From Rod-Buster to Campaign Co-Chair
Lloyd Carr’s connection with C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital goes deeper than he realized.
Early in 2000, then-University of Michigan football coach Lloyd Carr was guided on a tour of C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital by Valerie Castle, M.D. (Fellowship 1990), who at the time was associate provost for academic and faculty affairs for the Health System. Castle, who now chairs the Department of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases, was trying to enlist Carr’s assistance in a nascent drive to build a new hospital by showing him the inadequacies of the existing facility, and it worked like a charm.
“Even for someone who didn’t know anything about a hospital, except based on my visits to patients, it was very obvious that there was this incredible need,” Carr recalls. “It was easy to say that we wanted to be a part of helping them raise money.”
But even before the tour began, Carr saw something else that inspired him, something that wasn’t, and couldn’t have been, on the agenda.
“When I was a college student back in the mid-60s, I had worked construction for two or three summers for a subcontractor,” he says. “It was something I had really forgotten about, but when I met Valerie up on the seventh floor and we looked out, from that vantage point I was reminded that I had worked on the foundation. I was a rod-buster; you tie those reinforced steel rods in, then the concrete is poured over them and the rods keep it from crumbling.”
Remembering that he had helped to build the existing hospital strengthened not only his awareness of how outdated it was, but also his resolve to help build a new one.
The first thing Carr did was ask his players to participate in an annual car wash at Michigan Stadium to benefit Mott. “We had that car wash for maybe four or five years,” he says. “It was a really fun thing, and we made a lot of money, but the most important thing was that we helped to publicize this effort to build a new hospital.”
Carr didn’t stop there. He eventually became one of the co-chairs of the capital campaign for the new hospital building. “What I’ve tried to tell all these young graduates and all the guys that I coached is that this hospital is going to touch a lot of lives,” he says. “Their kids will be born there, their wives will be treated there, their kids and grandchildren will be treated there. It’s something that’s going to have a great impact not only here but across the country.”
And his role in the construction of the old building gave him a solid punch line.
“I told everybody I built that hospital,” he says, “and there would always be someone to say, ‘That’s why we need a new one.’ ” —JM