Oral History Program Louise Anderson Gillman Interviewed by Marci Farr 18 August 2008 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Louise Anderson Gillman Interviewed by Marci Farr 18 August 2008 Copyright © 2009 by Weber State University, Stewart Library 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 Special Collections. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Dee School of Nursing was founded in 1910 to provide training for nurses who would staff the new Dee Memorial Hospital. The first class of eight nurses graduated from the school in 1913 and the school continued to operate until 1955, with a total of more than 700 graduates. A new nursing school and home located just east of the hospital was completed in 1917 and all nursing students were required to live in the home during their training. This oral history project was created to capture the memories of the school's alumni before their stories disappear in the same way the Dee Hospital has disappeared. The oral interviews focus on how the women became involved with the school, their experiences going through training, and how they used the training. ____________________________________ 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 Special Collections 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: Louise Anderson Gillman, an oral history by Marci Farr, 18 August 2008, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Louise Anderson Gillman Application Photo 1949 Graduation Photo Class of 1955 Diane Gibbs & Louise Anderson Gillman September 10, 2008 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Louise Anderson Gillman. It was conducted August 18, 2008 and concerns her recollections and experiences with the Dee School of Nursing. The interviewer is Marci Farr. MF: This is Marci Farr. We are interviewing Louise Anderson Gillman. She graduated in the class of 1955. We are interviewing at her home in North Ogden. It is August 18, 2008. Louise, tell us a little bit about your early life, your education, where you grew up, and your family. LG: I grew up in Corinne, Utah. There was just my brother and I. We lived in the town of Corinne and my dad had a farm out in West Corinne where we worked in the beets. I went to Box Elder High, graduated in the spring of ’52 and started nurses training in the fall. MF: Why did you decide to become a nurse? LG: I just always wanted to be one. I do not know that there was any special reason. It was either a beautician or a nurse. MF: Why did you choose the Dee Hospital in particular? LG: It was local. MF: What were your impressions when you entered nurses training? LG: When I entered…well let me go back. We went to a meeting in the spring and they asked us at that time if any of us would like to apply for a scholarship and so I just wanted to ask for enough to get us through the beet check that came in. I was one of five who was awarded a full scholarship from the Ernest Bamberger Company. It paid for all three years, my uniforms and everything. Then I entered nurses training and I was one scared pup I think because I bawled for 1 two or three months, called my folks and said come and get me and that I was going crazy. It wasn’t right away; it was after I had been in there a little while. MF: Had you ever been away from home? LG: No. MF: So it was just your first time out. LG: Well and at that time they treated even psych patients on the floor in this one. I was so scared and you worry that you are failing. She would say to me, “Oh I wish I was like you.” I thought, “Honey, I am too much like you.” You know? But I got over that and then it was alright. MF: Tell us about some of your classmates. You said you had some you graduated from high school that you went with. LG: Four of us started but three of us finished. We were, of course, Box Elder at that time was not a very large high school, and you knew everyone. We went there from junior through…well from Corinne we didn’t start until we were in the eighth grade. But most of them were there from the seventh and went through the twelfth. You had mixed classes so you pretty well knew everybody. Then we moved down, at the time we went into training you lived at the nurse’s residence. When we first went in we were given a big sister. My big sister, she went with some others that were going to run away and get married and the only one that got married was her. Kind of on a whim but at that time you weren’t allowed to be married so she was out of nurses training. MF: They kicked her out? 2 LG: Yes, then we all went through initiation, which was exciting. There was three years of us there then in the nursing home. Then the next year they weren’t accepting students because they had opened the program at Weber College. MF: So they just merged with them? LG: Yes. Our school, and the hospital at that time was not certified for psych training even though by the time we were seniors they had a psych ward. We spent like six weeks at the TB San for our isolation because Ogden had a TB Sanitarium at that time. And then we spent our last…I can’t remember how long it was…six weeks, or two months, or something down at the psych hospital in Provo. MF: So you could get your training? LG: Yes. MF: Because you guys had training all through the hospital. You learned everything. LG: Oh you rotated to every department, even surgery. MF: So you took care of everything? LG: Yes. We learned everything and when I was in training and I was in the preemie nursery and at that time you put the tube down the babies each time they fed. I was alone in there, I mean, you learned responsibility early. MF: I am sure; because it was your job. LG: Some of the nurses did not have to work holidays because the students were all there. We lived at the nursing home, we ate at the hospital. MF: Room and board was taken care of? You didn’t have to pay for any of that? LG: That was part of their charge. And I guess it was, you know, you worked for nothing. By the time that we were in training they were down to a forty hour 3 week. So if we had twenty hours of class we worked twenty hours in the hospital. MF: Do you remember who you roomed with? LG: My first one was Joyce Udy from Fielding. I think she got tired