Oral History Program Kay Costello Young Interviewed by Marci Farr 8 October 2010 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Kay Costello Young Interviewed by Marci Farr 8 October 2010 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 St. Benedict’s School of Nursing was founded in 1947 by the Sisters of Mount Benedict. The school operated from April 1947 to 1968. Over the forty-one year period, the school had 605 students and 357 graduates. In 1966, the program became the basis for Weber State College’s Practical Nursing Program. This oral history project was created to capture the memories of the graduates and to add to the history of nursing education in Ogden. The interviews focus on their training, religion, and experiences working with doctors, nurses, nuns, and patients at St. Benedict’s Hospital. This project received funding from the Utah Humanities Council and the Utah Division of State History. ____________________________________ 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: Kay Costello Young, an oral history by Marci Farr, 8 October 2010, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Kay Costello Young Graduation Photo Class of 1959 Kay Costello Young October 8, 2010 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Kay Costello Young, conducted by Marci Farr and Sarah Langsdon, on October 8, 2010. In this interview, Kay discusses her recollections and experiences with the St. Benedict’s School of Nursing. MF: This is Marci Farr. We’re interviewing Kay Costello Young. She graduated from St. Benedict’s School of Nursing in 1959. It is October 8, 2010, and we’re interviewing her at her home in Ogden, Utah. Kay, will you just start out and tell us a little bit about where you grew up, about your family, and about where you went to school? KY: I was born in Montana and lived there until I was almost eight. Then we moved to Washington Terrace. I went to St. Joseph’s grade school. Then we moved to Twelfth Street, and I went to Ben Lomond High School, graduated from there in 1956, and then went directly to nurses’ training after that. MF: Is your family all around here? Your brothers and sisters? KY: Yes. My parents and one sister; my parents are deceased, my sister lives in Washington Terrace. She also worked at the hospital, but she worked as a secretary in the pathology department. So when we were little, my mother had a club for kids – girls – it was called the Sunshine Playmate Club. We made little tray favors and took them up to St. Benedict’s Hospital, to put on the patients’ trays, and that’s where I first got acquainted with the hospital up there. MF: When you were in high school, did you know at that time that you wanted to be a nurse? 2 KY: Yes, I did. I kind of always liked taking care of people, taking care of dolls, taking care of animals, you know, that kind of thing. Actually, when I was about ten years old, we went to take tray favors up to the hospital, and we put them on the trays for the new mothers, and in pediatrics. This is a picture. That’s Sister Mary Margaret, who was the first administrator. There are – the girls in there, there are two of us there who actually did become nurses at St. Benedict’s. The reason I showed you that is because this sister asked us, at the time when we took those up there, she’d have tea for us and all this kind of thing. She said, “How many of you are going to be nurses?” Well, all of us raised our hands. Afterwards, my cousin, who was one of them, said, “Did you really mean it? ‘Cause I didn’t.” But Gerry and I both said, “Yeah, we meant it, we want to be nurses. And we both ended up being nurses. MF: That’s a great story, I love that. So when you were in high school you took all the classes? KY: I did. When I was a sophomore in high school, I had a bad kidney disease, so I was seeing doctors and physicians quite a bit, and during that time I also had my appendix out, so I was in the hospital. So I was around the nurses and saw what they did. But what I remember – one of the nurses that was at my doctor’s office was a graduate of St. Benedict’s, and she had that cap on and I thought she was the most gorgeous lady in the world. That’s what I wanted to look like, wanted to be. 3 So I kind of always had this feeling that that’s what I wanted, so when I got to high school, I took anatomy and physiology and Latin, and psychology, and I loved all those classes. MF: That’s great. What were your first impressions when you got to nurses’ training? KY: I was really excited. I knew - one of my best friends was already there, a year ahead of me, and so I was excited. Nervous, because it was a really different atmosphere and situation than I’d been in before. I was used to the Catholic sisters because I’d gone to Catholic grade school, but the Benedictine sisters were much different than the Holy Cross. MF: Yes. KY: To start with, the studies were so intense right at the beginning. We had so much homework, and I thought, I’ll never be able to do this. I felt so dumb – and yet, I’d always been a really good student. That was just kind of an eye-opener there. I didn’t get the roommate that I wanted when we first started, because it was - a friend of mine from high school and I were planning on being roommates, and it didn’t work out. I was really disappointed. Then they had initiation, where you couldn’t wear makeup, and you had to wear a silly hat, and it just felt really dumb and stupid. So the first weekend we went home, and I thought, when Sunday came along my dad was taking us back up there, and I really didn’t want to go back. But I did, and then of course as you make friends, you get more comfortable, and as you get used to the instructors and the types of classes you have. MF: It was bearable. 