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Connie Crandall, who established the program as among the best in the U.S., calls it a career

In 1985, RMCOEH had existed for less than a decade. Its Continuing Education program, while successfully established, was also in its infancy. It offered all of eight courses. 

Those who are familiar with the program now know that, 39 years later, the situation is remarkably different. The program offers more than 60 courses. It includes the Mountain West OSHA Education Center. It serves more than 3,000 trainees annually and impacts more than 8,000 businesses. 

The driving force behind that progress, which has earned the program a reputation as being among the best of its kind in the nation? Connie Crandall, who served as the program’s director from 1985 through 2019, then returned in 2021 in an advisory role. 

After four decades, though, Crandall will no longer be pushing the CE program forward. She retired in 2023, with RMCOEH holding a celebration in January to recognize her career and the many achievements that marked it. 

Reflecting at the celebration, she said she is grateful to have had the opportunity to spend so many years in a job she loved. 

“It was amazing,” she said. “It was the heyday of occupational safety and health. The Occupational Safety and Health Act had been passed in 1970, so professions were building and there was so much continuing education that you could do. We responded to grants and it just blossomed. I was lucky. I had opportunities come to me.”

In addition to increasing the number of courses the program offered and helping found the Mountain West OSHA Education Center, Crandall’s achievements include spearheading distance education correspondence courses in the 1990s, paving the way for RMCOEH’s involvement in hazardous substance training, and collaborating with the CE programs of other NIOSH-sponsored Education and Research Centers. 

RMCOEH Center Director Kurt Hegmann, MD, lauded Crandall at her retirement celebration, noting that she is by far the longest-serving faculty or staff member in the center’s history. He credited the CE program’s success over the years as being a key driver behind the growth of the entire center. 

For her part, Crandall said she intends to fill her time during retirement through continuing to volunteer at animal nonprofits and other charitable organizations. But she will miss getting to fulfill a mission she is passionate about — especially alongside the people with whom she shared her four-decade journey at RMCOEH.    

“It’s hard to describe,” she said of the meaning of the relationships she formed during her career. “The loyalty of all the people that I’ve worked with over the years — they just have stuck with me and the program.”

She added, laughing: “We’ve all gotten old together.”