DEL.ICIO.USThe Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 03/18/08
A visit to a rooftop, much like a mountaintop experience, set Pete Correll on the path to his election Monday as chairman of a new board to run Grady Memorial Hospital.
Emergency-care physician Dr. Arthur Kellerman remembers it well.
 Jenni Girtman/AJC | ||
| 'I am a blunt, truthful person,' Pete Correll says. | ||
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Correll, then CEO of Georgia-Pacific, was touring the old public hospital when Kellerman took him up to the helipad where whirlybirds fly in with trauma patients several times a day.
"This is our clinic," Kellerman recalls telling Correll as they looked out over the city. "This is why we're here."
Correll says he realized then "that this hospital has an unbelievable mission to fulfill." Having just walked its halls, he also realized how much help Grady needed.
Correll's critics hope he stays focused on the hospital's mission to the city.
He has drawn controversy since last spring when he co-chaired a Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce task force that urged a new system to build trust and money for financially strapped Grady.
"He's a good money manager, but Grady is unique," said the Rev. Timothy McDonald, a leader in a group called the Grady Coalition that opposed the change. "It's about poor people. It's about the uninsured of all races, persuasions and religions. It's outside his domain."
State Sen. Vincent Fort (D-Atlanta) vowed to "watchdog" Correll and the other 16 members of the new board.
Correll's allies are sure he can stand up to the scrutiny.
"He doesn't suffer fools lightly," said the Rev. Joanna Adams, his former pastor at Trinity Presbyterian Church. "but he's one of the fairest and most compassionate people I know."
"He's sensitive to the needs of the community," said Mayor Shirley Franklin, who tapped him to head her Atlanta Committee for Progress, a kind of kitchen cabinet of commerce. "He's an executive who's willing to roll up his sleeves and take on the hard issues."
Franklin turned to Correll five years ago to spearhead memorials to former mayors Maynard Jackson and Ivan Allen. Some black leaders wanted the airport named after Jackson, the city's first African-American mayor. White leaders balked at removing the name of William B. Hartsfield, the mayor credited with envisioning Atlanta as the aviation hub of the New South.
"Pete got challenges from both ends of the community," said Curley Dossman, president of the Georgia-Pacific Foundation. "That didn't deter him from staying the course. I think you'll see some of the same things at Grady."
Under the leadership of Correll and former Atlanta Life Insurance chairman Jesse Hill came a wordy compromise: Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, with the Hartsfield domestic terminal and the Jackson international concourse.
'The Atlanta way'
Over the years Correll has assumed other roles on his own or through Georgia-Pacific.
He helped Beverly Hall, named in 1999 as superintendent of the troubled Atlanta Public Schools, by bringing business support to the school system. In turn he corralled her for the new Grady board.
He was among corporate leaders who supported Gov. Roy Barnes' change of the Georgia flag to get rid of the Confederate emblem, a position that earned him the title "Son of Judas" on a white separatist Web site.
And, when he heard on his car radio that renovation had halted on the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in 2001, he called several CEO friends and quickly raised $390,000 to restart the work.
It was an example of the "Atlanta way," he said recently.
Some say the Atlanta way led to the changes at Grady.
Heart quit, eyes opened
That is a tale that, for Correll, began with a heart attack.
He was with his wife, Ada Lee, in their Buckhead home in 2002 when he started to feel the symptoms. He asked her to drive him across town to Emory University Hospital where she had had heart surgery eight years earlier.
Before the night was over, his heart had quit beating. A doctor restarted it with defibrillator paddles.
Two years later he was back at Emory to have a cancerous kidney removed.
Because of his appreciation for Emory, he agreed to chair a capital campaign for the Emory University medical school.
And that led him to Grady.
School officials wanted him to see all the hospitals where faculty and residents practiced.
He saw state-of-the-art facilities and equipment at Emory University Hospital, Emory Crawford Long and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston.
At Grady, he saw handwritten paper charts duplicated with carbon paper and dingy halls lined with patients on gurneys.
"It was like stepping back 30 years," he says.
The tour ended on the roof with Kellerman.
Afterward, over a Tanqueray martini, he described his visit to his buddy, Cousins Properties CEO Tom Bell. He and Bell, who knew Grady's finances from serving on Emory's audit committee, decided somebody had to save Grady.
"After a few more drinks," Correll recalls, "we decided it would be us."
About the same time, Pamela Stephenson and Dr. Christopher Edwards, chairwoman and vice chairman of the Fulton-DeKalb Hospital Authority, the board that ran Grady, were turning to the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce for help.
The rest is a yearlong, tangled history that led to Monday's meeting.
Hard worker from youth
Correll says that by taking on Grady, he's just acting out the way he was raised — that you owe your community something.
The only child of the owner of a Brunswick men's store, Alston Dayton "Pete" Correll, 68, was thrown into adulthood at age 12 when his alcoholic father died.
Correll and his mother, a strong Presbyterian with a work ethic that matched her faith, eked out a living doing everything from cleanup to alterations.
From Brunswick, Correll went to Georgia Tech, dropped out, worked as a runner on Wall Street, then finished college at the University of Georgia, where he met his wife.
With a master's degree in pulp and paper technology from the University of Maine, he spent his career in the industry, arriving at Georgia-Pacific in 1988 and moving up to CEO in 1993.
In 2000, when Georgia-Pacific bought Fort James Corp., the maker of Quilted Northern Tissue, he crowned himself "king of toilet paper."
But G-P was facing millions of dollars of asbestos-related lawsuits, and stock prices were plummeting.
"There was all kinds of pressure from everybody," says Correll. "And I always thought I could solve problems by working harder."
That's when his heart stopped.
Only you know your score
Both Correll and Georgia-Pacific survived.
When Koch Industries bought Georgia-Pacific in 2005, Correll walked away with nearly $170 million.
He left a company with a reputation for environmentalism in an industry often considered an enemy of nature, and as a promising place for women in a male-dominated business.
Correll was on President Bill Clinton's Council for Sustainable Development and is a big supporter of the Nature Conservancy – although he likes to shoot "anything that flies."
Under his direction Georgia-Pacific won the 2005 Catalyst Award for the recruitment and advancement of women.
Pete and Ada Lee Correll have poured millions of dollars into pet causes such as the Boys & Girls Clubs, Emory medical school, and the Center for Aquatic Animal Health at the Georgia Aquarium. He's presided over almost every major business organization in town, and she, he says, has headed "damn near every fund-raising ball."
As he takes on his new Grady responsibility, Correll is cogitating over everything from an annual ball for Grady to aid from other hospitals like Piedmont and Northside. They'd be in "deep doggie poop," he says, if they had to take on Grady's patients.
He's already bringing in big bucks for capital improvements. An anonymous donor promised $200 million with the changeover to private nonprofit status. He and Bell have agreed to try to raise $100 million more.
Some critics complain that linking the money to the management shift amounts to buying off the hospital.
Correll gets tired of such comments.
"I really resent some of the crap people are saying," he said. "I suspect a lot of people don't like me because I tell the truth. I am a blunt, truthful person."
In the end, he says, what matters is who a person is inside.
In a 2005 graduation speech at his alma mater, the University of Georgia, Correll compared life to golf, a game he has played since he was nine years old.
"When you finish, you post a score, and only you know if that is the right score."
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