March 1, 2007

The vision to grow and build Buchanan County while at the same time enhancing medicine, educating its caregivers and investing in the restoration of an historically and architecturally significant building was applauded Saturday as the Honorable Elizabeth McClanahan, Virginia Court of Appeals judge and Garden High School graduate, took the podium.

McClanahan was the keynote speaker during Saturday’s open house event at the University of Appalachia College of Pharmacy’s newly renovated Garden campus.

McClanahan recognized the many dignitaries present including members of the choral group, the GardenAires, who performed, as well as Grace Wooldridge, her former piano teacher and bus driver. She acknowledged the past work by classmates Robert Simpson, (’77) and Larry Shortridge (’79), who she named as “the guys who put the first work into this building so that it could be used again in the community, through the Buchanan Basketball Foundation,” which occupied the gym after the school was closed and until UACP began its renovations.

She also recognized Jerry Elkins, who she called “a great 4-H mentor and talented painter, referring to the touch-ups and additions he made to the Green Dragon still on the wall in what is now the UACP lecture hall and which was originally painted by his father, B.J. Elkins.

In agreeing to speak at the dedication, McClanahan said she had consulted former classmates, some of whom had suggested she talk about the nostalgia and memories of attending GHS. Her response to that, she said was that surely the university would have picked someone much older than she to speak since she had “just graduated from Garden a few years ago.” She then pulled out her GHS letterman’s jacket and put it on for the crowd, remembering her first performance on the gym floor in the room in which all were gathered for Saturday’s event. It was a pom pom routine to “China Grove,” by the Doobie Brothers, she said, as the music was cued and she pulled out her green and white pom poms and gave them a shake before putting them back away.

Smiling at the crowd, she said, she guessed those were just the ghosts of GHS keeping her honest, adding it was about 35 years ago when she did that pom pom routine in the gym.

She said her children, ages four and six, suggested she tell the bedtime stories they had heard so much about the Garden Green Dragons fighting the Council Cobras, the Whitewood Indians and the Hurley Rebels and trying to swim through the waters of the Grundy Golden Wave . . . “of course, only in triumph!” she quipped.

Her former clients in the oil and gas industry, she said, wanted her to talk about coalbed methane gas in Virginia’s leading coal producing county.

In the end, however, she said she decided the real reason to be there was to thank those present “for having a vision, building and growing Buchanan County, enhancing medicine, educating its caregivers and investing in the restoration of an historic and architecturally significant building.”

She said she was sure those pursuing the project experienced a few naysayers along the way, but said she received a card and thought it held the perfect message for those who have suffered negative types and unbelievers.

The message?

“Many impossible things have been accomplished by those who refuse to quit,” she read from the card, adding, “and I thank you for not quitting.”

She noted that the building itself had meant much to so many who had participated in assemblies in that very room, even as grade schoolers sitting on the bleachers watching the upperclassmen.

“In 2007, you are now in a transition from educating elementary and high school students here at GHS to educating pharmacists,” McClanahan said, adding that pharmacists have been in a lot of transition since the profession began.

Initially, she noted, they were trained through apprenticeship programs and in the absence of legal restrictions, she noted it was possible for any person to set themselves up as pharmacist.
“In 1870, Rhode Island passed the first modern state law for the examining and licensing of pharmacists,” McClanahan said.

The federal government first became involved in 1906 with the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and following standards and accreditation requirements developed by the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (in 1900), curriculum has increased from two to three year graduate programs, pharmaceutical chemists, baccalaureate programs and now Doctor of Pharmacy programs.

“In practice, pharmacists are no longer just artisans who compound or dispense drugs, but have instead assumed a new, consultative role in healthcare delivery that demands knowledge of the drugs and their action in the body and monitoring of the drug regimen of the patients,” McClanahan said.

“As these transitions take place in GHS and in the education of pharmacists, Buchanan County also benefits with a transition and enhancement of the diversity of the local economy,” she continued. “You have made great progress in creating a system of higher education in Buchanan County that challenges and benefits students and meets the needs of law, healthcare, families, businesses, taxpayers and ultimately, the economy.”

She noted that both UACP and the Appalachian School of Law have been two successful components of what she called “the creative, diverse economic development strategy that is in transition in Virginia’s leading coal-producing county.”

She added that reports indicate the law school and pharmacy school are pumping in millions of dollars to the local economy.

She noted that a Roman philosopher in 42 BC wrote that “good health and good sense are life’s greatest blessings” and she added, “though we can’t do much about the latter, I am confident that the graduates of this university will do much to encourage good health.

“While others have chosen to pursue great wealth or celebrity, you have chosen to answer a calling whose chief goal is to ease the suffering or your fellow men and women,” she continued. “That is a courageous goal in a world where, sadly, suffering is too commonplace.”

She noted the pharmacist takes an oath to consider the welfare of humanity and that the relief of human suffering is his or her primary concern.

“When filling the prescription,” she said, pharmacists “become a part of every patient’s life at the most difficult time of his or her life . . . and you are the last contact in the healthcare team to answer questions after the very long process of injury or diagnosis, surgery, intervention and treatment.”

McClanahan said is a living example of the patient, the process and the transitions.

She shared with the audience that on the day after Christmas she had received a call from her doctor telling her that her annual mammogram was abnormal. She was diagnosed with breast cancer a week later.

“Since that time, I have faced MRIs, CT/PET scans, lymph node needle aspirations, sentinel node biopsies, general anesthesia for the first time in my life, a bilateral mastectomy (all of this in 14 days),” she said.

Just three days before Saturday’s open house, she said, she had undergone chemotherapy.

“The reason I share all of this personal information with you is because if this were 1940 -- the year this building was built -- I could not have done this. I could probably not have done it even five years ago,” she said. “Were it not for the enhancements and research in medical science and pharmaceuticals, I would at the very least be in bed, not standing here.”

She said the best news for her was that she is in the 95 percent category of survival rate thanks to the great strides in medical science and pharmaceuticals which she said had helped her to make the transition from patient to survivor.

“As a patient, I can tell you the real healing came from the Good Lord above and the compassion and care given by health care providers,” she said. “The medicine alone is not sufficient.”

The bricks, the mortar paint and new grass, she said make the Garden building more beautiful than ever, but she said those building materials have not and will not alone make GHS or UACP.

She quoted Colonial Williamsburg Foundation President Colin Campbell, who when speaking at the Wren Building Rededication in 2001 at a William and Mary Board of Visitors meeting, noted, “ultimately, a good building only becomes great when people love it. Absent their devotion, absent their emotion, a building is nothing more than the sum of its design and its materials. It can be nice. It can be impressive . . . but sublime? No, that requires the human heart.”

McClanahan said Campbell’s thoughts were significant and applied well to the building now housing UACP.
"Thanks to all of you for investing your human heart, with compassion for preserving the past of GHS, while transitioning to the future by providing a treatment of the patient, not just the disease, with compassion,” she concluded.

Back to Top