He was a medical pioneer and never quite realized how much of one until he marveled this week at what the Los Alamitos Medical Center had become.
Seymour Alban was a very young doctor in 1953 when he first came to Los Alamitos. After graduating from Loyola Medical School in Chicago, he assumed a residency at the veteran’s hospital in Los Angeles before joining his brother Harry in an orthopedic surgery practice in Long Beach.
Also an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Earl Feiwell, (for whom there is a plague now dedicated at LAMC) joined their practice. Together, they took on various roles in the development of a community hospital as Dr. Feiwell assumed the role of Chief of Staff until the facility was built and kept the role until it was ultimately sold, said Alban.
Although the local doctors were using the most advanced techniques of the time, they figured they could offer better service if they could organize a local hospital in Los Alamitos.
When another of the organizers, the late Dr. Leonard Lieberman, approached him, Dr. Alban agreed to take on a challenge to find property on which to build a community hospital in Los Alamitos.
Working together, these area physicians were determined to build a hospital. They pooled resources, raised money and went to work, he remembers.
Albans, now 94, was an initial investor in the project. He became a member on the steering committee to find a plot of land suitable to build the hospital.
Alban was then a practicing orthopedic surgeon. Even today, Alban, though not actively still practicing, performs orthopedic consultations two days per week.
One of the initial plots of land they found, and nearly purchased, said Alban, was located at the corner of Katella Ave. and Los Alamitos Boulevard (which is today home to the Fish Company and other commercial developments).
“We thought it was a great location,” said Albans, but in the end, the developer wanted more money than the investors could pay so they moved on to the current location, which the investors successfully purchased.
Not only is he amazed at the incredible technology that has revolutionized the world of orthopedics, but the dramatic advancements in medicine and healthcare overall still excites him.
In addition to the original community hospital, Albans said they constructed a nearby physician’s center, which stood pretty much empty for a long time.
“We were only hoping then that it could hold its own,” he said. Hospitals then were not as busy as they have become today.
Alban recalls when the original investors began looking for a hospital group to take over the facility. He says they became convinced, at some point that the community hospital could not survive, or thrive, as a stand-alone facility. He said the doctors eventually sold out to what is today Tenet Healthcare, a multinational healthcare provider based in Dallas, which operates the facility today.
Fifty years on, the community hospital has become the Los Alamitos Medical Center, leaving early medical pioneers like Alban to gasp at today’s modern, thriving hub of healthcare that began as a modest dream by area doctors.
“I still don’t believe it,” he repeated, sitting in the front row long after the ceremony had concluded, marveling at what has emerged around this large plot of land they had worked so hard to find, so many years ago. “This is a very proud day,” he said, remembering the early medical pioneers who found a way to make their dream come true.