Oral History Program Diane Stowe Gibbs Interviewed by Marci Farr 1 April 2009 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Diane Stowe Gibbs Interviewed by Marci Farr 1 April 2009 Copyright © 2010 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: Diane Stowe Gibbs, an oral history by Marci Farr, 1 April 2009, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Diane Stowe Gibbs Application Photo 1952 Graduation Photo Class of 1955 Diane Stowe Gibbs August 31, 2009 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Diane Stowe Gibbs. It was conducted April 1, 2009 and includes her recollections and experiences with the Dee School of Nursing. The Interviewer is Marci Farr. MF: We are interviewing Diane Stowe Gibbs. She graduated in the class of 1955 from the Dee School of Nursing. We are interviewing her at her home in Bountiful, Utah. It is April 1, 2009. We are just going to start off with you telling us a little bit about your early life, where you grew up, and your family and where you went to school. DG: I was born in Ogden, Utah. I am the oldest of five children. My mother was a Dee graduate. My father’s mother died when he was a teenager. My father and his brother were raised by his father without a mother in the home. As a result, he became inactive in the church. So when my mother met him, her mother was not very happy about them getting married. My father eventually became active in later years. My parents got married during the depression and didn’t have any money. My grandfather, my father’s father, gave them thirty-five dollars to buy curtains, dishes, an oil cloth for the table. They moved in and lived with him that first little while. I was born in 1934 and had a brother that was born two years later. The depression wasn’t any better. My father was working but it was hard times. My mother went back to work. She hired a lady to work for her and she had to pay her twenty-five dollars a month to tend us two kids. She made seventy five 1 dollars a month for working. She had to get up in the morning—they lived on 7th street in Ogden. She had to get up in the morning and go down and catch the street car and go into town and transfer up to the hospital so she could be there by seven o’clock in the morning. Then she worked until after lunch was served and the meds were given out, the treatments were done, she then went home around two o’clock. She was home for three or four hours and then she had to turn around and go back on the street car and help put patients to bed and feed them. She did all this for seventy five dollars a month. MF: The things we do to survive. DG: That is for sure. MF: Where did you go to school? DG: Ben Lomond hadn’t been built yet. I went to Lincoln School, then Mount Fort Junior High and then I went to Ogden High. Harrison Boulevard didn’t extend all the way out north in those days. It used to end by that big gully. We used to have to go down to Washington Boulevard and catch the bus. Then we had to transfer and go up to Ogden High. I knew that I kind of wanted to be a nurse and there was a scholarship offer. It was the Bamburger Scholarship—you probably heard about this from somebody else—and my mother urged me to apply. I am sure because she knew a lot of the people and because she was acquainted with them I am sure that helped the situation. Anyway, there were five of us that got the scholarships and so that fall I moved up to the old Dee Hospital nurses home and started nurses training. MF: You were in the picture that was in the paper? 2 DG: Yes. MF: What were your first impressions when you walked into the hospital? DG: We went to the nurses home and the nurses home had a big auditorium where we had classes and there were some classrooms downstairs. There were two telephones downstairs, there was a housemother, there was a library that was very dark, TV was just starting to be the thing. I remember once I went down to watch TV down there but it wasn’t engrained in you so much that you didn’t do it. We had a green room and we were right down the hall from the bathroom. Edna Walchli was my roommate. I am sure you have talked to Edna. I knew Edna vaguely from high school but we didn’t run in the same group so I didn’t know her very well. We had to be in by ten o’clock at night and had to sign in and out. We were very strictly controlled. We had a great time. Edna and I were the only ones who stayed together the whole three years. We are still very close friends. We stayed together the whole time. They assigned us big sisters. Maybe you have talked about that before with some of your people. My big sister was Kam Campbell. Her real name was Kathleen Campbell. Kam was kind of a maverick. She was fun as all get out. She was not religious. She didn’t have any religion. She played baseball for the Ogden Shamrocks which was a ladies softball team. She also played basketball. She was very athletic and she was prone to do the sneaky things and sneak out and do the things that we are not supposed to do. She was lots of fun and she treated me great. We became very close friends. When she graduated she and some of the girls moved down to Nevada to seek their fortunes and get jobs 3 while there she went into heart failure. Apparently she had a bad heart. She used to pass out every once in awhile and nobody knew quite why. That was before the days that they knew a lot about hearts. She ended up back in the hospital and she died within a year. I was at the TB San when she was really bad, Edna called me and my mother came and got me, took me up to the hospital, and I got to spend the whole afternoon with her and evening. She died early the next morning. She was very young when she died. It