4 KY: Yes. MF: So who was your roommate? KY: When I first started, her name was Mary Otto. She was a radiology student, and she came from Minnesota. The student that was my choice for roommate, Mary Sue and I got to be roommates. So we were for that year. Then Mary Sue didn’t come back after the first summer, so then Jeanette Smyth and I became roommates, and we were roommates the rest of the time through. MF: Do you have any fun stories to tell about her? Any things you guys did while you were in training? KY: Um… like fun stories? MF: Whatever you have. KY: I can tell you one, and I don’t know, maybe the girls in Seattle talked about it too, but one night we hung a dummy in a window. Mrs. Chase is the dummy’s name that you practice CPR on – I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of those. But she’s a vinyl, full-sized female. She’s dressed in running clothes. We hauled her upstairs into one of the girls’ rooms, and we hung her in the window by her neck. Then, when the girls who lived there – well, one of them of course was in on it – when the other one came back and we’re telling her, Gerry is so depressed, and we’re just really worried about her. We think something’s really wrong – Vi opened the door, and she – the light coming in from outside, she could see – that scared her to death. That was so mean to do. Then, of course, Gerry was in the room anyways, so she knew it wasn’t true, but that was a mean trick. 5 MF: That’s a great story, they didn’t tell us that one. Good thing we came. If you had some time off, what was something you would do? KY: You know, we didn’t have an awful lot of time off. We did have weekends, when we first started, but because I lived here in town, I went home most weekends, as did most of the girls that lived in town. Sometimes we’d bring other girls from out of town home with us for the weekend too. We went to things like movies, and we had a lounge upstairs. Everybody congregated there. We watched a lot of television, laughed a lot, told stories – just a gab fest. You know, it was just like having a whole bunch of sisters. The other students, ahead of us, were there also. We knew them too. We went out to eat. Rigo’s was new in town, which was one of the first Italian restaurants in Ogden, and we used to go there to eat. In the summertime we’d sometimes go up to the dam, lay out in the sun. I don’t know. We dated on weekends. We had a lot of homework, so really during the week, we didn’t go a lot. That was really spent studying, especially that first year. So I don’t know. I can’t think of really anything else that we did. MF: Did you guys ever sneak out? KY: Oh, yeah. That came after. Not our first year – I think we were more afraid to try things our first year, and we had a nine o’clock – I don’t remember, it might have even been eight o’clock that we had to be back to the dorm on weeknights, but I think it was nine o’clock, because I think lights out were eleven. So we always had some study time. But yes, we used to sneak out. There was a tunnel from the nurses’ home that went into the hospital, so we didn’t have to go outside. It 6 went over by the boiler room, then up to the – one of the – the door from the hospital and through the tunnel and into the nursing home was always open, so that at night, the students who were on the night shift could come back and forth. Because the outside door to the nurses’ home would be locked at night, even though it was a very short distance to cross a little – short parking lot to get from the back door of the hospital to the nurses’ home. Yeah, we used to sneak out. So we’d go out through the tunnel and we had friends that worked in the psychiatric unit, and they’d let us back in. We didn’t have to sneak out. We sneaked in more. MF: What do you remember most about the sisters? KY: I really, really enjoyed the Benedictine sisters. I had been to Catholic grade school, and we had Holy Cross sisters, and they were much more strict. So when I got up to St. Benedict’s, I thought, these are not what I’m used to with sisters. They’re not nearly as strict. So we enjoyed them. They were around a lot, because – well – first of all, we had Sister Chanelle in our class, so she was a classmate, and several of our instructors were sisters. But they were just human beings. MF: It was probably nice to see that, because I think you have a