Endowed Chair Series

Abstract

John Bent was president of the board of trustees of the old St. Luke’s Hospital in the 1950s, having first been elected trustee in 1948. He negotiated the merger of St. Luke’s with Presbyterian, becoming the new institution’s first president (1956–1960). He served as vice chair then chair of the board, and became a life trustee in 1976. He is quoted as saying, “It is a question of teamwork—of combining strength with strength” about the merger of the two hospitals. Bent was known as “Pleasure” to his closest friends and was the moving force behind founding the Anchor Cross Society at Rush University. A World War II veteran who received a Purple Heart and Bronze Star as a Navy air intelligence officer, Bent returned from the war and formed a venture capital investment partnership called Bent, McBride and Thorne. He was active there until 1963, when he became chairman of the Hartford Plaza Bank. He was a Pennsylvania native and graduate of Yale University but raised his family in Lake Forest after marrying a Lake Forest native, Mary, a member of the Shedd family. He served as a Lake Forest alderman in the 1950s and played on the 1932 U.S. Olympic ice hockey team (which lost to Canada in the finals) but was modest about having achieved this silver medal. Bent was a friend of Dr. Hassan Najafi, chairman emeritus of the cardiovascular–thoracic surgery (CVTS) department at Rush. As part of the campaign for Rush, Bent “finished off” an endowed chair in CVTS in 1992. He did not want his name on the chair and offered Najafi’s name instead. Najafi asked Bent’s wife, Mary, to persuade him and, thus, the chair came to be titled the Mary and John Bent Chair of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery. There were other donors to the chair as well, which helped fulfill the goal of raising $2 million. The chair now serves to support Robert Higgins, MD, MSHA, FACS, and the mission of the department of cardiovascular and thoracic surgery at Rush.