Oral History Program Josephine Heslop Manning Interviewed by Marci Farr 20 May 2008 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Josephine Heslop Manning Interviewed by Marci Farr 20 May 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: Josephine Heslop Manning, an oral history by Marci Farr, 20 May 2008, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Josephine Heslop Manning Upper Left: Application Photo June 20, 1940 Upper Right: In Uniform, 1943 Lower Left: Graduation Photo Class of 1944 Josephine Heslop Manning September 16, 2009 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Josephine Heslop Manning. It was conducted on May 20, 2008 and concerns her experiences with the Dee School of Nursing. The interviewer is Marci Farr. MF: This is Marci Farr interviewing Josephine Manning at her home in West Weber on May 20, 2008. Josephine, could you tell us about what it was like growing up in West Weber. JM: I was born and raised in West Weber. I graduated from Weber High School and then after one year of college I went into nurses training in about 1941. Then we had only been in six months and the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. It was a very serious time because they took a lot of our nurses and a lot of our young doctors and it made our training a lot different. We were taught things that only the interns were allowed to do, like to help draw blood. Sometimes we’d get caught in a bind and have two babies being born at once with a doctor in one room and a nurse in the other room because there were no other doctors to call. We learned a lot. We got a very thorough training. MF: What about when you decided to become a nurse? Why did you decide to be a nurse? JM: My first year in college I wasn’t happy with it. Part of it was because I worked too. I would go to school and then I would get through and work at the railroad till night. So I didn’t have any social life at all. MF: Why did you choose to go to the Dee School? JM: Because it was close to home. It was right here and I had several cousins that graduated. One trained the same years I did. 1 MF: Who was that? JM: That was Almira Heslop. MF: What sort of assessments did you have to take to get into the school? JM: I hadn’t planned on going into nursing. In college I had taken some dietary classes, but no chemistry so after I got in, they said I could go back and take a chemistry class because I didn’t have to take the others. So that way I was able to be with the class. MF: So you did that at Weber College? JM: Right. MF: What were your first impressions of entering the nurses training? What was going through your mind when you first got in there? Was it harder than you expected or was it just okay? JM: They were very strict. They made sure you did everything just right. It seemed like sometimes they were picking on you. But I felt if they were trying to get rid of me I’d show them I’d stay in. Laughter But no I loved it. I loved working with the people. Sometimes at first it didn’t seem fair. You’d have people who should live that died. A ruptured appendix in a young person in those days was many times fatal, and then you’d have someone in the next bed who would have the same thing, an old guy they’d picked up at the railroad would get better and walk out. It didn’t seem fair. MF: Tell me about how you cared for your patients when you first started your training? What sort of tools did you have? JM: The first six months you’re called a Probie and you don’t do anything without somebody being right there. And the first thing you do is to have a partner, a 2 roommate or one of the other girls, you did everything to her. I mean you learned to bathe a patient by bathing your roommate and the same when you’d start giving shots only we’d give shots to each other. The first time we had to go alone and give a bed bath that was a terrifying thing. Laughter MF: Did you live at the school? JM: We lived in the Nurses Home. MF: In the Nurses Home, do you remember Catherine when she was there? Do you remember Catherine Hogge when she had the store? JM: She was over the store. MF: She was telling me a story about how the nurses had to go in at a certain time. You had your curfew that you had to be in the house. You’d take food to other people. JM: We had a cloak room with no windows. We had to have our lights out at ten o’clock. Sometimes we would have little parties after lights out with the help of Catherine from the Corner Pharmacy. She would bring us a big bottle of coke or root beer and some cookies. So we’d get in that cloak room and we’d sit and talk because we could shut the door and they couldn’t see any lights. So sometimes if we hadn’t got in touch with Catherine, one person would sneak out and go across the street to the store. Then they would have to come back and we’d have to let them back in. So you had two chances of getting two people caught. The one that let them in and the one that went to the store. MF: I thought that was a great story, and I had to ask you about that. Tell me about some of your classmates, people you were roommates or friends with that you knew from that school. 