A helping hand
Lois Silverman's earliest memories are not happy ones. At 4, she remembers peering out through the bars of a crib at an orphanage where she had been sent with her younger sister after her mother died. She felt alone. And afraid. And didn't understand why she was there. ''Life was, and I am not exaggerating, life was cruel," Silverman says.
A lifetime later, Silverman's view has improved considerably, starting with the spectacular view from her stunning home on Commonwealth Avenue at the foot of Boston's Public Garden, a building investment luminary Peter Lynch also calls home. She built a company from scratch and took it public. From her living room she started the Commonwealth Institute, which in eight years has grown into an important forum for helping women entrepreneurs. This week Lois Silverman becomes chairwoman of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a powerful seat in the city's booming healthcare economy. But more important to her, it is the place where she got her start with a $300 nursing scholarship, and in a real sense is the home she never had as a child.
Silverman's friends and family attribute her success to her drive, her intelligence, her passion, her ability to synthesize differing opinions and persuade others to follow. Silverman, however, thinks there is another lesson altogether in her story: ''Everybody," she says, ''needs a hand once in awhile."
It is that lesson more than any other that has stuck with her as she has reinvented herself from nurse to chief executive to philanthropist to chairwoman of one of Boston's important academic medical centers. It is the lesson, in fact, that provided the basis to everything good that would follow.
Silverman, now 65, spent a year in that orphanage after her mother's unexpected death from complications from surgery. When her father remarried he reclaimed his daughters, and the family moved to Fall River and then Providence. Her father suffered a series of heart attacks and became an invalid. Money was tight, and her father died when she was 15. ''Life was very, very difficult for us," says Silverman's sister, Janice Gillis, a Rhode Island stockbroker. Two years later that $300 scholarship from an organization known as JORI -- Jewish Orphans of Rhode Island -- gave her a way out.
She went on to nursing school at Beth Israel, but never college. She became a rehabilitation nurse, then she saw a job in the want ads for an insurance company looking for a nurse. She spent five years helping the insurer get disabled workers back to work, becoming a vice president before she had a falling out with a new boss. Then she took $20,000 in severance pay -- she couldn't get a bank loan -- and started her own company doing the same thing. The first day she went out banging on doors and came back with five cases. Eighteen years later her company, CRA Managed Care Inc., had nearly 2,000 employees when she took it public.
Since leaving the company she built, Silverman has been trying to give back what she was given. She started the Commonwealth Institute and renewed her relationship with the hospital. If she has flown under the radar of men like me, Boston's women executives know better. ''She is willing to be on the ground to do the work she cares about," says June Rokoff, a former Lotus Development Corp. executive and vice chairwoman of the Commonwealth Institute.
It has been a remarkable journey from orphanage to nursing school to hospital chairwoman. She has been married 43 years, is a mother of two, and to this day remains a registered nurse. ''Success," she likes to say, ''isn't about the big bang. It is about making life incrementally better every day."
And none of us, she says, do it alone. Everybody needs a helping hand once in a while -- and it is a debt we must repay. No one understands that better than Lois Silverman.
Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902. 
