Oral History Program Margaret Warner Ranson Interviewed by Wendy Mayland Poll 23 May 1997 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Margaret Warner Ranson Interviewed by Wandy Mayland Poll 23 May 1997 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Ranson, Margaret, an oral history by Wendy Mayland Poll, 23 May 1997, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Margaret Warner Ranson. The interview was conducted on May 23, 1997, by Wendy Mayland Poll, in Ranson’s home. Ranson discusses her experiences as a student nurse in the early 1930s and her career as a nurse after. WP: Do you want to just tell me where you were born and who your parents were? MR: I was born in Mountain Green, Utah, in Morgan County on the 9th of May, 1912. My parents were Ralph Goodman and Katherine Freestone Warner. WP: How many years were you a nurse in the Ogden area? MR: I was a nurse, I would say probably around twenty years. WP: Do you want to tell me, when was it, how old were you when you decided you wanted to be a nurse? MR: Very early in life, my grandmother Warner lived in the house across the street from me and she was a practical nurse in Morgan County. She went all over and I saw the kind of work she'd done and I was interested in doing all sorts of things and helping people. She delivered a lot of babies in Morgan County and that was real early in life that I decided that's what I wanted to do. Of course she encouraged me to do that. WP: Okay. That was Jenny Freestone? MR: No, that's Minny Candalin Warner, my grandmother. WP: Minny Candalin Warner, okay. And so how did your parents react to your decision of being a nurse? MR: Well, at first they just went along and let me do through high school. Of course in high school I took all the necessary classes, physiology, all those classes I could get to be a 1 nurse, and they didn't have much to say about it. Of course my father encouraged me to be whatever I wanted to be. But nurses at that time did not have a very good reputation, and when I finally decided I was going into nursing, after I graduated in May of 1930, my mother felt very badly about it, for that reason that nurses did have kind of a bad reputation. WP: What kind of reputation would that be? MR: It was felt that nurses knew how to prevent getting pregnant, and knew all those things. And that they were wild and they ran around and all those sorts of things, you know. And the fact that they had to bathe men and could see every square inch of a man and give shots and all that did not appeal to women at that time. That was just a very unsavory profession for women to go into at that time. WP: So where did you go after high school to complete your training? MR: I went to the Dee Hospital, the Thomas Dee Hospital. WP: You went directly to the hospital? And you had on-site training, or did you take classes? MR: I had three years there, and we took classes as well as the practical side of it was taught by a registered nurse, and the classes were all taught by the different doctors. They taught all of our classes. Most of them were taught at night, some of them were taught in the daytime but most of them were taught at night because we had to work on the floors and take care of the patients. WP: What year did you start? MR: September, 1930. WP: In 1930, okay. So when you started your nursing there at the Dee Hospital, what was a normal day being a student nurse? What was a normal day for you? 2 MR: Well, we lived in the nurse’s home, or the annex. I lived there first, and then I went over to the nurses’ home. We had to be up in the morning and over to devotional by 6:30. We always had to have breakfast, and we had to be on the floors at 7:00. Then our various duties were assigned to us. One had to take all the temperatures and pass out the water and do all those things, and then we always had seven or eight patients that we had to bathe. Those that had to get up in the wheelchair, we got up in the wheelchair. But we had to be through with all our work by 11:00, because that's when our first class began. But we had to do all the work; we had to change the flowers, we had to wash the glasses, we changed the beds, we did all the patient care. Nothing advanced in nursing, but all that sort of patient care we did, and then of course we had class and we'd come back on the floors to get the PM care and the trays ready, and then we went again to classes. And we had to be in bed at 10:00 at night. One night a week we had a midnight pass. One night a month we could go home for an all night pass. WP: So you lived right there? How close were the dormitories? MR: The dormitories were less than half a block away, just a walk through there. WP: How do you feel like you were treated there at the hospital while you were in training? MR: Well, I was in a world that I wanted to be in, where there were people where I was loved. At Mountain Green I was the only girl there and I didn't like it. I was treated very well by the nurses. We had a lot of fun