A 92-year-old assisted living resident and military veteran is making a $1 million donation, aiming to further the field of nursing home care.
Washington State University’s College of Nursing announced the gift earlier this month, which comes by way of Waldron O. Lindblad. “Wally” flew medical evacuations during the Korean War alongside five nurses and his respect for the profession still holds strong decades later. On one occasion, he flew 28 injured individuals 1,700 miles back to safety, and all of them survived, thanks to nurses.
“I saw how hard they worked,” he told the school. “They were just 21 or 22 years old, but we never lost a patient. That’s how I fell in love with nursing.”
Lindblad — who saw success investing in securities and real estate after retiring in the late 1970s as a lieutenant colonel — is donating $500,000 to establish the Waldron O. and Janet S. Lindblad Professorship. The latter is his late wife, who died in 2011. Lindblad committed another $400,000 through his estate plan, on top of a $100,000 gift a few years ago to launch the Janet S. Lindblad Excellence Fund, to support students, faculty and programs in geriatrics.
Dean Joyce Griffin-Sobel tells McKnight’s that she hopes the new professorship will help to influence how colleges across Washington train nurses, and how nursing homes care for the rapidly aging population.
“It’s such an important area of gerontology,” Griffin-Sobel says. “He is very determined that the monies be used to improve nursing home care, particularly around nurse’s aides, to educate them more fully about the needs of the elderly. That’s an area that’s long been neglected in healthcare, so we are very eager to take this on.”