3 JM: I’m kind of outliving all of them. My first roommate, she didn’t adjust to nursing and after about six months she quit. They thought it would be better so she quit. Then I went through most of the time with a roommate name Kathryn McFarland. Almira Heslop was in the same class. There were girls from Willard and girls from Idaho. We had fourteen that ended up graduating out of about twenty-five. Of course they couldn’t get married in those days, so if some of them fell in love and decided to get married they had to quit. MF: Interesting. So why? Because they wanted them to focus on school, is that why the nurses did that? So tell us about your teachers. Who were some of them you remember from your training? JM: When I went in our administrator was named O. B. Glasscock. She was an older woman. She was the grandmotherly type. She was strict. A great teacher that we had was Mrs. Miner, a very good teacher and she taught very well. Some of the doctors would teach classes. I have to say one thing, we took a class called Materia Medica, the drugs, well everybody flunked it. So we all had to take that over. MF: You had some of your training at the hospital as well right? You had to take some classes there or did you have to take them from Weber College? JM: We took a lot of them right at the nursing home. Some of the classes were in the evenings, because after six months you are working eight hours a day. So not only do you have your classes, and you have to work eight hours a day, then you have to get your lessons. So there were a lot of times when we hid in the closet with a little lamp and would study. 4 MF: Tell us about your work schedule while you were at the hospital. What was your schedule like after your six months when you started working? JM: At first they start you with the very basics. You did housekeeping. You changed the flowers and you cleaned the unit after a patient went home. So that was at first and then pretty soon you would be given a patient and you would give bed baths and take care of them. You would have so many baths, and still have to be to class by eleven. You would rush like mad to get everything done so you get over to the Nursing Home and get in class. Every morning we always had a prayer and a song and a little spiritual thing. MF: Did they require you to attend church on Sundays? JM: They didn’t. We worked a lot of Sundays. MF: If you had chance and you had it off? JM: Always. There was a ward we could go to. MF: What about your living arrangements at the Nurses Home? What were they like? JM: You had two girls to a room and you each had a desk, a closet and a bed. That was about all you had. You were not allowed to have a radio in your room. They had one out in the lobby. You weren’t allowed, but I knew several girls that had them hid in the garbage can. MF: How many girls lived at the home? JM: Oh, it would be different at different times. In our class when we started there were twenty-one of us. There are three floors to the nursing home. As you went up the scale, each year we would move up a floor. The rooms were better on the top floor. We started in the basement. We had our own laundry and a kitchen. We had a house mother. Her name was Mrs. Woods. She made sure we were all 5 tucked in bed. She would check at night, make sure everybody was in and the lights were out. Lights had to be out by ten o’clock. MF: Tell me about a normal day. What would start your day off if you had a normal working schedule? JM: If you were working the day shift then you’d probably have to be to the hospital there any time after six if you wanted to have breakfast. You had to be up at the Nurses Station for the report from the night shift on all the patients at a quarter to seven. So you would be up and over and had your breakfast and be on the floor at a quarter to seven at least. MF: What were some of the rules of the nurses training that you had to follow? JM: You could never date a patient. And they were very careful that you were sure you didn’t embarrass the patient, that you always had them covered and were very careful with towels and everything so you didn’t embarrass anybody. MF: What would you do if you did get a night off? What was something that you would go and do? JM: We didn’t have a car. If it was a weekend and I had a night off my dad would pick me up and I’d go home for the weekend, but usually you just did something around the nursing home, or went to a movie. I don’t think I went to very many movies. We just kind of stuck around the nursing home. MF: Were there any traditions at the Dee Hospital or the Nurses Home that would connect to the nurses? Were there any that you remember, any traditions that took place? JM: We always had a tea and the older girls would be in charge of that. We put on this tea and had a little bit of entertainment. When the class graduated there 6 would always be a dance. A lot of the girls did have boyfriends and they would date, but they had to be in at a certain time. Saturday night I think you could stay out a little later. MF: So was there a capping or pinning ceremony