Volunteer Spotlight: Jane Stringer and Marty Frankel
Jane Stringer (left) and Marty Frankel (right), two founders of the Point Reyes Community Clinic, volunteering their time with CLAM at 35 Third Street.
Jane Stringer and Marty Frankel (right) were two of the first to sign up for CLAM's volunteer work day in January. Marty and Jane were two of the founders of Point Reyes Community Clinic, the precursor to Coastal Health Alliance, which was originally housed at 60 Third Street (which CLAM purchased last year). “When I saw the announcement for the work day, I knew we had to sign up,” said Marty.
The Point Reyes Community Clinic opened in September 1981 in response to the growing need for a bilingual, family-focused health clinic that would serve the many families that were moving to West Marin from Mexico to work on the ranches. A group of people began meeting to envision the new clinic. Jane, who was living in San Francisco at the time, was connected with the group by a social worker whom she had worked with in Mexico.
“It was six of us who worked at the clinic in the beginning. The doctor, Mike Witte, who spoke Spanish and had lived in Mexico, got a small business loan which allowed us to rent 60 Third Street. I was a maternal and child health nurse practitioner. Marty was a family nurse practitioner. Nancy Mills was a PA and midwife. Diane Haris ran the front office. Carol Whitman was the back office medical assistant. Cindy Ohama was the businessperson. Each of these people was multi-skilled and wore many hats."
It was a community effort from the beginning. To get the Clinic up and running, the founders hosted work parties, asking friends and relatives to lend a hand. Together, they turned the kitchen of 60 Third Street into a lab, the living room into a waiting room, and the two bedrooms into exam rooms with a bathroom in between. “A carpenter friend built a front desk out of wood. The back porch was our office and later became the pediatric exam room. Compared to today there was no privacy whatsoever! But we didn’t worry about those things and neither did the patients really, it was just about taking care of people.”
The Clinic took insurance, Medi-Cal, and had a sliding scale fee structure for people who didn’t have insurance. “Everyone volunteered their time in the beginning and we kept other jobs to keep ourselves afloat, working a couple days a week at the clinic,” Jane says. After one year, they were making enough to pay themselves something. Marty moved to West Marin from Sonoma and Jane from San Francisco, and they shared a house in Marshall for a few years.
There was a big desire and need for home births at the time. Many white women whom the Clinic served didn't want to give birth in hospitals, and most of the women who had immigrated from Mexico were already accustomed to having home births with midwives, plus they were almost all undocumented and did not have insurance, and could not afford to give birth in a hospital. Luckily, both Mike and Nancy were experienced in doing home births.
“We screened people carefully so they would be safe,” says Jane. “We didn’t allow anyone to have a home birth who we didn’t feel met certain conditions to have a safe home birth. We always went to their homes a month or so before the birth to make sure everything was acceptable for a home birth. After visiting their homes, we would hand draw a map – you probably couldn't imagine this but there were no cell phones and no GPS – we would hand draw a map and each of us would have the map. So, when a woman went into labor, whoever was on-call would get their map and would go find her place. Women lived all over! On the ranches out on the point, on ranches up toward Marshall and Tomales, Valley Ford, and over to Sebastopol. We had some women from East Marin who wanted to do home births. We had a couple of births on boats: one in Sausalito and one in Marshall. I remember driving in the dark, in the rain, in Bolinas where the roads are not well signed, saying to myself, 'Okay that’s Alder, so that’s A street. B Street must be over here…' Sometimes it was difficult! But I had my own son during a power outage in the middle of San Francisco, so it wasn’t that big a deal. We were treating whole families, young moms and dads and kids of all ages." (The Clinic stopped home births around the early 1990s, when the state passed a law that undocumented folks were eligible for Medical, and could access hospital births.)
After a few years, the Clinic was seriously outgrowing the space 60 Third Street. Richard Kirschman offered to sell his lot at a very low price, and the local bank in town, the Bank of Petaluma, gave the nonprofit clinic what they called "a community mortgage." And so they built a new health center, which is now Coastal Health Alliance. The move-in day was a big affair; everyone helped build it and finance it.
In closing, I asked Jane how she feels now that CLAM owns 60 Third Street. "I think it's wonderful. It would be wonderful to see those two bedrooms be bedrooms again. There are two lilac bushes in the front which you can't even recognize are lilacs anymore, and I love lilacs! I want to prune those things!
How cool is it that 60 Third Street has such a rich history? Forty years ago, the community rallied together to turn this home into a community clinic to provide health care to local families. Now, we rally together again, through community work days, community loans, and donations, to make it into a home for local families to live in. It is a joy to feel the community spirit brought to this project by people like Jane and Marty, and all the other folks who volunteered at our last work day. What a beautiful full-circle story!