Oral History Program Sister Chanelle Schuler Interviewed by Marci Farr 16 November 2010 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Sister Chanelle Schuler Interviewed by Marci Farr 16 November 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: Sister Chanelle Schuler, an oral history by Marci Farr, 16 November 2010, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Sister Chanelle Schuler Graduation Photo Class of 1959 Sister Chanelle Schuler November 16, 2010 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Sister Chanelle Schuler, conducted by Marci Farr and Sarah Langsdon, on November 16, 2010. In this interview, Sister Schuler discusses her recollections and experiences with the St. Benedict’s School of Nursing. MF: This is Marci Farr. We are interviewing Sister Chanelle Schuler. She graduated from St. Benedict’s School of Nursing in 1959, and we are interviewing her in Cottonwood, Idaho, at the Monastery of St. Gertrude. It is November 16, 2010. Will you just share with us a little bit about your family, about where you grew up, and also about where you attended school? CS: I was born on my parents’ 21st wedding anniversary; I was the twelfth child in the family. My parents got married in 1914. Dad said on their wedding day, “She’s not going to have any less than a dozen.” I was the dozenth. Mother was an only child, so I think that probably had to be overwhelming for her, but she was a wonderful mother. I was the only one of the twelve born in the hospital. My oldest sister was twenty when I was born. She was in nurses’ training at Mercy Hospital in Nampa at the time, so she insisted that I be born in the hospital. That was hard on Mother, because everyone else had been born at home. We had a family reunion this summer to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of my father coming from Switzerland to the United States in 1910. My niece has the papers for his registration at Ellis Island, and all about the ship on which he came over on. 2 I went to St. Paul’s, to a Catholic grade school. Our sisters – the Benedictines sisters – taught in the grade school there. Dad and Mom started out in New Plymouth, Idaho, which is about thirty-five miles from Nampa, and then Dad decided in 1928 that he wanted us to have a Catholic education, so they moved to Nampa. He had started raising registered Holstein, so we grew up on a dairy farm milking cows, feeding pigs, horses, and chickens and many other animals. My mother died in March of 1952 when I was just sixteen years old. I graduated from Nampa High School in 1953. Then my best friend and I went to Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane and applied to enter the nursing program there. Dad decided he wanted to go to Europe in ’54 and planned for me to go with him. I couldn’t start nurses’ training and then stop. Instead I came up here to Cottonwood to learn German, so I could speak with his family and understand them better. I took German with the high school kids students at the Academy, and I took some other classes with the novices here at the Monastery. That was in the fall of ’53. I went home in January and took care of my brother and sister-in- law until May. She had surgery in January. We went to Europe in May and toured seven countries visiting shrines of the Blessed Mother for a month. Following this we spent three months in Switzerland visiting our relatives. That was wonderful. We visited my dad’s home, and all his brothers and sisters and cousins. The highlight of our trip to Europe was the canonization of St. Peter Chanel at St. Peter’s in Rome in June 1954. When I entered and took my vows 3 the following year, we were still able to choose three names. I thought, “Who else can say they were at their patron saint’s canonization? So I took the name Chanel and just added an extra ‘le’ on to make it more feminine. It was after St. Peter Chanel, who was a martyr in the Fiji islands in the 1800s. MF: That’s a great thing, because you needed to be there for that. CS: I think the Lord has ways of working things out. I got back home from Europe in September. One of my sisters had a baby in October, so I stayed with her while Louise was born. I have fifty-eight nieces and nephews, and she’s the closest to me ever, and I think it’s because we bonded when she was born. She happened to be living in Spokane the fourteen years I was there, so that was also a good family connection. In October our novice mistress, Sister Lucille wrote this letter and said, “Cinderella, the clock is striking twelve. You either come now, or wait until next year.” So I got there by November 12th. The entrance day was the 15th of August but I had lived with the candidates and lived with the novices the year before, so I was living like a postulant, even though I wasn’t; I was still a boarder per se. You