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| Sid Peterson Memorial Hospital once had a gas station on the ground floor. Can you guess what this photo is showing? Click on any image to enlarge. |
I ran across some interesting photographs this week which I don’t remember seeing before – images of the gas station which operated on the ground floor of the Sid Peterson Memorial Hospital when it opened. One thing people frequently remember about that gas station: it had a system which could blow air-conditioning into your car, through big, flexible ducts. This would help keep you cool and comfortable while the service station attendant filled up your gas tank, and checked your car.
Why was a gas station built on the ground floor of a hospital? It’s a fair question.
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| Sid Peterson Memorial Hospital, 1949 |
The population of Kerr County in 1950 was only fourteen thousand; then, as now, about half of the county’s population lived in Kerrville.
To build a hospital in such a small, rural community wouldn’t seem to make a lot of financial sense. Hospitals require a lot of capital – equipment changes all of the time, medicines are expensive, and the people you need to run and staff a hospital are highly trained.
Such an organization usually requires a large community in which to operate, or there are simply not enough paying patients to meet the financial obligations of the hospital.
One brother, Hal “Boss” Peterson, was a gifted businessman. He left his parents’ ranch home at 15 to work in M. F. Weston’s Garage, on the corner of Sidney Baker and Water Streets in downtown Kerrville. By the time he was 18, he owned the garage.
Together with one of his brothers, Charlie, he built an empire known as the “Peterson Interests,” which included bus lines, real estate developments, businesses, and ranch land -- altogether 22 major enterprises worth millions of dollars.
Hal was the visionary, more the ‘risk taker’ of the two brothers. He had more business ideas per day than most entrepreneurs have in a year. Charlie, other the other hand, was the more grounded, quieter of the two. His counsel helped keep Hal avoid many a business mistake.
With this project, they “put the big pot in the little one,” according to Hal. And that was true.
Hal Peterson only had one regret about the project, wishing it was named after both of their parents, calling it the Sid and Myrta Peterson Hospital.
While the community was grateful to the brothers when they announced their plans, there was also a lot of disagreement where the hospital should be built. Some favored sites on the edge of town, and other sites were discussed. Most of the discussion was ill-informed, and came from people who had no financial stake in the project.
The story goes that Hal Peterson got tired of listening to all of these unsolicited suggestions and decided to build the hospital on land the brothers already owned, even if it was right in the middle of downtown Kerrville.
So the hospital was built on the corner of Sidney Baker and Water Streets, where it stayed until a new hospital, renamed the Peterson Regional Medical Center, opened in 2008.
That original hospital building had an interesting feature – much of the ground floor and the second floor were built to be rented to others. The ground floor had a gasoline station, and also a music store. The second floor housed the offices of the Kerrville Bus Company and other organizations.
These leased spaces, along with the Hal and Charlie Peterson Foundation, made sure the little community of Kerrville and Kerr County had a hospital – and a hospital much nicer than one would have predicted for such a rural community.
Until next week, all the best.
Joe Herring Jr. is a Kerrville native who was born at Sid Peterson Memorial Hospital. Both of his children were born there, too. This column originally appeared in the Kerrville Daily Times January 28, 2023.
So did they buy out J.C. Penney's to add on to the hospital?
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