Last Rites

Photo by Michael Amsler

Pomp and polyester: The Windsor Odd Fellows install their officers. The members are part of a trend that has seen the greying of America’s secret societies.

Are fraternal orders doomed to extinction?

By David Templeton

Masons. Elks. Moose. Odd Fellows. Druids. Shriners. As you read this list, who do you think of? Anyone at all? Your father, perhaps. Or your grandfather. An uncle. Even an old friend of the family. But if you are a man in your mid-to-late 30s, or younger, chances are pretty darned good that the one guy you are not thinking of is yourself.

Once a mainstay of middle-class American society, with thriving constituencies of all ages, the entire roster of fez-wearing, flag-carrying, hard-drinking, secret-keeping, private men’s clubs–politely called fraternal orders–has turned conspicuously grey. As fewer and fewer young men step up to take the place of those recently departed, concern is spreading among some of the brethren that without an immediate, dramatic infusion of youthful males, the Masons, the Moose, the Odd Fellows, and their kind will all end up merely as cryptic words carved on the sides of spooky old buildings.

Are secret societies like these really part of some greater conspiracy???

American suspicions (and conspiracy theories) about freemasonic secret societies are as old as the country itself.

Sure, some would argue that in 1996 this type of bastion has run its course. With their secret handshakes, mysterious rituals, funny hats, and pancake breakfasts, not to mention all the accusations of sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, secretivism, and alcoholism that have been leveled against them over the years, isn’t it time to just bury the dinosaur?

But according to those who live this fraternal life, who pay their dues, who participate in the secret rituals, and who work to keep their lodges meaningful to society, this dinosaur still has a pulse. What it needs now, they say, is an infusion of new blood.

As a jaunty little piano tune rings through the hall, and a small but attentive audience watches, the Odd Fellows are marching back and forth across the floor.

In a double row, black-suited men on one side, women on the other, parade about in a baffling, complicated, incredibly precise series of drills that make little sense to the uninitiated but keep those in the know spellbound. A collection of officers from around the district, these marchers are here at the Windsor Odd Fellows Hall to participate in the annual installation of officers, officiating over the men’s and women’s lodges. This is a small lodge (there appear, in fact, to be more visiting members than residents), with not a soul under age 50 among them.

The few young faces in the room belong to members of the installation team, and though they truly seem to be having the most fun of anyone here, exuberantly delivering their scripted pronouncements (“Noble Grands! We are instructed by the District Deputy Grand Master and the District Deputy President of the Grand Lodge Rebecca Assembly of California to ascertain whether you are ready to proceed with the joint public installation ceremony!”), treating the proceedings as if it were one major kick in the butt, they are still, agewise, very much in the minority.

“I was talking with one old guy the other day,” muses Odd Fellow District Deputy Patrick McCloskey, who presided over this evening’s ceremony. “I said, ‘What’s the problem with the lodges these days? Why don’t they have any new guys?’ And this guy said it was the war. World War II. I looked it up in the books and sure enough in 1947 we started losing members. They say that the war took all the young guys, and though they didn’t kill them all, things changed after that. Our society changed.”

McCloskey (in his mid-to-late 40s, he is considered one of the young ones) is himself the son of an Odd Fellow, and even he had no interest in joining until after his father’s death. “I never thought I would,” he explains. “’cause it was a bunch of old men, and their stuff was all based on the Bible. That put me off. But when someone asked me to join six months after Dad died, I thought, ‘Oh, what the hell. It’s a good organization. It’s based on helping people. It’s old-fashioned in a lot of ways, but maybe I can help bump it into the ’90s.'”

The Odd Fellows’ name, which often produces snickers when mentioned in public, is actually derived from the biblical story of the Good Samaritan, a daring young man who was willing to be odd in that he went out of his way to help a wounded man while the rest of the townsfolk walked on by. In short, the Odd Fellows were formed, well over a hundred years ago, to help those in need. Fraternities in general, despite their reputation (once well deserved) as “old men’s drinking clubs,” have always devoted enormous energies to community service, sponsoring everything from food drives for the poor and scholarships for students to drug prevention programs and major, state-of-the art medical clinics. “I get to give something back to my community,” McCloskey explains. “Which basically means that I get to go to the lodge meetings and make motions to give money away.”

The secret passwords and ancient rituals, according to McCloskey, though undeniably corny and probably not necessary, are kept on for tradition’s sake, and there is even talk that it might be time to let some of these trappings fade away. “I hope the fraternities don’t die off,” he says. “And my gut feeling is that if they’ve lasted this long, then they’ll adapt.”

