Cyndi Ott joined PR/Marketing before her boys, Cameron and Colin, were born.
The year was 1975. Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” terrified moviegoers. Bill Gates founded Microsoft. The Captain and Tenille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together” earned the top spot on the Billboard music chart. And Cyndi Ott started her career at Akron Children’s.
“I’ve been here so long that more than one building I’ve worked in has been torn down,” Cyndi said with a chuckle. “I was a candy striper at Children’s the summer I graduated high school. One of the nurses took me under her wing and taught me a lot that summer! When I joined Children’s as an employee, I started in Patient Accounting. This was before computers, and we did everything on paper ledgers. We were in the Krumroy building, which had a leaky roof and no air conditioning. It was an old building they didn’t want to waste money on for repairs.”
Cyndi had lab experience before she joined Akron Children’s, working for a private lab, so she moved from Patient Accounting to the Outpatient Lab. “I cross-trained with the Inpatient Lab, so I got to go on the patient floors and see what things were about,” she recalled. “I was charting in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) one day, and they kept their charts up at the nursing desk. As I’m charting, somebody walks in and plops down a bag with a placenta in it! Things were done a bit differently back then.”
Cyndi painted faces at the 2015 Akron Marathon Kids’ Fun Run.
Changes
A lot was different at Akron Children’s back then. There weren’t individual patient rooms in areas such as the NICU and burn unit – but large, open “wards” that did not offer much patient privacy. Smoking was permitted almost anywhere in the hospital, inside and out. “I remember a few doctors would walk through the hospital smoking cigars,” Cyndi said. “I haven’t liked the smell of cigar smoke since. It’s unbelievable how much we’ve improved our processes and safety over the years.”
The hospital campus has changed, too. “The whole front of the hospital is different from those early days,” Cyndi said. “I would take my lunch out to Perkins Square Park and watch the doctors and residents play tennis during their lunch hours. I don’t know if everyone knows this, but the City of Akron owns Perkins Square Park to this day.”
Cyndi moved from the lab to Hematology-Oncology, making the change to advance her career and earn more money. “Then I wanted a part-time position, as I was preparing to be a mom, but one wasn’t available in Hematology,” she said. “That’s when I moved to Public Relations (PR) in to fill in for a woman who was on maternity leave. She never came back to the department, and I never left.”
Cyndi and her Marketing and Communications co-workers love to celebrate Halloween.
Cyndi finds her forever department
Cyndi started in PR, now called Marketing and Communications, in 1983. Initially, she served as the secretary for the entire department. “We were in the Seiberling building, which has also been demolished,” she explained. “That’s where Kay Jewelers Pavilion is now.”
In 2015, Cyndi moved on from her secretarial role to focus on the Akron Children’s website. “I’ve always liked to learn and keep up with technology,” she said. “I had been helping with the website on a part-time basis – and it became a big enough project to make a full-time job for me. Now it’s among the most important ways we provide information for patient families, referring providers, employees and donors.”
Today, Cyndi is the electronic media specialist in Marketing and Communications. In addition to keeping the website content current – a full-time job in and of itself – she answers questions of all kinds that are submitted via the webmaster email address and responds to Google reviews written by parents. She also serves on the committee that reviews requests for on-campus employee events.
Cherishing the culture
One thing that’s been constant throughout Cyndi’s career is the Akron Children’s culture. “That is what attracted me to working at the hospital,” she said. “Roger Sherman, the president of Akron Children’s when I started in 1975, would walk the entire hospital every morning and greet everyone. The hospital was a lot smaller back then, but he set the tone for the organization.”
Cyndi and her co-workers have celebrated the births of children – her son Colin was born in 1984 and son Cameron in 1987 – the losses of loved ones (including the PR secretary, lost to a very rare disease) and countless silly moments throughout the decades. Cyndi recalled funny times when working in the Exchange building. “My PR desk faced Exchange Street. The Canada geese would go and eat the grass in Perkins Square Park, and then they’d walk across Exchange Street,” she said. “We’d be sitting there working, and we’d hear car horns beeping and beeping as people tried to get the geese to move faster. My co-worker, Mark Humphrey, would stand up and say, ‘Use your wings.’ But the geese didn’t fly across the street – they just strolled in front of cars and brought the traffic to a standstill.”
Cyndi with her sons, Cameron and Colin.
After 50 years, Cyndi has collected a wealth of institutional knowledge. “I am not ready to retire yet, but I am thinking about what people will need to know when I leave,” she said. “What do I know that nobody else in the organization knows?”
Cyndi keeps in contact with some of her former lab co-workers, and she’s made the most friends in PR/Marketing and Communications. “I have felt really supported in all of my roles at Akron Children’s,” she said. “I’ve worked with so many great people, many of whom I love like family. It’s hard to believe I’ve worked here for 50 years when I don’t even feel like I’m 50 years old!”
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