DID YOU KNOW: Fun Facts from Hazelden Betty Ford’s 75-year history

Nation’s leader in substance use and mental health care celebrates diamond anniversary

2024 marks Hazelden Betty Ford’s 75th year at the very center of addiction recovery — breaking through stigma, transforming care and saving lives. As we look back and look ahead, we have so much to celebrate! May 1 marks 75 years since the day Hazelden opened in a farmhouse on 217 acres near Center City, Minn., but we’re celebrating all year. Please stay tuned to our website and sign up for updates on special anniversary events and opportunities planned throughout 2024 and across the country (note save-the-dates below).

To learn more about Hazelden Betty Ford’s remarkable record of innovation and leadership in addiction and mental health care, see the history and timeline on our website.

And, for fun, enjoy these additional interesting tidbits, curated by Hazelden Betty Ford’s Jeremiah Gardner:

• The original idea that led to Hazelden was to treat priests and name the place Guest House. Austin Ripley, a newspaper writer and mystery author who was one of the original ideators, left the project before Hazelden opened but later opened a treatment center called Guest House in Chippewa Falls, Wis., serving members of the Catholic clergy. It closed a few years later due to financial trouble, but reopened in 1956 in Lake Orion, Mich., where is still operates today.
• While the original Hazelden farmhouse, which came to be known as the Old Lodge, first opened its doors to the public on May 1, 1949, the first patient — Lawrence Butler — had been admitted 10 days earlier on April 21. The addiction counseling profession didn’t yet exist, but founding general manager Lynn Carroll filled the role of counselor, helping Butler initiate a lifelong recovery that led him to serve on Hazelden’s board and attracted his brother Patrick to Hazelden’s care soon after. Patrick would later become the first president of Hazelden, serving and financially backing the nonprofit for decades as it grew into a sustainable force of healing and hope nationally.

A pre-1949 scene on the Hazelden Farm.

• The farm converted into a treatment center was purchased from Charles E. Power, whose first wife was Hazel Earle Thompson Power. The farm was named for her, and the treatment center’s founders decided to keep it. Charles and Hazel also named a daughter Hazel, who also gave birth to a Hazel of her own. The third-generation Hazel lives in Reno, Nevada, today and still occasionally visits Hazelden Betty Ford in Center City — the site of her grandparents’ farm.

In honor of the 75th anniversary, Hazelden Betty Ford is launching its first ❤ Giving Day on Wednesday, May 1. Help us mark the special occasion by making a donation and sharing the opportunity with others. Together, we can make a BIG impact: Give.HazeldenBettyFord.org/GivingDay.

www.hazeldenbettyford.org/75

• Prior to Hazelden acquiring the rights to Richmond Walker’s book Twenty-Four Hours a Day, which in 1954 launched Hazelden Publishing and ultimately the self-help genre of books, the General Service Board of AA declined to publish it.
• Twenty-Four Hours a Day author Richmond Walker’s father, Joseph, was friends with Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, served in the Massachusetts Legislature from 1904 to 1911 (including as Speaker of the House from 1909–1911), and ran for governor three times. Richmond’s grandfather, also named Joseph, served in Congress from 1889 to 1899.
• Hazelden opened a publishing distribution center in Cork, Ireland in 1988 and in 1992 changed the name from Hazelden Educational Services Incorporated to Hazelden Europe.

• Hazelden celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1975, a year late. Minnesota Governor Wendell Anderson proclaimed September 28 “Sobriety Sunday” that year in recognition of Hazelden’s silver anniversary.
• The Betty Ford Center celebrated its 20th Anniversary a year late, too — in 2003 — with a black-tie gala attended by President Gerald Ford, President George H. W. Bush and five First Ladies: Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Hillary Rodham Clinton and, of course, Betty Ford.
• The Betty Ford Center celebrated a decade at its 10th Alumni Anniversary Weekend in 1992, with Liza Minnelli and Whoopi Goldberg there to help raise funds for patient aid.

