Community Blood Bank celebrates 40 years

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By MARK ANDERSEN / Lincoln Journal Star

It’s been a different sea of red pouring through the Community Blood Bank over its exactly 40-year history.

Nearly a million units of red gold, or 125,000 gallons — enough to fill 20 percent of an Olympic pool — has coursed through tubes into bags for delivery to cancer patients, burn victims, hemophiliacs.

Sandy Czaplewski opened the new delivery center that first day, Oct. 14, 1968, and she still works there.

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Sandy Czaplewski with a donor from the original Community Blood Bank in 1968. (Courtesy photo)

Sandy Czaplewski with a donor from the original Community Blood Bank in 1968. (Courtesy photo)

That morning, the radio reported the Defense Department was sending 24,000 troops back to Vietnam for involuntary second tours. The pad at Cape Canaveral was still warm from the liftoff of Apollo 7.

And as part of their daily chores, nurses raised a flag outside the blood bank along North 48th Street.

Then, they waited through the first of many slow days.

“We didn’t start out doing too many donors,” Czaplewski said recently.

Lincoln was less than a third its present size, and the city’s hospitals still collected their own blood supplies.

There were 168 names recorded in the Community Blood Bank’s original green-tinged ledger in 1968, starting with No. 1: David Higgens.

To boost donations, the Community Blood Bank promised each donor free blood for their household family members.

Today, there are 15,600 donors giving 45,000 pints annually. Their confidential information is locked inside computers. Their main incentive for giving, beyond cookies and juice and occasional T-shirts, is altruism, a sense of contribution.

Retired Lincoln surgeon Dr. Dwight Cherry, 87, was board president of the Lancaster County Medical Society when it founded the blood bank to increase donations for cardiovascular operations.

Before then, he said, the city’s four hospitals, Providence, Lincoln General, Saint Elizabeth, and Bryan Memorial, had relied heavily on physician residents and nurses for blood donations. Rosters were typically metal recipe boxes.

The pay was $25 per donation — worth $157 in today’s dollars.

“The university students and nursing students were good sources of blood,” Cherry said. “They were always glad to get that $25.”

Cherry said he made arrangements with the city’s two pathologists to obtain blood before each scheduled surgery.

“In an emergency, you’d go with what you had,” he said.

Blood was typed and tested for syphilis then. Today, it undergoes 13 tests, requiring 36 to 48 hours of processing.

Then as now, it was an arm, a vein and a bag. Today, there is also double red cell apheresis. Blood is separated into components, plasma, red cells and platelets.

Czaplewski said she spent her working lifetime with the blood bank because it allowed her to work more normal hours as a nurse, and because of coworkers and donors. Early on, she said, she was on a first-name basis with donors. Over the years, fast friendships formed.

“Seeing them repeatedly, they almost become like family,” she said.

Today, as mobile team co-leader, Czaplewski works mainly with vans and trucks for off-site collections.

One day her work begins at 5:30 a.m.; the next day it might wrap up at 8:30 p.m.

Next month, she’ll be one of those working in the blood bank’s new, $500,000, six-bed coach — complete with interview and refreshment areas. Its satellite data uplink makes it an integral part of the blood bank information system.

It will be more convenient for donors and more efficient for staff, said Kelly Gillaspie, blood bank director of business development.

At the high schools where the mobile teams visit, the gyms are in big demand, she said.

“The last thing we want to do is be a disruption to schools and businesses,” Gillaspie said.

When the van returns at night, blood processing can commence immediately, preserving more of the coagulant factors, she said.

Mobile drives contributed just 20 percent to the total intake two years ago. This new addition will help increase that to 30 percent, said blood bank spokeswoman Joyce Halvorsen.

When the new van goes out on its first run to Fairbury Nov. 25, the eight blood bank employees on board will match the size of the entire staff in 1968.

Dr. Bob Hayes, a pathologist who retired in 1992, recalled the politics that surrounded the blood bank’s creation.

Bryan Memorial Hospital had begun its heart program in 1966, he said. At the time, most of the blood came from the Red Cross in Omaha, which often didn’t meet demand. Blood was drawn in local laboratories when the Red Cross supply wasn’t enough.

In December 1966, the issue came before the Lancaster County Medical Society, which left it unresolved. By now, a group of committed surgeons and cardiologists were bent on finding a solution.

By early 1967, there was a choice of affiliating with the Red Cross, and if that didn’t work, creating a local blood bank, Hayes said.

“That hung fire,” he said, until the unpredictability of the blood supply became a real problem.

Loans and grants for a blood bank were obtained. Articles of incorporation were signed, and the center opened in 1968.

Soon after, the Omaha Red Cross said that for a fee of $25,000 per year, it would affiliate with Lincoln’s blood bank and “we’ll provide blood when we can,” Hayes said.

“So they said no thanks.”

Soon after, he said, the Red Cross tried to get the Legislature to name it the statewide supplier of blood, but the bill failed.

By then, he said, the Community Blood Bank was up and running.

“Since then, it’s had nothing but spectacular growth.”

Reach Mark Andersen at 473-7238 or mandersen@journalstar.com.