The way her mother remembers it, Karon White Gibson’s first day of kindergarten wasn’t like that of other children. Outside the Southwest Side school that first morning, the girl coolly surveyed the scene of wailing tykes clinging to their teary-eyed parents, then turned and calmly addressed her mother.
“You can go home now,” she told her. “I won’t be needing you anymore.”
It was a fitting beginning for a woman who, in the ensuing four decades, has rarely not been in charge. A nurse wannabe at age 9 and a candy striper at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park by her early teens, Gibson spent the Saturday nights of her high school years behind that hospital’s emergency room information desk.
By the time she’d hit 21, she was charge nurse of the psychiatric unit at what then was called Christ Hospital and Medical Center in Oak Lawn. But even that auspicious start was only a warmup for what was to come.
At age 26, she and another nurse founded a home health care company in Palos Hills, at a time when home health care was as novel an idea as women running companies. In the 20 years since, Gibson, 47, has parlayed that pioneering concept into a successful, 60-employee Summit-based nursing firm called AmericaNurse Ltd. Homecare, which specializes in serving the private duty home care needs of the sick and elderly.
Along the way, she has found time to serve as medical consultant on a half dozen well-known motion pictures, co-author a book, and-for the past eight years-host a cable television show examining a wide range of medical and social issues.
“She’s one of the most phenomenal women I’ve ever known,” said Marilyn Kelly, owner and president of Chicago’s Kelly Flour and, like Gibson, a member of the Committee of 200, an international group of preeminent women business owners and managers. “There’s no stopping her. She’s capable of accomplishing anything she sets her mind to do. And she’s also just about the most generous person I know-both with her time and her money.”
Marilyn Miglin, founder and owner of the Chicago-based cosmetics and fragrance empire that bears her name, is another admirer of Gibson.
“She’s one of those pioneering women in business who has been very successful,” said Miglin, who also met Gibson through the Committee of 200. “But it’s more than her business acumen that’s brought her success. It’s her perseverance, her dedication, and her caring for other human beings. Her internal sensitivity is what’s been her driving force.”
If studies of entrepreneurs hold any merit, Gibson is a paradigm of the breed-a first-born child who never met a roadblock she couldn’t foresee hurdling. It was her father, she recalled, who first put her to the test.
“When I was growing up, my father always said no-to everything,” she said recently. “From that point I had to turn it around and make it a yes. So today, when a man-or a woman-says no, it doesn’t really mean anything to me. That feeling has always served me well.”
Also standing her in good stead were her early experiences as a student nurse at Mt. Sinai Medical Center on Chicago’s near southwest side, ministering to gunshot and stabbing victims from the roiling neighborhood around the institution. From that day to this, she said, she’s realized that being a nurse-and running a home care business-elevates the concept of responsibility to a level few people ever experience.
“When you’re working with sick people day after day, it’s a huge responsibility,” she said. “It’s not just what they want, it’s what they need.
“Running this business, you don’t call and say, `We can’t make it.’ In a crisis situation, like a bad snowstorm, we don’t ask are we going to do it, we ask how are we going to do it?”
Getting it done, and done right, has been Gibson’s specialty since she enrolled at Mt. Sinai Medical Center nursing school, fresh out of Chicago’s Bogan High School. The three-year, year-round program wasn’t for the faint of heart.
“They worked us very long hours, weekdays and weekends,” she remembered. “We lived there at the medical center, taking classes and working from 6 or 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. By the time I graduated, there wasn’t any situation I couldn’t handle. My friends who were becoming teachers and social workers just kind of fell away. They didn’t have the responsibilities or the rewards I was getting.”
After her graduation in 1967, Gibson spent a year as both an emergency room and psychiatric unit nurse at Mt. Sinai before moving to Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn in 1968 as psychiatric unit charge nurse. In the early 1970s, when she was earning less than $12,000 annually, Gibson read a newspaper article about a California nurse who was making $35,000 a year giving blood pressure screenings from a booth in a parking lot. The article got Gibson’s entrepreneurial juices flowing.
