Hackettstown Community Hospital

Description

Hackettstown Regional Medical Center has been open since 1973, but its beginnings go back to the 1940s when William Rossy and other residents of Hackettstown saw the need for a hospital in their home town. The first recorded plea for a hospital in Hackettstown came in 1945 from Dr. Carl Maxwell, a local Seventh-day Adventist physician. Several years passed before a group of Kiwanis Club members and other dedicated individuals formed the Hackettstown Hospital Committee, which first met in 1953. In 1955, Tommy Tomeo was president of the local chapter of Unico International, an Italian service club of businessmen and professionals. Dr. Frank Rocco spoke at a chapter meeting about the health care needs of the community and the distressing fact that the nearest hospital was some 20 miles away. Tomeo was hooked on the idea of building a hospital and, along with 20 other townspeople, formed a corporation called Hackettstown Community Hospital and became its first executive committee president. They pooled $22,500 out of their own pockets to purchase the hospitals 15 acres of land in 1956 and named Dan Allen, a local gentleman farmer, as Board president. At the time, the State of New Jersey considered Hackettstown a low-priority site for a hospital and would not support even the minimum 25-bed hospital that was requested. As the trustees persevered, the state raised the minimum to 100 beds. Banks would not make a loan toward such a large endeavor, and ten years slipped away as trustees wrote newspaper articles, made speeches and held monthly board meetings. The financial roadblock seemed almost insurmountable. However, as the years passed by, the dream of a hospital did not. Then in 1967, the first campaign unofficially began when a conversation between Henry Roehrich, a Hackettstown farmer and chairman of one of the two banks in town, and Thomas Kopko, a Seventh-day Adventist pastor and Bible teacher from nearby Garden State Academy, turned to a discussion of the world-wide chain of hospitals operated by the Adventists. The church, a conservative Christian organization, operates over 400 medical facilities in some 69 countries, ranging from the acclaimed Loma Linda Medical Center in California and 1,200-bed Florida Hospital in Orlando to boat clinics on the Amazon and mission hospitals in Africa. Banker Roehrich noticed Frank DeLello, a member of the original hospital board of directors, entering the bank and invited him to join in the conversation about the hospital. Mr. DeLello then suggested that the Adventist church build a hospital in Hackettstown. Subsequent discussions and events led the hospital board, unable to see their way around funding difficulties, to invite the SDA church to assume ownership, control and management of the hospital-to-be. Adventist church officials dispatched Milton Murray to visit Hackettstown and conduct a feasibility study among the townspeople. The Adventists and the community then took on the task of financing and building the hospital together as a team--individuals, families, small businesses, large corporations, foundations, service clubs, and government and SDA church representatives. Dr.

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