Heating-and-air contractor became a nurse later in life

7/4/2003

Milton C. Hollowell, Jr., a heating and air conditioning contractor who embarked on a second career as a registered nurse late in life so he could look after his ailing wife and parents, died Tuesday in his Spencer Township home. He was 65.

He died of heart failure caused by cardiac myopathy, a degenerative weakening of the heart muscle, said his daughter, Lisa Hollowell.

Mr. Hollowell, born April 4, 1938, was the first African-American in the Toledo area to be licensed as a heating and air conditioning contractor, relatives said. He worked for himself and occasionally provided services to customers poor enough that payment was unlikely.

“We live in Ohio, and you've got to have heat,” Ms. Hollowell said. “He knew ahead of time [that he might not get paid] and he did it anyway.”

But the work Mr. Hollowell ended up enjoying the most, his daughter said, was his brief nursing stint. He graduated the University of Toledo School of Nursing in 1998 and worked in both Toledo and New Orleans before retiring from Medforce Nursing Service there in 2000.

“He had always had an interest in nursing, and when mom and his parents got sick, he decided that would be a good time to obtain more knowledge so he could take care of the ones he loved,” Ms. Hollowell said.

Mr. Hollowell and his wife, Hazel Eley Hollowell, subsequently moved back to Spencer Township, along with their daughter, when his own health began to decline.

Born in Galesburg, Ill., Mr. Hollowell in 1956 graduated Toledo's Macomber Vocational Technical High School, where he played on the football team. He then joined the United States Air Force, with which he was stationed at Torrejon Air Base in Spain as a clerk.

Ms. Hollowell said her father also played football at the air base, and was a Golden Gloves boxer in his younger days as well.

After his 1960 military discharge, Mr. Hollowell was a truck driver before getting his heating and air conditioning license.

At UT, the daughter said, Mr. Hollowell was honored as a “non-traditional” nursing student and learned his skills quickly, often tutoring his classmates.

“He was a jack-of-all-trades - there wasn't much he couldn't do,” Ms. Hollowell said, noting her father built the family home in Spencer Township, including doing all the plumbing and electrical wiring himself. He tended pigs, horses, and sheep on the family property too, she said.

Mr. Hollowell's survivors include his wife of 40 years, Hazel Eley Hollowell; daughter, Lisa Hollowell; sons, James L., Christopher J., and Milton C. Hollowell III; brothers, Ernest, Vernest, Leon, and Terrence Hollowell; sisters, Gloria Hill and Sandra, Jacqueline, Barbara, and Madeline Hollowell; and seven grandchildren.

The body is in the C. Brown Funeral Home, Inc. Chapel, 1629 Nebraska Ave., where the family will receive visitors from 10 to 11 a.m. tomorrow. Funeral services will begin at 11 a.m. in the mortuary.