But Rancho didn’t begin as a hospital at all. It was the county poor farm when it was first founded in 1887. And not a very successful poor farm either until the arrival of William Harriman in 1915.
Harriman succeeded a long line of directors who had achieved little or no success in either making the poor farm self-sufficient or improving the lot of its hapless residents.
Harriman, who ran Rancho until 1952, changed all that. He drove his Model-T Ford every Monday to the County Board of Supervisors meeting in Los Angeles and presented them with a basket of flowers raised on the farm. He thus defeated the "out of sight, out of mind," syndrome that had been the undoing of many of his predecessors.
His philosophy was simple, "Tax funds provide the necessity of life for the dependent poor. The Spirit of Rancho Los Amigos provides the necessities of happiness without which life would be unbearable."
Harriman improved the lot of the farm’s residents. He offered the more ambitious among them plots of land on which to do horticultural research. He improved the dairy herd to the point it began to win prizes at the state farm yearly.
But good fortune was not to shine on Harriman and his farm forever. He was forced to order the prize dairy herd destroyed in 1924 when the dread hoof and mouth disease swept the area.
But persistence was one of his stronger traits. Harriman started the herd up again from scratch and within four years was winning state prizes once again.
In 1933 Rancho was hard hit by a great earthquake. Harriman rebuilt.
He saw the character of his poor farm change as the Great Depression progressed. At first there were the old people. Then younger members of the industrial and farm class began to appear. Then the service employees from hotels and restaurants appeared. And finally the CPAs, bankers, professors, the white collar class itself.
When Harriman rebuilt after the earthquake, he included hospital facilities. Rancho would no longer simply be concerned with custodial care, but would not enter the field of complete rehabilitation.
In 1944, Rancho accepted the challenge that was to make it world famous. It began a long-term rehabilitation program for the victims of polio.
Under the direction of Elberta Arnold, who had studied the techniques of Sister Kenney in Minneapolis, the local program took hold. Patients were taught how to re-educate their muscular systems. Many innovations were perfected.
When polio was finally overcome with the discovery of the Salk vaccine, Rancho celebrated. But the hospital still had hundreds of patients who had been felled by the disease before the medical breakthrough.
The success of the hospital with polio victims made it quite natural for it to turn to the treatment of other long-term rehabilitation cases, such as spinal injuries.
Today, Rancho is world famous for its work in rehabilitating a wide variety of injuries through long-term therapy and care.
Patients, their relatives, indeed, all of us, may be grateful to Harriman whose persistence ranged from constant flattery of the county supervisors with flowers to rebuilding Rancho’s crumpled structures after the quake.
Much of his spirit lives on in the fine therapy done at Rancho today.