times and of course there was a strict system of seniority at the time. All the older classmates, because it was a three-year program, and all the older nurses, you had to let them go through the door first and if they wanted to sit down you had to get up out the chair and let them sit down and all of this bit. Even 3 with the doctors, very hard seniority system. Other than that I liked it. Most of the nurses I liked, but there were some of them I didn't and it bothered me that I had to get up off the chair and I had to let them go in the door first and I had to do all these things, but other than that we were treated very well. And of course Irma Madsen was the superintendent of nurses and she and Uncle Homer dated at one time and she treated me very nice because I was Pug Warner's niece. Some of the doctors that I knew there, it was very nice, I liked it. WP: So did you find that the rumors about the reputations of nurses, was there any truth to it? MR: They were very unfounded, it was the same thing I found like in every profession, you'll have one or you'll have two that will go out and do something that will make a name for other. If a nurse got married or if they got pregnant, they were terminated right then. But it was no different, I found, from any other profession, except that it was elaborated on. People had nothing else to do. It seemed to me in some of those days gossip would go from one end of that town to the other and they had no phone. It was just something for people to talk about and they elaborated on things, and one or two always made a tough name for everybody else. I didn't find that, I didn't find any of that. WP: So how long were you a single practicing nurse? MR: I graduated in 1933 and married in 1934. WP: You went back to the profession later on? MR: Yes. WP: You re-entered into the profession about what year? 4 MR: Well, I did special duty nursing. I was the first general duty nurse to be hired at the Dee Hospital, when they went to the three shifts, from 7 to 3 and 3 to 11. And so I worked that way, then I did special duty nursing. At the time that I was married I was doing general duty nursing; then, after I had children, I went back to special duty nursing. So I went back to work, then I stayed away from nursing for twenty-two years while I raised my family and I went back to work in 1960. WP: So what kind of changes did you see when you went back in? MR: Oh, tremendous changes. Because when I was a student nurse we were not allowed to do any of the technical procedures that they did. We just did bedside nursing. We did enemas; that was about the most advanced procedure that we did, and got them up in wheelchairs. But when I went back to nursing and got on that floor, I was astounded at what we had to do. We had to do blood pressures, we had to start intravenous, we had to do blood transfusions, we had to do dressings, they had colostomy patients, they had ileostomy patients, and they had everything. It was a surgical floor and I was just astounded. Of course they needed nurses so bad so they took you back without having an orientation class of any kind. And I went down to the service room one morning and I started to cry. And I said, "Margaret did you think you could come back into nursing after being gone all this time and take up where you left off?" And then I dried my tears and said "I'll do it or die." So then I went out and one of the doctors, Dr. Gardner, the supervisor sent me with him to do a lumbar puncture. I didn't know straight up what a lumbar puncture was but I thought "Well, I'll learn." So, we went along and she had everything all ready on the cart 5 there for me to go in with him. And he looked at me and he said, "You know, I don't think I've seen you around here." And I said "No doctor," I was getting a little bit perturbed myself about that time. I said "No, Dr. Gardner, you haven't. I've come into nursing after being away twenty-two years. And I am going to pick up where I left off." But we had all those things. And another thing, the doctors treated you with much more respect, there was none of that seniority system around, we were allowed to take orders from doctors and write them down, and then the doctors would come along and sign them. We were able to take orders over the telephone, it was just absolutely like going in to a different world than it was when I quit nursing. WP: When you say that the doctors treated you better than when you had been there previously, can you give me an example of how they treated you before? MR: It seemed to me like when we were student nurses we were just more and less lackeys or flunkies or something. We had to do everything, we had no help. We cleaned the rooms with the exception of the floor, we put up all the supplies, we did the glasses. We did all that kind of work and we were just more or less flunkies, you know hired help, very little pay did we get. So they come around and we didn't have to go visiting with any of them; we had to hop up off