was really a sad, sad thing for us because she was a very fun, happy girl. She was really good to me. Big sisters were supposed to kind of help you! She showed us how to sneak into the downstairs thing and steal the brownies from the cafeteria. You went out the backdoor and went down and around to go in the backdoor of the hospital and there was a big pop machine there. You opened it up and the pop was suspended in a little rack. But you could take the lids off and drink the pop out. But we didn’t always do bad things. When we were first new they took us up—we hadn’t been in the hospital only to say hello to somebody every once in awhile so we were in awe of everything. They took us one night and took us all through the hospital in the dark and showed us all these creepy things trying to scare us. They took us up to where they did autopsies and Kam had gone up there before us and was on the autopsy table with a sheet over her. We got up there and they said, “This is where you do autopsies.” She sits up and scares us all. We had some fun times too. There were a lot of good times and you met a lot of good people. The older nurses were always really good to us and helped us a lot. 4 MF: That is good. Was Ruth Brown still there? DG: Ruth Brown was one of our directors. She would always say, “Miss Stowe.” You were never called by your first name. You always had to stand up proper and be very professional. Actually, when I worked here in Bountiful for years, her sister Joan and I taught the prenatal class and the young childbirth class for a long time. Her other sister, Helen Bingham was our head nurse on labor an delivery which was where I worked for twenty-seven years. But we were always still just a little bit afraid of Ruth Brown. She made you tow the line. MF: You had to know what you were going to say. DG: That is for sure. MF: Everybody said they would go in and do the medical floor, you had to make sure you knew everything about every medicine. DG: Exactly. MF: If not you had to go back and… DG: Do it all over again. You would get it right or else. MF: If you had a night off what was something that you would do with your friends? DG: I actually had met my husband before I came in to nurses training. He got drafted—it was during the Korean War. We did some things but nurses didn’t need to go very far. Our only transportation was Edna’s dad’s car. She probably told you about that; the little Volkswagen. Her dad was a retired engineer and he was a lot older because it was a second marriage and Edna was the only child of that marriage. He got a part-time job as the guy that cleaned the operating rooms after surgery. He would drive up there in his little tiny Volkswagen and 5 park it there. Edna then had permission to take the car if he was still at work. Of course, he wasn’t there at night. Sometimes we would take about ten people in that car and cram in. We had to walk down to Weber College for a lot of our classes when it was on 24th street. They would say, “Here come the nurses.” We didn’t ever had class with boys or men, we were separate. It wasn’t like going to college at all. MF: Totally different. DG: We had a lot of our classes at the hospital. MF: What were some of the class that you had at the hospital? DG: We had anatomy and physiology. Marie Donaldson was our teacher and she was another one that was a strict, straight stickler and made you do it just right. She had a baby just before we came. It was her first and only child. She didn’t get married until she was older. She brought that baby and kept it in a crib right out of the nursery and it was in our classroom right by her all the time. We would have our classes there and then sometimes we would have to take the classes down at Weber College. We usually worked from seven to eleven everyday in the hospital and then we went to class after lunch. Sometimes we would— depending on the schedule for Weber college—because we had our biology and microbiology and our chemistry classes, those kind of things we had to go down to the college. MF: After you had your probationary time what was your typical day like? DG: You got up early, you worked, then you went to class, then you did your homework, you ate. I remember we ate at the cafeteria in the hospital. I 6 remember we used to drink tons of milk. That probably made us all healthy because we would drink three or four glasses of milk at a meal because it was ice cold, really good milk. We didn’t go many places during the week. On the weekend sometimes I would go home because—I didn’t always go home but I went home sometimes because I lived right there and until my husband left I could see him, the man I eventually married. Edna had a boyfriend but she eventually broke up with him. When she broke up with him she started going with a whole group of nurses and went down to the same ward. She has probably told you all this because that is where she met her husband. It was a ward really close to the hospital and they could walk down there. Every year we did put on a dance. I don’t know if it is still there. Just across from Rainbow Gardens there used to be a big lodge. I remember we had a dance there and decorated for it. MF: Timbermine? DG: Timbermine is probably there. There wasn’t a restaurant there. It was a log place but it had this big gym floor and we had a dance there. In my mother’s day they put on plays and all this kind of stuff but we didn’t do that. MF: Was that the only tradition that you had? DG: Yes. We had fun times and stuff but we were pretty involved because as soon as we got smart enough to do something useful they put us to work. A lot of times on your off time you went back and worked a shift. MF: They paid you for that part right? 