In small towns, the collective memory is a living, breathing thing, almost separate from the people it grows from. A single bit of off-center behavior can embed itself in the recall of the community and define a person's personality for the rest of his life. For Helen Watrous, nee Petteys, that moment came when she stood up at a Brush basketball game, removed one of her shoes and hurled it at the referee.
The toss itself wasn't so harmful--she missed badly--but the incident struck people as a bit out of character. Helen Petteys was, after all, the dignified daughter of Alonzo Petteys, longtime president of the Farmers State Bank of Brush. When her brother, Jack, was killed in a flight-training exercise in 1943, the family set up the Jack Petteys Family Foundation. Now at nearly $4 million, the foundation is used to fund projects and scholarships exclusively within the community of Brush.
The trust--and the business of the bank--are still watched over closely by the Petteys family. Helen's husband, Warren "Doc" Watrous, who assumed the bank presidency after his father-in-law's death, is retired. But he still keeps a memorabilia-strewn office on the second floor of the Farmers Bank, where he can be found most mornings. Helen's office is next door. Next to that is the office of their daughter, Judy Gunnon. Judy's husband, Robert, the bank's current president, conducts business next to that.
This morning, Helen and Doc Watrous are sitting in Doc's emeritus office, a dark-paneled, plaid-carpeted room that is plastered with plaques of recognition and golf memorabilia in about equal numbers. Doc, who suffered a stroke recently, speaks slowly. But he still keeps his memories.
In fact, he is the one who has mentioned the shoe-tossing incident. "I don't even know why you brought that up," Helen says, irked. "That has nothing to do with what we're talking about." Doc just smiles slyly. He lifts his heavy black eyebrows slightly, crosses his hands over his lap and waits for his wife to explain.
What it was, Helen Watrous says, sighing, is that she had been making a more or less personal project of a Brush teenager who'd had difficulties--staying in school and the like. During the autumn, thanks to her efforts and others she'd recruited for the project, he'd made remarkable progress. Part of that was on the basketball team, where the teenager had demonstrated a gift.
It was the final game of the season, she continues, and a number of college scouts had shown up to observe the local talent--a huge opportunity for her project, in other words. To her mounting frustration, the referee kept calling him for traveling. "I saw my entire fall's worth of work going down the drain," she recalls.
At a loss and feeling hopeless, Helen Watrous, proper and impeccably dressed, did the only thing she could think of at the time. She stood up, pulled off her pump and chucked it at the offending official. "It's amazing," she concludes, shaking her head, "how you can work your whole life for certain things, and people will remember one silly incident."
She shrugs, reconciled to her feisty reputation, which, she is pleased to reveal, has been a fairly consistent trait of Brush all along. Yet she also acknowledges that the locals' cast-iron memories can get in the way of a good civic project. "It's silly," Helen Watrous says, shaking her head. "I don't understand it. It's no more people in Fort Morgan's fault than it is those in Brush. They're just not nice to each other. They don't cooperate like they should."
Doc perks up and nods in agreement. Just take the two country clubs, he says. As he remembers it, it was around 1955 when members of the Brush club approached Fort Morgan's club with the proposal that the two merge. A large farm between the towns had just come up for sale, and it seemed reasonable that the area needed only one exclusive golfing establishment.
For reasons that remain unclear to Doc, the idea quickly fell apart. "People just didn't seem to want to work together," he says.
It's hardly the only example of the two towns' egregious noncooperation that is still floating about in people's recollections. In fact, the civic friction seems to have made its way into nearly every dusty corner of Fort Morgan and Brush.
Take the airport proposal, for example. Stan Gray recalls his tenure as president of the chamber of commerce, about twenty years ago, when Brush's and Fort Morgan's chambers got together with the idea of combining the towns' two small airports--a seemingly sensible idea for two municipalities with a combined population then of less than 15,000. "We got a $10,000 grant to look at the idea of a new airport," he says. "But it died in the county commission. We broke down over where it ought to be located."
Or the nursing homes. In 1903 the Lutherans opened the Eben Ezer home for the treatment of tuberculosis in Brush. (Lutherans--and Danes--still maintain a curious presence. In 1939 Crown Prince Frederik and Crown Princess Ingrid of Denmark paid a royal visit to Eben Ezer. A town history records that "their friendliness and informality captivated everyone present at the hour-and-a-half ceremony for them"--a description that, according to those who attended, is almost entirely accurate. Helen Watrous sets the record straight: "One man was so excited he had a heart attack.")
