Oral History Program Carmen Mae Abram Wall Interviewed by Marci Farr 21 September 2010 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Carmen Mae Abram Wall Interviewed by Marci Farr 21 September 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: Carmen Mae Abram Wall, an oral history by Marci Farr, 21 September 2010, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Carmen Mae Abram Wall Graduation Photo Class of 1966 Carmen Mae Abram Wall 2000 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Carmen Mae Abram Wall, conducted by Marci Farr and Sarah Langsdon, on September 21, 2010. In this interview, Carmen discusses her recollections and experiences with the St. Benedict’s School of Nursing. MF: This is Marci Farr. We are interviewing Carmen Wall. She graduated from St. Benedict’s School of Nursing in 1966. It’s September 21, 2010. We are interviewing via telephone. You live in St. George, right? CW: Yes, I do. MF: Okay. Will you just share with us about where you grew up, a little about your family and where you attended school? CW: I grew up in Superior, Wyoming. That’s where I went to school. I went there from Kindergarten until I was a junior. In my Senior year, the school closed down because it was a coal mining community and they stopped using coal at that time, more or less. All the mines closed down so the school closed down. For my senior year I had to go to Rock Springs, Wyoming. That’s where I graduated in 1963. MF: So did you have to move away from your family? CW: No. The bus took us. I was born in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Rock Springs is eighteen miles away and is the bigger of the two communities and Superior didn’t have a hospital. So that’s where I was born but I was raised in Superior until I graduated and then went on to school at St. Benedict’s. MF: Oh, that’s good. Tell us a little bit about your family. 2 CW: I have four brothers and one sister. I’m the sixth. I’m the oldest. My sister is thirteen years younger. She’s the youngest of the family. So growing up, I really didn’t get to know her well because she born when I was thirteen and before I knew it I was out of school. We are really close but growing up we sure weren’t. My dad worked in the coal mines before he married my mother and he had a lot of jobs. He worked most of the time as a butcher in the little shop in Superior. Then from there he went to work for the school system as a janitor and at one time he even owned a little store in Superior where his line of work was being a butcher. People would bring their deer and elk and he would cut it up for them for a price. We would help him taking out the bone and the fat and all that. That was our job, me and my brothers. We did a lot of that ourselves. MF: So how did you end up coming to St. Benedict’s? CW: My dad really wanted me to be a nurse. Some of his friends that he knew were nurses. His mother died of cancer of the throat and he had taken care of her. In fact, he didn’t graduate from high school. In his senior year she was really sick and his dad had to work to pay all the bills so he ended up quitting school and taking care of her so he was really aware of the medical profession. He saw how the doctors and the nurses worked. Some of the nurses became friends of his so he convinced himself that I would make a really good nurse. I felt like I wanted to make his wishes come true. I wasn’t really too sure if I wanted to do that or go and do something in mathematics. I loved math but then my choice came to be a nurse. MF: Was this your first time away from home? 3 CW: Yes it was. We were very poor. We didn’t have a lot. Even to do any travelling, we didn’t do any travelling. My dad has two brothers and a sister and the two brothers moved to California so I think through the entire time I was growing up we might have went out there twice to see them. On my mother’s side, her family lived in Colorado and Riverton, Wyoming. I think we went maybe a couple of times to see my mother’s side of the family, my grandparents. We didn’t do a lot of travelling and to be alone-this was the first time I was ever alone. MF: I’m sure that was probably an adjustment. Tell us what your first impressions were when you first entered nurses training. CW: I was very close to my dad and called home very frequently and was crying and wanted to go home. We went home quite a bit. Dana Dona lived in Rock Springs and she had a car so her being in my class and that, we would go home probably at least once a month. She would take me. My dad would pick me up from Rock Springs so we could spend the weekend together. That was nice of her. MF: So who was your roommate while you were in training? CW: Let’s see. You know, I can’t remember. I think Mary Weibel was for a year. One of the ones that I had for a roommate, she ended up quitting in the first year that I went to school there. You had a curfew and she didn’t obey the curfew because her family lived in Ogden so she would go in the evenings to be with her family but she wasn’t meeting the curfew. She would get back to the dorm maybe at ten thirty or eleven o’clock. I really don’t even know why she quit. I don’t know if it was due to grades or she didn’t like it there or they asked her to go. One time 4 she didn’t show up so for the rest of that year I had the room by myself. In my junior year I believe I had Mary Weibel and then I can’t remember the last year. MF: Do you remember any of your other classmates? CW: Yes. MF: Tell us a little