that chair when they come, and we had to say "Yes, doctor. No, doctor. Good morning, doctor, Good afternoon, doctor." And that's all we said to them. And when we were in classes it was just, they never did call us Miss or anything, it was always "Warner." We never were addressed as "Miss Warner," It was always Warner this, the last name. But when I went back to work after I'd been away, we had really come up in the world. WP: Was it hard to adjust to that? 6 MR: It was hard, but I'd made up my mind, and I had such a tremendous supervisor of that floor that I went on to a surgical floor. And she just pushed me right along. Helped me do things, and made me do things, put me on a 3 to 11 shift, charging after I had been there three months, and I just about died. But I got a Physician’s Desk Reference (PDR) because I was doing medicines, and I would look up the medicines we had to know the effect of the drugs and the contraindications and what they were for, all this sort of stuff. So I got this PDR from a pharmacist friend of mine and I would take it home at night and I'd look it up and kept it there with me in nursing and I learned a lot. It was hard work, there was no question about that. I was determined that I was going to do it. WP: You mentioned how little you got paid. What was it, do you remember what your salary was? MR: The first year that I was in nursing training we got five dollars a month. If we broke a thermometer or we broke a syringe, or we broke a glass or anything, that was taken out of our wages. The second year I was there we received seven dollars a month, and the last year we got ten dollars a month. When we were graduated we were supposed to have received twenty-five dollars a month, but we didn't get it. Course when I went back to work in 1960, the wages for nurses still weren't what they should be, but then you had the nurses’ unions and the nurses’ associations that were getting busy. It wasn't long until we were being compensated for the work that we'd done and the responsibilities that we had to take. Nurses still take more responsibility than what they get paid for, still do. WP: It’s amazing. So five dollars a month; of course your housing was taken care of, and your meals? 7 MR: Yes, your laundry and all that sort of stuff. You had nothing to pay. WP: Just the five dollars a month for any incidentals that you might need. MR: Except, like I say, if you broke something you had to pay, that was taken out. WP: Did you find you ever had to ask your parents for any money? MR: No, because I had too much pride to do that. I made up my mind that when I went into nursing, I was out on my own. I worked all that summer to get my books and get my uniforms, get my cape from a nurse that had to quit. It was during the Depression years and I know that the folks were very poor. They simply didn't have it, and I knew I had to get along. There was one experience that I had - mother said that I didn't have a coat, I hadn't earned enough money to get a winter coat when I went into nursing. She said "Now you go downtown and pick out a coat and we will pay half of the coat for you, so you save your money." It seemed like it was a little easier to save in those days. So I went downtown. Well, the nurses had a charge account at the Cinderella shop, which was run by Jewish people, they were very nice Jewish people. I went all over town and I saw this coat in the Cinderella shop. It was a beautiful coat, it was blue and it had fur all down the front of it, gray fur, it was beautiful. And so they said "Well, you take this coat and you can pay a little bit out of your salary every month, just so you pay a little bit. And you can have the coat." And so I did, I took it home. Oh, Mother thought it was a beautiful coat. Then she said, "Well, how much did you pay for it?" And I said "Eighty dollars." And she said "Young lady, if you've gone and paid eighty dollars for that coat, then you are going to have to pay all of it yourself." 8 Well, by the time I got through paying for that coat I had learned the most valuable lesson that I ever learned in my life. You don't go into debt for things you can't afford, and you pay for things when you get them. It was something that really taught me a lesson, and it taught me also that I had to be careful. When I shook a thermometer, and when I shook the first one, I shook it right out of my hands – of course I broke it. And syringes you had to be very careful with. You learned that you had to take care of things and you had to be careful with things. You learn a lot of valuable lessons in life from the things I learned in nursing. WP: Now, doing your training during the depression, what kind of things did you see during that time that you didn't see when you came back? As far as treating the people, and the lifestyle of the people. MR: The people that came into the hospital during my student nursing days, they were poor; they did not have a lot. There were not very many people that had money in Ogden. Marilyn