The CMH Story: From Dreams to Reality and Beyond by Kerry D. Douglas and James C. Sterling
There are lots of things needed to make up a good story. And if all the elements there are true, and it leads to a happy ending, then so much the better.
So, what if we mixed hard work, political intrigue, common sense, faith in other, negative opponents, logic, desperation, and trust with a crying need, a miracle or two, answered prayers and lots of late nights, knocking on doors, dialing telephone and the right people in the right places at the right times with government intervention and salvation and plain of Polk County Stubbornness? Well, we'd have an amazing story to tel. And what if the story was told by some of the people who were in it from the beginning? well, then you'd have an amazing true story.
And that's what you have with The CHM Story. We had a pocket in the middle of the Missouri Ozarks that while not remote was certainly not close enough to any hospital to get hte kinds of health care and attract the kind of doctors needed for a growing community. Springing forth in the minds of a handful of young people that would not accept no for an answer, this community stood up and made something wonderful happen. Citizens Memorial Hospital grew from a small, small kernel of a dream to become a medical services power far beyond what was in the midst of any of the early believers.
We won't give away the ending here, but we suspect you all know how things turned out, long, long ago. what we'll tell you is what happened over a six-year peior almost forty years ago that changed, and saved, the lives of many people. Against seemingly impossible odds at times, things came together and the citizens got their hospital.
About the Authors
Kerry D. Douglas is in the middle of five generations of his family living in Polk County. Four of those generations produced Bolivar lawyers, including Kerry. Kerry jumped into the CMH story several years before the hospital was opened and he serves twenty-eight years as chairman of the CMH Board of Directors. He is one of only two of the original board still living at the time this books was published in 2019. Partially retired, he has just completed compiling his memoirs, written for his family, especially in regard to his life raising his family with hi late wife Synda. The latter is now president of the board of CMH. Kerry and his wife Lynda live near Bolivar and close to many of his six grandchildren.
James C. Sterling lives in Columbia today with his wife Nancy. He has retired twice - first after he worked at the Bolivar newspaper, eventually rising to ownership, for the final third of the twentieth century. Then he taught at the Missouri School of Journalism for seventeen years. Every forty years or so he writes a book, the last being Polk County Classics in 1975 with George Francis Hooper. He writes a column for Lake Ozark Profile magazine every two months and hopes to get his next book out in less than forty years from this time.
Product Specification
Published by The Donning Company Publishers, 2019. Hardback, 272 pages.
