Delivered for a Purpose
Friday, April 13, 2012 at 12:59PM Photo of Debra DeHass Lehr by Denice Rovira HazlettThere are 5,700 certified nurse midwives in the United States. Stock analysts? Around 250,000. And it’s estimated there are fewer than 2,000 professional opera singers vying for just a handful of positions in America.
Debra DeHass Lehr has been all three.
Spend any time at all with Lehr, and you’ll notice three things-- her infectious laugh, her intense drive, and her passion for serving others. But what you might not realize is that it took three distinctly different careers and 20 years away from Holmes County for her to finally discover where she truly belongs.
Lehr started out in Millersburg, in a family serious about serving others. Her dad, Don DeHass, was a musician with a passion for keeping young kids off the streets. Her grandmother, Eileen Baker DeHass, had an oft-repeated motto: not for ourselves, but for others.
So it’s not surprising that Lehr has always felt compelled to a career of servanthood.
But, the trouble was, which to choose.
Because while many decide on one career path, following it throughout their lives, Lehr has lived three, each in the quest to fulfill a persistent longing.
As a child, Lehr was impressed by her grandmother’s example. Eileen Baker was the daughter of a farmer who chose to serve others through nursing. While working at Massillon State Hospital, she met and fell in love with maintenance man, Ted DeHass. The couple shared a vision to give care not only to the elderly in their community, but to those who suffered from psychiatric illnesses, many who had no place to go.
Along with Dr. Adam Earney, they developed Castle Nursing Home for the elderly and mentally ill. Because it was Eileen Dehass’ dream to provide not just a medical facility but a home for the residents, they often joined family vacations, zoo outings, boating trips, and even little Debra’s birthday parties.
“It was very much a home-like atmosphere,” Lehr remembers. “My grandmother adored them. They were her passion.”
But then there was her father. Don DeHass could play almost any instrument he got his hands on and inspired Lehr’s love of music. Legend has it that his band, The Clichés, recorded Hang On Sloopy two weeks before the McCoys, who shot the hit to number one in October 1965. DeHass even bought Millersburg’s old Russell Theater, creating a live music venue that provided some of Lehr’s fondest childhood memories, but also one of the saddest.
On August 1, 1977, a few days after his band Fern Gardner & The Country Class played the Football Hall of Fame parade, Don DeHass fell asleep at the Castle Theater and never awoke. He was 35 years young and had suffered a heart attack, leaving behind his wife, Tootzi, and three children, including a devastated Debra.
That’s when 15-year-old Lehr decided to get out of Holmes County. Her family had been so well-known that it often felt like living in a fishbowl. With her father gone, she left Millersburg behind to fully pursue music at Michigan’s Interlochen Arts Academy, consistently taking first chair and top honors with saxophone. At Interlochen, her sax teacher advised voice lessons to allow her instrument to sing, and after the first lesson, her instructor delivered a shocking directive.
She was never to pick up that sax again. She needed to sing.
So she studied opera under soprano Marguerite Piazza, graduated early, and headed to New York to learn from famous tenor John Alexander, her voice taking her from coast to coast, landing her in productions from D.C. to Alaska, London to Milan.
But, deep down, she knew that wasn’t her calling.
And since the arts didn’t always provide a steady income, Lehr took a temporary job at Solomon Brothers, a huge investment banking firm. She set singing aside as the company promoted her higher and higher until, eventually, she was a stock analyst for property/casualty insurance, studying finance and economics at New York University. She climbed her way to financial consultant, hustling around-the-clock to price Warren Buffet’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) for Berkshire Hathaway.
But finance didn’t feel like her calling, either.
Then, in 2002, a call from home changed everything.
Castle was in financial distress. They wanted Lehr, with her experience in finance and economics, to turn it around. On the long drive from New York City to Holmes County, she thought about her life. At 38, she’d been both a successful opera singer and a financial analyst. But still, she wondered, what if the sky were the limit? What would she do if she could do anything? What was her calling?
And that’s when she knew.
Once at Castle, it all came back to her--serving the patients, being a voice for those who didn’t have one, giving men, women and children the care they needed.
So, while working full time, Lehr enrolled in nursing school at the University of Akron. The calling she’d felt for so many years, starting with her grandmother’s residents, was finally realized.
When the family decided to sell Castle, it was painful for Lehr, but she knew a larger company could see her grandmother’s dream continue. It also freed her to fully pursue nursing, moving straight from graduation to Case Western Reserve University’s doctoral program with a dual major created just for her as certified nurse midwife and family nurse practitioner. With these two things, she could serve people at every stage and need of their lives.
Now Debra DeHass Lehr, MSN, CNM, FNP and soon to be DNP, spends part of her time with Pomerene Hospital’s midwifery service catching 120 babies per year with her midwifery partner, Mary Ann Durbin, CNM. She also serves one day a week overseeing Carroll County Department of Health’s prenatal and women’s clinic, takes occasional trips to Guatemala for medical missions with Refuge International, and is rounding the corner on her post-master’s certificate as a family nurse practitioner.
At 48, she has finally realized her calling.
“I have the best career in the world,” Lehr says, “but I realize I’m just the hands. I very much feel I’m a servant carrying out God’s work.”
Lehr still sings at St. Peter’s Catholic Church and she doesn’t watch the stock market at all anymore. While those were great careers, and she did them well, she knows now they were merely vehicles to deliver her to this life, back to Holmes County, to serving the community she loves.
And she can’t imagine being anything--or anywhere--else.




