James Peter Pappas; Health Administrator

James Peter Pappas, who left the seminary for a career in public health and became a top administrator with Ventura County Health Services, died at his home in Ventura on Thursday of cancer. He was 49.

Pappas joined the staff of the Ventura County Medical Center in 1986 as supervisor of operations after working for 17 years at hospitals in Texas and California.

Pierre Durand, the hospital’s administrator, described Pappas as a caring man who enjoyed discussing philosophical issues. “He was tremendously compassionate and had a great sense of values,” Durand said. “Jim is going to be greatly missed.”

After four years at the medical center, Pappas was promoted to deputy director of the county’s Public Health Services, the highest-ranking non-physician in the department.

“He had a real knack of pulling people together and getting ideas out,” said Dr. Lawrence E. Dodds, Ventura County’s health officer. “Once everything was on the table, Jim was very creative in coming up with an idea from the side that cut through everything and worked.”

Dodds said Pappas cared about people in both his professional and personal life and was deeply concerned for the homeless and for the plight of single parents.

Pappas was born in South Amboy, N.J., on Dec. 30, 1943, and moved to Ventura County in 1984. He attended Maryknoll Seminary in New York, where he earned a degree in philosophy, and later received a master’s degree in health care administration from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

He began his career in public health in 1969 as an administrative assistant at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas and moved to California in 1973 to work at Peninsula Hospital in Burlingame.

Pappas also worked as an administrator at Los Medanos Hospital in Pittsburg, Calif., South Bay Hospital in Redondo Beach and Mountain View Hospital in Simi Valley before transferring to Ventura County Medical Center.

He was found to have cancer 18 months ago but continued working until three months before his death, said his wife, Mary Leu Pappas. “He wanted people to understand his death was from cancer caused directly by his smoking,” Mrs. Pappas said.

She credited the seven years Pappas spent at the Maryknoll Seminary with influencing his desire to work in public health services, saying, “You can take the man out of the seminary, but you can’t take the seminary out of the man.”

Survivors include his wife; his mother, Rose Smutko of Las Vegas; two brothers, Bruce Pappas of Las Vegas and Wayne of Raleigh, N.C.; and two daughters, Jennifer, 17, and Catherine, 9, both of Ventura.

Visitation will be from 3 to 8 p.m. Sunday at Charles Carroll Funeral Home in Ventura. A funeral Mass will be said at 9 a.m. Monday at Our Lady of the Assumption Church, 3175 Telegraph Road, Ventura, with burial to follow at Conejo Mountain Memorial Park in Camarillo.

Funeral arrangements are under the direction of Charles Carroll Funeral Home in Ventura.