When Armetta Hamilton joined the nursing team at Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula in 1967, she launched a family tradition.
Over the next 57 years, her daughter and then her granddaughter would walk the same halls Hamilton had, extending the family's legacy of caring for the community.
Hamilton started at Community Hospital after she and her family returned to the Monterey Peninsula from Germany for the second time. When the Army called her husband, high school sweetheart Ollie James Hamilton, to serve in Vietnam, she held down the home front in Seaside, caring for their two children, 12-year-old Larry and 9-month-old Pam, and working as a nurse.
Her first day at Community Hospital led to 29 rewarding and compassionate years, first at the bedside as a nurse on the Main Pavilion unit, and the last 13 as an administrative supervisor.
"I really, really loved my job," Hamilton says. "I loved the patients. I loved going to work. In 1967, it was a small hospital. Everybody knew everybody. It was like a family. It was home."
Just seeing my mom helping others, I knew that was what I wanted to do. I always admired how my mom cared for people, and how she made a difference in their lives. I wanted to do that, too.
— Pam Peete, former Community Hospital nurse
Hamilton retired in 1996 but continued to support the hospital and community as a committed monthly donor to Montage Health Foundation for the past 32 years. She is particularly passionate about giving in the areas of heart and cancer care, health conditions Ollie battled before his death in 2016 after 62 years of marriage. Her compassionate care for the community started through nursing and endures through her ongoing philanthropic support — and through the next generations of her family.
Hamilton's daughter, Pam Peete, started as a volunteer candy striper at Community Hospital. After taking courses at Monterey Peninsula College's Maurine Church Coburn School of Nursing, she began her own nursing career at the hospital. She later earned a master's degree in nursing education and became a nurse manager at a Southern California hospital.
"Just seeing my mom helping others, I knew that was what I wanted to do," Peete says. "I always admired how my mom cared for people, and how she made a difference in their lives. I wanted to do that, too."
The healthcare devotion also rubbed off on Peete's daughter and Hamilton's granddaughter, Jasmine Peete — at first in a show-and-tell kind of way.
"When my teacher asked me what I wanted to be, I made a shoebox, and it was of a hospital," Jasmine Peete says of an elementary school project. Now 24, she graduated in May 2024 from Montage Health Foundation's Minorities in Medicine program, gaining valuable experience shadowing Community Hospital doctors and receiving guidance and mentorship to help her pursue a career in healthcare.
Jasmine Peete aspires to be a doctor, following the healthcare path forged by her mother and grandmother. "Having the chance to help patients and walk down the same hospital halls that my mother and grandmother walked down during their careers has been pretty awesome."
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