Oral History Program Ruth Donaldson Brown Interviewed by Marci Farr 8 August 2008 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Ruth Donaldson Brown Interviewed by Marci Farr 8 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: Ruth Donaldson Brown, an oral history by Marci Farr, 8 August 2008, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Ruth Donaldson Brown Application Photo 1940 Graduation Photo Class of 1943 Ruth Brown, Karla Tripp & Donna Larsen June 1942 Ruth Donaldson Brown c 1990’s Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Ruth Donaldson Brown. It was conducted August 8, 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 Ruth Donaldson Brown for the Dee School of Nursing project. It is August 08, 2008. We are interviewing her at her home in Ogden, Utah. Ruth could you tell us a little bit about your early life, where you grew up, where you were educated, and a little bit about your family? RB: I was one of sixteen children. My father had two wives. His first wife died during the 1918 flu epidemic. Then he married my mother. I was the oldest child of the second family. So I grew up in a large family. We lived on 30th street just below Washington when it was a very nice area. There were a lot of people that became very prominent in Ogden during the years. It was a very nice area then. We grew up there part of the time and then when I was around ten or eleven we moved to what I’d call a city acre farm. It was a fifteen acre farm that my grandfather had. We lived there until I went into nurse’s training. My family continued to live there for awhile. My dad, during World War II, went up to the ship yards in Seattle and worked and after they came back they lived on 30th street again and completed their life there. I have sixteen brothers and sisters. It might be interesting to know that every one of those, every one of my full brothers and sisters, there were nine of us…are college graduates…they have been married in the temple…they have served a mission…three of us are PhD’s or EDD’s…and the rest are all university graduates. 1 MF: That is amazing. RB: They have always been outstanding in their field. MF: That is great. RB: We had a very busy, happy, wonderful childhood. We played with each other, we played rubber guns and run sheepy run. We had a lot of friends and just had a great time. We had a really good childhood but did not have a lot. My father and mother, were very independent people; they were very proud, and would never take a penny of relief no matter how tough it got. They would work and make things work out. They wanted to be self sufficient. They passed that on to their children. They were hard workers. Every one of my brothers and sisters are very hard workers and have done very well. MF: Tell us what made you decide to become a nurse and why did you choose the Dee School of Nursing? RB: When I was younger I took violin lessons for about ten years and loved it and did quite well in it, played through school and so forth. I had thought maybe music but then I graduated and began to think seriously about being a dietician. One of my sister-in-laws was a nurse. She started talking about it so then I decided I might be interested in nursing. That is really what stimulated me to go into nursing. I did and I have loved it. MF: Good. That is great. Why did you choose the Dee Hospital? Because of the location? RB: Yes. I lived during the depression. It was the depression time then. I knew that anything I did with further education than high school I would have to finance. I 2 would have to work and do it because mother and dad just did not have the money. They were just too busy raising all these kids. MF: Why did you choose the Dee School of Nursing? RB: I chose it because of finances. It was really the only one I could afford. I worked all summer, saved every penny I had to get the money to go into nurses training. I wore the same brown, rump stained skirt all during nurses training we were so poor. All of us were. None of us had very much. None of the students did. They gave us five dollars a month and took most of that out if we broke a thermometer or some silly thing. We did not really get much but that is what really promoted me or encouraged me to do the Dee because it was convenient and it was feasible, it was affordable. MF: Tell us about when you first entered nurses training. What were your impressions when you first started school? RB: When I first entered it I liked it immediately. I always loved sciences and was always interested in sciences and did well in them, and I loved my contact with people. I loved the contact with my student fellows. We just had a wonderful time. I was just favorably impressed and wanted to do it. MF: That is good. Did you have some classes at Weber College that you had to take? RB: Yes. MF: And you had some at the hospital? RB: Yes. MF: You had to walk down there. We heard everybody had to walk down… 3 RB: Oh yes… MF: …and hustle back. RB: …we used to walk down there as fast as we could and back as fast as we could. MF: Everybody said you did not want to miss lunch. RB: Right. MF: Do you remember