Oral History Program Grace Hall Walling Interviewed by Marci Farr 28 July 2008 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Grace Hall Walling Interviewed by Marci Farr 28 July 2008 Copyright © 2009 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in Special Collections. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Dee School of Nursing was founded in 1910 to provide training for nurses who would staff the new Dee Memorial Hospital. The first class of eight nurses graduated from the school in 1913 and the school continued to operate until 1955, with a total of more than 700 graduates. A new nursing school and home located just east of the hospital was completed in 1917 and all nursing students were required to live in the home during their training. This oral history project was created to capture the memories of the school's alumni before their stories disappear in the same way the Dee Hospital has disappeared. The oral interviews focus on how the women became involved with the school, their experiences going through training, and how they used the training. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management Special Collections All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Grace Hall Walling, an oral history by Marci Farr, 28 July 2008, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Dorothea Allen Hall Mother of Grace Walling Graduation Photo Class of 1917 Annie Jesse Hall Aunt of Grace Walling 1913 Dorothea Allen Hall & Intern Dee Nurse’s Home 1916 Dorothea Allen Hall Outside of Dee Nurse’s Home Nurses and Intern Class of 1917 Dee Hospital Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Grace Hall Walling. It was conducted July 28, 2008 and concerns her recollections of her mother, Dorothea Allen Hall, her aunt, Annie Jessie Hall and the Dee School of Nursing. The interviewer is Marci Farr. MF: This is Marci Farr interviewing Grace Walling about her aunt Jessie Hall and mother, Dorothea Allen Hall, on July 28, 2008 at her home in Ogden. Tell us a little bit about your aunt. GW: My Aunt was Miss Annie Jessie Hall. She was born in Pleasant View. Her parents had come over from England and she was the first child born to them when they got to Utah. Her life was very interesting. She did so many things that women weren’t allowed to do or were afraid to do. She never married. She had a lot of beaus though. They all liked her energy, her versatility. One thing she did was she went to St. Mark’s Hospital to become a nurse; she used that profession most of her life until she got very old and could not. But her energy carried over to the family in every way possible, sometimes she was too annoying because she took charge. Because of that ability and self confidence she held many top jobs for the time frame in which she lived in. One of them was with the Thomas D. Dee Memorial Hospital in Ogden where she was supervisor of nursing and the nursing school. This is how she met my mother and my mother attended the nursing school at the Dee Hospital. My aunt decided she wanted her baby brother to marry this young lady that was in the nursing school. There was a lot going on in that time but Annie Jessie was very interested in furthering the profession of women in nursing and also being very nitpicky 1 about cleanliness. It seemed to be her middle name most of her life. And especially with the nursing and the hospital. My mother would relate these stories about how everything had to be cleaned twice, you had to wash it down, you had to take care of this, you had to take care of that and the nursing profession then was not as well versed in sanitation. They actually were trained to be bedside nurses and patients did not get out of bed no matter what their problem was so they were fed in bed, they were bathed in bed, and this was the job of the nurses. Some interesting stories were of the nurses trying to get around Miss Hall as she was properly addressed, there was so many different situations where the nurses were faster or did it when Miss Hall was not on the floor. It seemed like the whole atmosphere was to train these women to be very successful and have a profession which was more than being married and having children and doing the house chores. So Aunt Annie, Miss Hall, was always pushing this cleanliness and the nurses, being the young girls that they were, they were not real happy about this kind of being hog tied and directed and checked on. My mother was kind of a renegade and so whenever there was a way to get around this lady, Miss Hall, before my mother became her sister-in-law, they had little tricks. The girls were not paid a lot but they got their board and their room so they ate at the hospital and then their homes the Dee family either rented or owned around the city. This is where they would sleep and have their friends over. And, of course, the hospital and the doctors all liked to interact because when they were not in the operating room or on the floors or treating 2 patients, there was time for them to socialize with the nurses…the nurses were not to be married until after they had finished their training but there were exceptions as some were secretly married. And the Nurses bonded with each other and this became a lifetime thing in the nursing profession. They stayed together, had their yearly reunions, most of them stayed in the area so they all participated and kept track of each other. I was fortunate as a daughter to be part of this because I didn’t