persona of them, and then probably to see that is probably such a different – to see that they really are human, and to see that they enjoy things. KY: Yes. They lived in one end of the nurses’ home as their residence. So they were around. They came to all our parties. We had a lot of parties, for different 7 holidays or just because it would be a party weekend of something, and they’d – they always came, we always had a good time with them. MF: So they did socialize with you. KY: Yes. There really weren’t – I mean, there were sisters, and there were a lot more than there are around now, but there weren’t really a lot of them. I thought they were very kind. I enjoyed them very much. MF: Who do you remember the most? Who stands out in your mind? KY: Of the sisters? MF: Yes. KY: Probably Sister Berno. She was the director of nursing. She had this way of looking at you and kind of clicking her tongue when she was disapproving of something. Sister Estelle – she was our anatomy, physiology, chemistry teacher, and she was just an amazing, amazing lady. A very strict teacher, but we learned an awful lot from her. She had a really good sense of humor. Sister Mercy was in the OB delivery, and she was just a delight to be around. Then there was Sister Mary Gerald, who was on the medical unit, and I probably learned more from her than anyone. They were strict with you. I mean, you had to follow the rules, and you had to do what you were supposed to do, but if you did that, you got along fine. They had one sister in the diet department, called Sister Boniface, and everybody was scared to death of her. It seems like – she had this kind of whiny voice, and she really kind of scared us all, and I think everybody got sick when they went to the diet kitchen, so they didn’t have to go to work. We were on such a tight schedule, and we had this tray of nourishments 8 that we used to take up, pass out to the different patients; the elevator would be slow in coming, and some of the girls would pick up this cart and run up the stairs with the cart so they weren’t late in doing their rounds. She was a riot. MF: We’ve heard that. Somebody said they were so tired of waiting that they did that – they were up to the next floor, and then the elevator opened, and there was Sister Boniface. KY: I always remember one of the other sisters, Sister Rebecca – she was a pharmacist, and she taught us drugs and solutions courses. My roommate, Mary Sue at the time, they had a terrible time getting along. We had a test one time, and it asked for the side effects and the treatment for drug reactions. She put in there, side effect was death and the treatment was burial. Sister Rebecca thought that was the most horrible answer – she got so upset. The rest of the class laughed, but she didn’t think it was funny. MF: How much interaction did you have with Sister Chanelle? KY: I personally didn’t have that much, because she wasn’t in the rotation group that I was in, so I didn’t really work with her. But when we were in classes we saw her a lot. She had to go back and take her final vows at the convent, so she was gone for a little while too. They also did not let her go on rotations with us when we went to our psychiatric training and to Denver. So there were gaps there. But we still – you know, when she was around, she was a really sweet lady. We’ve got much closer to her since we graduated. She’s just a delight. When we went up to – a couple of them have been over to Cottonwood a couple of times; I’ve just been there once. I’m looking forward to going back. We had the greatest time 9 up there. Sister Chanelle was just as funny as the rest of us, and she tells more stories about her dealings with the nuns, ‘cause she didn’t think Sister Berno liked her. She’s just – you’ll love her. MF: That’s a fun thing. It’s just such a different perspective. You were going into nurses’ training, but she’d already taken her vow, as far as that process. It’s going to be interesting. KY: She was from a different convent, so – sisters are human beings. MF: Do you remember any of your instructors that you had? KY: I actually remember them all. Jeane Morton was our nursing arts and crafts instructor – Jeane Barker, she was, when we were in nurses’ training. She’s still around, and I still see her. MF: She’s so cute. We interviewed her a couple weeks ago. She’s wonderful. KY: Yeah. She was so good. She was just the ideal, perfect nurse to look at. The starched, white uniform. She had a little lace cap. She had long sleeves with starched cuffs. She never got them wet, she never got dirty – she could do everything. MF: That’s what you want, that’s your perception. SL: Who else do you remember? KY: Sister Estelle – she taught us, and I can remember chemistry lab, when we had fetal pigs to cut open, and this kind of thing. Actually, one group of girls got a cat and took it in and euthanized it and opened it up and studied it. She walked in while they were doing it. I think she was quite impressed with the fact that they 10 had done it. It wouldn’t have been