Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Denogean: El Rio health center's founder a true local hero

ANNE T. DENOGEAN

Tucson Citizen

Where poor people suffered without health care, where workers lacked protection from hazards on the job and anywhere medically underserved folks needed a champion, that's where Dr. Herbert Abrams could be found over the last six decades.

The University of Arizona will honor Abrams, 92, on Thursday for his tireless work in public health.

If you've never heard of the man, he is considered by many – deservedly so – one of our true local heroes.

Abrams, a Chicago native, came to Tucson in 1968 to head UA's department of family and community medicine and start El Rio Santa Cruz Neighborhood Center, now El Rio Community Health Center.

His contributions to public health have been many, but El Rio is perhaps his greatest legacy.

In the late 1960s, the federal government was offering grant money to build neighborhood centers in every poor community in the country as part of the "Model Cities" antipoverty program.

The "model neighborhood" to be served by a new center included downtown and was roughly bounded by Grant, Silverlake and Silverbell roads and the railroad tracks.

It was an area characterized at that time by blight, according to a history of El Rio written by Abrams.

Half the housing was substandard. Many houses had no electricity. Some had outside toilets. One-third of the population lived in extreme poverty.

Every measure of public health was alarming.

The infant mortality rate was 50 percent higher than in the rest of Tucson. Premature births were one-third higher. The rates of tuberculosis and infectious diseases were excessive.

The area had half the physicians other Tucson neighborhoods with similar populations had.

Still, the efforts of UA and Abrams to establish a center were met with suspicion, not the open arms one might have expected.

The heavily minority community had seen the displacement of dozens of longtime residents from the old downtown neighborhoods to make way for the Tucson Convention Center. Distrust of the establishment, including the colossus that was the UA, was part of the community's makeup.

"I evoked the same suspicion as any white man coming into that community and offering to do good," Abrams said, smiling at the memory.

"Everyone thought he was just blowing hot air," said Miguel Rojas, an El Rio board member since the beginning. "We had been used by the system. We weren't going to trust anybody."

But Abrams was the real deal, having organized and directed for 14 years Chicago's Union Health Service, a center for union members, before coming to Tucson.

He persevered. There was meeting after meeting in schools, churches and other public buildings. Intense discussions went late into the night on where the center would be and how it would be run and organized.

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