7 DG: Sometimes they would and sometimes they didn’t depending on how useful you were. We always felt like we were better than the Weber College students because they never got as much experience as we did. MF: That is what everybody said. Tell us about some of the doctors. Do you remember some of the doctors that you worked with? DG: Oh yes. I ended up working a lot in the delivery room. I really liked—not the floor but the actual delivery room. Doctor Southerland just died, I saw his picture in the paper not long ago, but he was a resident when I was there. Doctor Egbert was a resident. He has been a doctor for years there. Doctor Curtis, Lindsey Curtis was the head of OB GYN. Dr. Samson was a resident there and I actually worked with him in Bft years later. Doctor Naisbitt and this was before all the tragedy in his life but he was always fun to be around. Yvonne Lowe was our head nurse. I think Yvonne died too. She retired and moved to St. George. She wrote a book with Doctor Curtis on labor and delivery. I think you can still find it in some odd places. I can’t tell you all the stuff that was going on because I don’t want that public. There was stuff going on. MF: Tell us a little bit about your capping ceremony and when that took place? Do you remember? DG: We went down to—there used to be an old tabernacle down where the Ogden Temple is. That is where we had the capping ceremony. It was alright. I can’t remember a whole lot about it. We got our caps and we had a little candle. I think I saved the candle, it is downstairs. 8 MF: What do you think was your greatest challenge while you were going through nurses training? DG: It was hard because you were so isolated. It isn’t like girls that go to college now and go into nursing. It was fun too because we would get together and talk and visit and do fun things. But you were there and you worked, you were busy. I was writing to this man who eventually I married and all I had to tell him was all the stuff that I learned. It kind of irritated him because he hadn’t had a chance to go to college. When he came home he said, “I’m not going to let you know all that stuff and me not know anything.” So he went to college after that. It was fun. What happened was in 1953 he was down at Fort Ord. Edna and I decided we’d go visit him because we had three weeks off during the summer. He had some friends who had married that he had gone to Bear River High School with. The wives were living down there and they said, “If you want to come down and stay with us”—because the men were on the base and they couldn’t leave the base—“you can come down and stay with us.” So Edna and I got on the Greyhound bus and we went down to Fort Ord and met him. These ladies took us sightseeing all day long. In the evenings, about six o’clock, we could go over to the base and see the guys for a couple hours but they couldn’t leave the base because they were still in basic training. That is where he actually proposed to me. We always joke—we were sitting on a ditch bank that didn’t have any water in it and he asked me to marry me as soon as he could get a chance. In those days if you got married you got kicked out of training. But we were the last class so they gave me permission to get married. My dad says, “Yes you can get 9 married but you can’t quit training. You can’t waste this scholarship. You can’t go follow him around the country.” Besides, they were sending everybody to Korea. We decided we’d get married and they said if I stayed and lived with Edna—it was just like I wasn’t married. He called me on a Saturday and said, “I’ll be home on Thursday night. Can we be married on Friday?” We had the invitations and addressed them, had the dresses made and all that kind of stuff but we didn’t know what day we were getting married. It depended on the army. He got home in the evening. My instructors let me take all my finals—(it was at Christmas time—they used to have a little kitchen by the delivery room that had a table in it and they kept juices and stuff for the patients, also the doctors spent a lot of time in there.) Since it was the end of the semester I would be free and wouldn’t have to worry about class. My mother had gone down to the clerk’s office and got a marriage license and brought it home. It was all ready to be signed. Cal said, “I am not going to wear a uniform to see all these people.” So he went home and changed his clothes. Then we went to see the clerk at his home and he gave us the marriage license. Cal had his blood work done in California and I had mine done at the hospital so we had a marriage license. Then we had to go see the Bishop and then we had to go see the Stake President. By the then—I mean we had just barely seen each other. My mother said, “You better get home and go to bed. We have to get up at five.” We had to go to the Logan temple in those days. So that is what we did. We got married the next morning in Logan. His aunt had a little dinner for us and then we came home. Because it was Christmas and it was so late, we couldn’t get the church 10 that night because they were having a church ward party. We had to wait until the next day for our reception. We went to Salt Lake and we ate at the first Colonel Harmon place—Kentucky Fried Chicken. There was a motel there and that is where we stayed. It snowed all night and we got up the next morning and there was snow this deep. So we had to get home and have the reception. Kam was a bridesmaid and a couple of my friends from high school and Edua. He was only home for a week and he had to go back in the service. MF: Wow. DG: I lived at the nurses home and played like I was one of the nurses. I didn’t