asked me about vocation. I think that the seed was planted when my mother died. I didn’t really seriously think about it until I came up here and realized this is where I was being called to be. When I was a postulant, I had to go teach for one week, because one of the sisters was sick. I had the second grade, and they were all over the place. I had never taken care of kids; I babysat nieces and nephews, but a whole classroom full of little kids was beyond me. 4 The sisters all wore habits at that time and as postulants we wore short veils so the children could see my ponytail. “Sister’s got a ponytail!” Of course, they’d never seen the sisters’ hair before, so this was a big deal for them. I came home and told the Novice Mistress, “If I have to teach, I’m leaving right now. I just can’t do it.” So, in retrospect, it was good that I had that experience, because that helped the Superior realize I needed to be a nurse. I’d always wanted to be a nurse. Growing up on a dairy farm; I was the fifth nurse in our family, probably because my oldest one started her sisters on that path. MF: How did you end up making it to Ogden and St. Benedict’s? CS: Well, because Sister Agnes was there ahead of me, and it’s because it was the Benedictine sisters, who had the hospital. MF: Because it was the same order. CS: We were junior sisters - that’s when you make your first vows until final vows, there are three years in between. So we were really pretty much under pretty strict obedience, and the Prioress just wanted us to be in a Benedictine environment. MF: So you could continue what you had started. CS: While in training there was a lack of freedom with the other classmates, in a way, because I was with the other sisters. Superior , Sr. Herena felt responsible for me, but she was very king. I had to go and get a blessing from her every morning, because those were our rules. Six years ago when we had a reunion here at the farmhouse, they were telling all kinds of stories that I never had heard of, because I wasn’t with them. 5 MF: You were with the sisters. CS: That’s right. So the nurses teased me. The second time they came, three of them brought their husbands, and I took care of their husbands at the hospitality house, and the women all stayed over at the farmhouse. They said, “What is this? We bring our husbands to the Monastery, and Sister takes over.” But we had a good time. I guess they told you they’re planning a reunion here next year. MF: They told us about that. CS: Because Kay Young had a scrapbook of the monastery, farmhouse, etc and they all said, “We all want to come see your place.” So I don’t know how that’s going to work out. Because in Ogden, there were people spread out all over. When you’re here, you’re here. MF: Yes, it’s quite central. CS: Quite remote, so you’re not going to go too far once you get here. MF: That’s so fun, though. That’s good. So other than coming up here for school, was this your first time away from your family? You didn’t have any family in Ogden? CS: No, no one in Ogden. The house that I grew up in was built when I was a year old, so I had never been off the farm until I went to Europe in 1954. MF: Tell us about your impressions when you first started your training at St. Benedict’s. What were your feelings? CS: I was a scared puppy. I had wanted to work as a nurses’ aide at the hospital in Nampa that summer before so I could just get a feeling of it, but my sister Anne had graduated from the University of Washington, and she said the nursing care was not good, and she said, “I don’t want you to get adulterated with this.” She 6 just didn’t want me to get into bad habits. So I knew nothing about hospitals except when my mom was in the hospital. Even taking a pitcher of water in the room - I was scared to death I was going to spill it, or I was going to do something wrong. It was pretty frightening. MF: I’m sure, to know that you have to start doing these little baby steps in order to start learning all the things. CS: I learned the hard way. I have women who have gone through nurses’ training that I taught as nurses’ aides, who are deeply grateful for that experience. The only place girls could get work was in hospitals, so they worked on night duty as nurses’ aides during the summertime. MF: That would be a challenge. CS: But they said we were so far advanced when they got into training because they had to do so much here at St. Mary’s. They had to do everything. I taught them well. One on one I was fine, but I still see that second grade classroom if I have to get up and talk in front of a class. MF: That memory still comes back. CS: The memory comes back, yes. MF: So when you were in training, you were separated - you didn’t stay with a roommate? CS: No, I had another sister who was my roommate. MF: Another sister was your roommate. CS: Yes; and she was from Mount Angel. She was a year behind me. MF: You were on the same floor as the girls, or were you guys separated? 