LITTLE ROCK — For the Blackmons, still in their 30s, kismet and the cosmos have conspired to crown them king and queen of the Miracle Ball on Dec. 10.
Fine, co-chairmen.
In just its sixth year, the fundraiser for Arkansas Children’s Hospital is one of the premier social events on the fall calendar. Last year it welcomed a little more than 400 - intimate, as these gatherings go - and this year Ginger Blackmon has planned for 500. Last year, the event grossed more than $500,000, and they’re expecting substantially more this year. The theme is a night in Morocco, based loosely on the legend of Scheherazade.
Thomas and Ginger Blackmon (nee Ledbetter) are the son and daughter of committed, innovative philanthropists. Thomas’ father, the original scion of Blackmon Auctions, arranged one of the first charity auctions for Youth Home. Ginger’s mother, Jeanne, was helping run the Fort Smith river festival when Ginger was no older than her own son Clark, 4. Jeanne Ledbetter is still volunteering with the Salvation Army and her church, something that makes Ginger ruminate: “I wouldn’t be surprised if [my daughter] Grace somehow followed her mother.”
During a recent junket, the Blackmons pulled up to the new, 258,000-square-foot addition to Children’s Hospital, which features a largely blue glass exterior, wavy roofline and sand-colored eaves that will no doubt inspire many children to dub the dreaded hospital visit a “trip to the beach.” Or maybe, “The Aquarium.”
This day, Clark espies something better yet.
“I see a bulldozer !”
“Where?” someone asks.
“Right in front of us!”
Blackmon Auctions holds liquidation sales of heavy construction and farm equipment, trucks and locomotives. So if lots of other children are too intimately familiar with the inside of Children’s Hospital, Clark is probably too familiar with the cabs of heavy rigs. His dad recently bought a firetruck just for kicks.
Clark had an outpatient procedure at the hospital when he was 6 months old, and his father remembers talking to some of the other parents in the waiting room and finding out that “there were people from all over the state and Missouri and Tennessee who had driven to this hospital specifically for an outpatient procedure, and a lot of them were regulars.
“Ginger and I have been able this year to see the back end of this business, and comparing this hospital here in a city of 200,000 to a hospital, I won’t say which one, but it’s one of the top two children’s hospitals in the nation, and it’s in a city of a million. When we walked through it, comparing technology and capacity, we’d turn to each other and say, ‘We have that same thing.’ We were floored by the level of care, the quality of care, Arkansas Children’s Hospital offers to this region.”
Inside the South Wing, the Blackmons check out the progress of the construction. Arkansas Children’s Hospital spans 29 city blocks, and in its 99 years, South Wing is the biggest single construction project. The four-story complex will house entirely new hematology/oncology and infant/toddler units, expand the neonatal intensive care unit and pediatric heart center, and welcome a new emergency department. It will house new neurology, ENT (ear-nose-throat), audiology, and dental clinics.
Today, the interior walls and floors are mostly finished. Some of the drop ceilings are absent still, along with the ubiquitous hospital railings.
“It’s funny, I walk in here, and I know the guys running the job. The Nabholzes,” Thomas Blackmon says.
The wing will open in the middle of next year. Its $120 million price tag is being paid in part by hospital capital funds and bonds, but from $25 million to $50 million will be the responsibility of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Foundation, says John Bel, foundation president, who answers to the nonprofit’s board of directors, whose most recent vacancy was filled this year by Ginger Blackmon.
Though she deals with Type 1 diabetes, neither Clarknor Grace do. They’re perfectly healthy. That the couple hasn’t spent a lot of time there at the hospital because of an ill child is a blessing they want to pay forward.
“I would hope every person [involved in] the foundation thinks about us as ‘we,’ because if the Blackmons, the Cresses, the Hickmans and the Buchanans ‘own’ this hospital, it has a wonderful future. If they think Dr. Gates owns the hospital, that’s not the future we want,” Bel says.
Patron sponsorship to the Miracle Ball (tickets for two) is $1,500. Tables (tickets for 10) are $5,000.
The event is being catered by Capers restaurant, and there will be a 10-foot-tall lighted cake designed by Jennifer Matsubara of Shelby Lynn’s Cake Shoppe in Springdale.
The Blackmons, and Holly Barron and Fred Scarborough at the hospital worked with Mike Nichols at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre and Yslan Hicks at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock to develop the Moroccan theme, loosely based on Scheherazade. Its execution is entirely on the shoulders of the Blackmons, Scarborough, the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Auxiliary and other volunteers.
“One of the great successes of the Miracle Ball is that it’s a small event. This one is intentionally not bigger,” Bel says. “As a result ... it’s one that community leaders really respond to.”
“We’ve tried to fill the evening with little celebrations,” Ginger Blackmon says, because the hospital is a miracle, and it’s almost 100!
A young 100.
Miracle Ball is from 6 p.m. to midnight Dec. 10 at the hospital’s Children’s Hall. For more information, call Holly Barron, (501) 364-2092, or e-mail or
High Profile, Pages 43 on 11/20/2011