The Broad Street salon gave 50 $7 children’s haircuts in four hours to raise funds for the medical care of Duwayne Powell, a 9-year-old Red Bank Primary School student suffering from a heart ailment. (Photo by Stacie Fanelli. Click to enlarge)

By JOHN T. WARD

A Navesink couple is the latest in a string of wealthy donors to write a whopping check to help pay for a new surgical center at Riverview Medical Center in Red Bank, the hospital announced late Tuesday.

Richard Saker, the third-generation CEO of the Saker ShopRite chain, and his wife, Laura, have donated $1 million to the cause through the business, the hospital reports.

The commitment pushes the hospital’s campaign for the 22,000-square-foor surgery center “well past” its $15 million goal, the nonprofit said in its announcement.

Prior donations have included $5 million from Bob & Joan Rechnitz, founders of the Two River Theater Company, and $1 million from George and Vita Kolber of Locust. Hospital workers themselves ponied up nearly $375,000, officials said at the center’s opening last month.

The hospital did not immediately say how the campaign surplus would be spent. [Update: Riverview spokesman Tom Paolella tells redbankgreen via email that the Saker contribution "continues the significant momentum and support from this community that has us ahead in our plans for a second phase of growth for Riverview that we will be sharing with the community shortly."]

Here’s the full announcement from the public relations office at Riverview, one of the hospitals in the Meridian Health universe:

Red Bank, NJ – April 17, 2012 – Riverview Medical Center today announced a $1 million charitable donation from Saker ShopRites to Meridian Health to benefit the Life.Changing. Campaign for Surgical Excellence at Riverview. The donation will help support the construction of Riverview’s new 22,000 square foot center for surgical excellence, and effectively vaults the campaign well past the $15 million fundraising goal. The project, which is currently underway includes: two sophisticated specialty surgical suites, renovated post-anesthesia care area, relocated and renovated surgical day stay, and a state-of-the-art conference and educational center. This advancement will allow patients to continue to receive advanced surgical procedures close to home, without having to travel to New York City or elsewhere.

The Saker family has spent a lifetime sharing their blessings. Richard currently serves as a member of the Riverview Medical Center Foundation board of trustees. As president and chief executive officer of Saker Holdings Corporation, and Saker ShopRites, Inc., Richard has harnessed the power of this huge enterprise to benefit countless lives and the quality of life for the residents of Monmouth and Ocean counties. Together with his wife Laura, a professional educator, dancer, and choreographer, they have both helped to raise millions of dollars to benefit the hungry, and many other worthwhile causes.

“Our family is extremely proud and honored to be a part of a project that is going to have such a life-changing impact on the surrounding communities,” said Laura. “We feel it is important to support the community we call home,” said Richard. “Laura and I have always had a deep affection for Riverview Medical Center where our children were born and where our family members have always been well cared for. When we heard about the new center being built, we wanted to do what we could to help make it happen.”

Richard serves on the boards of Wakefern Food Corporation, the New Jersey Food Council, the Academy of Food Marketing at St Joseph’s University, and the Joan Dancy and People with ALS Foundation. Both Richard and Laura have been recognized by singer Andrea Bocelli for their charitable work with the Vision of Children Foundation and are steadfast supporters of the FoodBank of Monmouth and Ocean Counties. In the past year alone, over 1,500 Central NJ organizations have benefited from Saker ShopRites charitable donations. In addition, Saker ShopRites supports the “ShopRite Partners in Caring” program, a charity dedicated to the fight against hunger, where this year over 1000 charities have received a portion of the $2 million donated by “ShopRite Partners in Caring”.

As third generation in a family business, Richard remains loyal to his roots in Monmouth County and to his hometown of Freehold; site of the first family owned and operated Saker’s market, established in 1906 by his grandparents. Together with Laura who serves on the boards of the Monmouth County SPCA, Two River Theater Company, Monmouth Conservation Foundation, and the Drumthwacket Foundation, they have maintained a decades-long Saker family tradition of giving back to the community in which they work and live.

“We are grateful for the long-standing commitment to Riverview Medical Center by one of Monmouth County’s most charitable families,” says David Flood, president of the Meridian Health Foundation. “This gift is a tangible affirmation of our commitment as the healthcare heart of our community and provides critical support for the programs and services we are developing. Thanks to their generosity and vision, the Sakers have put this campaign over the top, while contributing to a momentum that has us ahead in our plans for a second phase of growth for Riverview that we will be sharing with community shortly. This great community demands and deserves superior healthcare, and Riverview is committed to delivering just that with every dollar invested.”

