Tom Bell honored as Holton High's Alumnus of the Year

In the 50 years since he’s graduated from Holton High School, Tom Bell has become one of the most passionate advocates for better health care in Kansas, spending 15 years as the president and chief executive officer of the Kansas Hospital Association, an organization he was involved with for more than three decades.

During his years with the KHA, Bell — a 1974 graduate of HHS who was named the school’s outstanding alumnus of the year — said his most noteworthy “accomplishments” with the organizations involved not how hospitals and health care workers can be improved in Kansas but how they reinforced his outlook on the importance of a hospital system in any given community.

“Everybody understands how important it is to deliver the care that a health care system provides, but what I didn’t understand at the time was a hospital’s importance as an anchor in a community,” he said. “It’s an economic anchor, it’s a community resource, it’s a focal point of the community, and when you see how proud people in the community are of their hospital, it really gives you a sense of how important it is.”

Bell’s years with KHA also drove home the importance of the people who make up those hospital and health care systems.

“They’re the sort of people who will run toward a problem, as opposed to running away from it. They treat people at their most vulnerable, and I really got to meet some amazing people,” said Bell, who retired from KHA in 2020.

Just as important to Bell as health care workers, however, are the teachers who make up a community’s school system — even though you may not recognize that importance when you’re a kid growing up “on the last street in town.”

“I remember the teachers who challenged and supported me,” he said of his years in Holton. “It’s one of the things that I think about when I think about my hometown — how important public schools were to me and what a great job this community did in supporting it.”

Bell was one of 87 Holton seniors who graduated with the class of 1974, as was his girlfriend, the former Vicki Schirmer — respectively, they served as president and vice president of their senior class. They’d known each other since meeting in the sixth grade, attending classes in the former South Holton school, and began dating during their freshman year of high school.

After graduation, Bell moved on to Kansas State University, as did Schirmer — in fact, Bell said, “I mostly went there because my girlfriend was going to go there.” He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, so he majored in political science.

At the end of those four years at KSU, Bell and Schirmer were married, and they soon found themselves with a daughter, Catherine, and a son, Chris.

“We’ve just celebrated our 46th wedding anniversary,” Bell said. “She put up with me for a long time… probably the biggest accomplishment that I’ve ever had in my life is convincing Vicki to marry me!”

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