Pyramid on the Prairie

PYRAMID ON THE PRAIRIE CRAIG MINER i Pyramid On The Prairie Copyright © 2011 Riordan Clinic No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or by any information storage without permission in writing from the copyright owner. Photos by Steve Harper Cover design, book design and layout by Jim L. Friesen Library of Congress Control Number: 2012933553 International Standard Book Number: 978-0-9850681-0-3 Printed in the United States of America by Mennonite Press, Inc., Newton, KS, www.mennonitepress.com ii DEDICATION Published in honor of my husband, Dr. Hugh D. Riordan, a maverick and charismatic physician, and Olive W. Garvey, a bold and visionary philanthropist. Hugh and Olive conceived of The Center for the Improvement of Human Functioning, which became well known and highly regarded for its patient-centered nutritional approach to healing. olive w. garvey Businesswoman and philanthropist. iii iv FOREWORD Anyone who has driven along the northern edge of Wichita, Kansas, has likely been struck by the sight of seven geodesic domes and a white pyramid rising from the prairie. This collection of unusual buildings is home to an alternative health center established by two remarkable people: Hugh D. Riordan and Olive W. Garvey. My husband, Hugh, was a physician ahead of his time; Olive was a generous philanthropist who understood the value of his foresight. In 1975, he and Olive conceived of The Center for the Improvement of Human Functioning. Today, it is well known and highly regarded for its patient-centered, nutritional approach to healing. About a decade ago, Hugh commissioned Dr. Craig Miner, the Wil- lard W. Garvey Distinguished Professor of Business History and former chair of the history department at Wichita State University, to under- take the writing of a history of The Center. At the conclusion of Dr. Miner’s efforts, however, Hugh was reticent to have it published. Hugh died in 2005 and the manuscript lay idle for five years, until it turned up recently while I was going through Hugh’s extensive personal papers. Although I was very familiar with The Center’s many programs and services in the areas of wellness, nutrition, and vitamin/mineral research, I had little to do with its operation. I had been busy raising a large family of six children, practicing my profession as a Registered Nurse, pursuing advanced degrees in my chosen field, and working as a Professor of Nursing at Wichita State University. I found Miner’s manuscript fascinating and I learned a lot from it. The story reflects the tumultuous changes in health care over the course v of the last quarter of the 20th century. The book gives the reader a glimpse into the struggles of doctors of the time who sought to incor- porate “holistic” care in their practices while experimenting with new nutritional approaches to treatment. In reading the Miner manuscript, I came to a different conclusion than did Hugh: I felt that Dr. Miner, whom The Wichita Eagle called “Kansas’ premier historian” upon his death in 2010, had cre- ated a revealing, historically significant, and accurate document that I believed deserved to be disseminated. I decided to discuss the possibility and advantages of going forward with publication with Susan Miner, Craig’s widow. I also consulted with members of The Center’s Board and some key staff members. All agreed that the story needed to be published. And so, here it is. Jan Riordan vi CONTENTS Chapter 1 The Doctor And The Lady...........1 Chapter 2 Throwing a Rope .......................29 Chapter 3 Personal Health Control ............65 Chapter 4 One of a Kind ...........................95 Chapter 5 The Master Facility ..................133 Chapter 6 Health Hunters .......................161 Chapter 7 A New Era ...............................203 Epilogue...................................................229 Favorite Sayings of Hugh .........................233 Journal Articles ........................................235 About the Author .....................................249 vii viii Chapter One The Doctor and the Lady In May 1975, Dr. Hugh Desaix Riordan, Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, and Dr. Bill Schul were welcomed into a pleasant and spacious corner office on the top floor of the Ray Hugh Garvey office building in Wichita, Kansas. It was the headquarters of Garvey, Inc. and the Garvey Foundation. The former concern had until recently operated a substantial and diversi- fied business empire, including, among many other interests, a major independent petroleum exploration and development corporation, a group of grain elevators with around a quarter billion bushels of storage capacity, holdings of over 100,000 acres of farmland, a gasoline retailing company, and 2,000 rental housing units in Wichita. Those companies had been spun off to the next generation of the Garvey family, but