1/14/2004

What motivated you to become a nurse/nurse cadet?

Because it was possible I guess. One of the teachers at high school told me about

it and encouraged me to enter at the end of my junior year of high school.

Where were you living at the time?

Eldorado County, I went to Eldorado High School.

What was your home life like?

We were on a farm and my four brothers were already in the military.

Were there five of you?

No I also had a younger brother.

You were the only girl?

That’s correct.

How did your brothers and parents react to the possibility of you being in the military?

I didn’t hear about that until later, my brother said he would kill me, he had been

there.

Before that time was that expected that you would get a college education or training?

No, I thought about being a kindergarten teacher but who knows or marry the boy

next door and raise pigs.

How was it living during the war?

Well, I went in training in September of ’44 when I was 17 so there was still time

when we had gas rationing and sugar rationing even in the country, mom learned

to can things without sugar. Of course we had all of our own food, it was really

no hardship as far as I was concerned.

Did that change or was it different for you when you went to San Francisco and were in a

port city?

Oh I don’t suppose I thought about that. It was such a new and strange and challenge experience that, you know there was a book in the archives at the University of Pittsburgh that said something about how the cadet corps got all these dumb girls out of the country and put them to work. It was quite a change to go to San Francisco.

Do you think it was different for you because you were so young or were there other girls

that were 17?
I think there was one girl that was a month younger than me, but most of them were from the city, two of them were the daughters of the mayor of Santa Barbara. Most of them in my particular class that I know, there was one girl from up around Sacramento, but otherwise I think most of them were from the bay area.

So you think maybe it wasn’t such a culture shock for them then.

Right.

How about your social life, do you think it was affected by the war, by the fact that there

were soldiers and sailors coming in and out of port?

I didn’t have one, we didn’t have time. Oh we used to, it was our patriotic duty you see, to have a dance once in a while to entertain the troops. We had an auditorium with a stage and we had a piano and I think we had a jukebox but anyway we would decorate the auditorium. Once I know we had sailors and once we had soldiers and once we for whatever reason we had morticians and they were morticians but at ten o’clock the house mother and father, a couple that lived in, and ten o’clock it was over and they would stand at the elevator and all of the girls would have to go up you know there was no fooling around.

Other than the dances did you go out much, like dating or out with friends?

Not too much as I recall. There was a movie at the end of the block but we never got to see the end of the movie because we had to run back to report in.

You always had to be in by ten?

Yeah, unless we were working, we worked the three different shifts.

Did you work a lot of the evening and night shifts?

Oh yeah, and the split shifts. When we were having classes we would go to class in between.

They kept you really busy.

Yes they did, of course as you know in those days it was live in, there was none of this commuting.

Did you feel any peer pressure from other cadets such as drinking or smoking?

Oh one girl taught me to smoke, I didn’t throw up until she left the room. I don’t know that there was any pressure, I was very naïve and we had, at least I had, a private room. There were some double rooms but they had their choice of who to room with. So it was a pretty solitary time as far as I was concerned.

Do you think being there, that the other cadets had any influence on your identity?

Oh I don’t know.

How did you feel about your responsibility when caring for patients? What were your

experiences with that responsibility?

It was scary but you know you’re in the midst of it and you do what you have to do and you do what you can do. I guess maybe growing up in the country and being the only girl I was pretty independent anyway as far as that goes.

How were your relationships with the doctors and administration, especially in an era

before feminism?

Well of course if a doctor appeared we stood and acknowledged his presence whether he wanted us or not. We had a lot of good residents and interns, thank goodness, you know they were under as much as we were, it was tough.

Did you go on after school to work as a nurse?

I worked in a family business, the war was over by that time and they didn’t need us in the military. I had taken my extra six months in the OR, it was practically a post grad there but anyway, so I didn’t go back to nursing until ’52 at Mt. Zion hospital.

How long did you work as a nurse?

It has been off and on for a long time. Then I went to Pittsburgh, PA with a friend I had met who was going home to there while her husband was sent to Korea, she was a nurse anesthetist. Anyhow, so we went to Pittsburgh and I worked at the women’s hospital and then in the OR at the children’s hospital.

How did you end up in Charlottesville?

That is a long story. My son and his family are here. And here I was field supervisor for the Jefferson area board for aging which is a home care program. The aides were out with people at home and I had the five county area to set up there care plans and supervise their performance.

What qualities do you think made you a good nurse?

Oh golly I don’t know, I guess I was independent. Tried to do a good job and I was patient oriented when I was doing patient care although my favorite place was the OR. But I guess I learned to do what I was told and to do what had to be done.

What do you think would draw a person into nursing today with the nursing shortage?

It’s hard to say there are so many other things for these young women to do and nursing has changed so, from what I’ve seen of it anyway. I don’t think you have the patient contact that we used to, it’s more equipment and technology and those kinds of things which is great but I think you lose what used to be considered nursing you know the patient care.

What part of history was most influential in your life?

World War II changed everybody, I would never have been in nursing and it’s given me a career. I’ve kept my license for 50 years and finally decided to let it go because I didn’t feel qualified and didn’t want to be lured into something. I got my bachelor’s degree at University of Pittsburgh then I was back in California and got a master’s in Health Services at USF.

You really used your training….

I taught nursing in Pennsylvania at a hospital school there when they still had a hospital school. I was acting supervisor of the OR there at Children’s for a while.

Do you think that your cadet training affected some of your social skills or attributes such

as your leadership that led you to do some of those things?

I am sure it did. It was funny because when I let that license go it was like part of

my identity. Even working now I am working in the office of the Industries for

the Blind plant here so I am still busy.

Can you think of anything else about Mt. Zion or the effect that your training had, whether it was other cadets or the training, on your life that you would like to share?

Mrs. Jennings, who was the director of nursing, she was a tarter (?) but she kept

us pretty straight. Of course she was in a hard place too, getting all of these

people in there and I guess there were a lot of government patrols that came in with the cadet thing you that were not usual and all of her good nurses were gone. When I was on OB I was there before we had the classes. The supervisor there had fallen over the stairs and ruptured her spleen or something so here we were with a, thank god for the residents and interns, cause we had Navy babies all over, in the elevators, in the doctor’s room we had them everywhere. They came up with this twilight sleep stuff which is before women are completely out of their mind, we would have to get their husbands, these poor little sailors, to sit with them and I am sure it was a dreadful shock for them seeing their wife go through this thing. We saw a lot of different things. And when penicillin came out, when we mixed it in the bottle and gave it every three hours and ground our own needles and boiled the syringes, that kept you busy. I was on PMs once with 36 patients I guess and running around giving all of these injections. I went through my finger once but thank goodness it was penicillin.

What changed my life was WWII, thanks to the Japanese I got an education and a career which has been good for all of these years. I have been real proud to be a nurse and to be part of that. I wondered sometimes, they have had reunions, I did get back out and meet with my class a couple of times. I was back out there and lived in up in Calaveras (sp?) for a while and took care of my mother and father at home, they both died at home with me.

Do you keep up with anyone from the class?

There are a couple of them.

When you started hearing from Dr. Stern did that bring a lot of memories back?

Oh I was thinking about it, well then I went up to the women’s memorial they

have up in Washington D.C. which does include the cadet nurses so I signed up

for that and put my name on the list and I bought the book that they put out about

a year or so ago that they put out about the cadets. It didn’t have Mt. Zion in

there particularly but it had a lot of similar kind of situations, I guess it was all

across the country.

*This was a great interview; she was very interested and forthcoming with information.