go out partying with them. MF: What did you do after graduation? DG: In those days you had to go to the TB Sanitarium. It is out on 7th street and is now the deaf and blind school. We had to go out there for six weeks and learn about communicable diseases. Then we had to go to Provo for three months. We graduated in September so we started in Provo in the first of June. My husband actually got out of the service at the end of May. So the only honeymoon we had was when we went to St. George for three days. They let me live off campus because I was married. We found this little basement apartment and it was so dark. It had a fold down bed. You had to fold the table up to get to the bathroom. It was tiny. He went to school as he had never gone to school. He signed up for eighteen or nineteen credit hours and he was blown away he had so much to do. So he studied and went to school all day and he would take me up to the hospital in the mornings and deposit me on the lawn. 11 Somewhere we had a picture of us sitting out there in the morning waiting for class time to start. We had great big key rings with all the keys to the different departments in the hospital. You had to carry them around. I remember one of my classmates had long hair and one of the people at the hospital grabbed her by the hair and tried to hold her down and take her keys away one day. They were just starting to have medications for mental illness and they were just experimenting with it. There were a lot of people down there—they had a lot of problems. You had to go through two different sets of locks to get in to where the patients actually were. Anyway, my grades really slipped. I remember Mrs. Donaldson called us in and she said, “Are you having any problems in your marriage?” And I said, “No. It is just kind of fun to be married. Who wants to study?” I survived and I actually got good grades when I took my boards. When my husband got through we moved—I had worked a lot in labor and delivery and they offered me a job. We came back to Ogden and he went to Weber because Weber had started up to the new campus. We lived in a little apartment. He worked and I worked. It was a really good time. For some reason we never got pregnant. I went to Doctor Curtis and they did all the tests that they knew how to do in those days and they couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t get pregnant. Finally they decided we were working too hard and spending too much time apart. Cal went to school early in the morning, came home at noon, then he had to go to work at a grocery store. I would get ready and go down and catch a ride on Washington Boulevard at two o’clock to 12 go to work. Then he came and picked me up at eleven thirty PM. If he was too tired at night sometimes he would forget to pick me up. We didn’t have a phone because we were too poor. Sometimes I would have to sit there and think, “Where is he? Why doesn’t he come and get me?” Sometimes he would come and get me and I’d be in delivery and he would have to sit and wait for me. I learned a lot and there were some really neat experiences while we were there. Then we moved to Provo and they didn’t have any room in the delivery room so I had to work on the orthopedic ward but I actually got pregnant not at the hospital. I worked until two or three weeks before my first child was born and then I didn’t work anymore. I said, “I am not going to work anymore. I am going to raise children.” So we lived down there, he graduated, and we moved to Salt Lake afterwards and had another child. My husband decided he wanted to change occupations. By then we had three children. We had moved to Bountiful and had a home and I had a baby and then I had another baby, he was the Bishop and we had all these things going for us and he decided to change jobs. I said, “Well, if you are going to work on commission then I will have to go back to work.” So I walked up to the little hospital—they had only opened it about three years before. I went in and they asked me what kind of experience I had. I said I had worked in labor and delivery and they said, “Really? We can use some labor and delivery people.” They sent me over to the head nurse and she hired me just like that. I worked for twenty-seven years and there were four other nurses that were Dee graduates that worked in that hospital. When they built the new Lakeview hospital we helped move them. I had only worked there a couple years 13 and they asked me to start teaching the natural childbirth classes. Then eventually Joan and I taught early childhood classes where you have daycare centers, they are required to have a certain amount of training. I worked nights all those years, then I got pregnant and had another baby. I worked nights all that time and I was relief society president for part of that time. It was a real busy time. Finally my kids got old enough and I gradually started working days. We lived up here. I used to have to go down the hill. Sometimes I would be on call at night and I can remember going down the hill in the fog and thinking, “Am I going to get to the hospital on time?” I worked there twenty-seven years. I went out to dinner one night with some neighbors. We had started working twelve hour shifts so they waited for me to get off work and we went out to dinner. I must have gotten food poisoning. It was really a funny thing. I was the only one that got sick, nobody else did. I got really violently sick and I didn’t go to the doctor. Nurses don’t do that. I got better but for the next eight or nine months my stomach was just icky all the time. I got skinny, I couldn’t eat, I lived on soda crackers and lemonade. I was just feeling icky a lot. Finally