In 1960, Sunset Manor, another nursing home, opened in Brush. Despite the fact that two large nursing facilities--Eben Ezer had stopped treating TB and gone into the elderly-care business--in an area of a few thousand seemed sufficient, it apparently wasn't. Valley View Nursing Home opened in Fort Morgan several years later.
"Because there's always been such a rivalry between Fort Morgan and Brush, people didn't want to come to Eben Ezer," explains Kathy Mekelburg, who is Sunset's administrator in Brush but has lived in Fort Morgan for 26 years. "So they built Valley View.
"I think of the rivalry as like high school football teams. But that doesn't work for business. It's been going on for so many years that people just don't know how to get out of it."
Residue of the rivalry is not confined to the distant past, either. Jack Odor, who has lived in the area for 23 years, manages a company called GASP--Groundwater Appropriators of the South Platte River Basin, Inc.--out of a small office on Railroad Avenue in Fort Morgan. He recalls the time in the late 1970s when Fort Morgan was planning a new community center. Again, given the two communities' size, consolidation seemed to make sense--except to the respective town fathers.
"We approached Brush with the idea of a countywide recreation district," he recalls. "Brush said it wasn't interested."
And three years ago, he remembers, both communities began negotiating to hook into the Big Thompson water project, a massive public-works effort designed to pipe water from from the west to plains towns thirsty enough to share the expense. When it came time to sign on the dotted line, however, Brush backed out.
"Just between you and me," Odor confides, "the only reason Brush opted out was because Fort Morgan was in. They figured if Fort Morgan had it, they didn't need it."
He concludes, shaking his head: "It seems as though people in Brush wake up in the morning with the thought, `How can we outdo Fort Morgan?'"
Even attempts to more cooperatively promote and preserve the region have run up against the two towns' hyperdeveloped pride. Although Fort Morgan has a relatively new Morgan County Museum, which devotes a large part of its exhibits to Brush, Brush this spring secured a $100,000 grant to construct its own. ("Fort Morgan's museum is nice," Stan Gray concedes. "But we want our own. I guess it's part of that competition thing.") Both towns also have their own modern, well-stocked libraries.
Last year the Brush and Fort Morgan chambers of commerce made overtures to each other to merge their resources and promote the county as a regional economic opportunity instead of fracturing their efforts and money. The proposal was quickly shot down by both chambers.
And this spring, when the newly formed Morgan County Economic Development Corp. announced that it would like to begin providing countywide services in an attempt to promote the region, both Fort Morgan and Brush opted out of the organization rather than participate in it together.
"It's just an ongoing thing that I'm not sure we'll be able to overcome ever," sighs Brush mayor Coughlin. "It's been there forever, and we've made several attempts to get over it. But it seems like anytime the two cities try to do anything together, round and round we go."
Still, last year, when it became apparent that it was time to seriously ask the question whether two towns eight miles apart with a population the size of some of Denver's smaller neighborhoods needed separate full-service hospitals, citizens in both Brush and Fort Morgan decided to give it one more go. All too predictably, their efforts have not gotten far. This spring, a citizens group that was cobbled together to crack the stalemate has been forced to go begging for money to hire a consultant.
One of the proposed sources of funding for the organization was, naturally, the Petteys Family Foundation. Back up in Doc Watrous's Farmers State Bank office, Helen Watrous explains why the family trust has chosen not to fund the task force.
"We will put in money if Fort Morgan does," she says. "But we're not going to do it by ourselves. We can't have all the money coming from Brush."
Originally built in cornfields in 1952, Colorado Plains Medical Center now lies solidly and incongruously inside a quiet residential district between Route 34 and Interstate 76, the four-lane concrete ribbon laid through the eastern plains in 1967. Down the street, a few blocks to the east, is the new Fort Morgan High School.
This morning's official visit is being conducted by Janet Montel, who, after working fifteen years at the hospital--half of it as its chief financial officer--still looks as though she's about 28 years old; and Pat Roche, director of ambulatory services, who looks closer to 13. They are clearly proud of the building.
The first stop is in the obstetrics unit. When Brim took over the hospital's operations in 1986, the first thing it did was to overhaul the obstetrics wing, recognizing that a steady stream of mothers--and money--was leaving Fort Morgan for Greeley. Now the hospital delivers an average of 35 babies a month, more than double the number it did eight years ago.
In fact, Brim has been something of a godsend for the Fort Morgan hospital. Until 1976, the hospital had been run by Lutheran Hospital and Homes Society of America. On Dec. 31, 1975, however, the board of directors changed the locks and booted the Lutherans after concluding that the company wasn't conducting its financial affairs in the best interest of the hospital.