www.hazeldenbettyford.org/75

• On Good Friday 1966, women patients moved from Hazelden’s Dia Linn site in Dellwood, Minn., to the newly expanded main campus in Center City, Minn., joining male patients for the first time, though in separate units. So anxious were patients about a disrupted experience that some called it “Bad Friday.” All turned out well, though — both then and historically.
• In Irish Gaelic, “Dia Linn” — the name of Hazelden’s first women’s treatment unit and still a unit today on the campus in Center City, Minn. — means “God be with us.”
• Dia Linn nurse Jane Cain coined the term “chemical dependency” in 1957 as Hazelden expanded its scope beyond alcoholism.
• Pioneer House — the Plymouth, Minn., treatment center that Hazelden purchased in 1981, predated Hazelden by a year. It was founded in 1948 by Minnesota AA pioneer Pat Cronin and was, in fact, the state’s first Twelve-Step oriented treatment center.
• The 1880s mansion at Hazelden Betty Ford in St. Paul was originally a brewery that churned out 12,000 barrels a year. A legendary series of tunnels and caves beneath the property had to be sealed during the site’s major expansion project that was completed in 2016.
• Hazelden in Chicago occupies a building that once housed the Russian Consulate, a big-city outpost for the Russian Embassy.

www.hazeldenbettyford.org/75

• Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption, the memoir by Hazelden’s longtime public advocate William C. Moyers, was first published on Aug. 28, 2006, and reached the top-20 on the New York Times bestseller list by October.
• When Hazelden public advocate William C. Moyers appeared on Oprah in 1998 — supporting the PBS series, Moyers on Addiction: Close to Home — about 2,000 people called Hazelden’s 800 number, causing the switchboard to crash!

• Patrick Butler, the first Hazelden president and longtime chair of the board, served in the Ohio Legislature for four years in the 1930s.
• Patrick Butler’s uncle Pierce Butler was a U.S. Supreme Court justice from 1922 until his death in 1939.
• Patrick Butler’s wife Aimee Mott Butler was the daughter of Charles Stewart Mott, a founder of General Motors Corporation and its largest stockholder.
• Patrick Butler’s dad, Emmett Butler, stopped drinking in 1945, four years prior to Hazelden’s founding and also served on the board.
• Patrick Butler was a patient at Hazelden twice, in both 1949 and 1950.
• Brothers Patrick, Lawrence and Cooley Butler all served on Hazelden’s board, as did their father Emmett, Patrick’s son Peter, and Peter’s son John. (Six Butlers in all!)
• Patrick Butler first began lecturing at Willmar State Hospital in 1951, starting the collaborative relationship that led to the hospital and Hazelden sharing ideas and personnel, paving the way for development of the “Minnesota Model.”
• Patrick Butler chaired the Minnesota Advisory Board on the Problems of Alcoholism in the 1950s.
• While Patrick Butler was leading Hazelden and Dan Anderson was still working at Willmar State Hospital, Butler paid for Anderson’s first trip to the Yale Summer School of Alcohol Studies in 1954. Afterward, Butler also generously offered to pay for Anderson’s graduate studies, which led to Anderson earning a master’s degree and then PhD. Anderson began part-time work at Hazelden in 1957, became VP in 1961 and served as president from 1971 to 1986.