“The Saker’s generosity is inspiring,” says Tim Hogan, FACHE, regional president of Riverview Medical Center and Bayshore Community Hospital. “People rightly acknowledge that Riverview has had an exceptional past. But exceptional isn’t going to be good enough for the future; as healthcare moves forward we need to be at the forefront of patient care. The campaign provides an opportunity for any and all community members to put a personal stamp on this historic project — one that will provide state-of-the-art healthcare for generations to come.”

To learn more about the center for surgical excellence, or to support the Life. Changing. campaign visit www.RiverviewMedicalCenter.com/LifeChanging.

About Riverview Medical Center

Riverview Medical Center, a member of the Meridian Health Family, is a 463-bed not-for-profit community hospital located on the Navesink River in Red Bank, New Jersey. Riverview Medical Center provides health care programs and services in all major medical disciplines including: maternity, oncology, orthopedics and rehabilitation, neurology, thoracic and vascular surgery, cardiology, renal dialysis, diabetes management, and emergency and critical care services. Riverview’s Jane H. and John Marshall Booker Cancer Center offers comprehensive cancer services close to home, while Riverview’s Jane H. Booker Women and Children’s Center combines expertise and convenience to address preventative health, diagnosis, treatment, and support for women of all ages. Riverview Rehabilitation Center is Monmouth County’s only fully-accredited inpatient rehabilitation facility, and Riverview is a designated Primary Stroke Center and has also maintained prestigious Magnet designation for Nursing Excellence since 1998. Riverview is the only hospital in the region with the groundbreaking CyberKnife® system, offering new hope for patients with inaccessible or inoperable tumors. For more information about Riverview Medical Center and Meridian Health, please call 1-800-DOCTORS or visit www.riverviewmedicalcenter.com.

Joseph and Celeste Tamburello claimed the whopping prize at state lottery offices in Trenton Monday, nine days after Celeste bought the winning ticket at the Little Silver Family Pharmacy in Little Silver, the Asbury Park Press reports.

Today, on her fifteenth anniversary working at a food services company, Celeste plans to give her two-week’s notice, according to the reports.

The ticket – with the numbers 32, 43, 53, 55, 56 plus the Powerball number of 6 – was computer-generated, the Press reports.

From the Sledger:

Since they chose the whole pile of money at once, the Tinton Falls couple will take home $41.5 million before taxes.

“It’s unbelievable,” Celeste Tamburello, 41, said today. “I just never in a million years thought a $2 lottery ticket would turn into a $70 million Powerball ticket.”

The couple bought the “quick pick” ticket at Little Silver Family Pharmacy last Sunday. On Friday night, Joseph Tamburello’s sister called with news that the pharmacy had sold the winning ticket to Wednesday’s jackpot.

Joseph Tamburello ran and got the ticket, while his wife pulled up the winning numbers.

One by one she read the numbers aloud. Each time, her husband said, “Got it.”

Around the fourth number, she checked to see if he was joking. He wasn’t.

She read out the powerball number, which was 6.

“He jumps up, said ‘Oh my God it’s us,” she said. “We were just like screaming, the dogs were barking, my sister-in-law was crying.”

From the Press:

The Tamburellos are regular but modest lottery players, buying a single Mega Millions ticket and Powerball ticket nearly every week for more than eight years. They sometime buy scratch-off lottery games or visit the casinos; Joseph said the biggest thing he’d ever won before was between $2,200 and $2,500 on a 25-cent slot machine in Atlantic City.

“I don’t have much to say. It’s unbelievable,” he said.

One of the first things the couple plans to do with the money is buy Celeste a Cadillac. “I drive a 15-year-old Saturn, and I’m pretty sure I’m taking that creampuff in and I’m going to trade it in on an Escalade sometime in the very near future,” she said.

“See some parts of the world,” she added. “We haven’t really had the opportunity, because we’ve always worked full-time. We’ve never really had the opportunity to travel outside of the U.S. very much, and so I think we’d like to do a little travel, do a little kick back and relax. You don’t have to think too much about what’s to come.”

The couple married in 1999 and has no children, but they have a large extended family they intend to take on a nice vacation. “We’ve got family we don’t even know we have,” the suddenly wealthy Joseph joked.

Located in the third floor of the Blaisdell Pavilion and overlooking the Navesink River, the Red Bank hospital’s new “surgical day-stay” features 21 semi-private and two private rooms for patient recovery from same-day procedures, replacing a dormitory-style setup.