any of your instructors? RB: Yes I remember very well. We had a Mrs. Miner who was very excellent, very capable, a very good teacher. We had Ruth Morrison, she was very good also. They were both very exacting, competent people. We had Lucille Taylor. She was a local person who had gone through the nursing program. She was a neat gal. She was a very competent teacher. I remember all my teachers. MF: Do you remember your roommate? RB: Yes I shared it with a couple of girls. They were both good roommates. We got along really well, did not have any difficulty at all. MF: Tell us about a typical day when you started your shift work. What was your typical day like? RB: The way the hospital was then…at the old Dee Hospital they had these huge wards, sixty-two bed wards. They would not think of having that now in a hospital in this day and age. But they had sixty-two bed wards. The only really registered nurses they had were night supervisors or afternoon supervisors or the day head nurse and assistant head nurse. They did not have CT units or ICU units then. All of these patients were either on a medical or the surgical floor so that they had private duty nurses, if possible, that were registered nurses that 4 would take care of those people. But not everyone could afford that. So the nurses on duty did it. Except for those ones I have just mentioned, they were all student nurses, we did it. I was a charge nurse when I was in my second year and third year of nursing. I was always a leader in nursing. I always was in charge of a floor, in charge of something. We ran the hospital; the student nurses ran the hospital. Of course, the registered nurses oversaw us and saw that we were doing what we should be doing. We really ran the hospital and that is the way it was. MF: That is true. You were in during the war too. What was that like? RB: I graduated during the war. I had graduated during the war. The student nurse program where they gave grants, it was not available when I was in nurses training. That came along later. MF: Oh okay. RB: I am sure it was pretty much the same thing for many, many years the student nurses ran the hospitals. MF: With the shortage of doctors and nurses during the war that made a difference. RB: There still is a shortage. MF: What was something you and your friends would do if you had a night off? RB: We were so poor we did not do much of anything. Once in awhile we would go to a show or we would just enjoy each other, play cards or just goof around and talk and goof around in the nurse’s residence. We did not really do a lot of things because we did not have the money to do it. MF: That is true. 5 RB: Sometimes I remember my roommate and I walked up Ogden canyon up to…what is that place at the front of the canyon? MF: Rainbow Gardens? RB: Yes, Rainbow Gardens. We would walk up there and walk back. Can you believe it? From the Dee School of Nursing. If we had a day off we might do that. That was recreation for us because we just did not have any money to do anything else. We had a good time. It was mainly the comradery we had between each other. MF: You had to rely on each other too… RB: Yes we did. MF: …as far as getting through school and making sure everybody was, you know… RB: Very much so. MF: Do you remember if there was there a curfew? RB: Definitely there was a curfew. We resented that curfew. That was one thing about nurses training that always irritated me. I was a leader kind of person and I objected to it and they knew it. MF: Yes. RB: It did not go very well with the people in charge. I could never understand why we could go on a floor and be a charge nurse for sixty-two patients and then we had to be in at ten o’clock at night. To me it was absolutely ridiculous, which it was. Finally they got rid of those silly things. And not being able to be married, I thought that was ridiculous. MF: Exactly. 6 RB: Yes, they finally got rid of those things, which was a good thing. MF: That is. It is not like they would not work as hard as you guys just because they were married. They would probably work twice as hard just because they knew they had to get through. RB: Yes it was…they had a few rules that were just absolutely ridiculous and some of us really objected to them strongly. They did not like it very well. MF: That is okay. You had to make your opinion known. At that time were you required to attend church? RB: It was an option. They did have services in the nurse’s home. Generally we would go to them but many times we worked Sundays. MF: You were busy. RB: So we were not able to do it. If we could we would. MF: Did you work six days a week? RB: Yes we worked…I could not tell you the number of hours we worked. Between going to school and working I am sure we put in many, many, many hours. After I graduated we worked a forty-eight hour week for several years and then we finally got a forty-four hour week. And then eventually we got a forty hour week. MF: Many years of working. RB: Yes. After many years of working we finally got a forty hour week. MF: Do you remember about your capping ceremony? RB: Yes I do. MF: Will you tell us a little about