7 CS: No, they were in a separate wing. I was pretty much separated from them. Most of the time I was with the sisters, except for classes and when we worked together. Otherwise, as far as recreating with them or doing anything else, we just didn’t. MF: Because you would still continue your training? I don’t know how to say that right – I always say it wrong. Because you hadn’t taken your final vows, right? CS: I had to come home every summer, because we had classes, we had a junior college here. I got my AA degree along with my nursing diploma. But that was just part of the policy, that we were still under a junior mistress, and we had to come home every summer. So Sister Augustine had worked that out with Sister Berno, but it was difficult, because I had to pay for it in the end, because I had to make up all those clinical hours. MF: That would be frustrating, because you were kind of doing two things at once, making sure you took care of your religious training, and then also your nurses’ training. CS: Right. I had to study hard; I’m not that smart, and I didn’t know how to type, so I had to write everything long hand, because I got a C in typing in high school, and I thought, I can’t type. So I made up in my head I couldn’t type, and I didn’t, until computers came to be. MF: Marvelous invention. CS: Then somebody said, no, you can do e-mail. MF: That’s a good thing. 8 SL: Was Sister Agnes the only other sister in nurses training with you, or were there other sisters? CS: Sister Agnes was two years ahead of me; she graduated in ’57. Then, one of our sisters, Sister Miriam, had gone a year ahead of me, and she was only there a year. That was another fear, that I was going to fail. So I had to succeed. So it was hard. I often think part of my personality changed at that time because I was struggling so hard to be somebody who I wasn’t, really, because I lost a lot of my fun-loving spirit. MF: That would be, because you were so scared, so worried about everything. CS: I was scared. MF: What do you remember about the other sisters that were there, who taught some of the classes? CS: Sister Mercy was wonderful. She was our OB supervisor; but she didn’t teach us OB. We had an OB RN that didn’t teach us much. It was really frustrating, because the interns did all the checks and we just were bystanders in the delivery room. When you’re in a small hospital, you have to do everything, and oh my gracious, those first years of OB after I got out of training were very interesting. Sister Rebecca was our pharmacy teacher, and she was wonderful. Sister Boniface, even though she was strict, I loved her. She was the dietician, and a lot of them either were scared to death or loved her. Sister Estelle was wonderful. She taught anatomy, physiology, microbiology, and organic chemistry, which I couldn’t understand. I got a D, and I can still see her, sitting me on this high stool 9 and saying, “Sister Chanelle, you can do this. You go home and study your notes, and you will re-take this test.” I went home, and I memorized my notes, and I took the test and I passed it, but I still didn’t know anything about organic chemistry. MF: As long as you passed, that’s okay. CS: But I can still see her; I can still see her sitting me on this high stool and saying, “You can do this.” Okay… MF: If you say so. CS: She was a wonderful teacher, though. It was so hard. MF: Probably nice to have them, as far as their knowledge, and be able to share that with you, and as far as your training when you taught your nurses. What they taught you, to be able to be so thorough I’m sure made such a difference. CS: Right. But also, I learned a lot from one of our own sisters, after I got out of training. I started working at St. Mary’s on December the eighth, 1959. We graduated on my birthday, on the 17th of August in ’59. I’d made my final vows on the 12th of August, and then went back down for graduation, and then I worked until the end of November. I worked seven days a week to make up all that time, then came home and studied and took my state boards in Boise on December 3rd or 4th. That was scary, at the state capitol. I got the results on Christmas Eve, and it was the best Christmas present ever, because I passed everything. MF: Yes! CS: My sister had sent a dozen anthuriums from Hawaii; I can still remember those arriving about the same time my letter did. 10 Sister Giovanni was Sister Berno’s assistant. She was just a living saint. She’s still living; she’s in her nineties now, but she was just very, very good to me. She took me under her wing. She was a real blessing. She helped me get through those weeks and weeks of working afterwards, when everybody else was gone. A few