A new 52,000-square-foot wing of Jefferson Healthcare Hospital, called the Emergency Services and Specialty Building (ESSB), opened in October 2016 in Port Townsend. The main floor houses the emergency department as well as outpatient services, including oncology, orthopedics, cardiology, lab draws and select diagnostic imaging. Photo by Patrick Sullivan, flight by Tailspin Tommy’s By the 1960s, the original hospital — the one DeLeo was born in — was condemned and the sisters pleaded poverty, telling the community they didn’t have the means to build another one. “So someone started an initiative to create a hospital district. My mom ran for it. She didn’t win, but she ran anyway,” DeLeo recalled. The public hospital district idea was a Plan B of sorts in the event the nuns failed at finding the funds to build a new facility. As it turned out, the community donated what DeLeo calls “a ton of money” that was matched by federal Hill-Burton funds and a new hospital was built. “So the sisters basically got the building for free,” DeLeo says with a smile, knowing now what he didn’t know at the time. As a teen in the 1960s, DeLeo even went to work on that new building. “At the time, the railroad was still running and we would bring truckloads … I couldn’t drive yet, but I’d take a hand truck and wheel materials into the building on planks.” His family’s lumber company, DeLeo Brothers, delivered lumber to construct what was called the “65 Building.” Much of that building was demolished, but parts of it still stand — right outside the cafeteria where DeLeo sits, reflecting on it all.
AMBULANCE AT MIDNIGHT
Once DeLeo could drive, he signed up for ambulance duty for Cascade Ambulance Service. Being a driver was hard on the families who answer the calls for help 24/7. The ambulance service kept folding because those drivers, “had a bad habit of whoever was on at midnight not coming to calls.” So the young DeLeo, who did answer the calls, got creative. He once borrowed a vehicle that was a backup car for the funeral home to fill in for
20 LOP Fall 2017
the ambulance service. “And I borrowed an ambulance from the Forks Hospital District, an old beater they used to bring loggers out in,” he said. “One of the other times they folded, this was before they had the Open Public Meetings Act and the city council met in the back of the fire hall, the mayor wrote an IOU on a napkin for the police chief and I to go buy an ambulance from Shepherd Ambulance in Seattle,” DeLeo said, not remembering the price, only that he and Chief John Doubek drove over and picked up the ambulance. After the ambulance service finally folded one last time, the one-and-only commissioner on the public hospital board called and told DeLeo that maybe the hospital district could operate an ambulance. At the time, the hospital district board wasn’t doing much of anything because the nuns were still running the hospital. And that’s how DeLeo got on the hospital board. County commissioners appointed DeLeo and then DeLeo and Dee Oeinck appointed another commissioner to what was at that time a
three-person board. As it turned out, the hospital district could only offer such ambulance service if it also operated a hospital. But then not long after that, the nuns gave the community an ultimatum: “They said ‘either you as a community buy the hospital or we’re gong to close it,’” DeLeo recalls. “There was no negotiating,” DeLeo said of working things out with the Sisters of Providence. “They knew their price.” So DeLeo and many others went to work on a campaign to buy the hospital from the nuns in 1975 for $1.1 million — that same hospital the nuns had managed to get for free a decade earlier.
FIRST DAY, NO MONEY
“The next thing we know, we’re sitting at a table looking at each other wondering, ‘Now what do we do?’” “The worst part was the day we took over the hospital and they hadn’t kept up anything. You’d walk through it and think ‘This is a medical service museum,’” DeLeo remembers. “When the sisters left, they took the administrator, all the sisters, which was half the nursing staff, and all the accounts receivable.
Port Townsend Mayor Marilou Green stands with Sisters of Providence members at the ground-breaking ceremony for a new wing being added to St. John Hospital in May 1962. The new facility was dedicated in 1965. The facility was transferred to a public hospital district in 1975 and became Jefferson General and later Jefferson Healthcare. The Leader Collection photo