“I felt there was a need for a home care service to middle-class people,” she recalled. “The middle class wasn’t being served, either by the visiting nurses who served poor people through Medicaid or the private nurses who visited the rich.”
After toying with the idea of starting a business for the better part of a year, Gibson and Joy Catterson of Chicago’s southwest side, another Christ Hospital nurse, took the plunge. On Sept. 12, 1973, against the advice of many friends and colleagues, they established Registered Professional Nurses P.C. in a small office in Palos Hills.
She said those advising against opening the business thought doctors would hire attorneys to halt their enterprise under the assumption that they were practicing medicine themselves. “People told us we were going to have lawyers in our parking lot trying to stop us, but that didn’t happen,” she recalled. Instead, potential customers started dialing their number.
“We expected we’d be doing dressing changes in people’s homes,” she said. “But we started getting calls from people who wanted us for longer periods of time.
“One man needed help with his wife, who was a stroke victim. Another man, a psychiatric patient, wanted to be treated by a psychiatric nurse rather than a psychiatrist.”
Gibson and Catterson were overseeing their business in the mornings and early afternoons, then turning around and pulling a 3 to 11 p.m. shift at Christ. On top of that, Gibson took on another task: that of publicist.
“You couldn’t advertise back then, so I actually called newspapers and asked them to do articles,” she said. “After a few stories, TV stations came out and started profiling us.”
Gibson and Catterson abandoned their hospital jobs in October of 1974, and Registered Professional Nurses grew rapidly, aided considerably by the arrival of a most unusual client: the ill-fated Old Chicago Amusement Park in Bolingbrook.
“Old Chicago was opening, and they needed someone to set up first aid services in the park,” Gibson remembered. “We not only did that, we ended up establishing the park’s insurance department, the lost children department, and the safety committee.”
Shortly after Old Chicago’s opening, a movie company invaded the park to film a motion picture called “The Fury.” Gibson was called on to establish additional first aid services for the movie company. She proved so adept in that role that other movie companies filming in the Chicago area hired her to provide similar services.
Over the next few years, she delivered first aid services for the companies of movies like “My Bodyguard,” “Dr. Detroit,” “Naked Face” and “Risky Business”-the last of which required her to spend 17 straight hours in a CTA elevated railcar.
By the early 1980s, her booming business had given her the confidence to try her hand at writing a book. Co-authored by Catterson and a freelance writer, the result was “On Our Own,” the story of Gibson and Catterson’s experiences in establishing a home care nursing business. Released as a hardcover by St. Martin’s Press in 1981, “On Our Own” went into a second printing and was released as a paperback by Avon the following year.
Meanwhile, Gibson had begun handling first aid services on television commercial shoots, which led to her decision to film a cable television commercial for the business.
“Multimedia (an Oak Lawn cable company) produced the commercial, and I did the voiceover,” she recalled. “They liked the way I handled the voiceover, and because they had a spot for a health care show, they offered me the chance to put one together.”
She successfully produced an hour-long show examining ulcerative colitis, then went on to produce and host a series of 10-minute shows on a variety of medical topics. But Gibson sensed the programs had far greater potential.
“Those 10-minute shows were basically me on screen as a talking head,” she said with a chuckle. “I knew I could make them more interesting. I asked for a 15-minute format that would allow me to interview a guest, and they gave me the go-ahead.”
Awhile later, Gibson heard that Metrovision cable in Hickory Hills was producing a series of medical shows for senior citizens.
“I took the tapes of my Multimedia shows over there, and that led to them offering me my own weekly half-hour show with guests, which started in September of 1988,” she said.
The show, now in its sixth season, is “R.N. Action.” Telecast each Wednesday evening at 7:30, it is seen in 17 southwest suburbs as well as in Northlake, Melrose Park and Norridge. As host and producer, Gibson is given a free hand to select both topics and guests.
“It’s really a talk show on current and controversial subjects,” she said. “I like to spotlight a registered nurse on each show, but I also bring in a lot of other people-physicians, psychologists, disabled people, support groups and nutritionists, to name a few.”