that? 7 RB: We were really thrilled about when we get our first stripe. When we finish our first we would get our first stripe. The second year the second stripe and the third year we would get a stripe across the top. MF: Okay. RB: When you got your stripe they made it quite a big thing. They would usually have a program and then have some refreshments or something like that after. But we were really thrilled to get that because it felt like we had accomplished something. MF: Did this take place at the nurses home? RB: It always took place at the nurses home. It was always a nice thing. Of course, in those days and age…you have probably been told this…we had to wear white, starch stiff uniforms. We would not be seen without a cap. Nowadays they wear anything. MF: Yes they do. It is pretty much whatever you want. Whatever is in cute style. RB: People are a lot smarter than we were. MF: Do you remember where your graduation ceremony was held? RB: Our ceremony was held in the Dee School of Nursing. They had an auditorium that was a very good size. It was held there. MF: What did you do after you graduated? Did you continue with your nursing career? RB: After I graduated…before I graduated the hospital offered to send myself and my roommate back east. If we would become nurse anesthetists they would pay for our schooling and pay for everything, our room, board, everything. But we would 8 have to come back and work for them for two years. I was not interested in nursing anesthesia. I was a fool because I should have. They make so much more than nurses do. MF: They do make good money. RB: My daughter is a nurse anesthetist and she makes more than I ever made. I was very interested in furthering my education. I worked for three months for Doctor Wilson in his office. He knew it was a short period I would be there. Then I went to the University of Washington and took post graduate work in medical and surgical nursing. I completed a year and a half course up there. MF: Oh good. After that did you continue in nursing? What did you do? RB: Yes. I continued in nursing. MF: Yes. RB: The war was still going and I married my husband who was in the service. He was stationed in California. I went there and was a Director of Nurses at a hospital there. After I finished that I came back and worked some more in the hospital. Do you want to know about that? MF: Yes we do. Please tell us. RB: You want me to tell you about what I did in my career? MF: Yes please do. RB: Well when I came back from there…I worked in nursing, counting the years I got my education, I worked fifty-one years. So it is very difficult for me to remember everything I did. Let me kind of generally tell you some of this because I can not remember the dates exactly. 9 MF: That is fine. RB: I was a surgical supervisor, a medical supervisor, a house supervisor all at the Dee Hospital at different times. I was a head nurse on a medical floor and I was a head nurse on a surgical floor. I also worked in the emergency room. I also worked at the Logan L.D.S. Hospital for a couple of years while my husband went to school up there at Utah State. When I was up there I was a Director of Nurses at the hospital up there. I also was Clinical Director of Psychiatry. After I had done med/surge for twenty-seven years I went into psych. I was Clinical Director of Psychiatry at the McKay Hospital for eight years. After that I went to Weber State College and taught over there for thirteen years. And then I retired from there as a full professor. As far as my education is concerned, during all those years I did go back to the University of Utah and get my bachelors degree, I got my masters degree in psychiatric nursing, and then I went to BYU and got my EDD, my doctorate from BYU. So it was a pretty busy life. MF: How many kids do you have? RB: Five. MF: You did all that while you having five kids? Congratulations. RB: I had a husband that helped a lot. MF: That is amazing. RB: Had it not been for him I could not have done it all. MF: While you were in training…I forgot to ask this question…you mentioned you were paid five dollars a month and if you broke things they take it… 10 RB: Yes. I think the first two years we were paid five dollars. If we broke the glass thermometers, everything was glass then, we were responsible for the breakage. That is another thing that is interesting. Things were glass or they were rubber. They did not have plastic then. We would give IV’s and we would have to wash tubing. We used catheters for catheterizations, we would have to wash them and sterilize them. They did not have anything plastic or anything like that. So that if we broke something like a thermometer they would take that out of that five dollars. MF: So if you were having a bad month you... RB: We were very careful not to break things. Then I think when we were seniors we got $7.50 when we were a senior. That doesn’t sound like much but… MF: Back then… RB: …you could buy a loaf of bread for five cents then. It is quite a different story now. So it helped. MF: That is good. I forgot to ask you about that. You had to make sure you sterilized and reused