By Robert C. Hardy, published by the Oklahoma Health Sciences Foundation, 1985, out of print.
Review:Â Oklahoma City author Robert C. Hardy has been cited for his book chronicling the history of the Oklahoma Health Center near downtown.
In an article in Oral History Review, Hardy’s book is termed the best of eight local oral histories produced recently.
Reviewer Michael A. Gordon, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, praises Hardy’s book as “a candid administrative history of the center during its years of unprecedented growth.”
Hardy’s book is “HERO: An Oral History of the Oklahoma Health Center.”
He is a former director of the Oklahoma Health Sciences Foundation.
Between 1982 and 1984, Hardy conducted interviews with 155 people involved in the formation of the health center, which includes the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, Veterans Administration Medical Center, Oklahoma Memorial Hospital, Children’s Hospital of Oklahoma and numerous other health care entities.
Gordon said Hardy’s book provides “especially important insights about key administrative decisions, internal power struggles, and how people view their pasts and make use of public memory.”
HERO is the catchy acronym for the 1968 bond issue that helped expand the center and bring “health and education for a richer oklahoma.”
Funds were used to greatly expand the medical school and teaching hospitals complex.
Hardy has written previous books, including “Sick,” in which he conducted interviews with hospital workers and people who were being treated in hospitals. That book is similar in style to Studs Terkel’s “Working.”
Hardy is now working on a novel.
– Jim Killackey, October 16, 1989, The Daily Oklahoman