me, ‘cause I couldn’t have done it. They went out to the pound and got a cat. MF: Really? KY: I know. But it was very humane, the way they did it, and it was for a learning experience, ‘cause they didn’t want to be stupid when we got to the fetal pigs. They wanted to know what the insides looked like. So I remember her. Sister Boniface taught us nutrition, and that was a riot. We had to cook, and we cooked the most horrid stuff in that cooking lab, and we had to eat it. I can remember – we made coffee, and they put eggshells in it. I can’t remember the reason why you did it, but it was awful. MF: That is so funny. The things we learn. KY: We had some clinical instructors, too. We had a Mrs. Humphreys, and Helen Farr, and those are the main ones that I remember, but the sisters, the ones who taught us in class – Sister Rebecca and Sister Estelle was a main one. Sister Mary Gerald taught us on the floor; she didn’t actually teach classes. We had a psychologist come and teach us some psychology, whose name was Cliff Swanner. Then there was a Mr. Farmer who taught us something, and I can’t remember what it was he taught us. We also had singing with our group. I don’t know why they decided to do it, but they did. I think ours was the only class that did it. We used to meet for about an hour a couple times a week, and like a choir practice – we had altos and sopranos – then we performed. When the doctors had dinners, the student nurses were the entertainment, and also served the dinners. I have a picture of 11 that, too, and I can show you. I’ve got pictures of Cottonwood here that you’ll have to look at, because you’ll be seeing it. Most of the pictures I have are of reunions. Let me just show you this one picture – this was our fiftieth reunion, and all but two of our classmates were there. One had died, and one was sick. I have this one picture of the singing group – that one. MF: That’s great. We have not heard that. KY: The singing, the teacher’s name was Belle, and she was a secretary I believe, but she was the one who did that with us. MF: Yeah, we have not heard that. SL: What do you remember about the doctors? Who are some of the doctors that you worked with? KY: Oh, Dr. Swindler – he was an orthopedic doctor who was really strict. The OB doctors actually taught us classroom – Dr. Vernal Johnson, Dr. Tom Feeney, and Dr. D.F. Nielson – he isn’t around anymore. There’s another one here in town that I’m not thinking of his name, who taught us too. They’re retired, because they’re very elderly now. Dr. Howe was a surgeon – Dr. Lowe, who is John Lowe’s father, was one of the surgeons here in town that we scrubbed with. Dr. Grua; a lot of the old-timers. MF: Which was your favorite rotation when you were on the hospital floor? Which one did you like, and which one did you like the least? KY: The one I liked the least was OB and delivery room. I really didn’t care for that. I liked surgery, OR, when I was in it, but it wasn’t ever really my favorite. I did like medical unit very much, and I liked surgical unit a lot. We also rotated through 12 orthopedics, and that one wasn’t really my favorite either. We did two rotations out of state – one to Children’s Hospital in Denver, and then one to the psychiatric hospital in Hastings, Nebraska. I loved both of those rotations. MF: That’s good. How many went at a time? Four from your class went, or did it depend? KY: When we went to Nebraska to Ingleside, for the psych rotation, I think there were eight of us. When we went to Denver, there were four. MF: Okay. SL: What do you remember about each of those? KY: The psych unit was really interesting. We made a lot of friends with people in town. A family called Leemys, he was a social worker at the hospital, and he kind of liked a group of us, so they’d have us to dinner and things like that occasionally. We met a lot of guys in Hastings. This group of them called it the new crop whenever the rotation came. So there was a lot of dating. I really enjoyed psych nursing. It was a huge hospital. They had different buildings, and different types of – I remember one guy on one unit who was homosexual, and that was his diagnosis. They had him in the psychiatric hospital, because that was an illness at that time. How strange. MF: How crazy. I’m sure that just seeing the difference from then until now… KY: It’s incredible. A lot of elderly people with – I don’t remember Alzheimer’s ever being talked about at that time, but a lot of memory problems and that kind of thing where they couldn’t be on their own and they were there. A lot of disabilities, too, not just psychiatric diagnoses, but people who had severe 13 mental problems due to seizures, all different kinds of things like that. It was a long-term care facility as well. But also acute psychiatric conditions. We did strange things – like they did insulin therapy, where they gave these nasty doses of insulin and put patients into a coma and left them there for a little while, and then they’d give them massive doses of IV sugar to bring them back out of it. The other