I would go to work and check my blood sugar and we would check all this stuff. I would talk to the doctors and nobody knew what was wrong with me. I had actually been to my own physician and they had checked heart, lungs, and couldn’t find anything wrong with me. I thought, “I am crazy. Let’s face it, I have lost it.” Anyway, my husband had to go to a conference down to BYU and we went down. There was a women’s section and I met him afterwards for lunch and he said, “You look really bad. There is something wrong with you.” I said, 14 “Oh I am fine. I can’t eat but I am fine.” He says, “We are cancelling this stuff and we are going home. I am taking you home.” So he took me home and we get home and the church calls and wants him to help somebody move the next morning. The next morning I wake up and go to get out of bed and I feel kind of weird. I get to the mirror and the whole side of my face was droopy and I thought, “Oh I have Bell’s Palsy. Oh crap.” So anyway, my daughter who was married by then and going to school had just come back from her internship in California and was living in our basement while she was looking for a job. I finally roused her and she came up. She said, “I’ll go get dad to find out what is wrong.” She got Cal and he took me to the hospital and they did a CT scan on me. They told him I had a brain tumor. They could see this brain tumor sitting on my brain stem. It was a Saturday and they said, “You are not in any danger of dying. You are fine. Just go home and come back and we’ll do a MRI on you on Monday.” That is what he did. They had it all arranged that they would take me straight to LDS Hospital afterwards to have surgery for the brain tumor. I go back to have the MRI, we go to LDS, and we had to wait for the surgeon to come because he was busy in surgery. He finally comes upstairs and he said, “I’ve been looking at your pictures and I am not going to saw your head open lady. You don’t have a brain tumor, you have a blood clot.” I had had an aneurism but instead of killing me it clotted on the side of my brain stem. It was on this right side so this whole left side of me, by this time because it had been forty-eight hours, was paralyzed. They kept me in the hospital and he turned me over to a neurologist. He was a really fine neurologist but he “thinks he knows it all.” He 15 came in and he said, “Well, you may die. If you die you will die in the next three to four days. We are going to keep you in the hospital and watch you.” “Well thanks, I really appreciate your confidence.” I was in the hospital for a week and a half and they eventually transferred me to a room where I could learn to sit up and move and walk with a cane. Then they sent me home. They had the physical therapist come to my house. By Christmas I could walk with a cane. I didn’t need extra help. They wouldn’t let me drive. The hospital was really nice at first. They said, “Anytime you are ready to come back you can come back.” I had worked the Thursday night before all this happened. And actually, this gastronologist that I knew made me come in early in the morning that week before and scoped my stomach. I said, “My stomach just feels like its going around all the time.” They did find out that I had this bacteria in my stomach and that is what was causing all this. It made my blood pressure go up and that is what made me have the stroke. By February they let me drive and I could drive my self to the physical therapist or the hospital but it took my hand about nine months to come back. They said small muscles take longer. My legs came back pretty fast. When I went back and talked to them they said, “Well yes you can come back to work but we’ll have to start you back at beginner’s salary.” I had worked there twenty-seven years. I said, “No I am not going to do that.” I miss the people I worked with and I missed the doctors and it was really fun to work in the delivery room. Sometimes it was very harrowing but it was a neat experience. I said, “I am not going to do that. That is ridiculous.” The hospital had been sold to a new owner. They cared less. 16 They could hire someone straight out of college and pay them a third of what we have to pay you. So I didn’t ever go back to work. When I was working, a lot of times I taught for DATC and they had me come to the high schools here, Viewmont and Bountiful and Woods Cross High Schools, and teach when they were on the series of how the baby grows. I would go and teach for two weeks every semester. They had me come back and do that for awhile. Then my husband said, “If we are ever going on a mission we had better go.” So we put in our papers and went on a mission. I never have gone back to work per say. Sometimes I really miss it a lot. We worked in the temple for a long time and I said, “Will you look at those people’s hands? You can get that IV in there really good.” Your thoughts aren’t really in the right place but it was a really good experience in my life. My husband says it has been great to have the nurse’s training because it helps you be a better mother and know what you are doing. It was a very good experience and I am very grateful that I got to have it. MF: You learned every single floor. You didn’t do a specialized floor. DG: I remember Doctor Grua when we were in surgery one day and I was the scrub nurse he said, “Put your hand in here. Here is the stomach, here is the gall bladder and here is the spine.” He let me feel everything and check it all out. He was really nice. There was a lot of those old doctors from the Dee that we really enjoyed. They were really good to us. When I had my first baby, although I lived in Provo I went back to the Dee Hospital to have Doctor Curtis deliver that baby. After all we have got to come back here, this is the place. 