The story behind the phone number
Three generations of Blums. One Rochester company.
All licensed nursing-home and hospital administrators, running the same Rochester company for forty-three years. Two nurses, two nursing assistants, one phone line on opening day. Same family, same town, still answering.
Dorothy E. Blum buys Maple Manor.
Dorothy was an R.N. who’d watched the gap between hospital and home swallow people whole. So she bought a nursing home in Rochester and ran it her way — staffing the building around the clock with Registered Nurses, building a rehabilitative PT program, and hiring a dietitian on day one. All seven of her sons worked there at some point: nursing assistants, dishwashers, housekeeping, the front desk.
Four of her sons open Comfort Health.
By the early 1980s, Maple Manor was rehabbing and discharging 85% of its residents back home within thirty days. Which meant a lot of people were going home and needing help they couldn’t get. Pat Blum was the Assistant Administrator. He and three of his brothers — all licensed nursing-home and hospital administrators by then, working from Minnesota to Texas to California — opened Comfort Home Health Care Group out of two offices converted from part of the Maple Manor laundry. Two nurses. Two nursing assistants. One phone line.
Still local. Still family-operated.
Forty-three years later, the phone still rings into a Rochester office. The same family runs it. The same six service lines coordinate from the same coordinator desk. The discharge floor still calls it the company that runs the plan. We didn’t scale into a national franchise — we stayed in the town we started in, and stayed in the work we started doing.
