Issue link: https://kusm-wichita.uberflip.com/i/1372819
6 Pediatric Residency program is accredited. 1975 1977 Richard Walsh, M.D., becomes second dean. Medical school moves to 1010 N. Kansas, previously the E.B. Allen Hospital. Dr. Edwin B. Allen is considered to be the first practicing physician in Wichita and was Wichita's first mayor in 1871. 1977 Fairmount Towers 17th & Roosevelt When Bob Wiese takes schoolchildren on tours of KU School of Medicine-Wichita, he can't resist mentioning the ghost that supposedly haunts the basement. "There's a rumor that it will turn lights o and on at dierent periods of time," Wiese, director of Facilities Management, tells them. "It kind of roams the basement." Wiese is kidding, but the school's physical campus, past and present, has a pretty interesting history in reality. KUSM-Wichita's first home was a two-bedroom house (no longer there) on the Wichita State University campus at 17th and Roosevelt, across the street from what is now St. Paul Catholic Student Center. Envisioned as a community-based "school without walls," KUSM-Wichita nevertheless required some kind of administrative space for Dean Cramer Reed, M.D., and his small sta. The gray ranch-style house on 17th was far from fancy but the price was right. In fact, WSU President Clark Ahlberg let the school have it rent-free in 1972. "It was a very bootstrap operation," recalls Lorene Valentine, who was hired to take care of the books that year, left in the early 1980s and eventually returned to become director of Rural Health Education & Services. The house "hadn't been remodeled. People had oces in a living room, a bedroom. There'd be a couple of desks, you'd be back to back to each other facing the wall. It wasn't a gorgeous oce, that's for sure." The next year, WSU oered the school free space on the fifth floor of Fairmount Towers, a student dormitory. That was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, too, while a permanent home was constructed as part of Ahlberg Hall, where the WSU College of Health Professions is located. But the school's aliation with WSU was severed before that happened. 17TH STREET W I C H I TA S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y 21ST STREET HILLSIDE OLIVER KU Wichita campus