The hospital staff frantically pushed Susan Basler towards the delivery room. But there was a problem: the staff didn’t know how to get there.

It was August 1975 and Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital had opened only days earlier.

“The hospital was so new that the staff pushed me the wrong way,” Basler recalled. “I pointed to the signs and showed the obstetrician where to go.”

Basler made it to the delivery room safely and gave birth to her fourth child, Laura, the first baby girl born in the Santa Clarita Valley’s new hospital. 

Newhall Memorial staff and community leaders celebrated the hospital’s 35th anniversary on Thursday with a banquet in the hospital’s cafeteria. Officials talked about the hospital’s growth: with staff treating 800 patients and delivering 382 babies the year the hospital opened, to now treating more than 48,000 patients and delivering 1,100 babies a year.

Laura Battle, Newhall Memorial’s first born baby girl, was honored at the event. Battle, who graduated from Hart High School, is now living in Santa Barbara with her husband and two children. She graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara and has worked as a financial consultant for the last 11 years.

“It’s neat to see how the hospital has grown as I’ve gotten older,” Battle said. “I’ll keep coming back as long as they ask me,” she laughed, “it’s fun.”

Being baby girl No. 1 has made Battle the object of her family’s teasing.

“I guess I’m proud of her,” Kareem Battle, her husband, said laughing. “But I don’t know what she’s achieved.” 

Hospital officials used Thursday’s event to celebrate the hospital’s expansion.

On Monday, Newhall Memorial admitted the first 12 patients into it’s new Intensive Care Unit. The new ICU, which has 18 patient beds and 9,660 square feet of space, has six more patient beds than the old ICU and is more than double the size of the facility it will replace.

It took a year to build and replace the old ICU, which is about 30 years old.

Officials plan to begin building a new neonatal intensive care unit in January where the old ICU is. The NICU will have 11 beds to treat premature and sick newborn babies.

By the end of 2015, officials plan to finish building a new inpatient hospital wing that will add up to 120 more beds to the hospital.