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Our next Hall of fame nominee, Dr. Connie Mitchell, attributes her success to growing
up in a stable home, which allowed her to evolve as she identified new interests, abilities
and opportunities.
Connie was born while her dad, Jerry Mitchell, was a student at Long Beach City College.
Jerry is a Hall of Champions basketball and baseball honoree who coached and taught English
at Lakewood and Wilson High Schools. Her mother, Dorothy Mitchell, also attended LBCC and later
became a LBCC career counselor and teacher. Connie's parents arranged for her to join
Saturday Spanish classes at age 5 which years later contributed to her receiving the national
Hispania Medal for her achievement in the language. She loved being a big sister to
Cristi, Carol and Carrie and treasures memories of family water ski vacations on the Colorado
River as well as winning on the game show Family Feud!
At John Marshall Jr. High in Long Beach Connie was a self-described "nerd" by being on
the math team, playing flute in band and orchestra, and serving as president of the Scholarship
Society. At Millikan High School, Connie joined the Drill Team and was active in campus clubs.
In her junior year, she was selected to be an exchange student in Argentina. She traveled,
joined a rock band, witnessed a coup d'etat and helped at a gaucho round-up. Her year
abroad was a life-altering experience, not only because she gained language fluency and
cultural insight, but because she appreciated both the diversity and the common connections
amongst all people in the world.
She returned from Argentina and enrolled at Long Beach City College. She recalls feeling
a bit lost in the transition but the small LAC campus and the great teachers helped her
to get grounded again. She supported herself working weekdays as a teaching assistant and
weekends as a tour guide on the Queen Mary. Connie fondly remembers poli sci instructor,
Mark Hannaford and her participation on the speech and debate team. She transferred to
Cal State Long Beach majoring in Chemistry and Spanish and found her life's direction
in the field of medicine.
Connie attended medical school at Michigan State University. During her clinical rotation
in the ER she discovered she could make decisions quickly and remain levelheaded under pressure
so Emergency Medicine became her choice for specialty training. Connie married fellow
med student David Tai right after graduation but rarely saw each other for three years
as they completed residency training in separate states. After residency training, Connie did
a fellowship in international health in Costa Rica helping the country set up an Emergency
Medical System. In 1989 she joined the University of California
Davis as a faculty member in the Department of Emergency Medicine.
In the meantime, she and David managed to see each other enough to become parents of
two sons and had a strong partnership as they both juggled careers and family. Vacations
were almost always adventures in hiking, skiing or traveling. David had a big family and annual
family reunions are a favorite memory for both of them. And the Mitchell-Tai house is
famous as the scariest house on Halloween, Connie's favorite holiday.
At UC Davis, the emergency room nurses invited Connie to develop a training video about victims
of domestic violence. As she gathered information, she discovered a compelling avenue for exploration
and a need for improved healthcare intervention. The 1994 video she helped to create is still
shown today and was the first step to her becoming a nationally recognized expert in
this field. She served as Director of a state-wide forensic training program for health professionals
and authored California's clinical guidelines for the care of victims of domestic violence.
She is the chief editor of a textbook titled, Intimate Partner Violence: A Health- Based
Perspective, which won an award for best medical textbook of the year in 2010.
Wanting to learn more about how to prevent violence, she took another detour — to obtain
a master's degree in public health at UCLA. That led to a position with the California
Department of Public Health and she now serves as the Chief of Health Policy in the new Office
of Health Equity. Connie continues to publish on public health issues and remains very engaged
at the national level
She has now been married for 30 years to David, an accomplished orthopedic surgeon, and they
live in Sacramento. Their son Mitch is a UC Santa Cruz graduate in Film and Digital Media
and their other son Zack is a senior in Construction Management at California State University
Sacramento. She says that her home has always been a sanctuary that replenishes her on a
daily basis and that her sons are her gift to the world.
For her service as a physician and leader in health policy, the Long Beach City College
Board of Trustees and President --Superintendent Eloy Ortiz Oakley proudly induct Dr. Connie
Mitchell into the 2013 Hall of fame.