of me through my bawling spell. She is still in nursing, she is teaching in California right now. My second one was Barbara Stratford, no it wasn’t Stratford then it was Nielson. We roomed together till the end. She got married while we were in training. By the time we were seniors we got by with a lot of different things. There were two or three of them that were married while we were there. MF: And it was finally okay that they let nurses come back if they were married? LG: She had to make up time, she graduated with us but she still had to make up time after. I think she was the only one that had to make up because she had a baby. While we were at the Psych Hospital in Provo, they would come, they still lived down there and come home on weekends. But we were allowed our last year. They also that last year brought up some students from the University of Utah to live in the nursing home to do OB training. And we were so spoiled we had our own TV and we said, “Well they will have our TV,” you know, so we thought we would take it with us to Provo. They decided no they would see that we had one. Then we had to furnish our own teacher down there by that time so Marie Donaldson went down with us to teach us psych. MF: Were you down there for three months? LG: I think so. I can’t remember, too long ago. 4 MF: It was a long time ago. LG: We entertained them, you get up and do your little bit and they are very nonresponsive, a lot of those psych patients. One of them came up and wanted to light my pipe for me because I had one of those little corn cob pipes. It was an experience down there. MF: I am sure. Ruth Brown was telling us she taught psych. LG: Not in our school, she was my medical instructor. She was a good teacher. When I was down in Provo I had one run away from me. I could not leave the other so I had to get them back in their room but somebody saw her go and chased her down. MF: You could never predict what could happen. There was just no way. LG: They had one that would get a hold of your hair and pull you down to the floor because she would come up and want your keys but she never got my hair but a couple of classmates had some sore heads. MF: That was probably quite an experience. LG: We had fun down there. MF: Tell us a little bit about what a typical day was when you started your shift work? LG: A typical day, sometimes our class was at the old Weber College so we would have to walk down. We took two classes down there I think to Weber College. Some of the other classes we were taught at the nurse’s residence. Some of them were taught by doctors, some were taught by nurses. MF: At that time did you have the ones from University of Utah? LG: No. 5 MF: You just had your ones from around here. LG: Ruth Brown was one of my teachers. Mrs. Neville and also Mrs. Mills were teachers. Oh I can see the other one, Mrs. Law, she taught us OB, I know her but today is not the day; her name might come in tomorrow. Anyway, we had teachers that were right there with us for most of the classes and we did hands on training, you know, like making our beds…before we got to the floor we learned to make beds and do blood pressures and I can’t remember if we practiced shots, we practiced putting the tube down I think, you know, the NG tube. We did some training right there in our lab. MF: I think you were pretty much trained for everything in the hospital, and your bedside manner, you were taught, as far as taking care of a patient. LG: We were taught that and Ruth Brown was an exceptional but you might come out of her room and she’d stop you and say, “Now what did you see in there?” So you learned observation and you learned patient care. I think because of the fact that, you know; if we only had ten hours of class that week then we worked thirty on the floor. MF: So you make sure you were practicing what you learned? LG: We were in charge of floors before we graduated and the Dee nurse’s; you hardly ever had a hard time getting a job if you were from the Dee Hospital. MF: Because that spoke for itself, the training. That is great. LG: Yes, we did a lot of hands on training, but by the time we were seniors you were in charge of the floor. MF: That says a lot for your training. What would you do if you had a night off? 6 LG: Oh we would get at the piano and sing. We didn’t work a lot of nights sometimes but we would get together and sing or we would walk down to a movie. I really got upset at first when we went down to get a library card at Weber and she told me, the girl told me that I couldn’t have one because you had to be fourteen or else your parent had to come and sign. I was really indignant and said, “Well I am eighteen.” MF: So then you were feeling a little offended. LG: We did have library cards and we had a prom our first year there. But then as the classes dwindled you didn’t do as many things quite like that. We got in the car and they had, what we called then externs as they were med students up for OB training. One of the girls, her parents had let her take the car, so we took them down and parked them on 25th street and scared them. There was some soldiers coming, I recognized the ones, I think they were National Guard, and I yelled at one of them because it was my cousin, they got nervous they wanted to leave right now. MF: Were you required to attend church if you weren’t working on Sunday or was it a choice? LG: Choice. We went to a local ward; there was a ward that was available to a majority of the girls who were L.D.S. You have got to remember we were the last class. MF: Tell us a little bit about your capping and pinning ceremony. LG: You know, I don’t remember, this is my capping. That is Miss Scoville. I just don’t remember a lot about it except we knelt down with our candle, the nursing 7 candle, and they placed the cap upon our head. This is Louise Scoville. She was Assistant Director of the hospital. This is my original class. MF: How many started with your class, do you remember? LG: Oh how many was here. I count…twenty-six. MF: Okay. How may ended up? Do you remember how many you ended up with? LG: I am not sure really how many there was. It is all alphabetical. MF: Those are nice that they did that that way. LG: Yes. MF: All the