Grant aids Samaritan Healthcare with equipment
PHOTOS: Nancy Allison Brotherton, Delores Oestreich and Glenda Allison Anderson stand outside Conference Room 401, where the plaque recognizing a $100,000 bequest from the estate of George and Marianne Allison to Samaritan Healthcare is mounted on the wall.
Longtime ML residents leave bequest of $100,000
The prognosis is good for Samaritan Healthcare, thanks to a significant donation from a couple who share a long history with the hospital.
Samaritan recently received a bequest of $100,000 from the estate of George and Marianne Allison.
"Half of that money is going to a new 16-slice CT (computerized tomography) scanner that we're going to be purchasing," said Dave Campbell, director of Samaritan Healthcare Foundation. "That's about a $1.3 million piece of equipment. The other $50,000 is going to the equipment for an endoscopy suite."
Campbell said the equipment would "greatly improve" the level of services that Samaritan provides, and keep residents from having to travel to larger hospitals.
George and Marianne Allison moved to Moses Lake in 1946 when the city's population was 535. Wanting to be a part of the community, they formed a partnership with George's brother Harvey and his wife Ina, opening a building materials business, Allison Lumber Company on West Broadway. Marianne kept the books and together they operated the business until it was destroyed by fire in 1963. Later, George became a realtor with O.C. Shadduck and Associates until his retirement in 1979.
George Allison had a heart attack in the early 1960s, and was brought to Samaritan for care.
"The equipment that they had acquired at that time was part of what saved his life," explained Nancy Allison Brotherton, niece to the Allisons and a resident of Moses Lake. "When they came to Samaritan, they felt that the state-of-art equipment at that time saved his life. They talked about it after that happened and they just felt like that was their way to give back to the community."
George Allison died Dec. 13, 1992 at Samaritan Hospital. Marianne Allison died May 1, 2003 at Lakeridge Special Care Center. They had no children and are survived by three nieces — Brotherton; Glenda Anderson, also of Moses Lake, and Ella Jane McCarley of Battle Ground.
Brotherton said that the nieces spent a lot of time with the Allisons when they were very young.
"We were like their second family," she said. "We went to all the VFW things. We got dressed up and dolled out and away we went … Uncle George was just a real polite, polished man. He had a great sense of humor and he didn't mind you crawling all over him. I can remember biting his ear one time, I just loved him so much. He always was affectionate with us girls, always."
"He was a Mason so we went to a lot of the Mason things," Anderson said. "He was an Elk. He played pool and different things there and at the Elk when I was in high school, they always had dances there, and Uncle George was on that committee … He was a school board member, also."
"(They were) civic minded," Brotherton said.
George Allison's community involvement includes serving on the Moses Lake City Council, the Moses Lake Civil Service Commission, the Moses Lake School Board and membership of the Scottish Rite Bodies and Big Bend Shrine Club, among others.
Marianne Allison was a life member of the Ladies Auxiliary of Veterans of Foreign Wars and served as a member of the Drill Team and president of Auxiliary No, 5926 and District No. 13.
Delores Oestreich, longtime Allison close friend and trustee of the estate, said she didn't think the Allisons realized that the amount of the bequest would be $100,000 at the time they talked about it. The will was first drawn up in 1983, she said.
"The will was signed in percentages," she explained, noting that the $100,000 figure came out of what was left after the money had been dispersed to relatives "The only thing that was said in the will was that 50 percent was supposed to go to heart, and 50 percent to cancer."
The family feels that the Allisons would be pleased with the plans for the bequest money.
"They gave a really good presentation about the different things that were going on," Brotherton said. "That CT scanner is amazing, it really is."
"We met and went through the things that they were going to do, so we decided that sounded really good," Oestreich said. "We felt that it was better to leave it here at this hospital and in this town rather than take it over to Seattle to the big hospitals."