bit about them. CW: Linda Smith was a classmate of mine. She would come to Wyoming with me on some of the weekends that I had off. Dana would bring us up and sometimes there would be Linda Smith and Jeanie Campos and me and Dana. We were the four that would go home on the weekend. There was also a girl by the name of Virginia and I can’t remember her last name. She was from Rock Springs but she quit the program. Then some weekends I went to Smithfield. That’s where Linda Smith lived and I would go with her and stay with her on the weekends. Other weekends there was some very good friends of mine that I went to school with in Wyoming and they moved to Ogden the same year I started St. Benedict’s. It made it really convenient because they were there. One of them was a senior in high school when I started nurses training and they moved down here the same year I started nurses training so I would go stay with them once in awhile. So anyway, Jeanie Campos was a friend. Linda Smith, Dana Dona and Diane Cafarelli, Linda Ledett, Mary Weibel. I think we only graduated twelve or sixteeen. MF: Oh, so a small group. CW: Yes. So already I’ve named quite a few of them. 5 MF: So do you have any stories of you guys sneaking out or doing things you shouldn’t do? CW: You know I don’t think we snuck out. On the weekends you could stay out a little later so we would go to dances. We didn’t do much. I mean, I didn’t. If I didn’t go home then I stayed at the dorm and studied or go see Helen Normington. She was my girlfriend from Rock Springs. I would go see her on the weekends but I wouldn’t even stay there because she lived in Ogden so I would just go for the day and visit with her and we would go shopping. Then I’d stay at her house for awhile and then I’d go back to the dorms. No, I don’t think we did a lot of that. The ones that seemed to do that were the ones that really never even stayed. They were the ones that ended up quitting. Most of us we didn’t do that. We had Sister Cassian and she was really rough. She accused people of lots of weird things. I remember she called me in once and accused me of stealing irons. We had to iron our uniform. I said, “I have my own iron. Why would I want to steal other peoples irons?” She had some problems. It was best not to cause any hassle with her because was already making accusations that I didn’t feel were true. Other people had problems with her and Sister Berno took her place. She was so nice. Things kind of changed after she left. Once a week, the friends that I named, if we were there on a Friday or a Saturday we would go down two or three blocks to a place where we had pizza and stuff like that. We would go down there and eat pizza and cokes for a treat to ourselves. I still keep in touch with Jeanie Campos. She’s the only one I seem to know where she is at and we talk on the phone. 6 MF: Oh, that’s good. I’m glad. What else do you remember about the other Sisters that were at the school? CW: Who was the tall one? Do you remember any of them? MF: I don’t. Sister Mercy? Sister Estelle? CW: I can’t remember. She was real tall and one time I remember seeing her without the top of her habit on and she had really long hair I remember. At one time I heard they all shaved their heads because it was cooler for them. I guess they said some of them would do that but like her, she had really long hair. I remember we played, we would have parties on the back lawn of the dorm and we would play red rover and she would get right in and play. She wasn’t afraid to get in there. Some of the other nuns too would get in there and play too. We would have hot dogs and hamburgers and that was nice they treated us to that. Every once in awhile, once a year we had a sit down dinner with the nuns and all the students. I remember that. I remember we always had the same thing. It was always chicken. They said, watch whatever the head nun-what was her name? Oh, I’ve been sick so my mind is not really clear. I got Leukemia about seven years ago so I’m still recuperating from the Leukemia. MF: Oh, you’re fine. CW: Anyway, the main nun would sit there and we would say if she uses her knife to cut her chicken then that’s what you’re supposed to do. But the rest of us all got wings and we would say well how in the heck do you cut a piece of wing with a knife and a fork? I remember we would sit there and complain about that. MF: That’s funny. 7 CW: So we would have that once a year. Two or three times a year we would have parties on the lawn where we would play some games and have a picnic like thing. MF: Well that’s good. Was it nice to see the Sisters in that atmosphere? Did that help getting to know them? CW: Yes, because I’m Catholic and being from a little tiny town, we didn’t have a Catholic school or anything. They did in Rock Springs. We had what they call PCD and they would come out and teach us during the summer months. We would have two weeks religious instructions. Those nuns always were very strict it seems like. That’s what I knew about nuns and then to go down here and be around a lot of them, I was kind of surprised. I was surprised to see how gentle and kind they could be with patients and things that this that they took care of. MF: So what were some of your favorite classes that you took while you were in training? CW: I liked pharmacology. I liked ethics. I absolutely hated the psychiatric portion of it and I didn’t care for pediatrics. We went to Denver for our pediatric training. That’s where I met my husband. He