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Staff photo by Mark L. Thompson George Dawson is the president of Centra Health. Centra Health was formed from the merger of Virginia Baptist and Lynchburg General hospitals. Dawson was executive director of Virginia Baptist. |
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By Darrell Laurant The News & Advance It turns out that George Dawson is a social climber — but not in the way you’d think. “Our son Nick was never interested in the traditional team sports when he was in high school,” said Dawson’s wife, Rosemary. “Instead, he got into individual outdoor adventure sports like rock climbing and whitewater rafting — so in order to be able to spend more time with him, George got into rock climbing, too. He actually became quite adept at it.” At least Dawson wouldn’t lack for good local medical care if something bad happened while he and Nick were crawling up some granite face. He’s the president and CEO of Centra Health, and the climbing story provides a good metaphor for his “hands-on” style — literally, in this case. “When we were building our new house three years ago,” said Rosemary Dawson, who has known her husband since they were third graders together in Great Falls, “George took a day off from work and spent it working with the carpenters. He wanted to be able to say he’d helped put the house together.” And she remembered her husband giving her parents a tour of Lynchburg General Hospital while a massive remodeling project was taking place. “We expected him to walk us around and tell us where this or that entrance was going to be,” she said. “Instead, he started showing us the electrical cables and the heating and cooling ducts. He knew where everything was, which amazed even me.” In summation, the former college football tackle — still youthful looking except for his gray hair — is anything but a remote presence tucked away in a rear office suite. That’s not Dawson’s style. On several occasions since being hired as executive director at Virginia Baptist hospital in 1980, Dawson has taken it upon himself to respond personally to criticism of the hospitals. In 1983, he wrote a lengthy op-ed piece in The News & Daily Advance explaining The hospital’s position on performing abortions. Seven years later, after assuming his current role at CentraHealth, Dawson used the same tactic to lobby against a proposed Lynchburg city business license tax on hospitals and nursing homes. |
George W. Dawson
Who influenced you?
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“There is no
justification,” he wrote in the latter instance, “for
placing the full load on hospitals while giving a free ride to
other non-profit community organizations that do much less for
the city.” In 1981, Dawson was named Community Communicator of the Year by the Greater Lynchburg Chamber of Commerce. “I think if there’s an important issue and you don’t speak out,” he said in a recent interview, “it creates a vacuum that’s going to be filled, and it may be filled inaccurately.” Formed from the merger of Virginia Baptist and Lynchburg General hospitals in 1987, Centra Health now includes Guggenheimer Nursing Home, MedChoice, physician’s offices in Gretna, Brookneal, Bedford and Big Island, the Lynchburg Family Residency for physician training, the Mammography Center, Centra Lab and Courtside Athletic Club. It’s not your parents’ hospital anymore. Some local citizens view this mushrooming growth with alarm, and Dawson is well aware of that. “We have to guard against doing things, maybe even unknown to us, that step on somebody’s toes,” Dawson said. “Centra Health has a big foot in this community.” At the same time, he sees his organization as inseparable from the community at large (“Economic development, schools, the quality of the rescue squads in the counties, it all impacts on us”) and part of his job as being involved in community activities. “Some friends and I have talked about starting a ‘volunteers anonymous’ group,” Dawson joked. “If you get the urge to join another board of something, you can call someone else up and they’ll talk you out of it.” Absent such a group, Dawson has sometimes found himself spinning in a whirlpool of extracurricular activities. “I have periods when I’m out four nights a week,” he said. Besides belonging to a number of professional organizations that are extensions of his job, Dawson has served on the boards of the Lynchburg Fine Arts Center, Lynchburg College, United Way (campaign chairman in 1986), Step With Links, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, the National Conference of Christians and Jews and the Greater Lynchburg Chamber of Commerce, as well as performing volunteer work for his church (Peakland United Methodist). Community service is a legacy from his parents, Laurence and Grace Dawson, who moved George, his two brothers and two sisters to a farm in Fairfax County as a child. “These days, the idea of a farm in Fairfax County seems pretty funny,” he said, “but we had 20 acres, with cows and everything. I had to get up early and milk them.” Laurence Dawson was a career State Department employee with a particular interest in refugees. “At one point,” George Dawson said, “he helped get a couple of Russian Jewish girls who had survived the death camps into the United States after World War II. They were both accomplished musicians, and one of them wound up marrying my father’s brother.” Grace Dawson, meanwhile, taught her son George “a lot about what it means to be a family. Whatever we were doing, she was doing. When we were in Cub Scouts, she was a den mother. When we were in 4H, she was one of the adult leaders. when my sister Phyllis got into equestrian sports, she was out there building jumps.” Hence, George Dawson’s desire to learn rock climbing with son Nick, a Randolph-Macon College student who is the couple’s only child. Centra Health is an organizational mountain, but Dawson has climbed it. He has the top job, with all the power, responsibility and aggravation that entails, and says he still savors that. “At the time of the merger,” recalled Jim Candler, a Centra Health board member who started out on the Virginia Baptist board, “George was the president of Virginia Baptist and Ray Hogan was in charge at Lynchburg General. Ray was in the twilight of his career, and one of the reasons we gave the job to George was to keep him around.” Dawson was just 41 when he assumed the reins of Centra Health and admits “I never expected to stay in Lynchburg this long when I came here (from Holston Valley Community College in Kingsport, Tenn.). Four or five years at the outside was pretty much my window. But the merger afforded me an opportunity for personal growth that was unusual.” A graduate of Wofford University, where he played football for a year before finding himself “too slow,” Dawson really began his personal growth in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. He spent a year in Vietnam, rising to the rank of captain, and was in charge of evacuating injured soldiers (and, in some cases, Vietnamese civilians caught in the crossfire) from the killing fields around Da Nang to military hospitals in Japan, Germany and the U.S. It was, literally, life and death responsibility for a young man in his 20s, with 100 medics under his command. “We had a group of people who pulled 12 hours on and 12 off,” he said. “We were in constant contact with the Medivac choppers bringing in the wounded, and we had to know how many beds were available and where they were. This was in 1971, and we also had a growing drug problem to deal with. We established rehabilitation centers, and everyone coming or going had to pass a drug test.” To Lynchburg College president Charles Warren, Dawson is “a leader on our board, a person full of ideas, and a consensus builder.” Part of that leadership may have come from Dawson’s Vietnam experience, and part from his parents. One of his brothers owns a Harvard MBA and a manufactured housing company. His other brother is an executive in the same firm. Sister Phyllis Dawson has been a member of the U.S. Olympic equestrian team, Dawson said, while his other sister is a Realtor. Meanwhile, Jim Candler calls George Dawson “dynamic, one of the most highly regarded hospital administrators in the country.” For his part, Dawson worried whether a recent interview might give the impression that he was hogging the glory. “Ray Hogan was as responsible for the merger as I was,” he said, “and I couldn’t do what I do now without the staff and the medical community.” He had just returned from a vacation, he pointed out, and Centra Health kept running quite nicely during his absence. The Dawsons — George, Rosemary and Nick — had been in Colorado. Skiing. |