Jan and Doug Garver

After her career in nursing, Jan Garver and her husband, Doug, are finding new ways to continue that caring for a new generation.

by Kristen Schmidt

The life story of Jan and Doug Garver can be hard to separate into the stories of two people. Maybe that’s because they speak in the “we” so much, or because so many of their sentences are affectionately completed by the other person. Jan, BSN (’75), and Doug, MCRP (’76), have been together since they met at Boardman High in Youngstown, Ohio, back when he was in band and wore Coke-bottle glasses and she was in choir. They stayed together, attended Ohio State, raised a family and are now settled in a light-filled ranch in Hilliard, where they plan to age in place. “We do feel so grateful,” said Jan, who retired from a career in nursing at Ohio State in 2005.

After the busy years of working and raising their daughter and son and, more recently, caring for aging parents, they still look to their future, though at a different pace and through a different lens. They prioritize family, travel, gratitude and paying forward, including to their alma mater.

From their seats in Ohio Stadium on football Saturdays, they had seen major donors recognized on the field or on the big screen. That wasn’t them, they felt. They were, well, ordinary. In a good way. Then they found out they could transform the lives of individual students in perpetuity, through an endowed scholarship. Ohio State doubled the impact of their $100,000 gift through the Scarlet and Gray Advantage debt-free tuition program. The Garvers set up a scholarship that will fund one nursing student and one city and regional planning student each year – representing their respective fields.

In paying forward to future nurses and engineers, they could also pay back to their hometown, still affected by the migration of the steel industry that started in the late 1970s.

“Fifty thousand jobs were lost to steel and supportive service functions, and the city never recovered from that,” Doug said. “We made it a preference that students from Boardman have consideration for our scholarship. We’re trying to pay back to where our roots are.”

Jan Garver started attending Ohio State after graduating from Boardman. They married at the end of Jan’s junior year, two weeks after Doug graduated from what is now the University of Mount Union, and he moved to Columbus to start his graduate degree in city and regional planning. Their college memories are mostly of being together, studying, working and living in married student housing at Buckeye Village.

“We got engaged after my freshman year at Ohio State and we got married in 1974. A lot of my decisions were based on that,” Jan said. She knew as a teenager she wanted to be a nurse and follow in the footsteps of other women in her family. Jan saw the four-year program in the College of Nursing as a perfect fit. She was a strong student and was even encouraged by a professor to continue to medical school, but she loved the patient-nurse relationship and chose to work in endocrinology at University Hospital (now The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center) after graduation.

From endocrinology, she moved to the medical intensive care unit, which at the time had only six beds. She stayed 14 years, becoming, she said, the “old lady” on the unit. While she worked nights and weekends, Doug covered after-school parenting duties. “He was Mr. Mom,” Jan said.

When their daughter and son reached junior high and high school, Jan was ready for a scheduling change. “I was starting to miss out on things from 3 to 11 p.m. It was bugging me,” she said. She switched to days and weekends and took a job in outpatient dermatology, where she stayed another 15 years. “It was a totally different kind of nursing,” Jan said. “One of the things that I really enjoyed was patient education.”

Doug was a busy professional himself. He worked for decades in economic development and affordable housing, retiring in 2017 as the executive director of the Ohio Housing Finance Agency. “It’s great to be involved in a setting like our agency, where the mission is affordable housing. It’s a basic human need,” he said. “I’m doing work that makes a difference in people’s lives. It was very special.”

In retirement, Jan shifted her nursing knowledge to helping care for her and Doug’s aging parents, advocating for their healthcare needs and becoming a valuable link between them and their caretakers in assisted-living facilities.

Now, in yet another new stage of life together, they are traveling the world (including a safari to Kenya), reconnecting with Buckeye friends old and new, and spending time with their five grandchildren. Though they come from different academic and professional backgrounds, for the Garvers there has always been a common driver in their work, their lives and now in their philanthropy. It’s simple, even ordinary. Do what you can to make life better for others.