was in the military. In fact Jeanie Campos and I met them downtown and they asked us out and we went out with them once and it continued so Jeanie married the man she was dating there and I married the guy I was going with there too. So they were friends, so maybe that’s why we still keep in touch because our husbands knew each other. That made it nice. Then we had part of our psychiatric training in Salt Lake City. They had the barracks up on the campus that were closed down at the time so they used some 8 of those classrooms. That’s where we had our psychiatric classes. Of course, hands on was done at St. Benedict’s. I couldn’t comprehend or understand the psychiatric stuff. MF: That would be hard. CW: I could not get a hold of what was going on. I didn’t like that. That was my least favorite. I did like anatomy. MF: So do you remember any of your instructors? CW: I don’t know if Sister Cassian taught a class or not. I know for ethics I think we had a priest. I just can’t remember. MF: Do you remember what your favorite rotation was while you were at the hospital? What was your favorite floor to work on? CW: The surgical medical floor. MF: Why was that? CW: The nurse that was in charge of that floor I just thought she was a very special person. She was very knowledgeable. She was very good with her patients and she had a good rapor with the doctors. I don’t remember her name but I would look at her and say now this is the type of nurse I want to be. I want to be a nurse like her. By the name, one of my instructors was Mrs. Etcheverry. She was kind of strict. She taught OBGYN. I kind of liked OBGYN. She was one of the instructors. MF: Do you have any memories of a patient that you cared for while you were in training? 9 CW: I had an uncle that was a patient there while I was there. I had a younger guy, our age. I mean I was 21 and he was 28. He asked me out and you couldn’t do that. You couldn’t go out with one of your patients and he was persistent on it. Eventually after he had left and several months later I ended up going out with him a couple of times. After I felt like they wouldn’t remember the patient. They frowned upon that. I can’t remember his name. MF: So tell us a little bit about your graduation ceremony and where it took place. CW: It took place-they have Catholic churches down there and it took place at one of the churches and I just remember that our uniforms were very stiff. They had to be starched. I remember us, Diane Casterelli, Jeanie and all of us, we wanted everything to be perfect. We all got flowers. I remember that. It was a beautiful ceremony. We all had everything white and then you had the St. Benedict’s cape. MF: What do you think your greatest challenge was while you were in nurses training? CW: To get through the psychiatric class. MF: That’s what a lot of the nurses have said. CW: Really? I hated it. I just could not comprehend it. One of the classmates in my class ended up specializing in the psychiatric department. She was from Brigham City and she ended up going back there and was head of that department. She really enjoyed it. The rest of us absolutely hated it. To each his own I guess. MF: Absolutely. That’s why it works out that way. After graduation, did you stay at St. Benedict’s? What did you do? 10 CW: I went to Rollings, Wyoming with Jeanie Campos. We both got jobs out there so we worked through the summer and then we had met those boys the previous winter so I got married like a year from when I met him. I don’t know when she got married but then we moved. He was in the military, the Air Force in Denver so we went to Denver. I can’t remember what Jeanie and her husband did. I didn’t work in Denver. He only had three months. From there were moved to Albuquerque and I worked in Albuquerque. Then we went to Minnesota and he went to Browning Institute to be an announcer. I went to work there while he went to school. From there we went to Wyoming and from there we came to Saint George. I worked at all these different places as we moved around. MF: So are you still working or did you retire? CW: I retired about six or seven years ago. MF: What do you think has been the greatest change as far as nursing? CW: There’s been so many changes. I worked in Wyoming and nurses seemed to have done a lot of hands on. You know how they used to put, like if you had a bowel obstruction they would take a mercury ball and you would swallow it like you were putting down a G tube. At the bottom of the G tube was this mercury ball and that would pass through the intestinal tract so you had to turn the patient ever so often. You’d turn them to their left and to their right and then eventually, usually it would come out and the bowel obstruction would be resolved. Nurses would do that in Wyoming. They would start IV’s. They were doing butterfly needles and at that time doctors were supposed to do them. Nurses weren’t supposed to do those kind of procedures. In Wyoming because the state is small 11 and there weren’t that many nurses that did all that. Now, nurses put in central lines. That’s a huge change. I don’t think they even used mercury anymore for bowel obstructions. Now, doing central lines and they wouldn’t even let them do a butterfly. MF: So it has changed quite a bit. CW: Yes. It’s funny. I’ve taken continual education trainings throughout my career to learn how to do all of these things just to keep up with all the changes. MF: There’s quite a bit. We appreciate you letting us visit with you today.