17 MF: So your training served you well through your life. Everybody has said that is the thing they loved—knowing that the things they learned could go on more than just a hospital setting. It could go for their family or their neighbors and helping the community. DG: Oh yes. I taught a lot of classes in church situations and in community situations for stupid little teenagers that can get themselves in really a lot of trouble. MF: Exactly. DG: It is interesting—I will have people come up to me still and say, “I think I remember you. I think you helped me with my baby.” Or, “You taught my prenatal class.” Usually they were first time mothers that took the classes. I still have this one lady that talks to me all the time when I see her and she says, “I remember you.” And now that son is in Iraq as a soldier. MF: Wow. DG: It is fun because I don’t always remember them but they remember you because it was a pivotal time in their life. MF: So how do you think nursing has changed over the years? DG: Oh it is harder. When mother went back to work—she went back to work when I graduated because she had missed it and her kids were getting older. She had to learn to take blood pressures because they didn’t let nurses take blood pressures when she was in nurse’s training. Of course, I don’t think she ever did learn to do IV’s. Now they have to know so very much, the computer stuff and the technology and all the stuff. This little niece of mine that works for these 18 cardiologists—they just know tremendous amounts of things. They just assumed what the doctors would do—we never would get to do that. MF: I think you were educated for everything in the hospital and now they are computer literate. So the personal touch probably isn’t there. They don’t have time to… DG: The people that do the bed baths and the waiting on you they are the aids— sometimes practical nurses. The RN’s are the bosses and the supervisors and they run the show. It is a whole different ball game. When my husband was in the hospital having his knee operated on I went down to the labor and delivery room. They have remodeled it a little bit. There are only two or three of them left that I know. It was fun to talk to them. Everything is so computerized. Labor and delivery gave me the opportunity to talk to the patients and to coach them and visit with them. MF: It is probably still more personal. DG: A little more personal than it is just going in and taking their temperature. MF: I think it is a little more personal. I just had a hysterectomy in November. I was so surprised that one nurse, an RN, spent so much time with me the night I had surgery. She came in and made sure I was okay because I had to get up to walk. She probably stayed an hour and a half in my room. I was so impressed by that. I thought it was probably because I was on the OB floor. That is probably the only reason because of that. DG: That was the part that was fun about it was being able to talk to the patients and being able to help them. You would get somebody that was frightened or scared 19 and didn’t know what was going on and you were able to visit with them and tell them what was happening. I have had some fantastic experiences. A little girl from Ogden had gotten pregnant and had a child and she was pregnant again. They were really screwed up kids, they were only seventeen or eighteen anyway. Her husband jumped off the roof at the Ben Lomond Hotel. Life got beyond him. She was pregnant with this child. She knew the baby was premature so they had to bring her to the hospital and we were taking care of her. She knew she was going to die. She was sure she was going to die. She wanted to leave a will. It was the middle of the night. “There is nobody here to write a will.” “Well you have got to help me, I have got to do this.” I helped her write this thing out, it wasn’t legal but anyway—she told me how she wanted her child raised. She needed somebody to confide in and to talk to. “You have got to start taking her to the nursery as soon as she is old enough because I quit going to church and look where I am.” She didn’t die, the baby lived. It was a tremendous learning experience to see some of the people that came in—I have talked a lot to church groups about mothers that come in and try to control the daughter and the husband gets sifted out. The biker guy that brought the girl in and dropped her off and came back and got in bed with her. There are just weird things that happen. They are certainly learning experiences. I came home and talked to my kids about a lot of things. My husband says, “Well you are much more open than a lot of mothers your age.” I can talk to them about sex and having babies and I was there for all of my grandchildren when they were born. That was kind of a neat experience because there are twenty of them. It has been a really good 20 time. I just met a doctor the other day in the grocery store and we were talking about how different it is nowadays and the way things run. Some of the OB doctors that I worked with—none of them are still actively working, two or three of them have died. We keep saying we have got to have a reunion before everybody dies off on us. Some of them have been dying. MF: That is true. That is why we want this documented because we want to know the experiences and what it was like. It affected Ogden so much. It was such a big thing for Ogden to have this great hospital. DG: The Dee family. Mother knew a lot of them because she knew a lot of the people that ran the hospital and stuff. Some of the people that went through training with her were the supervisors