Drive, they had people that lived up there that had money. The doctors had some money, but more or less the patients were quite poor, they didn't have much money. And they didn't have fancy nightgowns and things; they more or less wore the gown that the hospital provided for them. They felt like they were very fortunate to be able to come into a hospital. Whereas when I came back to work, it was a whole different go-round. People had private rooms, they had nicer clothes; everything was nicer all the way around, you could really tell, and the attitude was a lot better. The people during the Depression, a lot of them they just barely eked out a living. It was bad. 9 WP: Did you have any experiences with, during the Depression, seeing women giving up children for adoption because they couldn't afford to keep them? MR: Yes. Yes, I saw that. I had one experience especially where a mother had gotten involved with a Chinese fellow and of course she gave the child up. It was in the pediatric department. All of us grew so attached to that baby, it was a darling baby and so intelligent. But there were quite a few. And another thing, abortions were very prevalent in that time. Women were doing everything. They used hairpins, they used knitting needles, they did everything. They had a lot of abortions at that time. And you heard so much - women died from it, there were doctors who did abortions and women died from it. Because they had so many children they simply felt like they couldn't support another child, they simply couldn't have another child. So they were very prevalent, and children were fathered by their own fathers. I mean, it was the girl's own father that got them pregnant. People think nowadays that things are bad; they were bad at that time too. WP: You were saying how people think things are bad; did you see incidences of spousal abuse, and child abuse. MR: Oh yes, yes. When I was in pediatrics I saw lots of child abuse come in and we had lots of cases. Of course in that day, women did not tend to - unless it got really bad they had to go up to the emergency room. There was a lot of it that was never reported, they were just in that category where you walked two steps behind a man. Women weren't really up in the world so to speak, I mean they didn't have too much respect, that was my feeling about it. WP: When you were there at the hospital, did you ever see any female doctors? 10 MR: No, we never had female doctors. We had four interns on all the time but there were no female doctors. There were no male nurses either; there was one male orderly, that was all. WP: Did you feel that, kind of disrespect, came from not only being a lowly student nurse but also that you were female? MR: I think so, definitely. And I felt also that as I got to the end of my nursing that if you would speak up you had more respect, if you demanded respect. It seemed to me like the more you demanded respect the more respect you got. But it wasn't until towards the end of my nursing that I felt that women were treated, nurses were treated half the way they should be. WP: This may be putting you in a difficult situation, but did you, after experiencing being a student nurse, have the desire to go on and become a doctor? How do you think the people who were working with you would have felt about that idea? MR: I think they would have resented it. Just like the early pioneers, you had some women doctors in that, but they had to get out and earn their respect, it was the fact that they were needed. I think they would have resented it. Of course I didn't have any desire to go out and be a doctor, I had put my papers in to be a stewardess on an airplane. I had all the qualifications that I could have become a stewardess. And that's what I wanted to be, because the wages were good. They paid terrific, and you had to be a graduate nurse. And you had to be so high, and you had to have all these qualifications, and that's what I wanted to be. I did have an idea that I would like to go into some country doctor's office and probably be a receptionist, ‘cause I had typing and all of that business to go along with it. To be a receptionist and maybe send out the bills and be 11 an office nurse more or less. To assist the doctor, and there were a lot of nurses that did that, went into small towns in doctor's offices, in Malad and around. But no, the biggest thing that I wanted to do was to be an airplane stewardess. WP: And at that time they required a nursing certificate? MR: Yes. WP: I didn't know that. Did you see any incidences, during your early years, of drug abuse? MR: Yes, oh yes. We had a lot, simply because morphine was the drug that you used the most of. Morphine and the different strengths of morphine from a 4th to a 6th to a 8th, those were the drugs, and it was easy to get addicted to morphine. I don't know - to my estimation, they weren't as careful as they ought to be. We had incidences come in where people had gotten addicted to morphine from their stays in the