For decades to come, patients will rest, recover and regain their health in a new inpatient unit at UnityPoint Health — Trinity Regional Medical Center.

Those patients and their visitors will likely notice the words Highland Herum Center for Acute Care on the wall.

The center is named after two families with a local connection.

Floyd Herum is a Fort Dodge resident who donated a significant amount of money that helped pay for turning a previously empty section of the hospital into a state-of-the-art place to care for patients recovering from surgery or in need of heart monitoring.

The maiden name of Herum’s late wife, Melva, was Highland.

But the Highland family’s last name didn’t live on because her brother, Bob, died in a plane crash during World War II.

”When he died there was no one else to carry on the Highland name,” Herum said Thursday during an open house at the new center. ”My wife was very distraught.”

The Highland name, however, will now be remembered forever because of a gesture by Herum. He directed that the center should carry the Highland name as well as his own.

”I’m extending that by getting her name on the wall,” he said Thursday.

That touching gesture reveals Herum’s compassionate nature.

It’s kind and generous people like Herum that help make Fort Dodge and Webster County such wonderful places to live.

Generations of patients that Herum will never meet will get well because of what he did to make the acute care center possible.

We thank him for unselfishly making it possible for the health care needs of others to be met.