and the people that were running the hospital when we were there. It was a very interesting thing. I don’t even know some of the doctors that are there now. I used to know every single one of them. MF: Who did she know from the Dee family? DG: I don’t know. I can look in her little books and show you all of these little pictures of people she knew. I can remember going downstairs at the Nurse’s Home and you had to prop the door open because you are supposed to be locked out at night. Sometimes we would prop the door open and someone would come home late and we’d have to go open the door and let them in. Nobody did anything terrible. We had to stay in there and had to be in at a certain hour. I guess in a way it was good. It was a three year plan but we went to school year round. We only had those three weeks off. We were there all the time. People always said they liked the Dee nurses because when they hired them they knew how to work. 21 They knew how to do things. When we were seniors we would go over and be the charge nurses in the afternoon on the three to eleven shift often times because it earned you extra money and it helped the hospital. They didn’t have to pay us as much. MF: That experience is valuable. Your friendships remain. You showed us when you got together for your fiftieth anniversary. And your one friend that was there and she died right after. DG: She was a diabetic and she worked at the Bountiful hospital with me on and off. She didn’t work very much. Edna probably told you about the other gal that died in our class. She died on her way home from a trip. The rest of us have been fairly healthy. It is kind of scary to think we are getting this old. I keep thinking we are still thirty-five. MF: You don’t seem that way. You are fabulous. Well we appreciate you letting us come visit with you. If you want to show us your mom’s stuff we would love that. DG: Alright. Let me show you a little bit about it. She has kind of an interesting story. She was from a family of fourteen children. She wanted to go into nursing really bad but there was no money, of course. She had an aunt that she used to do housework for and her mother said, “Why don’t you talk to this aunt and see if she’ll lend you some money?” She lent her fifty dollars. She had fifty dollars to go into nursing. She had to pay it back ten dollars a year. It was hard to come by. You didn’t make much money in those days. Then she married my dad right after she graduated. She graduated in January and got married in April. She paid back the aunt and she bought her a pressure cookers. They cost nine 22 ninety-nine so she bought her a pressure cooker to pay the interest on the fifty dollars. MF: Oh wow. DG: She tells in her history that when she got the fifty dollars she had to buy her uniforms, her shoes, her socks, her cape, and she had to buy her own thermometers and her own syringes. I remember when I was a kid she would give shots to all the neighbors and she always had to boil them in a little pan. Of course, there were no disposable things and how hard that was. If you broke anything you had to pay for it. If you dropped a thermometer—it was a whole different lifestyle. She moved down there and she absolutely loved being in nurses training. This is her notebook from biology. MF: Oh wow. DG: I took mother to all of the reunions until she died in the spring. MF: 2007? DG: Yes. She just died. It will be two years this spring. It has got little things in here talking about the different people. Caroline Meyers, was the housemother. There are pictures of things they did. Here is the faculty of the school of nursing and the hospital staff. Maybe you have already got this. Louise Scoville was a really good friend of mother’s. She was a classmate. She was one of our head honchos when we were there. Brewerton, she was another one. We were kind of scared of her too, she was a tough lady. When we were in training we had to go down to central supply and wash the instruments and package them to be sterilized and wash gloves and powder them. Here is a couple of pictures of 23 things in the hospital like the operating room and the baby room and stuff like that. MF: So this is how you got the babies. Six little babies in the little thing. That is great. DG: They used to have a choir. My mother met my father because they had to put on a play. She had to be the man’s part. One of her friends said, “Well I have a friend and he’ll let you borrow his suit so you can wear it.” That is how she met my dad. She wore his suit in the school play for the Dee Hospital. Edna Stokes and Roskelly were friends that she knew. She kept good track of them and she knew them for many years. She went back to work in 1953 or ’54. They had a transitional care unit over in the nurse’s home for awhile. She was the head nurse on that. They put people in there that were diabetics and had to learn how to do their shots and how to manage their diet and all that kind of stuff. She took care of Shaun Myers. He was just a child and was a diabetic. They are the Myers Mortuary people. She became very good friends with them. They came personally when she died and took care of everything. They were just so good to us. After my dad died of cancer and she took care of him at home, Myers Mortuary had her come and run the Good Grief program because she kept a journal of how she felt and everything. She spoke on TV and stuff about it. It was on the Jackie Nokes program a long time ago. They used her in their Good Grief program to help people who had lost someone. A couple of times her doctor had her come up and work when his office nurse had a day off. She was so thrilled to be able to work when she was