one that they did was lots and lots of shock therapy – electric shock therapy. Not particularly straightjackets; I never really saw those in use. They did ice baths for people who were really, really upset. So the treatments – a lot of them were kind of harsh. It was about the time that Thorazine and some of the medications were getting really popular, so we got in on that too, and of course that made a major change in how they treated psychiatric patients. MF: That’s good. It was probably nice to get that perspective. KY: Yes. MF: What about Children’s? KY: Children’s was amazing. They had all kinds of units. You know, they had – we did mostly on the medical/surgical unit, but they had infant surgeries, where they had the little tiny ones. It was more like an ICU for infants at that time. They had a communicable disease unit; it was two huge floors. They used to hospitalize a lot of kids because they had complications in those days more than they have now. They did a lot of reconstructive surgeries; a lot of cleft palates, I remember. Tonsillectomies they did; they were doing those more or less like an outpatient, but they’d be in close to twenty-four hours for their tonsillectomy patients. They 14 had a huge orthopedic area, and they had a heart surgery area, which we didn’t work in at Children’s, but I did eventually when I went back there. We had a really, really strict pediatric instructor named Kay Thompson. She scared everybody to death. They were as scared of her as could be. When I graduated after I moved to Denver, I worked at Children’s Hospital and was her assistant. MF: That’s how it works. So was Children’s more of a learning hospital? Or was it more of a pioneering, trying to find cures for children? KY: No, it was just a regular hospital. Most of the departments in the other hospitals didn’t really have very active pediatric hospitals, they just all went there. But they had – they did do some research and stuff. They had a lot of patients with leukemia – so they had that. It was just mostly that it was – it was like Primary’s here, only Childrens in Denver. MF: Do you have any memories of patients that stuck out in your mind? Someone that stuck with you? KY: Do you know, I was trying to think about that. I can think of a couple – not particularly their names, but I remember one lady who had cancer, who had cancer of the jaw. It had progressed so far, and they had done bone transplants, but it had broken down, and all of it had broken down, and the jaw was sticking out. I’ll never forget that. I can’t remember specific patients, but I can remember specific ways we treated patients. We used to have the heart attack patients just on the medical floor; they weren’t in a cardiac unit. You kept them all for two weeks. They never, ever could feed themselves or do anything – they just had to 15 be really quiet. Now, of course, medications have changed, but that was before cardiac units. Then – it was even quite a while after I graduated before they had the first coronary care unit. The other ones that I remember were the cataract patients that had cataract surgery. They had to be flat on their back; you had to feed them too. They had sandbags on either side of their heads so they couldn’t move their head. Now it’s an outpatient procedure; you get up and go home the same day. So it’s just – things have changed so much. MF: It has. What do you remember most about your capping ceremony? Tell us a little bit about that. KY: I remember it was really exciting, and actually, I have a picture that was in the paper here. The reason why I have that is, of course, because Mrs. Morton was our instructor. But Loretta, this was one of our classmates. We just thought that was great – we got our caps, and we got our capes, and we felt like we really were nurses. I’ve got a couple pictures here of that. This is Gerry, who’s one of my classmates, and she’s the one I’ve known since I was seven years old. MF: Oh, okay. KY: We went all though school. Here’s another one; that was Mary Sue, one of my roommates, and Gerry. Then that was me. But we thought that was just great. We had the lady dressed like Florence Nightingale, and they lit our candles, and that’s Sister Berno, of course. Our parents came, and it was really a big deal. We just felt like we’d made it. MF: I’m sure. Was it six months after you started? 16 KY: No, it was three months, because I think it was in December when we got our caps. That was the probationary period, until you got your cap. At that time, the cap really symbolized nursing. Everybody was working toward getting that cap. MF: Do you think, if you made it to that point, you were pretty much – not guaranteed, but you would probably be successful? KY: Over the hump, yes. Yes. MF: That’s good. That was probably a nice feeling. KY: A lot of them didn’t, you know. We started out with – I think thirty-five or thirty-eight, and when we graduated, there were twenty-two, and I think two of them were actually radiology, or maybe it was twenty-two of us, I can’t remember. Are you a cat person? Because if you are, he won’t leave you alone. SL: He’s fine. MF: Your best friend now. KY: You must be, because otherwise he doesn’t come around. MF: What do you think was your greatest challenge while you were in nurses’ training? KY: You know, that’s really a difficult question. To start with, it was getting used to the type of learning that we were doing. I think – we learned to be leaders right away. That was really a challenge. But we were just pushed right into it. MF: That’s true; they expected so much. KY: Yes. I think the challenges were the high expectations and meeting those high expectations. 