everything. RB: Oh yes. We sterilized everything. We spent hours, you know, washing the IV tubing. They did not have plastic bags for the solution, they used glass liters of fluid. You had to use everything you could over again. MF: I remember when I was in the hospital, it was 1979, but they still had the glass… RB: Yes. MF: …for the IV’s. I remember that. RB: They did not have all the monitors and… 11 MF: That is true. RB: …all the equipment that they have now. They are so wonderful now. MF: They are. RB: They did not begin to have what… MF: They did not. RB: …then what they have now. MF: Yes. RB: Nursing has become much more skilled and much more complex and… MF: It has. RB: …better than it used to be. MF: But you were trained to take care of the patients every single need though. As far as… RB: Absolutely. We did everything. MF: You did. RB: We were the nurses. We were the respiratory therapists. We were the physical therapist. We were the medication nurses. We did everything. They did not have all these other people. MF: That is true. RB: But nurses did everything in those days. MF: They did everything. You were housekeepers too because you had to clean… RB: That is right. We were housekeepers, absolutely. MF: Take care of everything, wash the bed down, wash the whole room, everything. RB: You did, absolutely. 12 MF: Yes, so you did pretty much everything. I think nowadays the nurses are educated but I think you were trained in every single aspect of… RB: We were. MF: …I mean every floor and not a specialty. You did everything, on every floor. RB: That is right. You got it right. MF: I am thinking this is totally different but I think that, you know, you were trained and now nurses are educated to learn the computer aspect so they tend the computers and sometimes more than they do the patient? RB: There is a lot of truth to that. Unless you are on…if you work on an ICU unit or the CCU unit… MF: Where it is a specialist… RB: …you have a lot of patient contact care. Of course, in psychiatry, you are working with patients all the time. When I was Clinical Director of Psych. I did a lot of counseling. When I was teaching at Weber State I did a lot of counseling of students… MF: That is true. And that is probably good. RB: …as well as teaching. MF: I have talked to a few nurses that said if you were on a floor and you had a nurse that had graduated and they would watch over the little student nurses just to make sure. RB: True. MF: …because they have been there, they know what they’ve been through, kind of guide them along. 13 RB: That is true. MF: A lot of them had said that to me, that that was the nicest thing, that they had nurses that they knew that would know that they would take care of them. RB: That is really true. Oh there is one more thing I should mention that I did. I hope you do not feel I am bragging but… MF: Oh no. RB: …at one time, nurses could not be, what they called, designated examiners. Designated examiners are what you would call expert witnesses. MF: Oh. RB: In the state of Utah, there was a law that only doctors and psychiatrists could do examinations on psychiatric patients or patients who were put in a hospital against their will… MF: Yes. RB: …who were supposedly had psychiatric illnesses. So they finally passed a law that if you were a registered nurse and you had five years experience, and you were considered an expert in your field, you could be designated an expert as a designated examiner. MF: That is good. RB: And I was one of two nurses in the state of Utah that were first appointed as designated examiners. So that capacity I saw hundreds of patients and did psychological evaluations on them and had to report to the courts about their emotional status. 14 MF: Yes, because if you worked with them you would know what the signs are, what to look for, and why not. RB: Yes. It was interesting work. MF: That is great. Did you know any members of the Dee family? RB: I knew who they were but I was not personally acquainted with them. I just knew who they were. MF: You retired from Weber State that is where you finally ended… RB: Yes. MF: …your nursing career. Okay, just wanted to make sure we had all that. Jess did you have anything you want to ask her? JJ: Do you have any specific memories with patients at all? RB: I have a lot of memories of patients. I will tell you one that I remember. When I was a medical head nurse we had a patient in our ward who…I was a young nurse then…and she had lupus. In those days they did not have cortisone. They did not realize how valuable cortisone was and how valuable it was particularly in the treatment of lupus. So this woman came in and she was very ill and having blood transfusions. When I made rounds this one morning…I would go see my patients every day first thing in the morning…she told me she had had a terrible nightmare the night before that she was in the hospital as a patient and she was all tied down with IV’s, blood and IV’s running. Her arms were all tied down and this black dog was up trying to get her and grab her and get her and, you know, try to kill her. MF: Yes. 15 RB: I still remember her because, in