seventy-eight years old for three or four days. 24 Just to be an office nurse—she didn’t do any nursing per say. She was heavily involved into nursing. She really liked it. It was a good opportunity in her life. MF: Probably through the depression—I am sure that made a difference. DG: Oh yes. Being able to survive—it really helped. Like I said, they didn’t have to do it forever but for those two years—it took like twelve hours to work an eight hour shift. MF: Her bus schedule. DG: Yes to get there and come back and forth. They didn’t have a lot of cars so they had to do that. When she went back to work she really enjoyed it. It was really fun for her. She got to be friends with all these doctors and she was very good friends with Doctor Bartlett. He finally retired and finally died but they were buds all the way. My family always laughed. They said, “Your mother thinks that doctors walk on water.” She treats them very respectfully and very reverently. I said, “Oh I know but sometimes they are not too great.” It was interesting. Doctor Sumstion was an OB man who lived here in Bountiful. His wife Diane Sumstion was in the very first class of the Weber students. I knew her vaguely because the Weber students were coming over. They only had to work three or four hours a day. We had to work eight hours a day. We said, “Oh you pikers.” I knew her a little bit then and she ended up marrying Doctor Sumstion and I ended up working with him while we were here. Tragically while we were on our mission he went hiking with his son and had a heart attack and died. It was so sad and really tough because he was young and getting ready to retire. His son is now a doctor in Layton. You get to know them really well. You don’t tell how 25 many of their babies you ended up delivering because they didn’t get there in time. The nurses do the work—I shouldn’t say that. The nurses spend all the time and the support system and everything with the patient and the doctor walks in and catches the baby. If there is a problem of course he has the training to take care of it. But they don’t always like you to acknowledge that. That is the way it is. I enjoyed it, I really did. I liked working. It was a good time. MF: This lady, Audrey Kennedy, she lives in Cody, Wyoming and she sent us a thing. She is ninety-six and the oldest one we have talked to. She is ninety-six and she still goes to the Billings, Montana temple once a week. She is just active and is going like crazy. She still has lots of spunk. DG: They are goers. Mother was almost ninety-seven when she died. Just about a month ago there was a lady from Colorado that died. I saw her obituary and I should have cut it out for you. I can’t remember her name but she was a Dee graduate. They are out there all around. MF: That is why we are trying to get as many as we can. Plus this will be useful for people that are doing research. It is going to be available so people will know what is going on. DG: Have you talked to Phyllis Ball? MF: Yes, Phyllis is my mom’s cousin. DG: Oh alright. I worked with Phyllis for years at the hospital. MF: She was our second interview that we did. DG: Oh that is good. She wouldn’t come to the reunion so I said, “I hope they get some of these people.” She is also a very talented cake decorator. She made 26 my oldest daughter’s wedding cake. We have been really good friends for years. Joyce lives in Farmington—she was in the same class with Phyllis. You probably know her. When we started nurses training this one girl was in love with this guy so she would come and embroidery pillow slips. Of course she didn’t do her homework. Two weeks later she quit and went home to get married. She married and they live here in Bountiful. I see her every once in awhile. It is kind of fun to visit with her. Have you talked to Lee Onna Stuart? She lives out in Granger. MF: No we haven’t. DG: You need to call her, she is an interesting lady. You talked to Pauline Anderson I am sure. MF: Yes. DG: Leona Gibb lives in Idaho. MF: I just did a phone interview with her. DG: Norma died. Norene lives down in West Valley. She says she has been depressed since the day she was born but she managed to raise a family and to work and do things. Evelyn lives in Colorado. Louise lives in Brigham. LuAnn Secrist is on a mission. Louise Holman wore my wedding dress when she got married. After I got married they let a couple others get married as long as they didn’t have to move away. Her husband was in the service too and they were from Panguitch. He was going up to Utah State so they had to get married up here and he was home on leave so she wore my wedding dress when she got 27 married. She has worked for years at the Panguitch Hospital. She ran it for years and years and years down there. MF: What is her name again? DG: Louise Sanden Holman. She lives at 190 West 1st Street in Panguitch. Maybe she has a different address. MF: Okay I will send her a letter. DG: She really knows a lot about nursing. She spent a lot of time in that little hospital. She had to run everything. Joyce Udy actually has her PhD and teaches in California at a college. MF: She is from Tremonton? DG: Yes she was from the Tremonton area but she lives in California now. Kathleen O’Barr is really good. She tries to come home for a lot of our parties. All of her family has died now so it is hard for her to come home. She has been a real active one too. LuDeen Peterson Schrock—she has mild Alzheimer’s. She came to the last party but she had a hard time. She knew me but she couldn’t remember her daughter’s name. She is struggling a little bit. LuDeen died about two months ago. MF: Thank you for allowing us to come interview you. We appreciate it. 28