“This is a heck of a leadership group,” the president of the United Hospital Fund of New York, James Tallon, said Friday. He was speaking of the 31 recipients of the 2006 Distinguished Trustee Award, honoring trustees at New York City’s 59 not-for-profit hospitals. It is an eclectic group of people – teachers, nuns, engineers, chief executives, and even a couple of doctors – working for an equally eclectic group of institutions.

Manhattan honorees included Jeffrey Greenberg, the chief at Aquiline Capital Partners LLC, formerly chief of Marsh & McLennan, whose list of commitments at New-York Presbyterian Hospital includes oversight of the hospital’s human resources committee and the executive committee’s short-term special strategy committee.

A board member of New York Methodist Hospital, Leslie Jacobson, told of how her hospital is adding beds to accommodate the Park Slope baby boom. The hospital had more than 5,000 births last year, the highest number in its history, Ms. Jacobson, who is chairwoman of the department of health and nutrition at Brooklyn College, said.

Some board members live within blocks of their hospitals. Others are farther away, such as the president of Pacific concord Investment Corporation, William W.H. Chiang, who lives in New Jersey and serves on the board of New York Hospital Queens, in Flushing.

During the awards ceremony, Mr. Tallon and the chairmen of the event, James Niven and Brooke Garber Neidich, read the names of the winners, who stood to applause. Being at the beginning of the alphabet, Gordon Bell, a portfolio manager at Legg Mason Asset Management, on North General Hospital’s board, got a decent sounding round. But Wendy Rodriguez got raucous hoots and hollers from her colleagues at St. Barnabas Hospital. “That’s the Bronx for you,” one gues quipped.

Mr. Tallon, a former state assemblyman, described the fund as both a think tank and a philanthropic organization. It is currently raising $25 million to take on an ambitious agenda with four goals: to expand health insurance coverage, strengthen hospital finances, improve the quality of care, and redesign health care services.

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You’d think those close-knit Upper East Side mothers and daughters would have had enough of each other after Mother’s Day. But the day after the holiday, they were smiling, hugging, and giving each other gifts one more time, for the reprise of the holiday organized by four chic pairs of mothers and daughters: Marilyn Brown and Donna Fergang, Marcia Applebaum and Lisa Applebaum Haddad, Barbara Lane and Meredith Verona, and Judy Steinhardt and Sara Berman, whose column on parenting in The New York Sun draws on the experiences of many of the women who attended the event.

One of the most pampered moms was Susan Bernstein, visiting from Chicago. Her daughter, Julie Bernstein, hired a chef trained at Aureole to prepare a five-course meal at her home. “We had lamb, tuna tartar, risotto, an amazing apple tart, and lots of Champagne,” the elder Ms. Bernstein said.

One quality that made this lunch different from the official Mother’s Day festivities was the absence of the little ones (thank goodness for Mondays, nannies, and pre-school).

agordon@nysun.com