Alvin Lee, at 62 still looking strong enough to flatten a linebacker, strides into the Family Health Center in Cherry Hill in short pants and sandals, as though heading out to summer football practice. That’s what he used to do, back when he was a legendary high school running back at Poly and then one of the first African-American athletes at the University of Maryland.
But now he’s here to talk about those who are not so healthy. He sits on the Family Health Center’s board of directors. The building’s big and sunny and loaded with health care professionals, and Lee’s recalling a time when none of this existed in South Baltimore’s Cherry Hill community, situated on the far side of the Hanover Street Bridge.
The geography’s important. It’s always given Cherry Hill an increased sense of community — but a sense of isolation, as well, and a distance from other places that’s both physical and psychological.
“When I was coming up,” says Lee, who’s lived in Cherry Hill all his life, “we had two doctors and a dentist for the whole community. If you were uninsured or poor — and most of us were — it was like visiting a country doctor. If you didn’t have money, he’d say, ‘See me when you can.’ Nobody was denied. Either that, or you’d go to the emergency room at the old South Baltimore General Hospital.”
Lee tells the story with a certain warmth. The doctor was looking out for folks as best he could. But there were far too many to handle. The joke was, you brought along a magazine and your lunch, because you knew you’d be sitting in the waiting room most of the day. Cherry Hill has about 7,000 people. Barring emergencies, many simply did without doctors or dentists.
So much has changed now. Lee sits here with Paula McLellan, the health center’s chief executive officer, and in one breath the two of them mention a name: Ethel Ellison, with whom the whole thing started roughly three decades ago.
Ellison, now about 80 years old (she’s a little coy about it) was a returning student at Morgan State University back in the 1970s. She wrote a term paper on the deplorable medical conditions in Cherry Hill, sent the paper to the Public Health Service, in Rockville, and lit the first fires under federal officials. The result was this not-for-profit, federally qualified health center that provides primary care services for thousands in Cherry Hill who previously never saw a doctor or a dentist.
“She was the driving force, starting with that paper, and sticking with it over the years,” McLellan says. “This was a community that was medically underserved, with a high poverty level, high infant mortality rates, a lot of people living high-risk lifestyles — and a lot of people who didn’t go to a doctor or dentist — or take their children to one — from one year to the next. This center has become an oasis for them.”
A lot of the community’s children now come here to see Dr. Bernard Abbott, who strides into McLellan’s crowded office between appointments.
“This place,” he says, “has saved a lot of lives. It’s also created a sense of security for Cherry Hill. It’s one of the most stable entities in the area. We do everything that any big community health center provides.”
That includes pediatric and adult medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, dental care, outpatient substance abuse detoxification, podiatry, diabetes education, nutrition counseling — and transportation. And discounted fees for uninsured patients whose incomes are significantly below the federal poverty level.
There’s also an outreach program in which health professionals visit area schools, McLellan says, “to teach the importance of annual checkups and proper nutrition and hygiene and dental care. The goal is that the children will learn and pass it on to their siblings — and to their parents, who never had access to this kind of care.”
When Ellison first lit the spark for all of this, the best-known government health care in Cherry Hill was a one-room well-baby clinic on Spellman Road. Back then, Ellison was working at Social Security and taking classes at Morgan State. Her husband, Sherman, was a maritime seaman, encouraging her every step of the way. They’ve now been married 60 years.
“I looked at that little well-baby clinic,” Ellison remembers, “and I thought, ‘We’ve got to do better than this.’ So I wrote the paper, and sent it off, and then asked God to take care of the rest.”