Due in September are two high-tech surgical suites, which will bring the number of operating rooms to 12 and complete the project. Hospital employees themselves contributed $374,000 to a capital campaign for the project, a spokesman said. (Click to enlarge)

“I’d almost rather be incinerated than have to live down here,” says Suellen Sims, below inspecting her new home’s fallout shelter, built beneath an earthen berm alongside Harris Park. (Click to enlarge)

By JOHN T. WARD

It survived the Cold War without so much as a scratch, but a Red Bank fallout shelter is about to prove no match for the great wave of American home renovation.

Sometime in the next few weeks, a backhoe is expected to demolish the underground bunker beside a River Road house recently acquired by Suellen and Jamie Sims, who plan an addition to accommodate her mother.

Suellen Sims in her soon to be demolished bunker. (Click to enlarge)

The Cold War was raging in 1959 or 1960 when Dr. James Clark, a Red Bank eye surgeon, decided like many other Americans that he needed a fallout shelter to protect his family from radiation in the event of a nuclear attack.

But when a manufacturer of mail-order shelters told him there was a two-year backlog, Clark decided to build his own on the Harris Park side of the house, said his son, David Clark.

“He drew it up on paper, dug the hole, designed the hand-cranked air-filtration system,” said Clark, of Fair Haven. “He built wooden platform beds, and loaded it with canned goods.”

The result, on the outside, was a handsome berm of soil, grass and pine trees trimmed with a low brick wall. Inside, about a dozen feet below the surface, was a room off about 12 by 12, set off to the right of the stairwell, because, said Clark, “radiation can’t turn corners.”

Clark, who was about 10 or 12 when the bunker was built, said his father gave him the chore of emptying water containers and refilling them each month, adding three drops of chlorine to each. The elder Clark died suddenly in 1962 of a heart attack, and in the ensuing years, the son and his pals used to occasionally hang out in the bunker.

“They’d ask if they could come down here if the Russians attacked,” he said. “I’d say, ‘sure, you and the 5,000 other people who have asked.’”

The new owners, who have never met Clark, referred to the bunker at a recent planning board hearing as a “bomb shelter,” but Clark says it wasn’t built for that kind of shock. “A bomb hits the top, everybody’s dead,” he said.

Suellen Sims said that when a real estate agent first showed her and her husband the house, the bunker wasn’t included in the listing information. “We said, ‘What are all those pipes sticking up out of the ground?’”

Turns out they’re part of the air filtering system, equipped originally with automotive air filters.

Sims, who said she had to duck under her desk and participate in air raid drills as a schoolgirl and recalls having been “terrified” during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, still finds it “weird that you would build this just for yourself and your family.”

And the shelter itself she finds “dystopian. I’d almost rather be incinerated than have to live down here the rest of my life,” she said.

With the bunker’s days now numbered, Sims says her daughter has suggested a sendoff party, complete with t-shirts bearing the message: “I got bombed in the bomb shelter.”

By JOHN T. WARD

Red Bank’s Navesink River Rowing club closed for a one-day scrubdown Sunday after officials learned that two young members were diagnosed with a common, antibiotic-resistant infection.

Though there was no evidence the infections were picked up at the club, officers opted to briefly halt rowing activities to disinfect all oars and other equipment as a precaution, operations manager Susan Meltsner tells redbankgreen.

“Our concern was just to take a better-safe-than-sorry approach,” she said. “We would hate it if another of our rowers got it if we didn’t take the precautions.”

The club acted after two members of its youth rowing program developed visible skin blisters. The mother of one was advised to take the child to a hospital, where the girl was diagnosed with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus, or MRSA (pronounced “MER-sa”). The parents of the other informed the club that their son had also been diagnosed with MRSA.

Sandy Van Sant, the health officer with the Monmouth County Regional Health Commission, which serves as the health department for Red Bank and 22 other towns, said the “community” form of MRSA is not among those that healthcare providers are required to report.

Incidents of the ailment “happen all the time” in schools and gyms, where open cuts can come into contact with the bacteria that causes it, she said.

Van Sant also said she had not heard of any recent cases of MRSA, but added that any episode is a good time to remind people to wash and disinfect their hands. People working out with athletic equipment should be sure to cover abrasions and lay towels on equipment on which they sit, she said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a series of preventative measures that can be taken by health clubs, school and individuals here.

NRR, meanwhile, was back in action on the Navesink Monday morning.

This week’s ‘Where’ rolls in from… well, you know how the game is played.

Last week’s image was a gimme for Brock Siebert, Jenn Woods, Mike, Sandra Talarico, Carl Colmorgen, Karen Dougherty, Sarah Stanley, Trish DePonti and one Dr. Howard Rubinstein, chair of the department of emergency medicine at Riverview Medical Center in Red Bank: it’s the canopy over the ambulance entrance at the hospital’s emergency room.

