Joan Riccardi Humphrey reacts to the plaque denoting her induction into the Brookfield Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame. Committee member Dan Deramo is with her.
This story is part of a series on the 2024 inductees into the Brookfield Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame.
Joan Riccardi Humphrey considers herself lucky.
“I’ve had a lot of lucky things happen, and I’ve taken advantage of them,” she said.
She was lucky that Lou Saloom, who was teaching the Occupational Work Experience class – the precursor to what is now known as Career-Based Intervention – when she was in high school, challenged her to try to get a job at a Masury industry. Humphrey wasn’t even in the OWE class.
But, the 1975 Brookfield High grad got the office job, working from 1 to 4 p.m. each day while attending high school in the morning. The work was boring and she couldn’t relate to the other workers, whose lives revolved around gossip and what they were going to make for dinner, but she loved the money, which became a prime motivator, she said. She could learn to drive because she could afford the insurance, she said.
She’s lucky that her guidance counselor, Wayne Bair, encouraged her to go to college. Although she didn’t enroll until later, Bair had planted a seed that Humphrey would not have considered watering.
“My mom would always say, ‘Curiosity killed the cat. You can’t be curious,’” Humphrey said.
Humphrey came from a working-class family. Her dad was a mailman and her mom worked for Packard Electric making car parts. “No one ever went to college,” she said.
She was lucky that she ignored her mom’s advice about being curious.
“I love being, ‘Why does that work? How do you do that? What’s that about?’” Humphrey said.
Humphrey worked a secretarial job in the Sharon hospital emergency room after high school, and fell in love with the chaos.
“That’s where some stuff was going down,” she said. “You know things come in that door that are just out of control.”
Intrigued by the medical field, Humphrey started her climb into it by becoming an emergency medical technician for Brookfield Fire Department. Then, she went to the Sharon hospital’s school of nursing.
“I took it step by step,” she said. “I worked the whole time I was in nursing school.”
She worked as a nurse in the Sharon ER, then moved to St. Elizabeth Hospital’s ER in Youngstown because it was a Level 1 Trauma site. She attended Youngstown State University while working at St E’s.
“When I went to college, I just never stopped,” Humphrey said. “I am still trying to learn as much as I possibly can every single day.”
Humphrey has five degrees: in nursing, public health and health education. She is a nurse practitioner, a former teacher at Penn State and YSU and now works for Primary Health Network of Sharon, primarily serving the Amish community.
Humphrey stressed to a class of high school students that she was never a straight-A student, considering such a pursuit to be too stressful. Plus, sitting to study does not suit her personality.
“I would rather scrub a floor than write a paper,” she said.
That’s another way in which she is lucky – She understands that her biggest hurdle is herself.
“Brick walls are not put there to stop you. They’re out there to see how bad you want this,” she said.