Lutheran sued for breach of contract, and the hospital board countersued. The dispute was settled in 1979 for only $3,000. Yet the hard feelings toward Lutheran in Fort Morgan linger and define the current debate over the county's health-care reform efforts.
After jettisoning Lutheran, the Fort Morgan hospital boardmembers decided to go it on their own. Unfortunately, they weren't particularly good at running a hospital. The year following Lutheran's departure showed the hospital with a $2 million operating fund balance. By the end of 1985, the hospital was operating more than a half-million dollars in the red.
Desperate, Fort Morgan's board gathered itself and approached the Lutherans, who were then--and still are--running the East Morgan County Medical Center in Brush. Although it is disputed by the Brush hospital board, Montel says Fort Morgan asked for help and was rebuffed.
Brim was hired in early 1986 and immediately plowed $700,000 into the ailing hospital. "We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Brim," says Roche. "We were two weeks from closing." The company has since purchased nearly $2 million in new equipment--and earned the undying gratitude of many Fort Morgan residents who still remember the company riding knightlike into the hospital's dark days between 1975 and 1985.
The tour continues through the pharmacy, the two-year-old intensive-care unit, the hospital's fully self-contained laboratory and its rehab center. Montel and Roche point out the hospital's CT scan (Brim is in the process of purchasing a new one) and its new laser surgery equipment. (Colorado Plains was the first area hospital to have one, although Roche concedes they don't use it much.)
Then it's out to a trailer to view what Roche describes as the country's first rural, fixed-base magnetic resonance imager, a sort of uber-X-ray machine. Two years ago General Electric agreed to keep the machine in Fort Morgan as long as it made money for GE, which it has.
From the MRI trailer, the tour leads to the emergency room, which has seen a leap in the number of patients streaming through it--600 a month, up from 350 a month a year and a half ago. That's because in November 1992 Colorado Plains earned its certification as a trauma center by satisfying the American College of Surgeons that its emergency protocols were good enough to treat all trauma victims within a certain radius. Since then, all car and farm accidents that had been going to Brush now have had to come to Fort Morgan.
Although Colorado Plains officials insist the move was completed as part of its larger plan to build a better hospital, people in Brush didn't see it that way. They saw it as another attempt by Fort Morgan to to get a leg up by swiping patients.
Cris Linker, Colorado Plains' trauma coordinator--who lives in Brush--says she still gets irate calls from Brush residents wondering why the ambulance picked up a relative, zipped past East Morgan County Hospital and proceeded down the road to Fort Morgan. And Mekelburg, the nursing home administrator, recalls how "we had a lady who fell and was knocked out. Her doctor was waiting for her in Brush. But she was taken to Fort Morgan because hers was a trauma case." She adds that, although in retrospect the ambulance corps probably made the correct decision, the case caused considerable consternation in Brush.
The tour ends up in the office of the medical center's new administrator, Keith Mesmer. He is round-faced, bearded and gangly, with a car salesman's immobile hair. He talks about his hospital's just-beginning $4.5 million expansion plan--for which Brim has purchased an entire block to the north--and the recent discussions about working together with East Morgan County Hospital.
"I think the best possible thing that could happen is that the two hospitals merge and be under one management," he says. "But the trust level is so low that I don't think that could happen."
Eight miles due east, at East Morgan County Hospital, a low-slung building directly off Route 34, administrator Anne Platt demonstrates why Mesmer's prediction might be accurate. As she passes by the hospital's entrance, a plaque on the wall catches her attention. It memorializes, in bronze, the officials who oversaw one of the Brush hospital's expansions. It indicates that East Morgan's administrator at the time was Keith Mesmer.
Depending on whom you ask, Mesmer was canned from his job with Lutheran Hospital Services, left in disgust over the company's increasingly bottom-line conduct or sold his Brush soul to a Fort Morgan devil. Whatever the reason, Mesmer himself concedes that when he left Brush two years ago and signed on with the competition, he left behind no fond feelings toward his former bosses and current cross-county rivals.
The feeling apparently is mutual. As Platt passes the plaque, she recalls arriving in Brush six months ago and sitting down to watch an orientation film that featured, among others, Mesmer welcoming newcomers to the hospital. "I said, `Get rid of this tape; it's too old,'" she recalls.
East Morgan County Hospital is a study in comparisons and contrasts with Colorado Plains. Like its Fort Morgan counterpart, it is in the process of securing a new CT scanner. It has its own lab. It has its own pharmacy. It has its own emergency room, mammography unit and, through a mobile service out of South Dakota, its own access to an MRI.