Or all but one of them, we should say. One thought the photo was taken at the Two River Theater.

Thanks to all who wrote in, and apologies to the good doc for misspelling his name in a story two years ago, an error we became aware of today.

Authorities ordered the evacuation of the low-lying Chapin Hill at Red Bank nursing home Saturday as Hurricane Irene neared, packing winds of 90 miles per hour in North Carolina yet leaving the anxious Jersey Shore eerily calm.

Also affected by an evacuation order was the 40-unit Locust Landing apartment complex on Locust Avenue, Tommy Welsh, coordinator of Red Bank’s Emergency Management Committee, tells redbankgreen.

A 1 p.m., two buses and an ambulance were on the scene of the nursing home, on Chapin Avenue near the Newman Springs Road bridge over the Swimming River, preparing to relocate 113 patients.

Affected are 77 wheelchair-reliant patients and 8 bedridden ones, Welsh said.

Many of the patients were to be relocated to a sister facility in Mercer County, Welsh said, but that home doesn’t have enough beds to accommodate all Red Bank residents, he said. “They are are still trying to secure a location for 41 beds,” he said at 1:30 p.m.

Facility managers are being “totally cooperative,” and the Monmouth County Office of Emergency Management has pledged to try to help the center with transportation and placement issues later today if they are unable to resolve the shelter issue, Welsh said.

“Of course, the last thing you want to do is evacuate a convalescent center,” Welsh said.

The four-story brick nursing center and the Locust Landing apartments are the only structures affected by “code red” order issued late Friday by county OEM, which directed  towns to evacuate properties lying within designated flood zones.

No others exist in Red Bank, Welsh said, noting that the Oyster Point Hotel, while situated on the Navesink River, is not in a flood zone.

Police went to Locust Landing at about 10:30 to ask residents to move their cars, and found that about 70 percent of the residents had already vacated or were planning to do so. The order to vacate was issued about 90 minutes later, Welsh said.

“It’s right on the river. It’s about 20 yards away from the water,” he said.

Students at Red Bank Regional held their annual Relay for Life fundraiser for cancer research Friday night into Saturday morning. redbankgreen photog Peter Linder was there to document the smiles and miles on that soggy overnight.

To enlarge the photo display, start it, then click the embiggen symbol in the lower right corner. To return to redbankgreen, hit your escape key.

Little more than a week after disclosing it had received a $5 million donation toward a planned $15 million revamping of its operating rooms, Red Bank’s Riverview Medical Center announced Monday that another $1 million contribution had come in.

The donation, by George and Vita Kolber, of the Locust section of Middletown, will go toward the construction of a new 22,000-square foot “center for surgical excellence” within the exisiting footprint of the Red Bank hospital, officials said.

A $5 million donation by Kolber neighbors Bob & Joan Rechnitz, founders of the Two River Theater Company, is to be used for the same purpose.

George Kolber is the immediate past chairman of the Riverview Medical Center Foundation Board of Trustees. He and his wife, a former school teacher, have supported several philanthropic efforts, including Jumpstart and Monmouth University, as well as privately administered educational scholarships and grants to underprivileged and inner-city students, according to a press release issued by the hospital.

From the announcement:

“George and I are privileged to support Riverview Medical Center in this way, as our entire family recognizes what Riverview means to us and so many others in our community,” said Vita. “We feel it is imperative that Riverview remain on the cutting edge of technology because a top-notch facility is necessary to attract the finest physicians and staff, enabling Riverview to continue its record of excellence in serving the community now and in the future,” added George.

The center for surgical excellence at Riverview will include: Two sophisticated specialty surgical suites,  renovated post-anesthesia care area, relocated and renovated same-day surgery suite, and a state-of-the-art conference and educational center.

“We are grateful for the long-standing commitment to Riverview Medical Center by one of Monmouth County’s most charitable families,” says David Flood, president of the Meridian Health Foundation. “The Kolber’s gracious support of Riverview Medical Center and the creation of our new center for surgical excellence is immeasurably appreciated. Their generosity and continuing service to Meridian Health helps to distinguish our region as home to the finest health care services in our state.”

Over the past three years, Riverview Medical Center’s surgical volume has grown by more than 20% and has created a need to improve and enhance current operations. As a result of the expanison, Riverview expects to handle 445 new surgical cases, a 5.5% growth by 2013.

“A gift of this stature lends additional honor and prestige to our already excellent surgical program,” says Tim Hogan, FACHE, president of Riverview Medical Center. “The Kolber family’s generosity will go a long way in enabling Riverview Medical Center to continue our journey over the last decade to bring the very best, highest quality health care to area residents in a comfortable setting that is caring and close to home.”