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• Betty Ford wrote two autobiographies: The Times of My Life in 1978 and A Glad Awakening in 1987 (which Hazelden Publishing is reissuing in 2024). The latter was turned into a 1987 TV film on ABC called The Betty Ford Story.
• Betty Ford helped lead the intervention on U.S. Ambassador Leonard Firestone, who went on to co-found the Betty Ford Center with her.
• Betty Ford went to treatment nine days after her family staged an intervention — two days after her 60th birthday.
• When Betty Ford visited Hazelden in Center City, Minn., on a business trip in 1980, she also delivered a lecture to patients in Bigelow Auditorium.
• In 1981, Eisenhower Medical Center sponsored the first annual Alcohol Seminar, which would later become known as the Betty Ford Center Conference on Alcoholism and Chemical Dependency. Who spoke at that first event? Hazelden President Dan Anderson!
• The co-founder of the Betty Ford Center’s Awareness Hour (with Dr. Joseph Cruse) was Del Sharbutt, longtime CBS radio announcer and voice of Campbell Soup’s “Mmm Mmm Good!” campaign.
• The outpatient treatment program that was started by Dr. Joseph Cruse at Eisenhower Medical Center in 1978 and that helped set the stage, culturally, for the Betty Ford Center, was developed with consultative help from Vern Johnson, founder of the Johnson Institute in Minnesota, who — along with Dr. Cruse — had close ties to Hazelden.
• John Schwarzlose who was hired in 1982 at age 33 to be the program director for the new Betty Ford Center and later became its longtime CEO had previously trained at Hazelden and been mentored by Dan Anderson, who recommended him for the job.
• In 1999, Betty Ford accepted an Emmy Award for the ABC Television special, Athletes and Addiction: It’s Not a Game.
• Prior to becoming the longtime medical director at the Betty Ford Center, Dr. James West helped perform the world’s first kidney transplant.
• The current Betty Ford Center in Los Angeles is not the first. In 1991, a Betty Ford Center outpatient program also opened in L.A.., but it lasted only 14 months before relocating to the main campus in Rancho Mirage.
• In 1991, Betty Ford was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
• In 1994, North Hall at the Betty Ford Center was rededicated as DuPont Hall in honor of Dr. Robert L. DuPont, the first Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the second Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy — not because he donated funds but because one of his patients donated funds in his honor.
• Hazelden and the Betty Ford Center collaborated on a patient aid fundraiser in 1995 — a Broadway performance of “Victor-Victoria” starring Julie Andrews and Tony Roberts that raised more than $1 million, split evenly between the two organizations.
• In 2009, Golden Retriever “Irish”, a gift from a donor, joined the staff as Betty Ford Center’s first therapy dog. Today, the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation has therapy dogs at several of its residential sites to support animal-assisted programming.

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• Long before he was the Hazelden and then Hazelden Betty Ford chief medical officer, Marvin D. Seppala was the first adolescent patient admitted to Hazelden, in 1974.
• The CORK buildings on the Betty Ford Center’s Rancho Mirage campus and Hazelden’s Center City campus were built, thanks to independent donations from Joan Kroc, the widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc. CORK is Kroc spelled backward.
• Children’s Program Director Jerry Moe was appointed to serve as an advisor to White House Office of National Drug Control Policy in 1998.
• Although Betty Ford did not testify before Congress as an incumbent First Lady, she did so twice as a former First Lady — first on 1991 and again in 1994, both times making the case for addiction treatment funding and insurance benefits.
• Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Hazelden and the Betty Ford Center both stepped up to assist people in the New Orleans area, providing treatment scholarships (hurricane victims were prioritized for patient aid for several months) and, in the case of Hazelden Publishing alone, almost $500,000 worth of Big Books, videos and other items lost to the flooding. It remains the largest year of donations since Hazelden’s Book Aid program began in 1954. The two organizations also helped get members of AA and NA to the SuperDome, where hurricane victims had gathered for safety; the Twelve Steppers walked around with big signs reading, “Friends of Bill W,” which helped them locate people in recovery and direct them to a nearby location with round-the-clock recovery meetings. The Betty Ford Center’s Jerry Moe got a call from a 10-year-old former Children’s Program participant who had memorized the Betty Ford Center’s 800 number and dialed it up from the phone banks at the Superdome. The child said, “I’m really worried about my dad. I think he might drink again.” Jerry told him to get his dad and look for a “Friends of Bill W” sign so he could get to a meeting. “I’ll never forget it,” Jerry said.

www.hazeldenbettyford.org/75

WHAT ELSE HAPPENED IN 1949?

• George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984 was published.
• The song Rudolph the “Red-Nosed Reindeer” topped the radio charts.
• The Minneapolis Lakers won the NBA title.
• Harry Truman was president.
• China and West Germany became countries.
• The first nonstop circumnavigation flight circled the globe.
• These Are My Children, the first soap opera, premiered.
• RCA perfected a system for broadcasting color television.
• The first Polaroid camera sold for $89.95.
• The average cost of a new house was $7,450.