the two-building office complex remained along with enough other business to be the envy of most operators. The second entity for which decisions were made in that corner office, the Garvey Foundation, was, and had been for 15 years, one of the major philanthropic forces in the state of Kansas. Among its many achievements were substantial support of Friends University in Wichita and Washburn University in Topeka, the establishment of public television stations in both Wichita and Topeka, and making an enormous difference in the sweep and quality of the local and regional YMCA. 1 PYRAMID ON THE PRAIRIE But it was hardly an ordinary executive suite. For one thing, it was decorated much like a home, with a sofa, a credenza, paintings, and memorabilia from world travel. For another, the person behind the desk, the one in charge of all this, was not only a woman, but a grandmother and great grandmother, eighty-one years old. Olive White Garvey had taken over the Garvey family enterprises in 1959 when her husband, entrepreneur Ray Garvey, was killed in an auto accident, and both the business and the philanthropies had not only survived but grown and prospered vigorously since. The three doctors knew that Mrs. Garvey had wide-ranging interests and was a considerable reader as well as a published writer of fiction, non-fiction and plays. And they knew that among her interests were medicine and nutrition, although the depth and extent of that interest was doubtless not guessed at by any of them. A favorite Biblical quote of hers was from Proverbs: “with all thy getting, get understanding.”1 Mrs. Garvey had read Nutrition and Your Mind by George Watson, which she had begun one day with enthusiasm while under the hair- dryer. She had also read the publications of Pfeiffer, who was working in Princeton, New Jersey, and the work of Dr. Roger Williams on nutrition and on the importance of understanding the unique biochemistry of individuals. She had gone to grade school with Karl Menninger, 1 There are a number of published sources for the life of Olive White Garvey. She herself wrote (with Virgil Quinlisk) a biography of her husband, entitled The Obstacle Race: The Story of Ray Hugh Garvey(San Antonio: The Naylor Company, 1970), which included much about herself, and a volume called Once Upon a Family Tree (1980), which was a personal account of her life and ancestry. In addition there is Billy Mack Jones, Olive White Garvey: Humanitarian, Corporate Executive, Uncommon Citizen (Wichita: Center for Entrepreneurship, 1985) and Craig Miner’s Garvey, Inc.: Expectations to Equity (Wichita: privately printed, 1992) which documents her role in Garvey, Inc. after 1959. She kept scrapbooks, which were a source for these paragraphs also, as were the author’s many talks with her, some of them videotaped. I knew “OWG” well, our acquaintance beginning in the 1950s through my family, but always from afar until 1985, when I began working for her son Willard and we met regularly at her corner office in the Garvey building to talk about her still long list of ideas and enterprises. After her death I designed an exhibit about her. I have drawn on all this here. 2 The Doctor And The Lady founder of the famous Kansas psychiatric clinic, and had dared to discuss with that master the shortcomings of Freudian theories and the frustrations of therapy along those lines. Her practical Quaker background and her no nonsense experience as a mother and a businesswoman had led her to question whether it was always necessary to delve into childhood experience or sexual practice to explain or treat a spiritual malaise that might as well be traced to a sugar imbalance or a B vitamin deficiency.2 “I always felt,” she wrote, “that psychiatry was an inexact science…. For years, one of my inner irritants has been popular, permissive, irresponsible psychology, which the general public has embraced as gospel and which has all but destroyed our society. And when I learned that Freud, the father of much of this thought, had based his dictum that all motivation is based on sex on observation of caged animals in the zoo where there was scant opportunity for any other type of activity, it strengthened my prejudices.” Mrs. Garvey had recently tried to give money to several regional universities for nutritional research and had been turned down.3 Dr. Schul, author of many books and articles, was doing a six-month study for the Garvey Foundation on the holistic approach to the mul- tiple origins of disease. “While this involvement [of the foundation],” he wrote in March 1974, “may include financial support to research and clinical facilities, the immediate task is to continue the study of research findings and to pull this material together in a manner that it can serve as a useful guide to both professional and lay persons seeking additional sources of information.

Load more