17 MF: Absolutely, because you pretty much ran the hospital once you got past your first year. KY: We did. The first year we didn’t, but after that, the students were in charge of units at night, and actually, we were in the daytime too, but there was always someone there overseeing us. At night, it was the hospital supervisor who had a huge responsibility, because she had students. But we rose to that challenge, and I’ll tell you, all of the nurses that worked in that hospital were so great in helping students. Everybody really, really was part of the team. So it was amazing. I thank God for my training. I think I had the best in the world. MF: Because you had the hands-on, as far as being able to learn in class, and then be able to go out and practice it. KY: Yes. What we did – I mean, it was difficult. The other challenge was the amount of time that we had to put into it. I mean, our whole – like you said, what did we do for fun – our whole life was just, for three years, was really concentrated on working and learning. It wasn’t quite as bad – they used to have twelve-hour shifts, and they had like maybe four hours off a week or something, and of course we had weekends, until we started working on the floors. Then we didn’t. We had – you know, when we had classes, the first year we had them all day long. I shouldn’t even say the first year. The first six months, probably. As we got toward the end of that, the class schedule was, the book learning was cut down, and we did a lot more on the floor. But we worked – we’d go to work in the morning from seven to ten on the unit and do patient care, bed baths, that kind of thing, and then go to class until three o’clock, and then part of us would go back 18 and work a shift from three to seven, and part of us would go out at seven and work ‘til eleven. So it was a split shift most of the time. There was no such thing as a forty-hour week. We worked forty hours a week plus classes. If we worked nights, we were expected to work nights and get up and go to class in the daytime. MF: That would be so hard, I think. You’re so tired after you’ve had a night, then be able to concentrate – it would take a lot of dedication. KY: At that time we just had afternoon classes, so that was at least better. MF: That probably helped. KY: That did, tremendously. But you know, we worked – weekends, we covered the floors. MF: Were you on call? Did you have to be on call at that time? KY: We were in the operating room, we were on call. Of course, there we always had a lot more supervision than we did. However, because it was the circulating nurse that was supervising us, because we scrubbed – we didn’t circulate, we just scrubbed. If there was a surgery and we were on the rotation and they had it at night and they got called in, we got called too. We also covered emergency room; we’d be on call for that. But we were – like I said, we were charge nurses too. We learned to work into that. So there was a lot of working. As time went on, they had to cut down the number of hours; you couldn’t work and go to school more than forty hours a week, and eventually the time on the floor was really, really cut back. I loved mine. I think it was asking a lot of people, but we did it. It was a sense of accomplishment. We didn’t harm patients. I can’t think of 19 anybody, anything that we did that really harmed people. Of course, things are not like they were when we were in training now. The patients in the hospital are much sicker, and the technology has changed so much, so that the booklearning part is really, really important now because you’ve got so much more to learn in that respect. But the kids coming out now have to pick up their clinical expertise after they graduate. MF: As far as their knowledge is, they have to get there, but as far as the personal care, I think it’s sad that that’s lost. You know, you have that personal time that you’re able to take, instead of taking care of the machine. That’s just how it goes. KY: I mean, you do both now – but really, the ICU is the machines, and even though you have patient contact, it’s a different kind now. You know, we were expected to be very knowledgeable and competent, and personable. MF: It’s like you guys were this whole lump sum of everything. But what great nurses you turned out to be, though. KY: See, I think we did. In fact, they may have said this when they moved up to Seattle; this one hospital said she’d hire