“Our members are dying off faster than we can get new ones in,” says Willard Burris of the Free and Accepted Masons Yount Lodge 12, in Napa. The fifth oldest existing Masonic lodge in the country, the Napa Masons are as hungry for new members as all the others, to the point where any growth at all is greeted with hyperbolic enthusiasm.

“We’re beginning to see a resurgence in new people, though,” Burris boasts. “In ’95 alone we took in two of them that are 30 years old. That’s a real nice age. We’d like to get them after 21 if we can, but when a guy’s 21 he’s too busy chasing girls and building cars. He’s got other things on his mind.” Still, compared to others, Burris’ lodge is a rather busy one. “We’ve got candidates. We’re taking in new ones, and that’s good. But the whole thing does need rejuvenation. We’re all having problems.”

John Cooper, secretary of the Masonic Grand Lodge, based in San Francisco, has been observing the decline for some time. “I can’t speak for the other organizations, but the Masons have been losing 6,000 members a year statewide,” he says. “That’s a serious dip, but from our standpoint it’s only a result of our past successes. In the late ’40s and early ’50s, many men came into this fraternity. Unless you can sustain that same rate of growth, the Grim Reaper is eventually going to catch up with you.”

New Masonic memberships across the state have been steady for most of the last decade, with an average of 2,000 new members a year. “Now, that’s not enough to balance out the death rate, but it’s not a bad number at all.”

Still, before the 1960s rolled around, 2,000 new members would have been considered surprisingly small. So what happened? “In 1965,” Cooper theorizes, “we were on the verge of the Vietnam War and we were on the verge of an antiestablishment movement which a lot of men of that generation had a hard time understanding. We had all the riots on our campuses, and all the things that moved through society, and a lot of the young men growing up at that time simply were not attracted to an organization that their fathers were involved in.”

Cooper concedes changes in the lodge might have curbed the decline, but changes do not come easily to an organization that some claim dates back thousands of years. “Every fraternal organization has to change for a new day,” he says. “But the essential principles won’t change. Those of our lodges that are very successful right now are those that have made themselves deeply involved in their communities.”

The lodge, fighting off claims of racial exclusivity, has seen a growth in minority membership, and has recently joined forces with the Black Freemasons, a self-formed group that dates back to the days of American slavery. The women’s arm of Freemasonry has become increasingly active (as have the women’s auxiliaries of all the major fraternities).

Additionally, they have cut back on some of the stringent memorization of rituals and history. And that’s not all. The Masons have joined the information age, with a brand new Web page, featuring sharp graphics, browsable archival materials, and lively on-line exchanges between thoroughly modern Masons. “I do believe we’ll be around in another thousand years,” Cooper offers. “I think there are universals in human nature that don’t go away. People have a need for community, for fellowship. And that’s what we offer.”

And some fraternal organization members think the age issue is a bit overblown. “To me the fraternity is an older persons’ organization to begin with,” says Ben Garcia of the Santa Rosa Grove of Druids. “Most of those who join us are settled down, in their 40s.

“We’re a low-key group. We have a pool table, a shuffleboard, a nice little bar. It’s a nice place to take your wife and not worry about getting beat over the head. Our rituals are nice. Brotherly love stuff. We have a real nice funeral service,” he smiles.

One of several Druidic organizations in Sonoma County, Garcia’s lodge has also seen a decline in new Druids, though nothing compared to some of the other groves in the county. Occidental’s Frederick Seig Grove has lost so many members over the last several years, with no replacements, that their Druid-owned cemetery on Occidental Road fell into sad disrepair (no dues means no maintenance money). A community uproar brought the matter to the attention of the overseeing California Order of Druids, and the cemetery is now recovering nicely.

The Santa Rosa Grove contributes to the community in much the way the other lodges do. They have a scholarship program, school outreaches, and food drives. In the last year they brought in about 30 new members, mostly the 40-year-olds Garcia referred to, but he adds that they need at least 50 new men to stay steady. When asked about the future of the lodge, he simply shrugs.

The Druids, of course, have their secrets, like the Odd Fellows and the Masons. When asked about the nature of their rituals, Garcia shows me a little pamphlet: “The Story of Druidism–History, Legend and Lore.” There is mention of Merlin, of bards and mistletoe, and frequent calls for “virtuous living.” Nothing overtly frightening. “People hear the word Druid, and they kind of expect something else,” Garcia laughs. “Something wilder. But we’re mostly Republicans.”

