Recalling Carson-Tahoe's 60 years of care

This month marks 60 years since Carson-Tahoe Regional Healthcare came into existence as a tiny 10-bed hospital serving a community of just a few thousand.

Carson City in the 1940s had three family doctors and no hospital. If someone required surgery or advanced care, they had to go to Reno, not an easy trek in those days.

One of those doctors, Dr. Richard Petty, 95, came to Carson City in 1941.

"The whole population of Nevada was only about 100,000 in those days, and only about 1,900 or 2,000 in Carson City," Petty said.

Petty retired in 1985 and lives with his daughter in Texas, but returns to Carson City during the summer months. He's planning to come back next month.

Petty recounted how he and another doctor were playing golf in Glenbrook when they ran into Major Maximilian Charles Fleischmann, who promised to match all donations made to build the city's first hospital.

"You have to have a hospital to treat people," Petty said. "We all worked to get some kind of facility in Carson City."

In 1946, the Carson-Tahoe Hospital Association was formed to raise money to build a facility. Richard and Edith Waters gave a five-acre parcel to the effort, and a 10-bed hospital opened on May 2, 1949.

George Allison remembers moving as a boy with his parents to Carson City when the hospital opened. The family had lived in a mining town north of Ely called Kimberly, where father George, Sr. was the lab and X-ray technician for the hospital, and mother Helen was a surgical nurse.

Dr. Petty recruited the couple to come work as two of the first employees of Carson-Tahoe Hospital. Helen Allison later became hospital administrator.

"There was nothing out there at that time, not a building, just fields," George Allison said.

Allison recalled many hospital fundraisers held at a bar and casino where the Carson Nugget now sits.

"They had parties and carnivals and fundraisers, and everybody would come," Allison said. "They raised money community-wide every way they could."

As the city grew, new plans were drawn up in the late 1960s to build an expanded medical facility. In the middle of this effort, the original hospital caught fire in August 1968.

Allison recalled his mother working across the street when the fire started, and she help evacuate the patients. No one was hurt, and the new 77-bed hospital opened three months later.

In 1978, the hospital added an emergency room. A year later, the North Wing expansion was opened, adding 33 more beds.

By the late 1990s, with a fast-expanding population to serve, the hospital board decided that a new hospital was needed. But the hospital also needed to update its organization as well, and in 2002, decided to become a private, non-profit corporation.

An 80-acre tract on the north end of Carson City was selected for the new hospital site, and the new 352,000-square-foot facility opened in 2005. The campus included a new cancer center, and cottages for patients to stay in during cancer treatments.

"I think it's exactly what it was built to be, a regional medical center with a great staff," Petty said. "They are doing a lot of modern, up-to-date things for the community."

Allison, who had heart surgery in the new hospital in 2006, says the facility is a great asset for Carson City.

"I think for a hospital setting, it's great," Allison said. "It's great for patients, it's great for staff. There is a certain healthy look about it."