of the nurses stayed and worked, but not very many of them. I was feeling pretty alone at that point. Anyway, made it through, and I’ve never been sorry. That’s what I was going to say – Sister Roberta was our director of nurses here, bless her soul. She just died of lung cancer three or four months ago. She was the most ideal nurse I have ever met in my life. She was so good, and taught me so much, in three months because she and the doctor were trying to get me ready for night duty. The doctor didn’t want to be disturbed at night, so they taught me all kinds of things to look for and what to be aware of. MF: That’s good. What about the doctors? Tell us about the doctors. CS: I remember the orthopedic one that Jeanette Smyth worked for; I can see his face, but I can’t think of his name. He taught orthopedics for a long time. SL: Swindler? CS: Swindler, right. I knew it started with an S. I remember him; I don’t remember a lot of them except the doctor who started with an H, who was the surgeon that everybody was scared to death of. MF: Dr. Howe? CS: Dr. Howe, yes. When I got called as a student to scrub in for a surgery, I was scared to death. I started to give him a right-hand glove for his left hand. “Stupid! 11 What do you think you’re trying to do?” So you know, naturally, I froze at that point so the whole surgery was not good. Surgery was not my cup of tea, and I think it was because I was so scared I was going to do something wrong all the time. MF: Probably so. That would not be a good thing. CS: The irony of it is, I got put in charge of surgery at St. Mary’s Hospital for three years. That was after the fact. But the first time I had to scrub for a surgery, Sister Bertha told me, I would pick up that needle several times before he needed it. She said, “You’d pick it up and put it down, and pick it up and put it down.” Our surgeon here wasn’t the easiest person to work with, either, so I was scared. I learned a lot, and the patients were the reward. I did it all because of them. MF: Tell us a little bit about your favorite classes. Did you have any that you enjoyed the most? CS: I think I liked nursing arts the most, just because it was hands-on. I liked it much better than books. MF: Was Jeane Barker - Jeane Morton still there? CS: Yes, she was there. She was wonderful. Is she still alive? MF: She is. She’s still alive. We interviewed her in September, and she still is fine – she’s in her house, she gets around; she’s sharp as a tack. CS: How old is she? MF: Eighty-eight? I think she’s eighty-eight. CS: She still lives in Ogden? 12 MF: Yes. She’s just down the street from Weber State. CS: Does she really? MF: It took us like two minutes to get there. CS: Oh – tell her hello. MF: She was amazing. She’s just sharp as a tack – it was so fun to talk to her. CS: I imagine. She went through a lot of students, but she was very precise. I can remember her coming and flipping a quarter off of the draw sheet to see if you had it tight enough. Back rubs and back rubs and back rubs, which are a thing of the past nowadays. I can remember one night when I worked on orthopedics, I gave thirteen back rubs on the evening shift. But you just did it, and that was part of what you did in those days. Now everybody’s looking at the computers. I worked at Sacred Heart the last fourteen years as a chaplain, and they have all these computers. They seldom looked at the patient it seemed. MF: No, they don’t spend a lot of time. CS: Everything’s on the computer, and there’s a part of me that says, “Look at the patient!” MF: That’s true. So when you had your different rotations, did you go on rotations at all with them? CS: I went to Denver with them for our pediatric training. MF: You did. Okay, tell us a little bit about Denver. CS: Denver was okay. Those were the days when we still had to count the IV drops on the kids, and the kids would move, and you’d start over; that’s the thing I remember most. I liked caring for the babies in the pumpkin patch; all the 13 jaundiced babies. The nursery I liked more than I did the older peds. I was always a little fearful. It was okay. I wandered off a few times on the bus, and went all through the city, and I’d think now, “What were you doing out here all by yourself?” I still had the habit on, and I often walked over to St. Joseph’s Hospital; it was about three blocks away. So I’d go over there to pray, and to Mass periodically. One day I was walking home, and this little black girl came out of the house – “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, I just saw God’s mother!” It was so precious. I can still see her. Those were the days when we were still in the habit. As for for my psych training, Sister Berno thought that Hastings was too far out in the boondocks, and she thought I wouldn’t be able to get to church on Sunday so she sent