a way, that stimulated me to go into psych. Because I did not fully understand what it was all about but I realized after I got some psych training it was death. She was dying. And she knew it and she did die. So I remember her. I remember a lot of them. I could tell you so many stories in psych about people that…I could go on for hours telling you about the patients I have evaluated and some of those and some of the young people I have worked with that would have suicided had they not gotten treatment. And so I could tell you a lot about that, about electric shock therapy… MF: Yes. RB: Oh and that is another thing. When we were young nurses, when I was a young head nurse… MF: Yes. RB: …I was Clinical Director of…oh I also taught in the Dee School of Nursing, I forgot to tell you that. MF: Oh okay, good. RB: I taught at the U too, at the University of Utah. But when I taught in the Dee School of Nursing, I taught the last five classes that graduated… MF: Oh good. RB: …of the Dee School of Nursing program. We had patients that had in some shock therapy. It was before they did electric shock therapy. They were just mixed in; there was no psych ward at the Dee then. MF: Yes. 16 RB: They had one later but they did not have one then. We had all these psych patients we did insulin shock therapy on. I would have my students always take them because they could learn a lot, you know? I would just be running from one end of that place to the other to be sure they were not going in to irreversible coma and die. We never did lose a patient which I was really thrilled about but anyway it was interesting to see how that worked. Then, after that, then they started doing electric shock therapy. It was much safer. Another thing, too, when I first was head nurse on that medical floor they did lobotomies. And, you know, they are just really looked down upon. MF: Yes. RB: Now they just would not do those now. Fortunately they stopped that. MF: Yes. RB: Unless someone has a tumor or some medical, you know, organic problem there they would not do it, which is a good thing. MF: Did you notice when you were doing your psych care with lithium, is that what it is when they use for depression, did that come in while you were… RB: Yes. MF: …in medical? RB: They were using lithium when I started psych. They were using lithium and they use it in bipolar or in medic-depressives is the other name for it. MF: Yes. RB: They used lithium bipolar. It has worked very well with some patients. It really helps them. 17 MF: Because I know my husband said his neighbor, I mean she suffered for years, and they just could not figure out what was wrong. They finally got that and just made the world of difference. RB: Oh yes. Lithium is very specific for bipolar and it works very well with some people. MF: That is good. Because I wonder…it has come a long ways though as far as medicine… RB: It has. MF: …treatments and stuff. RB: They have even improved forms of lithium now they are using. It is very good. MF: That is good because people need that. It is nice that they can… RB: Less side effects. MF: That is true. That is probably the other thing with the insulin, you know, with the shock therapy, how that side effect would be, you know, if you could not get it back or you know… RB: Well if they went in to irreversible coma, boy, you were really in a bad way. Fortunately we never had a patient that did it but…you know, when I think about it now I think gee how did…it is kind of scary to think that we had those patients were given huge doses of insulin and they would get almost ready to go comatose and then we would give them some IV to bring them out of it. It is kind of scary to think… MF: It is a scary thing. 18 RB: …I look back on it and I think we knew it was dangerous but we did not realize how bad it was. MF: While you were teaching at Weber State did you teach with Helen Farr? Was she… RB: Oh yes. We are colleagues. MF: Oh good so you taught at the same time. RB: Yes she and I…I think she was in the class behind me. She was one or two classes later than I am but she and I are friends. MF: That is good. RB: We did that, we have known each other for many years. MF: Oh good because she had said that and I did not know. It is nice when we come meet you and find out you have taught at Weber State or what your career has been. It is nice to get that little connection with Weber State. RB: In fact, Helen and I went to the BYU and got our doctorates together. MF: Oh good. RB: We were roommates. We had to go each summer full-time. MF: Yes. RB: We lived together down in… MF: The dorms? RB: No not in a dorm. We lived together in an apartment one summer. Another summer we lived in a recreational vehicle that we had. We have had a lot of nice experiences together. 19 MF: That is good. We interviewed her and Faye Ball together. That was fun; we had a good visit with them. RB: Yes, I remember Faye too. MF: We appreciate you letting us come interview you. I hope that was not too painful. RB: Oh it was not painful at all. MF: We appreciate you sharing with us. RB: I hope you got the information you want. MF: Oh yes. Thank you. 20