Then there are the Moose, with several lodges around the county, who are also experiencing the antipathy of young men. Their response has been to shift from being seen as an old-boys club, dropping the use of the term fraternity in favor of the more inclusive family organization. There is frequent mention of the Women of the Moose as being “a separate and equal body that works in harmony with the Men of the Moose.”

The result, predictably, is that more men with families are joining, though slowly. The Elks, which reportedly lost their charter in Santa Rosa owing to sharp declines in membership, are rumored to have recently voted to accept women into the lodge as full members.

But are these changes too little too late? Can the lodges wait for boomers and Gen X-ers to settle down and mellow out before joining? Perhaps it isn’t the notion of fraternities themselves that is keeping people away. There are also fewer Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Business & Professional Women, church members, Rotarians, Lions, and Bowling League members than there used to be. In the age of television, “cocooning,” and diminished economic expectations we seem to be shifting away from “joinerism” in general.

So for now the dinosaur waits, still breathing, still alive. But if dinosaurs had hands, you could be sure that this one would have its fingers crossed.

From the Jan. 25-31, 1996 issue of the Sonoma Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
&copy 1996 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc.

Devilish Doings

Watch out! That harmless-looking gent in the fez over there, riding his go-cart in the parade with all the other Shriners, may secretly be planning to eat your brain! Don’t laugh. Over the years there have been some awfully strange things said about the “secret societies,” the fraternal organizations such as the Masons and the Odd Fellows.

They have been accused of everything from being an affiliate of the Ku Klux Klan to wreaking havoc in the Vatican Banking System to holding potlucks with the Devil himself. Since members-only meetings are held in secret, no one can prove any of this, of course. And the societies can do nothing more than roll their collective eyes and deny it.

One fascinating theory, outlined in Jonathan Vankin’s book Conspiracies, Cover-ups & Crimes: Political Manipulations and Mind Control in America (Paragon House, 1991), points to the Order of Free and Accepted Masons as the reconnaissance team for an impending alien invasion of the earth, following which we all be slaves and/or breakfast. This theory states that when the secret groups first began in the Middle Ages, their purpose was actually to combat the alien invaders, who looked just like everyone else and were up to no good. These sensational accusations, which seem to be inspired by too many late-night movies, are nothing new.

What kicked anti-Masonic paranoia into high gear? A lodge member, William Morgan, wanted to publish the rituals once and for all, to prove there was nothing to fear. He disappeared and was never heard from again. “To this day no one knows what happened to him,” explains John Cooper, secretary of the Masonic Grand Lodge in San Francisco. “But it was sufficient to cause an explosion against Freemasonry.”

So who knows? Are they evil or are they harmless? A bunch of sweet old guys acting goofy once a week or an assembly of little green men in disguise? There’s really only one way to find out: Join up and see for yourself.

From the Jan. 25-31, 1996 issue of the Sonoma Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
&copy 1996 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc.

News Briefs

Davis Trial Date Set

SAN JOSE A Santa Clara County judge on Monday set a Feb. 5 date for the murder trial of Richard Allen Davis, 41, accused of the 1993 slaying of 12-year-old Polly Klaas of Petaluma. Both prosecutor Greg Jacobs and defense attorney Barry Collins had asked for a delay, but Supervising Superior Court Judge Jack Komar denied their motions. The court ruling puts the long-delayed trial on a fast track that begins the two-month jury selection process almost immediately. The actual trial is expected to last four to six months.

New Charge Filed

EUREKA Humboldt County prosecutors have filed a new charge of felony child molestation against the Rev. Gary Timmons, the suspended Catholic priest also accused of molesting boys while serving as a youth counselor at St. Eugene’s Cathedral in Santa Rosa. The new charge was filed after a 15-year-old Crescent City high school student alleged that Timmons fondled him at St. Bernard’s Catholic Church in Eureka. Last month, a Sonoma County Municipal Court judge dropped several older counts against Timmons because they may be excluded from the statute of limitations. Timmons has denied any wrongdoing in the cases. However, the Catholic Diocese of Santa Rosa recently paid an $830,000 settlement to nine local men who claim the priest molested them when they were teens.

Forum Sparks Protest

PETALUMA Several angry women held protest signs aloft at a town meeting on Jan. 18 held to explore the proposed management merger between Petaluma Valley and Santa Rosa Memorial hospitals. The latter, a Catholic-owned facility, has indicated it may suspend abortions, tubal ligations, and other reproductive services. Protesters, including many PVH hospital workers, worry that the loss of women’s health services could endanger the welfare of local women. PVH administrators are considering a plan to create a separate women’s health-care clinic on the hospital campus.