me to St. Joseph’s in Omaha which was a Catholic Hospital. I remember there were a lot of nuns that were going to Creighton who stayed there. I got to meet a lot of other sisters there. But my scariest thing in psych was giving the insulin and wondering if they were going to come out of this insulin shock. I just found that very barbaric. MF: It’s so terrifying. CS: It was terrible! I don’t think that the shock treatments were as scary as the insulin shock, because you wonder if they were going to wake up. You’d feel you had to get the orange juice down them to get them out of this shock. I can still see those wards. MF: Absolutely – that would be a little scary. You’re just this young girl learning all these things, and I can’t imagine having that responsibility. CS: Of course, there were nurses around us, but it was still scary. 14 MF: So when you were at St. Benedict’s, which was your favorite rotation as far as in the hospital itself? CS: I think orthopedics I liked most. MF: What about which one you disliked the most? Least favorite? CS: Peds, I think, just because I was too scared. MF: Plus, with the little kids, that’s hard. CS: I think that was probably the hardest part. MF: What do you think was your greatest challenge when you were going through nurses’ training? CS: Well, to try to become who I wasn’t, I think. To try to be true to myself, and try to really learn, because I really had a real desire to help people, and that’s why I became a nun and a nurse. I didn’t want to do anything to hurt anybody. But I had a real need to please everybody, and that was probably one of my biggest challenges, to face myself after a while and figure out that you don’t have to be everything for everyone. But the sisters were good to me; I used to spend Saturday mornings in the bakery with Sister Janice, just sharing with her was special. I can remember Sister Gerard – she was so precious. She’d take care of the dining room, and I’d help her. I’d help the sisters out a lot, because I didn’t do anything with the other students, so I would help the sisters. One day I was scratching my head like this, and she said, “Have you got five after one?” I said, “No, it’s ten minutes after two.” She said, “You’ve got five fingers after one cootie.” So that was this wry sense of humor that she had. She was pretty special. 15 I think I did go on hikes up to the mountain behind the hospital a couple of times with some of the students, but really not that much. This is why when they were here sharing at the farmhouse all these different things that they were sharing was a revelation to me. “Wow, I didn’t know any of that went on.” But the nurses in Seattle have just been really, really good to me. Pat Thrasher even gave us her house for a week when our sisters went over there to a conference. She was gone to Florida, and she gave us the keys to the house and I wasn’t even a part of it. MF: That’s how they are, though. They’re just so nice. CS: They are – aren’t they wonderful? Had you ever met any of them before? MF: We hadn’t until October. CS: Until you went up there. MF: They are wonderful. I had talked with Mary Lou quite a bit before we got there. CS: Before you came; because she was in Ogden a lot. MF: Yes. So that was fun, to visit with her and get – make sure we had all of our connections. She was just amazing, just wonderful and so kind-hearted. CS: They just really are a fun, fun group. MF: What a nice thing, to have them as your classmates to go through with. CS: That’s right. Shannon and Janet were both from Shoshone, which is in southern Idaho, and they’d worked at our hospital in Jerome before they came to Ogden. So I think this was another Idaho bond, because so many of the girls were from Ogden or Wyoming or from that direction. They were the only Idaho connection I had. Then, to have them continue to be friends - Janet was just very special. She 16 and Shannon were both very special to me when we were in training. Mary Lou, too; I didn’t know Pat as much. Pat was wilder then. She was redheaded and fun. MF: Did you participate in the capping ceremony? CS: Well; I did – I went with them, but I didn’t get anything. I already had my veil. MF: Tell us a little bit about your graduation at St. Joseph’s. CS: We graduated at St. Joseph’s, and my dad, my stepbrother, and my sister Anne came down for the graduation, so that was really very nice. I have a picture, somewhere, of us looking over that back banister in the parking lot, but I don’t know where it went. But I got a blank diploma, because I hadn’t finished yet. So I still had to work and do all those clinical hours. But it was nice. It was nice to have been able to graduate with them - to go through the ceremony with them, even though I wasn’t on the picture. It was good to feel finished, or on the way to being finished. MF: You just had that little bit left, and then it would be complete. CS: I took my state boards in Idaho, because I knew I’d never work in Utah anyway. At that time you could take them wherever, so that was nice that they let me do that. MF: That’s good. So then you came back up here; have you been up here ever since? Tell us a little bit about after graduation. CS: After graduation. I got my state boards done on December the 4th, and December 8th I started working at St. Mary’s hospital, which was an old hospital. We just celebrated eighty years of the beginning of St. Mary’s hospital; it was Our Lady of Consolation at that time. It started out as an old house that – the banker in town 17 went bankrupt and skipped town, so as part of paying back the sisters, he gave us this old house. It was a three-story house. So that’s where we started a hospital eighty years ago; 1930. Dr. W.F. Orr had encouraged the sisters to open the hospital, and they had one room that had four bassinets in it, and one room that had a four-bed ward; then we had a chapel and a chaplain’s quarters, and a little administrative office. The emergency room was on the top floor; the OB patients and the sickest cardiac patients were on the second floor; other medical patients on the first floor, and the kitchen was in the basement. But if you had an emergency that you needed a suction machine, you’d take the suction from the second floor up to the emergency room on the third floor. I can still remember we had the radar base in Cottonwood at the time, so there were a lot of young mothers with new babies who were scared to death when the babies got sick with croup. We’d have to bring the oxygen tank in, set up a croup tent and put the ice in it. We got really fast at that, because it seems like we had lots of croup babies those winters. So I started out on days for three months; then I went on nights on the 21st of March in 1960, like three months out of training, and had one aide with me. You just did it. One time we had ten mothers, and I thought, “Oh my gosh.” In 1939 they’d built an addition with the new surgery and OB wing and whatever. I didn’t work when it was just this one little building, because that was 1930; I wasn’t quite born yet. I started there in ’59 and worked there until ’64. Then on December 8th of ’64 I went to Jerome. We had St. Benedict’s Hospital in Jerome, and I took over 18 the OB department there and worked in OB until ’67. In those days we had to have an LPN and an RN at every delivery, and at one point I worked thirty-six hours straight until one doctor came up and he said, “You’re as white as a sheet. You are going to bed. Somebody gave me two Nembutal; I slept for thirty-six hours straight. I got smarter after that and didn’t try to do everything. After two and a half years I came back up here to St. Mary’s in Cottonwood in ’67, and worked there until ’81. I worked nights, and then I had charge of surgery for three years, and worked three to eleven for a little bit, but I was mainly on nights, and then just that three-year stint in surgery and emergency room. But I was a much better bedside nurse than I was a machine nurse. The machines would always go wrong in surgery. I really did like night nursing because I liked the one on one patient contact. MF: That’s good. So when did you officially retire? CS: Well – in ’84 I went to Gonzaga; I took a CREDO program at Gonzaga. That was just a year of becoming more immersed in theology. In the spring of 1985, I went on a two week pilgrimage to the Holy Land with the group from Gonzaga. It was a truly wonderful experience. Then, at the end of that year, Mary Marge, who was our prioress at the time, said, “I want you to go to Jerome and be a chaplain.” I said, “Why? I’m a nurse, I don’t know how to be a chaplain.” She said, “You can do it.” So I went to Jerome and became a chaplain, and then that summer I went to St. Luke’s in Boise and took one unit of CPE training. That’s the chaplaincy training program. So that was helpful. Then in ’89 I took two more units, and that was at Willmar, Minnesota, at a state hospital. That was an interesting 19 experience, living on this state hospital campus in this big old stone building all by myself. It was a little scary. But anyway, it was a good experience so I felt more qualified to be a chaplain. I started working at Sacred Heart in Spokane in February 1990 as a chaplain. I went to Portland and was trying to find work there, because Sister Louise was chaplain at St. Vincent’s in Portland, so I thought I could stay over there and live with her and work there. But trying to interview for jobs in December wasn’t really very smart. I received a letter from one of the Jesuits who was working at Sacred Heart who knew he was dying of cancer, and he said, “I think there’s going to be an opening there, so