hospital. Ponapean was not as addicting, but I don't think they even use Ponapean anymore. When I came back to work in 1960 they didn't use Ponapean anymore. But morphine was put on a back burner, you had Demerol and Vistaril and some of the other ones that they used. Morphine was used as a last resort, but it was used an awful lot as a student nurse. WP: Do you ever see any incidence of drug abuse among the medical personnel? MR: No, no. The doctors themselves, I didn't really get to know much. But the interns, all the nurses got a chance to know the interns there. And they were a very good group; there wasn't any drug abuse that I saw with any of them. I didn't see much drug abuse until after I come back to work among doctors. WP: And you saw it then, when you came back in the 60's? 12 MR: Yes, I saw it then. I saw quite a little bit. In fact I had a case where a doctor came down and asked me to draw up some Demerol, well of course, it was going to go down to give it to a patient. Well, about an hour afterwards, the patient was still demanding a shot. Well, we found out when we got into the case that the doctor had taken the shot himself, so he was eliminated from the hospital not too long after. But we found several cases where they were addicted, and of course they were let go. But never in the interns, I didn't see any cases of the interns. I didn't see any cases in the doctors per se when I was in training because we didn't get that close to the doctors, to know anything. We weren't allowed to give medicines, only when you were in your senior year. So you didn't get a chance to get that close. WP: Now, kind of reverting back to why your mother was hesitant to let you become a nurse and part of that was because you would be viewing the male anatomy, and that wasn't proper and moral in those days. MR: Yes, that's right. WP: Because of your strict upbringing and moral upbringing, was it a shock to see a naked man for the first time, give a bed bath or whatever, was it difficult for you? MR: No, it wasn't. I just viewed it in physiology and anatomy and those classes I'd taken in high school. I just knew that this was a part of life, it was something that was necessary that had to be done. WP: Was there anything that was difficult for you to overcome in the learning process of becoming a nurse? MR: The only thing was that in high school, they didn't have chemistry when I went to high school, of course that was required. So I had to take this chemistry class when I got into 13 nursing and when it came to mathematics that was the only thing that was difficult. I don't know why we had to take chemistry, because you really don't have that much use for it. We had to take Materia Medica, which was the study of the medicines and the components in medicines and so forth like that. Now that made sense, but why they had chemistry I'll never know, still don't know. That was the only hard part of nursing for me, was the chemistry part that I had to take. WP: Do you have any recollections or experiences, interesting experiences that you would like to share? MR: We had a lot of experiences, we had a lot of fun. They had recreation for us in that we tried a lot of things. We had to be on call for surgery if they had a case; why, they would call us in the middle of the night or two o'clock in the morning. And a lot of the doctors would get us, order up chow mein or something; some sort of a meal for us to have after we finished the surgery. This one time we were really, really tired and one of the girls said "Have you ever tried nitrous oxide or how it works?" we had observed it in surgery in the operating room, and we said "No." We got talking about nitrous oxide and we thought "We're here all alone, there is no supervisor around." We had to clean up the operating rooms, we had to clean them all and sterilize all the instruments before we went home, after we got through operating. And we thought well, we were tired and just a little bit on the giddy side, so we thought we would lie down on the table and put the mask on and try the nitrous. One of them got a little bit too far and had to slap on the oxygen to get out. But we did try nitrous oxide. 14 And then another time we all had to serve in all the different departments in the hospital, public health and the whole works. And they had an intern who was over the public health part of it downstairs and at that time they had to line up all the prostitutes in Ogden, they had to come in monthly for a check. And this one day the doctor had taken quite a bit of marijuana from some patient, one of the prostitutes that had come in. And of course he had to turn it in. It was the end of a long hard day, and it was just a certain group of us, that was there. We got talking about this stuff, and he said "Would you like to try a little, a couple of puffs?" So we did, we just all took a couple of puffs of marijuana. It taught us a very valuable lesson, that there was something that you didn't mess around with. I tell