Annexation Voided

SANTA ROSA A 10-acre annexation in northwest Santa Rosa has been thrown out by a Superior Court judge, who ruled that a third of the 27 votes cast in the localized election that approved it were fraudulent. The invalid ballots came from the Birchwood Guest Home, a nursing home owned by annexation advocate Fredrick Fonoti, and were supposedly cast by individuals who actually reside at another Fonoti-owned nursing facility in Windsor. An investigation into the apparent voter fraud is continuing.

Gay Resort Arson

GUERNEVILLE A third fire hit The Woods last week, further damaging the colorful gay resort near Armstrong Grove. The early morning blaze was apparently set at two ends of the empty 21-room lodge, and bore suspicious similarities to an earlier fire last September, said Guerneville Fire Chief Hans Henneberque. The two fires caused almost $200,000 damage. The third blaze, in 1991, destroyed the popular Hexagon House bar and disco, but it was determined to be electrical in origin, despite speculation about arson at the time.

Park Plans Progress

FORESTVILLE The creation of a new county park at Steelhead Beach got a strong endorsement from county planners last week, despite some misgivings from nearby residents and the owners of other private campgrounds along the lower Russian River. The 17-acre park site could be opened for fishing and other undeveloped uses later this year, if the $1.7 park plan is upheld by county supervisors Feb. 27.

Short Takes
State and federal highway officials are asking the county to put the brakes on gravel mining in the Russian River because excavations may be undermining highway bridges in the area. The feds say they might refuse to pay for costly future repairs unless the destructive practice is stopped. . . . Nicole Bradley, the 18-year-old Santa Rosa woman charged with the Jan. 18 shotgun murder of a carjack victim, won’t face the death penalty, county prosecutors decided this week. However, the suspect could still face a life sentence. . . . Judge Lloyd von der Mehden has set a Feb. 7 hearing on a bid to block county supervisors from acting on a proposed lease of Community Hospital before voters can decide a measure giving them a voice in the decision. The ballot initiative will not be decided until November, while the supervisors are scheduled to act on the lease with Sutter/CHS on Feb. 9. . . . Petaluma city officials say they will not try to restrict a topless show driven out of Santa Rosa by a recent ban on public nudity. The California Hardbodies will continue to appear at Holidaze Bar & Grill in Petaluma, home base for the theatrical outfit. . . . Residents north of Sebastopol got a scare on Monday when a low-flying crop duster from the nearby Gallo Winery cruised to within 50 feet above homes in the neighborhood. Gallo later sent three employees door to door to calm rattled nerves.

From the Jan. 25-31, 1996 issue of the Sonoma Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
&copy 1996 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc.

Ch-ch-ch-Changes

Transitions teacher Suzy Allegra can help your emotions undo the twist

By Gretchen Giles

Seven years ago, elementary schoolteacher Suzy Allegra came home from work and began to weep. There were no problems at school–her students were learning well and the administrators and parents were pleased with her work. She had no relationship troubles and the money thing was OK. “I finally realized that it was about burnout,” Allegra says of her malaise, leaning forward in a pillow-backed chair at her home office.

“I was so exhausted from giving that I needed to get out. I went the next week and signed my leave-of-absence papers, not knowing what I was going to do. I just knew that I had to leave.” Fear kept her in school on a part-time basis for a few more years, but three illnesses in short order–the last one an end-of-summer dash to the hospital to remove a hot appendix–convinced her that if her head wouldn’t let her change jobs, her body would force her to.

Today Allegra–a petite, energetic blonde in a jewel-toned silk suit–is most decidedly not burned out. If anything, she’s on fire. Still a teacher, Allegra now trains adults to handle the one constant in all of our lives: change.

“There are two reasons why we have difficult transitions, and one of them is how well prepared we are on the inner level,” she says expertly, “and the other is how connected we are to what we’re letting go of. I was so connected to teaching that that’s why [the thought of moving on] was so traumatic in my life.”

Citing three stages to transition–endings, middles (which she calls limbo, that period of waiting to act), and beginnings–Allegra recommends a “take-care-of-yourself checklist” for the overwhelmed. “In transition, we tend to have a lot more stress,” she says logically, “and so what we tend to do is that we eat all the worst things, we give up the exercise–we do the exact opposite of what we need to do.

