The Timbers of Cass County Administrator Kevin Baker lived in Dowagiac near Beckwith Theatre from the turn of the century to 2004 while working in South Bend, Ind.

Robin Lovely, LPN, started as admissions coordinator Feb. 10.

As The Timbers is poised today from 4 to 7 p.m. to celebrate its first anniversary with an open house, it is home to 63 residents, including the six original occupants.

Census has been as high as 72, but in January 36 more beds come on line.

There will be a tree plaque dedication ceremony with representatives of the Deal family at 6 p.m.

“We’ve had more than 50 rehabbed to home since October,” Lovely said Wednesday afternoon.

Baker, of Niles, started June 6, coming from three years with a facility in New Carlisle, Ind.

“There have been a lot of changes,” Baker said, “but I look at change as opportunity for growth. I’ve enjoyed the weeks I’ve been here. I’ve been in long-term care all my life. Most of my long-term career has been in the northern half of Indiana. This is my first venture as an administrator into Michigan.

I’ve been licensed as an administrator since 1995 and started in long-term care in 1984. I know it from the ground up.”

Publicly celebrating the first anniversary acknowledges the community collaboration, including an active  advisory board which continues, which Atrium embraced when it acquired the property at 55432 Colby St.

“That board didn’t stop once this became operational,” Baker said. “They’re still very much a part, watching what we’re doing. We have a liaison (Rotary Club President Barbara Groner) who meets with Robin and me. She actually heads up our volunteer program, which is wonderful. It really helps us a lot to have volunteers in the building. It helps tremendously with activities to be able to offer different things. This is Atrium’s premier building, its first venture into new construction/remodel. It just reinforces their commitment to this community and wanting the community to keep involved. As the size of a small factory, Atrium respects its responsibility to this community as an employer. Atrium wants to be a good employer and a good community partner. The town was devastated” when Dowagiac Nursing Home folded and “Atrium wants to be sensitive to that and has taken the time to understand the history and built a dialogue with community leaders before it ever broke ground. I’ve never seen that with any other corporation I’ve worked for. I was fine where I was, but that commitment intrigued me.”

Baker, who as a youngster kept himself in spending money by delivering more than 300 Penny Savers every Tuesday, said long-term care became his career because “growing up, I always had interaction with the older set. I grew up in a household with four generations in it. I gravitated, particularly, toward my great-grandmother, and we’d visit all the little widow aunts. My mother is a nurse. If your mother is a nurse in long-term care, I can almost guarantee you that at some time you have been drafted at some function at the nursing home. That’s where I got started. Ironically, until I went to work at Miller’s in New Carlisle, I never really applied for a job. My first job (washing) pots and pans, the dietary manager said, ‘You’re here all the time. Would you like a job?’ I was very fortunate to work both vertically and laterally through that company in various positions and went on to go through that company’s administrator training program.”

For 10 years, during the time he lived in Dowagiac, Baker worked for the priests of Holy Cross at Notre Dame.

“I went in and renovated their medical complex,” he recalled, “and brought up the standard. I was sought out for that job – they kept bugging me for almost a year to work with them. After 10 years, they got to where I needed some other challenge. I think that’s what appeals to me about this facility is the newness.”

“There’s excitement and energy in building a team,” Baker said. “Even at a year old, we’re still growing. There’s a lot of growth yet to come. We have 36 beds that won’t even come on-line until January of 2012. Right now we’re around an average census of 66 or 67 residents out of a capacity of 72.

“That won’t change until January. Then we’ll go to our full capacity of 108. There’s still a lot of staff development because we’ll be adding a whole another staff for that unit coming on-line with 36 beds. That’s another small nursing home. We have about 110 employees right now. When it’s all said and done, we’ll probably top out at about 150 employees.”

“That was one of the draws I had” in the religious setting, too, he said.

“The last home I had in Fort Wayne, I worked with the community there to develop a very specialized Alzheimer’s unit,” Baker said. “I’ve always found myself in these positions growing something within that organization. When this opportunity was presented to me, it had that same appeal. As a matter of fact, I do garden when I have spare time, but don’t look at it right now with the long hours here. I really wish I’d been in on the design side. I had that opportunity with the religious, working with the architects and contractors. The religious had not had anybody with administrative background in long-term care before I came on. Actually, I was their first lay person with any real authority.”

Lovely and Baker only met when they began working together in June, but “we mesh,” said Lovely, who graduated from nursing school in 1981 and has worked in Niles and in South Bend during her 30-year career.

Though she feels at home in long-term care, “When I graduated from nursing school, I didn’t want to go into it – but I love it,” Lovely said. “You’d be surprised at how many people are living into their 100s.”

“The population is changing,” Baker agreed. “We’re taking care of a very different population. They’re much more infirm, which is a dynamic of what Medicare is doing.

“They want people home, so the industry started to modulate over to be focused on that.”