my grandkids this and they just about "Grandma, you tried?" And yes I did, I tried nitrous and there were a lot of things we tried while we were there. The whole thing, to me, was a teaching experience. That taught me, and of course the doctor was right there, and we only just took a couple of puffs of the stuff to see, you know, what it was like. In a way we were being supervised, we didn't go out and doing something on our own, except the nitrous we did. WP: Was there any effect from the marijuana, did you feel any effects? MR: Nausea. Yeah, I was nauseated, oh boy. I received some valuable lessons from my nursing that I don't think that I would have been taught any other way. WP: What do you feel that they didn't teach you that they probably should have taught you back then? MR: Well, they didn't teach us how not to get pregnant – which was part of why nurses had blamed on to as being wild. We never received any of that kind of training, we never received any of that kind of knowledge. I didn't know anything, and when I got married I 15 knew nothing, absolutely nothing. And here nurses were blamed for knowing all of this stuff and we didn't get any of that in nursing, we didn't get any of it. WP: So what you were seeing during that time is a lot of women coming in who had tried self-abortions, but they weren't being told how to prevent pregnancy? MR: No, women weren't told how to prevent it. Well, in fact, anything that I ever found out about anything was taught to me by my Aunt Jenny. People didn't talk about it, they talked behind, it was a closed-door subject. You went to seminary and the Bible it was this word or that word, I come home and ask my folks, well go and ask Aunt Jenny, they couldn't explain it. To be pregnant was 'in the family way' in my day, women were in the family way. And your periods were the 'monthlies' and this is the way it primarily was when I was in nursing, it was something that you didn't talk about. Still, you didn't talk about it. Few of the mothers did, but not all of them, not too many of the mothers prepared their daughters. I didn't have any preparation, and I didn't get any in nursing either. WP: So you felt that was probably an area you would have liked to have more information? MR: Yes, I would have liked to have known more about it from a religion side as well as the medical side. All of that, I thought that it was of course being a woman, you should have been better prepared for marriage and what you were getting into than you were. Because you had none of it. You had the delivery room, you saw the babies born, you knew how they got there and all of this bit but that's all you do. And when the women would feel so good after the baby was born you thought 'there's nothing to that.' Go ahead and have a baby, there is nothing to that. They got up on the floors and they were laughing and having a fun time, and you thought there was nothing to that. And a 16 lot of the nurses were the same way, were very ill-prepared for marriage. We didn't get any of that in nursing. WP: Is there anything else you can think of that you would like to share, any other experiences? MR: Well, those three years, we were a close family, even with the cooks. It was just close. The only thing that I hated was the autoclave. We had to take so much time with the autoclave. ‘Course we had to put up all our own supplies, we had to powder the gloves and wrap them and put them in their wrappings and we had to do all the dressings, fold all the dressings. We had roll the plaster up and we had to do all of that; make all the solutions, and then when they were all folded and ready, and all the packages to go into the nursery and go on down to the delivery room were all put in great big packages and pinned and they went into the autoclave. I was mortally afraid of the autoclave because you had to set it and the big hissing ole thing would spin around there and you had to sit and watch it. That was one reason why I never bought a steam cooker. I was scared to death of them. The autoclave just bothered me to no end and we had to do it. I had to do it. It was something I didn't like. I didn't mind putting up the supplies, but it was hard work. It was three years of really hard work. I was grateful for one thing, that I had learned how to work when I was home. Because it was not easy work. WP: So, do you have any advice for young women who might study your history of being a nurse in the future? Any advice for future nurses? MR: Well, I think that it's a good field. There will always be sickness. They might could renegade some of the things to like thermometers now that they put in their ears, and some of these things that I don't know, that I haven't been around nursing for a few 17 years, a lot of things that they have done to improve the quality of nursing. But by and large people are always going to be sick and there is always going to be a demand for people who have an affinity to be around sick people, who can be with sick people and