“Half of the battle is to be conscious of what some of these elements are.”

As a transition teacher, Allegra engages herself in helping others to better understand ways to cope with the inevitable twists and turns of life–changes that she feels are becoming more and more overwhelming all the time. “Two hundred years ago, we lived on farms,” she reminds. “We had a community, and birth, death, and marriage were basically the biggest changes that a family faced. Life had a fairly even rhythm to it.

“Now change happens more rapidly.”

Acknowledging the inevitable, Allegra nonetheless laments our society’s brusque attitude to life-sized transitions. She advocates small, inexpensive ceremonies such as leaving a note and flowers for the new tenants of a house you are vacating or the framing of a memento from a previous job to hang in your new office as important transition markers.

“We get more emotionally and in a spiritual way when we honor and demarcate [transitions] in a symbolical way, as opposed to what our society does, which is to just ignore them,” she adds. “We have this macho attitude about not acknowledging emotions and the significance of things in our lives.

“We’re supposed to be just fine no matter what happens,” she says incredulously. “We’re strong, and we’re modern, and all of that.”

Calling feelings the new “F word” in our society because she believes “that it’s easier for us to swear in public than to really talk about our emotions,” Allegra advocates what she calls the “Four-A method of handling emotions.” Acknowledgment of feelings is first on the list. Allowing them to surface ranks next, since unallowed emotions can “stay there until it is too late and you get ill or [the emotions] explode.”

Once you’ve acknowledged and allowed, you need to accept the ugly little feelings that might worm their way to the top of your consciousness. “Society tells us that some emotions are good and others aren’t,” Allegra fumes. “My belief is that emotions just are, they aren’t good or bad. If you can get into a space where you can accept yourself and your emotions as being OK, whether it’s fear or anger or grief or sadness–or one of the ‘good’ emotions–then I think that you move through them more easily.

“The fourth step is appreciation of emotions, and I think that’s a hard one for all of us,” she grins. “There are reasons why we have emotions; there are good reasons. For example, fear puts us on notice. I think that grief is a cleansing emotion, it lets you let go of some of the pain of loss. Anger [can be] a separating emotion.

“If you appreciate that the emotion is there for a good reason, then it helps you to accept that you are going through the process of transition.”

Suzy Allegra presents “Transitions: How to Handle Life’s Changes with Courage and Grace,” on Saturday, Jan. 20, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Glendale Federal Bank’s Community Room, 290 B St., Santa Rosa. Admission is $69-$79. 527-8843.

From the Jan. 18-25, 1996 issue of The Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
&copy 1996 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc.

Gold in Them Thar Ills

Sutter Health, tapped by supes to run Community Hospital, mines big bucks in health care, but is it at patients’ expense?

By Bruce Robinson

“It’s been a very good place to work, very high quality of care. Sutter has been an excellent umbrella organization over Novato, up to now,” says E, a registered nurse at Novato Community Hospital for the past five years who prefers her name not be used. But, she adds, “Sutter’s undergone a very significant change in management over the last few years.

“I see big, major destructive changes in the wind.”

Sutter Health, the Sacramento-based heath maintenance organization that is negotiating a lease agreement to assume operation of the county-run Community Hospital in Santa Rosa, is a rapidly growing non-profit organization that is one of the largest health-care companies in the state. A merger with California Healthcare Systems, a major Bay Area hospital owner, took effect this week. That makes the resulting new company, to be called Sutter/CHS, the second largest in Northern California, after Kaiser.

The new combined corporation owns 23 hospitals with 4,900 beds, employs 26,000 people, has doctors’ offices in more than 100 communities, and has assets worth $2.4 billion, according to Sutter/CHS communications director Bill Gleeson.

But the company also has a sizable cadre of critics who charge that Sutter is skimping on patient care to boost its corporate cash flow.

The profits from health care are going into the corporations and not health care. This is a national pattern and you can see it in your local hospital,” says Linda Remy, a policy analyst for the University of California at San Francisco who is active in the Marin Safe Healthcare Coalition. “Sutter has been out in the country working all this stuff out. Now that they’ve learned how to do their real estate manipulations out there, they’re coming into the city and are just creaming off the money, unimaginable hundreds of millions of dollars.

“These people are paying themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in salaries and then cutting nurses.”

Cutbacks in nursing have been a source of ongoing controversy at Marin General Hospital, a former public facility that became part of California Healthcare Systems in 1985. Last spring the directors of Marin General announced that “they were going to drastically cut registered nurses, and they did,” says Dr. William Rothman, who is among the leaders of a Marin petition drive to reverse the hospital’s 11-year affiliation.

