SERVICE ABOVE SELF:FIFTY YEARS OF PIONEE Format: Paperback

Service Above Self combines the history of the first fifty years of the Lutheran Hospitals and Homes Society (LHHS) with events that took place in rural health and nursing home care from 1938 through 1987. The Society is unique in healthcare because it pioneered the system s approach for the industry and became one of the giants in the business. LHHS is an offshoot of the Lutheran Evangelical Good Samaritan Society which was founded in 1922 in a small North Dakota farming community. Many of the basic concepts came from the Bethel movement in Germany. The changing structure of the sparsely-populated, natural resource-based economies of farming, ranching, energy, and forestry of the rural west made it difficult for the small communities to support proper health and geriatric care facilities. The old time doctors hospitals or the small community- or county-owned hospitals, could no longer meet the demands of a shrinking but increasingly sophisticated populace. This provided a setting for these not-for-profit, privately-operated systems which were alert to the opportunity and pioneered a new approach for the healthcare industry.

After serving in the Air Force as a combat navigator on bombing missions in the European Theater of Operations of World War II, Hiram Drache earned degrees at Gustavus Adolphus College, the Unversity of Minnesota, and the University of North Dakota. During his college years he worked in the family truck line and other businesses and later taught high school. He married Ada Nelson in 1948 and in 1950 the couple purchased their first farm. They were involved in farming until 1981 when the home farm was sold and the others were leased out. He started his career at Concordia College in 1952 and in 1991 became Historian-in-Residence. He has written fifteen books and has contributed to eight others. He has also written more than fifty articles chiefly on contemporary agriculture and/or agricultural history. That writing lead to a speaking career with over 1,000 engagements in thirty-six states, the District of Columbia, six provinces in Canada, plus Australia, Germany and Norway.