leave home early. During World War I, Aunt Annie volunteered and went overseas as a nurse. She was in charge of a field hospital in Brest, France. She was decorated and acknowledged by the President of the United States for this. Also in the Second World War, because she had had these accolades, she was put on a very secret job here in the State of Utah. It was as an advisor and kind of like a secret homeland spy. She was to be very aware of the communities in Salt Lake and Ogden and report whatever she saw. Because this was World War II, I was a much older person and my father said, “Now Aunt Annie has a secret and we have to keep it quiet, but if anything happens to her during the war, I have to take over her estate and take care of all the arrangements.” She not only was in World War I but she also was involved in World War II and had a very lovely letter from our President during the war time acknowledging her work and her reporting and her observations of strangers and what was going on, were we in danger, was this person a terrorist, those kinds of things. But it had to be kept secret because we didn’t want to blow her cover. 3 After she wasn’t working in the nursing profession at hospitals, she then took on private duty nursing. She would move in and take care of elderly ladies whose family had a lot of money and the family couldn’t control them. They wouldn’t take their medicines so Aunt Annie would move into their homes as a private, sort of caretaker, and give shots and regulate their medications and see that they were fed. Most of them were extremely wealthy. One way they paid her back sometimes was with treasures. I have some of those treasures that she received as extra gifts above her salary. That has made Aunt Annie a part of my life always, as long as she lived. SL: How long was Annie in charge of the school of nursing at Thomas Dee? GW: I think until she went to the First World War. MF: So about 1914? GW: That would be about the time frame. There was a lot of consternation from her family…where were the nurses going? I am not sure if she went for any initial training, whether it was to a military fort somewhere in the United States and then shipped out overseas. MF: The nurses went to New York. SL: Yes. MF: First or second class that the nurses in World War I went…they went to New York first. GW: That rings a bell when you say New York. Now whether there was any pretraining, because they had to get uniforms from somewhere. We had the picture of one of the ladies, now who she was in connection with Miss Hall I have no 4 idea. She might have been someone that worked with Miss Hall in France because they have the same uniform but it was a very trying time for the whole family. Her stories about her time in France…it was pathetic because the French people were so poor and their country was being ravaged. Annie didn’t speak French, very few nurses or soldiers did. The mud was one of the things, because it rained so much at Brest, France, where she was stationed. Evidently this hospital was mostly tents and the ground around them became a mud bog. They would have to walk through this. They finally got a few boards and put them down and tried to make a walkway. The local people would come; they would keep asking for food, and Miss Hall’s little story about this one lady…she came everyday and she would say, “Pain, pain,” and she would rub her stomach. And Aunt Annie would send her off with Aspirin. The French word “pain” is for bread. So Aunt Annie was sending her off with medicine when she wanted food. There was always the problem with sinking the mud over your shoe tops and it was hard to keep clean. The clean thing was a big thing for Annie. Still mud, mud, mud…and the poorness. They evidently were given some leave time and she would go into Paris, however she got there, with conveyance maybe on a truck that had troops going in for supplies or something. Then she would shop. She brought home wonderful things to keep. As she grew older she would very gingerly separate herself from these treasures and give them to nieces and family members. I was able to acquire some very lovely things from her time in France. Her attitude was 5 never defeated. She was never depressed at any time in her life. Everything was positive and everything was can do. If you want to do this you can do it. This was some of the training she instilled in whoever she worked for or worked with. Aunt Annie was very special and a big part in my life. MF: Was she there until the end of the war? When did she come back from France? GW: I am not sure but she must have been there through the war so that would have been 1917-18, that time frame. She was successful in getting my mother and her baby brother together. My father tried to enlist and they wouldn’t take him, he was too thin, he had a deferment because of his size. He was six feet tall and very, very thin. So he went to Seattle and there he worked in the shipyards. He had never worked on metal before, he had worked on wood with his dad. So the metal was a complete new type of training, fortunately he got very lonely up there by himself, he kept writing home to my mother and his folks so finally mother broke down and went up and married him in Seattle, Washington. Then Aunt Annie was happy. She had her little brother married to this very special nurse. Aunt Annie’s life continued with many, many adventures. She really was not a great cook; she was even a worse driver. Sorry Aunt Annie, I