like that part of it. And I like bedside nursing, I loved it. I did not like being a charge nurse. I did not like that authority, to be that responsible part, to be over somebody. But I had to be that in order to get a decent social security when I quit, after I went back to work. But I was a team leader on one side because that did help me, I realized that. But I didn't like it, I loved bedside nursing, taking care of people, being a med nurse, doing all those things. I loved doing intravenous, and taking care of all the different aspects that nursing brought along with it. Melissa is doing home care now and she has so many patients, it’s always a field and the public will work with you more. Like they got so they would let you go in at 5 o'clock and work until 10 o'clock, when the hospital was really busy right in there. They would make the hours more for women more able to come in when they weren't busy at home and do some work. And it’s been a field, I think, it’s one of the best fields for women to get into. There is not that constant worry of being away, off. And all of this part was that they will always need nurses, they will try and lay off once in awhile like they did in the hospital, but they soon found out that the nurses had no problem getting jobs. We had a bunch of nurses that went on a trip to New Zealand and saw how the hospitals were in New Zealand, come up and give their notice here. I think a lot of them are still down in New Zealand. They found out that they can go around to these hospitals and you can adapt with the training that you had and you can find work, you can get a job. If you want to work you can work. 18 Not only that, for your own family it is such a help in raising your children and doing that sort of thing. And working in a community you've always got jobs in a neighborhood where I went out and did and gave women insulin shots, showed people how to do things, right in the neighborhood. There is always a use for it. Always. When my daughter came to me, she took one year at Weber College and took all of the basics, and then she came to me and she says, "Mother, I decided to be a nurse. Will you help me?" Man, I was just overjoyed, that I would have one girl that was going to be a nurse, and that was great. And of course my grandmother encouraged me and of course that I had two other cousins that went into nursing after I did. But I was the first of grandmother's granddaughters that went into nursing. Now it is, you say you are a nurse, you are not looked down on, you are looked up to. It is something that has really gained a lot of respect and I have to hand a lot of that to a few dedicated women who went out and organized and got the nurses, brought them up to feeling that they were people, that they were nurses, they were women. And they were something to be looked up to, that was a part of life that people needed. There were some dedicated women that did that, in Utah. And there are still some that are paving the way for nurses, they’re doing a lot. I think it's a good profession myself. I think that women had to command respect because before I quit in 1974, I would be walking down the hall and doctors would give me their orders and I would say "Now hold up, just a few minutes, we've got to get this all straight." And then they would read them and be sure that the order was right then they would sign it. I never let a doctor get away from me without him signing that. And then very often they would call up on the floor and they would say "Mrs. Ranson, I'm having this problem with this patient, in your 19 estimation is there something else that we could do that would help this patient out a lot?" And a lot of times just from observing and being with that patient, there was something and I would say to them "Well I think that if you tried respiratory therapy.” And it would help them with their breathing. And different things that we would suggest or sometimes there were some doctors that were very strict about giving the patients fluid, and you would say "Would it hurt if they would just rinse their mouth out with a little diluted lemonade or something?" And it would make the patient feel so much better. They would ask our input, ask our ideas about doing different things. WP: Something that they didn't do in the thirties? MR: No! And we suggested "Well, this patient doesn't have any drains in their incisions, is there any reason why they can't get up and take a shower?" "Well, no, I never thought about that." And they would let you get up and put a patient in the shower, take off the dressing and put them under a shower. It helped them heal a lot faster. It helped them be a lot cleaner. And a lot of things like that we suggested to doctors. Where before, when I was in training, you did not suggest anything, you just got up and let them have your seat. You said "Yes doctor, no doctor, good afternoon doctor" and that is all you did. WP: That's great. Thank you for letting me come today and hear your story. 20