Like Fort Morgan, it is in the midst of a multimillion-dollar expansion project, funded partially by local residents. The centerpiece will be a shiny new rehabilitation center that will be newer and better than--but not entirely unlike--the rehab center eight miles away at Colorado Plains.
What Brush doesn't have that Fort Morgan does is actual patients. In fact, this afternoon the hospital is empty--no patients at all. Unlike the bustling obstetrics wing at Colorado Plains, East Morgan's has been mothballed since November, when the last ob/gyn physician left Brush. The wing now houses administrative offices while the expansion is completed.
The rest of the hospital fares only marginally better. When asked what the 29-bed facility's vacancy rate is, Platt responds that she prefers to think of it in terms of occupany rate. But even that is only a money-hemorrhaging 15 percent. Says Platt, "I definitely looked at this as a turn-around situation when I came in."
If local loyalty were all it took, Platt's job would be easy. Older Brush residents, especially, who remember raising the money to build East Morgan County Hospital thirty years ago and who continue to pay for it through a hospital district levy, are fiercely attached to the hospital. "Patients who came in would tell me that they'd never go to Fort Morgan," says one physician who has worked at both hospitals.
He adds that the attitude extends to the facilities' staffs as well. Confronted with patients who needed care unavailable at Brush, he says, he was shocked when the medical staff would refuse to send them down the road to Fort Morgan, choosing instead to ship them to Greeley or Sterling.
"I remember telling some of the Brush nurses that they'd better start looking for new jobs, because I thought the hospital was going to close," the physician recalls. "I suggested they apply to Fort Morgan, but they all said they'd never work there. I said, `You mean you'd rather not work than work at Fort Morgan?' And they said yes."
He concludes: "This is not just some mild feelings. And I'm not just talking administrators, either. It's the people in the kitchen, the nurses on the floor. And it's the exact same thing over at Fort Morgan."
Eighteen months ago Lutheran Hospital Systems proposed building Morgan County a new hospital at a cost of up to $20 million. But, says Platt, there was a caveat: "Only if the two local hospital boards could agree to work things out"--in other words, only if Brim shoved off.
With Brush's bitter former administrator now at Fort Morgan and Fort Morgan's equally bitter memories of Lutheran--not to mention Brim's growing profit margin--the result was predictable. "For some strange reason," Colorado Plains CFO Montel says, "we didn't like the idea."
As Lutheran's proposal sat on the table going nowhere fast, the East Morgan County Hospital board approached Brush's city hall and asked for help. The result was the formation last September of the Morgan County Health Care Task Force. Since then, the group has met several times, invited guest speakers (former governor Richard Lamm was an early one), toured both hospitals and amassed a boatload of statistics and studies.
But the task force has, by its own members' admission, stalled. Much of its momentum was lost this spring, when Brim announced it was going ahead with its $4.5 million expansion plans regardless of what the task force recommended. At the same time, the hospital board signed the Portland management company to a new twenty-year contract, with two additional ten-year options.
Although Mesmer says the expansion had been planned for years, many people--particularly in Brush--felt that Brim was thumbing its nose at the whole idea of cooperation between the hospitals. Mike Erker, a Fort Morgan grain trader who quit the Colorado Plains Medical Center board of directors in disgust with Brim in April, is one of them. He contends that the Portland company just made a bad situation worse by looking no further than its financial statements.
"Number one," he says, "we got two communities that don't get along. Number two, we got some greedy son of a bitch from Portland, Oregon, trying to keep its sugar daddy."
By May the situation had deteriorated to the point where most people in Brush (and some in Fort Morgan) were blaming Brim for scuttling attempts at reform. Not surprisingly, Brim, as well as many locals who still cling to their bad memories of Lutheran, disagree. "I'd love to see a one-hospital county," Debbie Hays, president of the Colorado Plains Medical Center board, told the Fort Morgan Times. "But it's not going to be Lutheran Health Services."
Erker is even more particular. "I don't want Lutheran Health Services here in Morgan County," he says. "But I don't want Brim here, either."
In the meantime, the health-care task force has plodded on, attempting to come up with some plan for the future of health care in Morgan County--even though most people concede that its recommendations likely will go nowhere. The most sensible idea to come out of the task force seems to be keeping both hospitals but consolidating them under a single management company and playing to their strengths.
That way, Fort Morgan could handle the bulk of the county's trauma and medical needs. Brush, with its brand-new rehabilitation center, could concentrate on that. "Now that would make good sense," says Erker.
"But," he adds, "heaven forbid that we would make good sense down here."
end of part 2