pictures, those are great. LG: You had your invitations. Louise Scoville the assistant. Marie Donaldson, I told you, the teacher, she was the administrator for the nurses. Leona Maas was one of our clinical supervisors. That is Ruth Brown. She was one of our teachers. MF: We had a good time visiting with her. LG: And Ursula Hawkes was a class advisor. Nineteen graduated from our class. Pauline and I and LuAnn Secrist were from Box Elder. There was another one but she didn’t last the first year. MF: Oh she didn’t stay, okay. LG: Lou Ann Larsen was our class President. Edna Stratford, well it wasn’t Stratford then but it was by the time that we graduated. She is one of the married ones. This is Pauline that you are going to meet. Norma (Frank Burton) was with us on our fiftieth anniversary and then she passed away right after. La Verne Christensen has passed away too. There were six of us that moved in together 8 right after graduation down in Provo and she was one of them. This is Marion Cook, she is still alive, and she lives here in North Ogden. MF: Oh okay. LG: She lived with us down there. Kathleen Ferrin, she lives in San Francisco. Lu Ann Secrist is one who I went to Box Elder with and she lives in Logan but she probably won’t be at the luncheon. She and her husband are leaving for their second mission. This is Louise Holman, it was Sandin and she lives down in Panguitch. She has retired from nursing but she worked down there. Then she and her husband went on a mission, I don’t know that she will be up. Marilyn Kjar is deceased. Evelyn Knowles. She is a widow and she lives in St. George, she will probably be here for the luncheon. Lou Ann Larsen, she married a dentist. She came for our fiftieth but she usually doesn’t make it to the luncheon but she is still with us. Barbara Stratford lives in Layton. But she didn’t make it to our fiftieth either. This is Edna; she is on a mission to Nauvoo. Leona, she lives down in the Salt Lake or Bountiful, she is still with us. Joyce Udy was the one that was my first roommate from Fielding. She is teaching nursing in California. We had quite a few get married our last year. We had housemothers at the nursing home and you had a curfew to be in. But our last year we didn’t have all that because it was only us. MF: Where was your graduation held? LG: It was in the ward. MF: Okay they had it in the church. And it was ‘55. LG: Yes. 9 MF: So while you were in training did you get paid for your time or you just did it because, you know? LG: It was part of our training. MF: Part of the training you did. LG: And then we lived in the nursing home. I don’t know what all everyone was charged because even my uniforms were covered by my… MF: By your scholarship. LG: Those five of us that was in that picture, we are the five that had the scholarships. That is why we were in the picture that was in the paper. I said, “What a shock to open the paper and see yourself when you are eighteen.” MF: We love that picture. LG: I have a copy in there. MF: So after graduation did you stay at the Dee Hospital? LG: By the time we graduated, six of us had jobs in Provo. Three of us worked at the hospital and three worked at the college in their dispensary. MF: How long were you there? LG: I didn’t work a whole year then I got a job at the Clark Clinic and I worked there until I was married. MF: Did you know any members of the Dee family? LG: I didn’t. MF: So when did you retire? LG: I retired from IHC in ’97 so I could be home to take care of my husband. MF: So how do you think nursing has changed over the years? 10 LG: I think they are excellent book learning nurses. But I think they lack in their patient care. MF: They more tend the monitor instead of the patient. LG: One lady said to me she didn’t want to get up because she had surgery and I said yes let me tell you. Your body protects itself, it grabs so you take a deep breath and relax, work with it, because it is just protecting its injured part. We were walking down and she said so why didn’t the others teach me this? We also did case studies on every single floor. MF: Yes. I think you learned everything because you had to. When you were there did you have any disposable items or did you have to rewash and sterilize. LG: We washed and sharpened our old needles. You had to learn to deal with the doctors in surgery. Some of them are kind of ornery. MF: Do you think your training served you well though as far as what you learned and how you were trained as a nurse. LG: The earlier nurses would tell you when a doctor came in you stood at attention. We did not stand at attention my year. I mean we let them sit down and do their charting. So when I left there was like a chip and I didn’t take everything from doctors. We worked everything in the emergency room when we first were in training. The emergency room was part of surgery so you got that training too. MF: What was your favorite floor or department? LG: I liked post-op, post surgical quite well. I got a job at Utah Valley and we were taught that when a doctor wrote an order you filled it. The nurse down there, if the chart laid down after two she never looked at it so when I came on at three 11 nothing was done so we had a little conflict and I had told them I would work everywhere except the operating room so then they came and offered me the operating room. So I went in to the operating room. That was just my first job. There wasn’t a pharmacist so then you had to wait so these people that should have gotten stat medicines weren’t getting stat medicines. MF: That is kind of important to take care of that. LG: It is just I was ornery I guess, I don’t know. New student who thought she knew it all. MF: We appreciate you letting us come. LG: I’ll have to show you a fun thing we did. Do you know the Dee Hospital at all? MF: A little bit. LG: The nursing home was behind it. So one day we got bedpans and went sledding down the little hill. MF: That is what those metal pans were good for right? LG: Oh yes. We practiced on each other first aid. That is the other class that graduated. Anyway, we had banquets; we went to the other classes. Anyway, maybe I just have a lot of just little fun things. MF: Thanks for sharing that with us. 12