that took place? JM: This was a real big deal. When you’d been there six months and they decided you would make a good nurse, then they had a capping ceremony. This was held in the church that was on 23rd Street just below Harrison Boulevard. We would all march over there in our capes and white shoes. We’d go over there and we’d get capped and there would always be some speeches and stuff like that. MF: Would they give you your uniform at that time or was that when… JM: No we already had those, but not our caps. And when you got your cap it had one stripe on it, meaning that’s your first year. There was never a big deal about the second or third stripe, but you were always happy to get it because it gave you a little more authority. MF: How did you feel when you finally graduated? JM: When I graduated I went to Salt Lake and spent three days there taking state exams. I stayed in a hotel and you’d go over and take all these tests in one day and then I’d would go back and look up the answers in my books and I was just so sure I were going to fail them all. After they were all done we came back and we just went back to our schedule. It might be three days before they would say everybody passed. That was great when we heard we’d passed. I was more embarrassed about what I would tell my mother if I flunked. MF: Did religion play a role at the hospital at all? Did that have any influence at the Dee Hospital? 7 JM: They honored every religion. We had a lot of people who were administered to. We had a chapel and other churches or groups could meet in there if they wanted. MF: What about your relationships with your patients. Do you remember any that you got close to while they were there? JM: You naturally just like lots of people everywhere. I enjoyed the patients and if one was cross, why they usually had a reason, but I enjoyed the patient care. MF: After graduation did you stay at the Dee? Where did you go after you graduated? JM: There was the war on. We’d only been in six months and the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. So when we got out then we were going to be close to our jobs. I’d had a little trouble with some of my supervisors. I don’t remember now what it was all about, but I went to Salt Lake to work. I didn’t stay very long and came back. Then I did private duty and then I got married. MF: What was your greatest challenge as a nurse? Were there any challenges when you were training or after you were graduated? Any challenges that came across or was it okay since you’d gone through the training? JM: I enjoyed every bit of it. I was determined the longer I was in the more I knew I was going to be a nurse. After I got out, I would have loved to have gone on and studied to be an anesthetist but then I couldn’t get anybody to go with me. MF: Were there any nursing procedures that were hard or that you had hard time learning? JM: Mostly everybody was strict. Each procedure was taught by a teacher or by a doctor, usually an intern. 8 MF: So it was mostly just the roles. Do you think there have been a lot of changes that have come since you’ve been a nurse? JM: Oh a huge amount of changes. We were bedside nurses. We knew how to take care of patients. I have worked with nurses that didn’t even know how to give an enema and they had two or three degrees. They get more into the technical stuff. MF: That’s good. Do you have anything else you want to ask her Sarah? SL: What did you get paid per day when you were in training? Did you get paid? JM: Probably ten dollars a month. SL: Ten dollars a month? JM: Yes. As I remember. SL: Do you remember how much your tuition was? JM: Ninety-four dollars and my dad had to buy the cape. He paid for everything. I decided to go in such a hurry, but they furnished the uniforms and we bought the cape. And they gave us the caps when we got them. SL: Did you spend holidays at the nursing home or could you come home, like for Christmas? JM: Lots of times you had to work. So it would be low man on the totem pole that gets stuck at work. SL: For those that were stuck at work did they do something special for you, especially during Christmas? JM: I think the classes would just get together. We had little groups like you have everywhere. We got along and so we would just get together. I don’t remember that we did anything big. Maybe if we’d have one day off we’d go home. If I was off my folks would come get me and I’d go home and spend the day with them. 9 MF: That’s good. That’s all I had. I don’t know if you had anything else? We appreciate you doing this Josephine. Thank you. This will be helpful. This is so interesting. Is there anything else that you wanted to say or are you alright with what you’ve said? JM: That’s long ago. MF: We appreciate you taking time to do this. JM: I know that they gave good training. They gave very thorough nurses training, now they don’t have the time. They have too many students. They can’t get them in the hospital to do the work so they can learn. We did the work and then we learned. I think that‘s the only way to do it. MF: Hands on. Well we appreciate that. Thank you. 10