am telling the sad side of your life now. But through it all she really was like the matriarch of the family. Her nieces and nephews all benefited from that. And I think women in her company also benefited. Did you have anymore questions? MF: Now when did she retire? In the ‘50’s? GW: She didn’t actually retire from nursing then because in the ‘30’s and ‘40’s she was at other hospitals. She went back and did nursing at St. Mark’s again. She 6 was also at the county hospital in Salt Lake City. She went to Bozeman, Montana, and was in charge (up there) at their hospital. She just was in nursing somewhere before it got harder and harder for her physically to keep doing the floor work and the cleaning, insisting, and of course nurses then did a lot of charting. They spent hours and hours on charts. So as that got harder for her to do that is when she opted out. MF: That is when she did the private duty. GW: Her private duty then probably started, I am trying to think back, probably in the late ‘40’s and ‘50’s, only the last two and a half years of her life, was she not in private duty nursing and housekeeping which wasn’t her forte either. I had the privilege of living with her when I was going to the University of Utah because her home was in Salt Lake City. She set the kitchen on fire one day when I was at school. She put the bacon fat on to melt so she could clean the pan and then went outside to do yard work and visited. The pan caught fire and the fire department came. MF: Oh that is not good. GW: So as I said, her cooking, housekeeping, and driving were not good but everything else she took incredible charge of. SL: How did the girls react to her being the house mom? GW: She wasn’t really a house mother. SL: She wasn’t? GW: No because I don’t believe that the… MF: Oh because the house wasn’t there yet. 7 GW: Well, I don’t think the nurses had her in their homes because she was the supervisor. I think she lived separately in other homes because my mother’s father and stepmother rented rooms to the nurses in their home up 25th street. And then while Aunt Annie was still at the Dee and my folks had returned from Seattle married, she moved in with them which wasn’t the best. The personalities were confrontational let us say. So she was still working all those years but not living at a hospital. To my knowledge, she never was a housemother. There were other graduate nurses that lived with the student nurses in the homes. Then my mothers stories start to blend in with Annie’s because of the close connection there. SL: Let’s start talking about your mom. GW: Okay. SL: When did she enter into this program? GW: She went in…the pin says 1916. Now I don’t know if these pins were given to them when she entered the school or whether it was upon graduation. MF: I think it would have been graduation. GW: It was graduation. So she would have gone in then and she had almost a year because of the typhoid. She had two bad bouts with that. I think the class she started with would have been three years so that would have been fourteen… MF: 1913. GW: Thirteen…fourteen…and then she graduated in 1916. But she had a year off. There was a very large recuperative period but she did graduate before she got married because married nurses were frowned upon…I don’t know if the hospital 8 turned blind eye if they thought they were married or if they discharged the person from the program…I am not sure. But of course, my mother was not married then. The stories of trying to keep ahead of Annie, Miss Hall, and trying to have some fun, which most of them really wanted to do. The story about the infamous jell-o which you could bounce off the wall, you couldn’t cut, it was more like a rubber ball than it was jell-o and it was served at every meal. The food was probably hospital food that the patients got. Hospitals have been notorious through the centuries for so-so food. I may get my house burned down if this becomes public…telling these dreadful tales. I had a cute tale about my mother and Aunt Annie and the girls in the hospital on night duty. When the hospital quieted down at night there isn’t a lot to do and when you get your charting all done the girls are just there. They said, “Oh gosh, we are so hungry, can’t we make some fudge?” So sure enough, out came the pots and out came the ingredients and they stirred it up. All of a sudden they hear clunk, clunk, clunk coming down the hall. The alert goes out and it was like a string with two cups they sent messages to each other by knocking on the walls or the floors and it was Miss Hall. She was on her night do about. She may have had a room at the hospital. Boy, what do you do with the pan of fudge? Hide it. So here was this hot pan of fudge, it wasn’t quite ready so my mother grabbed it up and ran down to the next room that had a bed in it. Of course, the beds had springs and she put the pan between the springs and the mattress. Of course, it tipped over and spilled onto the floor. There was no way to clean it up. Miss Hall was there and I am sure there were some words 9 spoken and some extra duty like a military…you pay for your mistakes with extra duty. They also had parties, sometimes at the houses where they were housed and sometimes in the hospital. I think they had as good of time as you could, being a working girl. There were these uniforms that they had to wear that were starched and long and white and any spot on them you couldn’t get them off. You had to either cover them up with another