar

GARNETT RADIN. THIS NAME MIGHT not be familiar to newcomers to Indian River County — such as those who have moved here in the last 30 years. But everyone should be aware of this remarkable yet unassuming woman who contributed so much to the health care of this community.

Radin founded the first local hospital and went on to play a role in future hospitals in the country until her death in 1987. As Mary Jane Stewart, the former director of volunteer services at Indian River Medical Center, now Cleveland Clinic Indian River Hospital, put it, “Garnett Radin was a nurse first and foremost, and patient care always came before anything else.”

The 29-year-old registered nurse moved to Vero Beach from Nebraska in 1931 with her two small children. She was petite in stature and had big ideas. It seems that when she arrived, she was troubled by the fact that the nearest hospital was 70 miles away. So she plunked down $22,000 of her own money and bought a two-story stucco structure on Old Dixie Highway. The recently constructed building was destined to be a hotel, but it never opened because of the Great Depression. Radin converted it into a 21-bed hospital and opened its doors in 1932.

Despite its newness, the facility was primitive even for a hospital of the day. A wood-burning stove in the waiting room was the only source of heat for the entire building. It had no kitchen facilities and patient meals were prepared in a separate building. An artesian well provided the hospital’s water supply, and a septic tank system was its sewage facility. Suzan Phillips, a 97-year-old Vero Beach resident who as a teenager served as a nurse’s aide, says that the operating rooms had no doors.

Yet Radin and her small team of nurses and volunteers delivered care and comfort to thousands of patients in the 1930s and early ’40s. Stewart, who was born in the hospital during World War II and later worked with its founder, says that Radin herself insisted on visiting every patient every day, a practice she continued at subsequent hospitals she managed.

Stewart remembers her mother telling her that the hospital windows were draped with blackout curtains during the war and that, despite the terror of the darkness, it was a comfort to new mothers to have their infants in their rooms with them.

At the start of the war, Radin turned the operation of her hospital over to the Indian River Hospital Association, a nonprofit organization formed by the Vero Beach Chamber of Commerce several years before for the purpose of raising funds desperately needed to improve the hospital that served a growing community.

Radin left Vero Beach to join the U.S. Navy Reserve Nurse Corps and served from 1942 to ’45. She was head nurse at several stateside Navy hospitals and one in Guam, and finally on the hospital ship USS Haven in the South Pacific.

In 1946 Radin returned to Vero Beach to resume her work with the local hospital, this time as its paid administrator. Within the next few years, the facility proved inadequate for the community’s growing population, and Radin supervised the move to a larger facility at the airport — the former dispensary of the air training station the U.S. Navy had established in Vero Beach during the war.

This move increased the bed capacity to 35; yet it was only a temporary solution, and rightly so. Longtime Vero Beach resident Mary Ellen Replogle tells of delivering her first baby at this facility in August 1949: “The hospital was built on stilts, and while I was there, we had a hurricane and the whole building rocked and swayed.”

Indeed, a Category 4 storm hit the state, making landfall in Lake Worth. By the time it moved north to Vero Beach, the sustained winds were close to 100 miles per hour and gusting higher. “A nurse came in and told me to take my 2-day-old baby and hide under the bed,” Replogle recalls.

Fortunately, at that time Radin was already scouting out possible sites where a modern hospital could be built. Grants for the project came from a number of sources, including the Indian River County Commission and the federal government. However, a public campaign for contributions brought in the bulk of the funds. And so, in 1951, construction began on Indian River Memorial Hospital — newly named in honor of those who had died in the war — a 35-bed facility on 25th Street near downtown Vero Beach.

Radin served as administrator and, shortly after it opened, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals sanctioned the facility, making it the smallest hospital at the time to be accredited. Within two years the hospital was again overcrowded, and another campaign raised funds for a 25-bed addition.

Robert Radin was just 4 years old when his mother brought him and his sister, 2-year-old Maxine, to Vero Beach in 1932. Here, Garnett and Robert Radin are shown in front of the original hospital on Old Dixie Highway, where they lived next to the autoclave room. Robert followed in his mother’s medical footsteps, serving the Vero Beach community as a psychiatrist. His children continued the family’s legacy by choosing medical careers.

In 1953 Radin left Vero Beach again, this time to further her education. She returned to her native Nebraska to earn a B.S. degree from Nebraska Wesleyan University, and then went on to earn a master’s degree in hospital administration from Northwestern University.

After a two-year tenure of residency and research at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, Radin became involved with the Shriners Hospitals for Children and served in several of that system’s facilities. Most notably, she supervised the building of a Shriners hospital in Mexico City and stayed on as administrator for four years.

Radin returned to Vero Beach in 1969 to retire. This pause was short lived, however; the Cedars of Lebanon Mary

Hospital in Miami recruited her to head its planning department. Radin returned to Vero Beach again in 1972, this time to stay, and finished her work for this community’s residents as the planning coordinator of IRMH. Her major responsibilities involved moving the operation from the 25th Street hospital to the current facility at 1000 36th Street in 1978.

By then the hospital had reorganized as a not-for-profit corporation, with a volunteer board of directors and professional management. Radin was appointed to the board, and she was still a member until a few months before her death in 1987 at age 84.

Radin was recognized posthumously in the Florida League of Cities’ Great Floridians 2000 program. Her contributions to the health care field were also recognized beyond the state of Florida. A worthy example is the following tribute made at the time of her retirement from IRMH in 1983 by Alex McMahon, then president of the American Hospital Association:

“The health care industry has undergone many changes since the days you opened the first hospital in Vero Beach. … You have been a vital part of that growth and innovation. The leadership you have shown throughout a career of more than 50 years has been a gift that touched many lives. Your contributions to the delivery of health care are a legacy not only to the people of Vero Beach, but to all of us who serve the industry.” ◆