anybody she could from St. Benedict’s, because they were such great nurses. We were. Our reputation was good. For a long time, it was the people in the hospital that were working there would say, well, she’s a graduate from here, so they really felt comfortable with… MF: Knew that the expectations that they had would be fulfilled. KY: You know, we fulfilled those, but I’ll tell you, we had to work at it. You had to really be dedicated. Those who couldn’t do it dropped out. 20 MF: Just wasn’t made for them. Better to find that out, instead of three years later go… KY: I feel fortunate that I got to go during that time. That was an experience I’m glad I had. My daughter’s a nurse, and she’s had, of course, a different experience. She knows a lot, and now she’s been practicing for so long that she has lots of good skills, but that was really tough to start with. We started out – I can remember my very first day on the floor, the most frightening day of my life. It was dark, and our job was to go in and pick up the water pitchers out of the patients’ rooms, and I couldn’t see what I was doing, and I was afraid I was going to stumble and wake people up. We’d put them on a cart, and our first responsibility was wash all the pitchers and glasses and refill them. Here we were. Then deliver breakfast trays and that kind of thing. So we thought we were really nurses; of course, nurses don’t do that any more. We had to sterilize our own needles and syringes – you can imagine – sharpen needles. It was a whole different thing. I’m glad they have changed all of that, but it was a great experience. It was terrific. MF: Tell us a little bit about graduation. Where was graduation held? KY: Graduation was held at St. Joseph’s Church, and it was a very formal affair – it was a very tearful affair, because none of us – we were glad we were finished, but in a way it was the end of a way of life, and everybody was kind of going their own separate ways. We had become close, and we were sisters. So it was kind of teary and that kind of thing. We went to graduations of the classes ahead of us 21 and we wore our caps and our capes and processed, and it was a big deal – it was a big deal. MF: So your families were all able to come? KY: Yes, all the families came. All your relatives and friends; the church was packed. We carried big bouquets of roses. MF: You were glad that day finally came. KY: Yes. MF: Did you stay at St. Benedict’s after? KY: I worked in the psychiatric unit there for about three months after graduation, and then I moved to Denver. I had met friends in Denver, at Children’s Hospital, and they had gotten an apartment, and they were all working there, and said, “Why don’t you come?” So I did, and I worked at Children’s Hospital there for a couple of years. I did enjoy it, I really did enjoy it. Then I came back to Ogden; I worked in pediatrics here for quite a few years, until my children were born, and then I did not work for almost ten years. Then went back, and I got back by doing like a lemonade party for children who were going to have surgery. That was just kind of a – once a week, bring them in and explain the hospital to them and tour the hospital and answer questions and that kind of thing. My husband also worked at the hospital; he was the director of the laboratory at that time. Then he moved up the chain and he was in the administrative – he was the vice president for a while – but anyway, one of the departments that he had was the respiratory department, and they were just starting to do bronchostomies with the fiber optic scopes. Respiratory therapy was handling that, because their doctors were the 22 ones who were doing it, but they didn’t have any nurses to help them or recover the patients or anything like that. So I started out doing that. That was not really frequent either, so it was just kind of part time. I moved from that into – they used the GI lab to do the procedures in, so I kind of watched around, and they asked if I wanted to help with this, that, and the other thing, and I got back into the GI nursing. Then, because I needed a few more hours to pick up, I started doing a little bit in the chemical dependency unit. I was doing the utilization review between the unit and the insurance companies, and getting coverage time for patients in the chemical dependency unit, and kind of got into that, so for a long time I had both departments, and eventually became the director of the drug and alcohol unit; so I always said I was the director of the nuts and butts, because I still had the GI lab and the psychiatric department and the drugs and alcohol. MF: Have you retired? KY: Yes, I retired seven years ago. Missed it. Missed it so much. MF: That’s what a lot of them have said – they miss it, but at the same time, they realize that part of their life is probably over. Still hard, because it was such a big part. KY: I do a little bit of volunteering work for them now, but as far as doing any nursing or anything like that, I don’t. MF: Thank you for letting us come visit with you today.