Notable Author: Marilyn Fordney
Author writes 'first' textbooks in medical field; newest 'first' to come out this year

Marilyn “Winkie” Fordney is an award-winning artist and author who has written and co-written more than 52 books in the past three decades. Several of her books, which cover three different medical areas for transcription, administrative medical assisting and insurance, were the first textbooks in those fields.

This distinction includes her first book, Insurance Handbook for the Medical Office, which had a 30-year anniversary in 2008. The first edition was published in 1977 in both hardback and paperback.

Currently, she’s looking forward to publishing the first edition of her newest book, Fordney’s Medical Insurance Dictionary for Billers and Coders. It will be published by Elsevier Saunders by the end of 2009. “It is the first of its kind to have a comprehensive listing of health insurance, billing, coding, and credit and collection terms with definitions,” she said.

Also this year, Fordney will see the 11th edition published of Insurance Handbook for the Medical Office.This is the book that launched her writing career in 1975 and continues to be successful today.

Interestingly, this book, her most successful, was borne out of one of her initial teaching assignments. She began instructing an insurance and billing course off campus through Ventura College in California. More than 60 students showed up the first night. There was no textbook for the class.

“A few years later, the school bought a printing press, and I put together a syllabus for the class,” Fordney said. “Six schools began purchasing it at cost for their campus students.”

Then in 1974, she sent copies of the syllabus to four publishers and received positive responses from them. She agreed to contract with W.B. Saunders Company in Philadelphia one year later. She began typing her book on a typewriter she rescued from her house fire of 1970.

Insurance Handbook for the Medical Office continued to prove successful. The second edition in 1981 included a workbook to accompany a revision of the textbook. After the third edition in 1989, the decision was made to publish the handbook every two years to keep the material updated.

The seventh edition in 2002 marked the 25th anniversary of the Insurance Handbook for the Medical Office, which won the William Holmes McGuffey Award by the Text and Academic Authors Association.

Fordney has won several TAA awards. She also is a long-time member of several professional organizations, including the American Association of Medical Assistants and the American Association of Professional Coders.

Fordney with her co-author Linda French earned the TAA Texty Excellence Award in 2003 for Medical Insurance Billing and Coding: An Essentials Worktext, first edition. In 2004 she and French were honored with the William Holmes McGuffey Award in Life Sciences for Administrative Medical Assisting, fifth edition. In June 2005 Fordney was inducted into the Council of Fellows by the Text and Academic Authors Association at the annual meeting in Las Vegas.

With the success of her textbooks, Fordney and her husband, Sandor “Alex” Havasi, have formed two nonprofit organizations. The first private nonprofit is Fordney Foundation, which helps those from ages 6 to 25 in dance sport – ballroom dance competition. “We actively fly to many of these competitions during the year to hand out the awards in person,” Fordney says. Earlier in 2008, they attended the Arnold (Schwarzenegger) Sports Classic in Columbus, Ohio, where more than 17,000 athletes competed. Fordney sponsored the dance sports events. They met both Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver.

The second nonprofit private foundation is the Havasi Wilderness Foundation. “The objectives are to help disadvantaged schools and children to educate them about animals, plants, birds, our ecosystem, and how to respect our environment,” Fordney said.

Prior to focusing solely on her writing career since 1987, Fordney worked in the medical field and eventually as a teacher for many years. These jobs brought her the experiences and opportunities to write textbooks, an endeavor she greatly enjoys. “I write mainly in the morning hours, because I am fresher and not tired and can create and think better,” she said.

Her interesting family background and numerous successful artistic pursuits also broadened her ambitions and horizons. Marilyn Yoshiko Takahashi, a Japanese-American, was born in Los Angeles on Dec. 22, as the eldest of five children. Even before birth, her mother gave her the nickname “Winkie.” She also instilled a positive attitude in her daughter.

Throughout her life, Fordney says she has always believed she “can do it” and “does it all,” living every day as though it was her last. Fordney won many county fair ribbons for her arts and crafts. She has worked in a wide variety of mediums, from painting with oil and water to sculpting with stones off the beach. Since 1971, she has knotted; she’s known as an expert in Chinese knots.

She’s been involved in fiber arts, beaded art, cloth doll making, paper making, origami, sewing, knitting, crocheting, needle lace, tatting, Brazilian embroidery and other crafts. “I have traveled extensively to many other countries and learned the folk crafts from each of those countries that I have visited,” she said. “I never spend time being idle and my hands are always busy.”

In her younger years, she was a ballet dancer. She continues to tap dance, line dance, and square dance. In 2001, she began ballroom dancing, competing regionally, nationally and in world dance contests. She reached the intermediate silver level by 2004.

Perhaps her childhood set the stage for Fordney’s tremendous amount of stamina, curiosity and enthusiasm – her obvious zest for life. When World War II broke out in 1942, she and her family were sent to an internment relocation center at Santa Anita Racetrack in California. Father Flanagan of Boys Town, Neb., took them under his care. He hired her family to care for the Boys Town grounds and supervise groups of boys for the next five years.

“In 1947 the family drove back to California with little to start with. We lived with three other families in a house in Los Angeles for three years,” Fordney said. “The savings reaped us an old farm house, which we fixed up by ourselves.”

When she graduated from high school in 1954, she was hired by the son of her godfather, an orthopedic surgeon. She learned front and back office skills on the job and attended night classes for several years.

She expanded her experiences by working for a general surgeon and in radiation and nuclear medicine at hospitals. She also worked for biophysics and medical professors at the University of California-Los Angeles.

In 1968 she was invited to teach medical assisting subjects to high school dropouts for a pilot project school in a ghetto funded by federal grants. “This first teaching experience was so rewarding that I decided to attend school to obtain three teaching credentials based on experience,” she said.

Through her teaching, she became reacquainted with Alan Fordney, whom she married. They had only been wed for 25 days when their beach home was destroyed during an annual attack of the Santa Ana east winds.

The couple drove north to Oxnard, Calif., where they found another beach house to enjoy life together. Their marriage ended after 27 years, when Alan died in 1997. Later, she met Havasi from Hungary at a local dance; they married in 2004 and reside in Oxnard.

Kim Seidel is a freelance writer based in Onalaska, Wis.