Kettle River news

Ma & Pa Kettle Days bingo is at 1 p.m. Sunday, March 19 at the senior center.

The first Finnish luncheon of the year will be held at noon on April 19 at the Kettle River Senior Center.

The Kettle River fire department is looking for volunteer firefighters and first responders.

As you begin your spring cleaning, be sure to set aside your books for the Moose Lake library book sale. The sale benefits the children’s summer reading program. This year the sale will be June 16 and 17. The library cannot accept books at this time. I will give you more details closer to the date.

When I was a student living in the Presbyterian-St. Luke’s dorm in Chicago, my sister, Sonja, who was a year older than me, was living in the apartments behind the dorm. My dorm and her apartment building were connected by a tunnel, which also connected to the hospital across the street. We could go there through the tunnel to visit each other.

My sister, Fran, who was a year younger than me, was living in the University of Illinois dorm, which was across the street from the back of Cook County Hospital. We could go the block from my dorm to the hospital’s front door, through the basement, and come out across the street from my sister’s dorm. This was really nice in the winter. We would see each other often.

The first hospital was built in 1857. At that time, Cook County Hospital was a teaching hospital and had been an Army hospital during the Civil War. It was rebuilt in 1916. It was the largest hospital in the world at that time. I toured it one day. They had 100 bed wards with only movable curtains to separate the beds for privacy. The hospital had a 4,500-bed capacity and had about 100,000 admissions a year. There were always many people waiting in the emergency room whenever I was going through there.

Nearly every intern was trained at Cook County. The hospital had its own commercial-style bakery that was working around the clock because they needed so much bread and baked goods every day. The kitchen was also very large.

The basement was filled with hallways going to many areas of the hospital. We had to learn the shortest way through the hospital to get where we wanted to go. One of the areas we had to pass on our trip was the bakery, and the area where they did the autopsies. The hospital closed in 2002 with a new hospital built adjacent to it. The old hospital was then converted into a Hyatt hotel.