why don’t you apply?” I called Sister Ethel, and she hired me over the phone, sight unseen, and no interview. “You be here on February 12th.” I thought, okay and went with fear and trepidation. I worked three days and two nights the first two years. Then I finally said, “I’m in my mid-sixties. I need to not do this.” So then they put me on the dialysis unit, and I worked with dialysis patients for twelve years. I went to other areas too, but dialysis patients became the love of my life. It was a really good program. In 2004, they began downsizing and got rid of six chaplains. I could see the writing on the wall, and I said, “I’m not going to let you fire me, I’m going to retire.” So I had a retirement party. I found a really bright pink hat, and I had a pink boa that somebody had given me, so I really went out in style. MF: That’s great. 20 CS: We all had a wonderful time. Sacred Heart was a really good place for me. It’s huge; going from a 28-bed hospital to a 615 bed was a bit ominous, but chaplaincy was really good. I still go back up there. It really became a part of my life, and they welcome me like I’ve never been gone, and it’s sort of fun. I was on the steering committee for our capital campaign here for five million dollars to build the spirit center and to renovate the monastery, and I got $20,000 from the doctors up there. So I guess, even after being gone five years, I left some kind of mark somewhere. But it’s been good, and it’s been good being at home. Two years ago, I got into the volunteer ombudsman program for the state of Idaho. So I visit an assisted living place every week and there are nine or ten clients there. It’s a wonderful gift to be able to continue to share with them. Also, while I was at Sacred Heart, every two years they had what they called the Heart Follies. So I got to be on stage at the opera house singing. We sang a song from Sister Act one year and I had to dress up like a sister again. I was just in the chorus and it was really fun. It was a really good thing for me to bring that other side of me out. I loved to sing, loved to dance – used to try to play guitar, but I don’t do that much anymore. It’s just really good to be home again. I was gone for almost fifty years of my religious life, so being home is just really pretty special. I took care of the infirmary up here for years in between, and then I did it when I first came back for about a year. So now I’m just doing hospitality for guests that just arrive out of nowhere, and do monastery tours. When we opened the Inn they appointed me as assistant innkeeper. But I still take sisters that are not in the infirmary to 21 doctor’s appointments. So I still use my medical knowledge, and I take blood pressures for sisters not in our infirmary. MF: That’s good, to be able to serve. CS: Yes. I’ve kept my nursing license, and I’m an emeritus in my chaplaincy program, NACC, so I don’t have to pay their full dues, but I still get all the chaplain materials. So that’s good. MF: I’m sure your training from St. Benedict’s served you well. CS: Oh, yes. It was good, and the fact that I was able to help so many other young women along the way is wonderful. I got this marvelous letter from somebody who had to be there when I was in charge of surgery from 1972 to 1975. I don’t know what year she graduated from high school. I was washing down the surgery walls, and I needed something, and I said, “Dr. Dick, is there a loose girl out there?” He said, “Chris, are you the loose girl Sister’s looking for?” The next five days in surgery were interesting. “Have you hired any more loose girls lately?” But she wrote me this most wonderful letter of how I encouraged her to go on and become a nurse, and she wouldn’t have been the nurse she was if I wouldn’t have helped her. It was good. It’s been very good. MF: Absolutely. Well, we appreciate you letting us come and share this time with you. CS: I’m so glad you got to come. Pat said, “We told them they had to come to Cottonwood,” to see the place, if not for anything else. So I’m so glad you were able to do it. MF: Yes. We appreciate you sharing your story with us. I don’t know if Sarah had anything she wanted to ask. 22 SL: I just have one question – when you were in Denver, were you able to interact with your fellow students more? CS: Yes, a little bit more when I was there, because there were no other sisters around. In fact, I did interact with them some, but until we made our final vows, it was pretty strict, about how much we did with the others. We were still in the habit, and we didn’t socialize a lot in those days. Not nearly like we do now. It was just not part of who we were. SL: Thank you. CS: Thank you both. This was wonderful. MF: We appreciate you letting us come; we were so excited. After we had Seattle, we were so excited for Cottonwood.