Topics have ranged from reimbursement issues, impotence, workplace stress, legislative health reform and cosmetic surgery to child care and psychology. For a recent show on street savvy safety tips, Gibson enlisted two retired Chicago policemen, one of them her husband, Ralph, a former detective, and the other a former investigator named Gil Broderick. Gibson serves as the moderator of the show but is not shy about jumping into the fray when she feels strongly about an issue.
“I try to get involved in the topics,” she said. “Because I’m an R.N., I feel it’s important for me to voice my opinions on the issues. I also ask plenty of questions. I ask the kinds of questions a nurse would ask, but also the questions I think any consumer sitting at home would ask.”
Part of her goal as moderator, she said, is to stimulate discussion and debate.
“On a lot of the shows, I try to get synergy and disagreement,” she said, adding that she often succeeds.
Representatives of the cable station say Gibson is not only a skilled moderator and interviewer, but has become a talented producer as well.
“Karon’s a very enthusiastic, in-control producer,” said Holly Tlusty, production manager at Metrovision. “She’s very organized and usually has her guests lined up weeks in advance. I can’t say enough about her.”
Gibson also earns praise from nurses she employs at AmericaNurse. One is Alice Ferguson, a licensed practical nurse who has worked full time for Gibson since 1987.
“She’s a very sharp businesswoman,” said Ferguson. “When it comes to insurance and legal matters, she has a mind like a steel trap. But she’s also a nice person-and a nice person to work for.”
Gibson has been alone at the helm since Catterson left the management of the company in 1983 to spend more time with her family. Though she still does some fill-in nursing work for the company, she no longer has any ownership in the business.
Catterson, who works as a nurse in the psychiatric unite at McNeal Hospital in Berwyn, remembers the early days of the company times fondly. “What I remember most is the fun,” she said. “We really had some good times back then. It was so different from the hospital because we were on our own.
“It was challenging. We didn’t know how we were going to pursue it at first, but we always knew it was going to be the right thing for us.”
Renamed AmericaNurse Ltd. Homecare six years ago, the company serves on the order of 25 to 60 patients annually, with most cases requiring long-term intensive care. Referrals come from physicians, social workers, nurse discharge planners and families of other patients. Additionally, AmericaNurse provides script consulting services for television shows and movies that deal with medical matters. Gibson declines to discuss the company’s revenues.
State Rep. Terry Stecz (D-Oak Forest), knows Gibson from when he chaired a committee looking into licensure of home health care practitioners. “I consider her to be one of the experts in the field,” he said. “She’s the first person I turn to if I have questions about home health care.
“Her company takes particular care in helping not only the health needs of the patients, but also in helping them through the morass of insurance-related paperwork. She really cares about her patients.”
Gibson no longer works 80 hours every week, as she did through most of her first two decades in business, but she still puts in work weeks of as many as 60 hours. In addition to managing AmericaNurse, which requires her to spend hours on the phone each day with insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, and patients, she constantly looks for new topics to spotlight on her show. And recently she has begun a new project: collaborating with her husband and Broderick on a book offering streetwise safety tips for women.
“She’s still the smartest nurse I know, but she works very hard,” says husband Ralph. “It works out to be a perpetual dinner date with us because she works late every night.”
She also revels in time spent with her family. Though her father is deceased and she has no children, she remains very close with her three younger brothers and her mother.
“Little did I know back on my first day of kindergarten how much I would continue to need my mother,” she laughed. “She’s in the process of moving into a home down the street from our house (in Plainfield), and I call her at least four times a day.”
Gibson’s mother, Vilma White, said, “I think her success is wonderful. Whatever she wants to do, she’ll do. Nothing stands in her way. Whatever she has planned, it will happen.”
As she looks to the future, Gibson admits she has a tough time envisioning retirement.
“I’ve always wanted to be a rescuer, to make a difference somehow-and I’ve always wanted to reach the greatest numbers of people possible. I started doing that through my business, and now I’d like to do it through the media, possibly with a syndicated TV show.”
Whatever direction her future takes, however, Gibson is unlikely to forget her first and primary passion. “I’ll always be a nurse first,” she said. “It no longer represents the majority of my time, but it’s what I enjoy most. There’s nothing that surpasses making a difference in people’s lives when they’re sick.”
