Meet Our Donors
Ruth Kramer
Ruth Kramer was one of the last babies born in the original Somerset Hospital in 1925. Over the years, she and members of her family continued to rely on the hospital for their medical care as it grew from the small house on East Main Street in Somerville where she was born to what is now Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Somerset. She has also witnessed the hospital's growth as a long-time hospital volunteer and donor.
"Somerset has always been special to me," says Ms. Kramer, who grew up in Bound Brook and has lived in Bridgewater - just down the street from the hospital - for the past 19 years.
She remembers her father telling her stories about the April day that she was born in Somerset Hospital, the former Lord Mansion located at 350 East Main Street which opened in 1901 with 12 beds. At the time of her birth, it had grown to a capacity of 24 beds.
"Dad sat outside on the house steps to wait to hear if he had a daughter," she says. "At that time, men weren't allowed to be in the room during childbirth."
Four months after she was born, the "new" 100-bed Somerset Hospital opened on Rehill Avenue, where it is still located today.
Ms. Kramer remembers going to the red-brick building as a young girl to visit ill family members and climbing up the "steep stairs" at the main entrance.
Over the next fifty years, the hospital continued to grow and expand with the addition of south, north, east and west wings that increased bed capacity to 350. It became known as Somerset Medical Center in 1978.
In the late 1980s, Ms. Kramer began volunteering at the hospital, knitting baby caps and slippers. Over 25 years, she knit a total of 900 pairs of slippers – in three different sizes and a multitude of colors – for hospital patients.
"I had a fun time knitting all those slippers but I decided to stop in 2007 when I started getting arthritis in my hands," she says.
Ms. Kramer started supporting the hospital in 1989 with a gift of $50 – just at the time the hospital was completing a $15 million expansion that included a new Same Day Center, Center for Diagnostic Imaging, Clinical Laboratory and a 3,000-foot addition to the Emergency Care Center. A portion of her donations are earmarked to support the hospital's Rapid Response Team, which evaluates patients who have had sudden changes in their health in order to ensure prompt treatment or transfer to the Intensive Care Unit, if needed.
Although she is fortunate to only have had to come to the hospital for minor health issues in recent years, Ms. Kramer has maintained close ties to the hospital through Somerset Health Care Foundation. She is committed to supporting the continued growth of the facility, which has expanded its footprint on Rehill Avenue to encompass two parking garages, the South Fuld Building, a Somerset Family Practice Center and the Steeplechase Cancer Center. In 2014, the hospital merged with Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick.
"Somerset means a lot to me and I just want to do what I can to help the hospital," she says.