“Everyone recognizes that since more hospital procedures are being done outpatient, there do not have to be as many nurses employed in the hospital,” he elaborates, “but what they cut was the ratio of registered nurses to patients.”

That is an important distinction, he continues, “because with managed care, as soon as your eyes are open after the operation, they throw you out of the hospital. The average patient today is sicker than the average patient five years ago. Therefore the need for highly skilled nurses should dictate the ratio of RNs to patients should be increased.”

A few months after the nursing cutbacks, the plans to merge CHS and Sutter were announced, and while the transaction did not require the participation of the largely toothless board of trustees at Marin General, they were asked to approve a pair of “side agreements” of which Rothman is highly critical. One allows the hospital to join what is called the “obligated group,” a consortium of Sutter/CHS hospitals that share joint indebtedness. While that allows Sutter to borrow money at lower rates, it also means that local hospitals “become obligated for the debts of other facilities over which you have no control,” Rothman objects.

Sutter’s hospital in Roseville “just issued bonds for remodeling. If they can’t repay those bonds, then they go to the obligated group, which is Sutter, and they decide where the money should come from,” he adds. “Sutter could decide, ‘Well, let’s cut nursing care some more and take the money from Marin General. Or anywhere.’ “

A second fiscal arrangement that Rothman questions is called “excess cash transfer,” under which “everything over two weeks’ operating expenses is automatically transferred to Sutter. The problem is that the two-week cushion can be changed arbitrarily by Sutter. It could be two minutes, it could be two months,” Rothman says. Again, the local hospital and its board are left with no meaningful financial authority, he claims.

Both fiscal mechanisms are expected to be employed at Community Hospital after Sutter takes over, says Sutter’s Gleeson. The excess cash transfer is “a policy which has served our organization well over the years,” he adds. “If Sutter did not have this ability to move cash within the system, these types of partnerships would not be possible.”

However, neither practice is being discussed as part of the ongoing negotiations between Sutter and Sonoma County. “There are certain profit margins the county would share in, and if they are in excess of that, we’re not dictating what [Sutter can] do with their money,” says Colleen Murphy, the Sonoma County project manager for William M. Mercer Inc., the consultant hired by the county to negotiate the lease agreement.

“The county is making sure that the hospital remains a separate reporting entity, so we can monitor its financial and operating activities for the purpose of our health-care access agreement. We don’t want to micromanage what they are doing.”

Nor will the local hospital trustees have much meaningful input. Although the size and membership of the new board is yet to be determined, Gleeson explains they will primarily be “responsible for assessing community needs and ensuring that their organization meets those needs.”

Linda Remy is concerned about the independence of that board, even with its limited authority. The pattern in Marin and elsewhere, she notes, is that the boards are filled with doctors whose practices are tied to the hospital they hope to help govern.

“How can they vote against anything the corporation wants when their livelihood and everybody who works for them depends on them going along?” she asks. “This really is a pattern, where everybody is incredibly conflicted. As consumers, we don’t have anybody looking out for us.

“We have all the foxes in there and they are ravaging the chicken coop.”

Rothman points to Quentin Cook as a prime example. Cook was the attorney for the Marin General Hospital District in the early ’80s, and in that role helped pave the way for the hospital to link with California Healthcare.

“Two weeks before the lease was finalized, he resigned as the hospital district’s attorney, and shortly after the lease was finalized he went to work for California Healthcare Systems,” Rothman says. Cook, who was CEO of the company at the time of the merger, is now the second-ranking executive in the new combined corporation.

Sandra DeBello, professor of nursing at Sonoma State University and a member of the Community Hospital board of directors, is trying to be upbeat about the new deal with Sutter. “I do not see it as a necessary evil or a bad thing to be affiliating with a system,” she says. “I am positive that without affiliation, Community would not be here by the end of the year. I am not a happy camper about health care being a commodity. But I also recognize that if I want health-care services in my community, I have to hook up with a provider that will make that possible.”

Still, she has some philosophic misgivings. “We’ve got a major problem. We’ve got economics and health-care insurers in the driver’s seat for health-care decisions,” DeBello laments. “Who does this health-care system serve? It does not serve the patients. It does not serve the providers, who are pulling out their hair trying to get the services their clients need.

“So who does it serve?”

From the Jan. 11-17, 1996 issue of the Sonoma Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
&copy 1996 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc.