SALUD CLINIC, the FORTIETH YEAR

A History of the SALUD CLINIC From the Beginning until the Fortieth Year.

Board of Directors

Community  Health  Worker

These are recollections of the  beginning of Salud Clinic. Yet the events and timeline are quite accurate as they are taken from public documents, board minutes, and personal records.  May 21, 2010 marks the beginning of the 40th year of continuous operation of Salud. I dedicate this history to the Board, to the community that gave rise to the clinic, to the entire staff, but in particular to the Salud Community Health Workers. (I recently discovered a pile of old slides telling of those days, and hope to transfer them to electronic form and   add them  here when time allows.)

In October 1968 Broderick  was  an older unincorporated town like  West Sacramento, the adjacent industrial and residential community where the relatively more rich and famous lived, and Bryte, the oldest and most stable town in the area, home to many East European immigrants, notably those from Russia and the Ukraine. The older streets of Broderick and Bryte were lined with one and three quarter story buildings where the lower levels rose only 6 or seven feet above ground. They had been built that way in expectation of winter flooding so common one hundred years ago.  As flood control became more effective these low-ceiling spaces began to be developed for living quarters.

Many large tree shaded lots had been converted into trailer parks that were originally built as auto courts or camps.  Clusters of ten by ten wooden shanties rented to single men persisted.  With the completion of the cross country Lincoln Highway in 1916, travel had boomed.  The auto court was the way people settled for the night.  But when motels and better highways appeared, the auto camps/courts in Broderick often became “apartments” for single men. They had no indoor plumbing and very limited cooking facilities. Despite ongoing attempts to condemn them usually failed as  these shanties were owned by politically powerful people and survived until well after  incorporation of the city in 1988 [1].

East Yolo, as the three towns were referred to, was far from the Yolo County administrative centers in Woodland, where the low cost or free medical care was available at the Yolo General Hospital. Across the Sacramento River were the State Capitol, the Sacramento County Hospital and clinics, but medical care was not readily available there to uninsured Yolo county residents.  People survived in an economic and political backwater even though Yolo County maintained a Dept of Health office and a  sheriff’s substation at  Third and C streets, the West end of the I Street Bridge.  Even the name of the bridge reflected an attitude which is telling; it was the Sacramento Street Bridge in East Yolo, but such was the self effacing humility of residents that I never heard that term used.