apron, a partial apron, or you had to go change your uniforms. This was probably a constant problem. In a hospital you don’t wear long dresses to your ankles in the heat of summer, of course, there was no air conditioning then and those hospital rooms could get very, very hot. But the nurses were as starched as they could be under the circumstances and under the work they did. My mother was sent off to St. Louis, I am sure the hospital paid for it, to study what was called Swedish massage. She had that knowledge and she never got paid for it but she could give the most wonderful massages. It was a very soothing, healing type medicine that very few people knew about. The hospital also sent Aunt Annie back to, I think, Chicago to become an anesthesiologist. For a woman, this was almost unheard of. I think she was the only woman in the class. To say that name when I was a child was very difficult, you got your tongue all tied up. My mother, being a registered nurse all my life, I would take in any child that got injured while we were playing or on the street, I would drag them, usually kicking and screaming, to my mother and say, “Mother! This is my mother, she is a nurse.” There was lots of healing in our home as I 10 grew up to. I felt she was the proper one, just send them off to their mothers…no, their mothers didn’t know how to be a nurse and my mother did. There was always this thought in my mind that I was very fortunate to have her in my life and Aunt Annie, Miss Hall, in my life. The nurses at the hospital and the hospital staff and the doctors that stayed in the city all stayed in touch or knew about each other always. A lot of these nurses through my lifetime would meet. My mother had a group of about twelve that were in the class she was in. They got together regularly, several times a year, and they were all like mothers to me when I came along. I came along fifteen years after my folks were married so there was a big difference but I was born in the Dee hospital and my son thirty years later was born at the hospital and now my son is studying to be a male nurse. MF: What made your mom decide to go to the Dee Hospital? GW: Well her life was difficult because her mother died when my mother was nine years old here in Ogden. I am named for my grandmother, Grace. She is the lady over the fireplace, I have an oil painting of her. She insisted that her husband send the two daughters back to the family in New York because these were wild people out here in Utah and the schooling wasn’t nearly as good. My mother went to the Madison school one year. When their mother died, my grandfather sent the daughters back east. They were like indentured servants because there was no money for them to pay the families that took them in. So it was a hard life. 11 In the summertime, because my grandfather worked on the railroad he would have a pass, and he would bring the girls for short visits in Utah. Grandfather remarried and the new stepmother really did not like my mother at all. She made it very difficult for my mother. So because my mother was indentured and her lifestyle with family in the east was not that wonderful she got here and could see that the hospital would feed her and give her a place to live so she didn’t have to live with the stepmother and her dad and then give her a profession. So it was a very easy decision. That is why the nurses became my mother’s family. My step-grandmother was very happy to not have her in the house. She would rather rent it to the other nurses rather than give it to this stepdaughter who was not her favorite person. As soon as I came along then I had a grandmother. She was fabulous all my life. She was about twenty-three years younger than my grandfather so she lived a lot longer than he did. So my mother chose a lifestyle that suited her very well. My mother was very organized. She was a good worker. She was a good cook. Of course, she liked to clean. Then she had this mentor of a sister-in-law. Their life here, as the years went on, got very, very much easier. Things became much nicer. My dad loved it in Utah so he never wanted to leave. They did things that time-wise was very unusual traveling, when people didn’t travel. Transportation was very iffy. My mother and my dad worked with family on the farm in North Ogden but then he had his work in town here so…one of it was working with a gentleman called Mr. Binford. Mr. Binford was in the Ford dealership with Mr. Wattis. When 12 Mr. Binford sold his half of the Ford dealership, my dad worked for the WattisKemble Ford dealership. Mr. Binford hired my mother and sometimes Miss Hall to be in his caravan going back and forth to Los Angeles over the desert. The model A’s and the model T’s that my father sold and repaired were the way they got there. Nothing to do with nursing other than Mr. Binford paid my mother and Aunt Annie went along because she could take charge of Mr. Binford. Mr. Binford was a very difficult man. My mother could do the driving as well as whatever medical nursing that they needed. That was a tie in there with my mother’s private duty. My mother really didn’t do the private duty nursing or the hospital nursing that Miss Hall did in her life. The stories through my life were from all these wonderful nursing mothers that I had the privilege of associating with. They would get together and have parties and luncheons and picnics and little trips like up to South Fork and go at six o’clock in the morning. They were all early risers. Then they would have a cookout, a big breakfast, and I got to go. Over the years they became just like little mothers to me, very special people. MF: That is good. Is that the picture that was in the envelope, with all the nurses? GW: Some of the nurses yes. MF: Some of those were your mom’s friends? GW: Oh yes, those were all the nurses. Yes, that was the group that got together. They usually got together at each others homes but every so often they would go on these jaunts while they were in nurses training and then afterwards they would get together with even some of the doctors and their wives and go 13 swimming out at Salt Aire or up to the Hot Springs there at Pleasant View and have parties, some of them were quite daring, you actually showed a leg in bathing suits. The nursing community, because of the Dee Hospital and the nursing program bringing in doctors, letting them do their residencies and staying in the Ogden community and having their private practice and still staying connected with the Thomas D. Dee Hospital. MF: Did your mom know any of the Dee family? Was she associated with any or did she know any of them? GW: Knew them as who they were but there was no…they were nurses and employees and the Dee family were above that. So the nurses and some of the doctors were all very good friends and Dr. Seidner was one of those doctors and he was our family doctor. I adored that man. He is the reason that I am here today because my mother didn’t carry children well. That is why the fifteen years after they were married. Finally my mother went to him and said, “I think I am pregnant.” And he said, “Good. I want you to have this baby. We are going to have this baby together now, you hang in there.” And so I did. And then, of course, he was our family doctor. He also left and volunteered during the Second World War. He went off as a doctor. I was very ill and they said I had to have an operation and I said, “No, no no. I am not going to have that operation. Dr. Seidner has to come home and take care of me.” My mother said, “Well, he can’t dear. But we will call him and you can talk to him on the phone.” Which I did. I think he was somewhere in Washington D. C. or New York City or somewhere, one of the hospitals there, probably the military hospital. He said, 14 “Now, young lady…,” I think I was seven, “young lady…you behave yourself.” Mother told him what the situation was and he said, “Yes, now you go ahead and have that done and you will be fine. I will be home and see you and you will be well.” So I went along with the operation after Dr. Seidner…bless his heart. Those were just little thoughts of my family and how the hospital contributed to my life and the communities life and the individuals that had some part of…in fact, my mother and one other nurse were the ones that designed the cap for the Dee Hospital staff nurses. They did quite a bit of research because there were all sorts all across the country and mother had seen them when she had gone for her training in St. Louis, some of them were quite large and floppy, some of them looked like hats that chefs would have worn and mother said, “No, no, no we want to find something very simple, very easy because we have to keep washing these and starching them and ironing them.” So they came up with a base design and then the decoration was the black band across the top. I think…nurses don’t wear those anymore. In fact, they don’t wear uniforms…they wear scrubs with pattern tops. You knew the nurse, now you are not sure if it is a visitor at the hospital or if it is an aide or if it is a registered nurse that is coming in to your room. They don’t have any distinguishing or uniform appearance on the floors in the hospital now…good or bad. MF: Did you have anything else? SL: I want the story about Annie and your mom going up the canyon. GW: Oh, okay. This was probably when Aunt Annie was living with my mother. My mother was driving the car, which Annie did occasionally but nobody trusted her, 15 she was a hazard on the highway, her whole entire life she was a hazard on the highway. So they were driving up Ogden Canyon at the mouth and they could see an automobile turned over on its top and so mother stopped and the two nurses ran up to see what they could do and they found that there was a man trapped under his car and his legs were sticking out so the girls tried to get the car lifted off of him a little bit but they couldn’t. The car was heavier than they could handle. Aunt Annie said, “Just grab a leg and we will pull him out.” Each of the girls grabbed one of his legs and started pulling and the leg came right off in Aunt Annie’s hands. She was shocked. And my mother said, “Oh! You have cut off his leg.” And Aunt Annie said, “No, I think he has a false one.” Whatever happened to the man and his leg…the story never continued past my mother’s version of Aunt Annie dragging the man out by a wooden leg that didn’t stay attached. MF: That is a great story. GW: So there were some pictures in there of the nurses in costumes. That was a big thing back in that day. You had costume parties theme costume parties and you got silly in a lot of them with what you could find or what you could put on your face or what you could put on your head. They usually did it with their friends that weren’t in the profession…boyfriends, and dates, and things like this. MF: Thank you for letting us come interview you and learn more about your mom and Aunt Annie. 16