Oral History Program Lois Polson Interviewed by Marvin Hansen 4 August 1972 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Lois Polson Interviewed by Marvin Hansen 4 August 1972 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii 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 University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ 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 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: Polson, Lois, an oral history by Marvin Harris, 4 August 1972, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Lois Polson. The interview was conducted on August 4, 1972, by Marvin Hansen, at 913 6th Street, Ogden, Utah. Polson discusses growing up in Farr West and, particularly, her nursing career during World War II at the Thomas Dee Memorial Hospital. She talks about how the war affected her and the town she lived in. She also discusses things that changed during the war. MH: Mrs. Polson, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about yourself, to when you became a nurse and how you got into it? LP: I was born and raised in Farr West, Utah, which was just a small country town. While I was in high school, we had an afternoon in career days. Several of the girls and I didn’t know which department to go into. We didn't know exactly just what we wanted to be, even though we were seniors. We thought nursing sounded glamorous and went in there. When I went home everyone laughed at me and said that I would never make a nurse. To show them, that is what I went into. MH: From what I understand you were a nurse during World War II. Could you tell me some of the events and things that were mandatory of you when you were a nurse or what had to be done? LP: The first thing is that we started at Weber College. There was a class that started ahead of us. Usually they took one class a year but after three months after this class started, even though we weren't at war, they started to take the nurses. So they told us that they wanted to open this other class and so we went into it. There were 21 of us, and in the first three months they weeded us down to seven girls. We had to take classes in order to catch up with the group that was ahead of us. Usually at that time, when a nurse went into training 1 it would take several months before they went on the floor and did actual nursing. After two weeks we went. We were on the floor working, doing bathes, and that, because they were beginning to take nurses into the army. Then as time went on we were in nursing a year before Pearl Harbor. When Pearl Harbor was declared like in the nursery there would be two nurses on shift probably with seventy babies. These were the war babies of the fellows, so that if you had children you would have that many deferments to help him not be drafted. So that is why they had such a crop of babies. One of the things that we ran out of was bassinets. So we had to take all the drawers and put the babies in the drawers. We had them stuck everywhere. We had a working bench that was quite long and quite wide. We had drawers all over there. Then we would go into the rooms and get the dresser drawers and put the babies in there. On a floor now days, if they have five bathes or four bathes, for a nurse that is a day’s work. But then we would have 21 and we would have to have them done by eleven. They wouldn't get their breakfast trays until eight. So you could figure about eight thirty or nine you could start the bathes. That was the time that new mothers stayed in the hospital for fourteen days at least. While I was there working, they cut that down to ten days. Then they cut it down to eight days. Because of so many babies being born, they had to cut it down to five days, which had never been heard of before. When I went there, a hernia patient wasn't even allowed to sit up for two weeks. One of the things that they learned in World War II was to get them up immediately, after surgery as soon as the anesthetic had worn off. This is one of the good things that came out of the war. 2 Another thing, we weren't allowed to open packages of dressings to dress an incision until we could actually see that we needed it. Always before you would open them and have them ready for the doctor. But when the war was going on, so that we wouldn't use dressings unnecessarily, we would always wait. It was hard for doctors to learn to have patience. They always had used the dressings anyway that they wanted. If they didn't use them, fine, they would throw it away. It was also during this time that penicillin was discovered. In our hospital we had a group of doctors that would decide which patient would get the penicillin because we were only allowed a certain amount. That was the same with quinidine. Because there were so many of the boys getting malaria, we were only allowed a certain amount of quinidine. We would use it as necessary or whichever patient needed it the most. MH: Could you tell me what quinidine is? LP: It is Quinine. MH: What was this hospital that you worked at? LP: It was the Thomas Dee Memorial Hospital. MH: Could you tell me some of the things that went on while you were a nurse around Ogden? LP: One of the things we had food rationing. You had to have certain stamps for meat, cheese, and butter. You had to have another stamp for canned goods. You had to give another stamp for sugar. This really didn't affect me because I left all my stamps home with my folks. The hospital received enough stamps to feed us without calling for ours individually. Although some of the personnel who didn't have another home would give the hospital some of their food stamps. Another thing that we had to have was shoe stamps, which was hard on a nurse, because you were only allowed so many a year, and 3 if you wore your shoes out that was too bad. If you didn't have a stamp you would try and get a stamp from some people that didn't wear out their shoes quite as fast. They also had gas rationing, and you had so many gas stamps issued. It was different to each person according to their occupation. I think doctors had all the gas that they needed. They were one of the few that could. So, people didn't drive as much they used the bus in town a lot. The people out in the country just didn't come into town quite as often as they had before. A lot of the farmers used horses. That wasn't too much of a hard ship for them. You could go down town in Ogden and you didn't see young fellows. They were all off to war. After a while you saw a lot of soldiers from Hill Field in the Air Force. Other than that there were very few young people except for girls. It seemed like everyone walked and they would stand around and talk about the war. They had the bank smoke review then. It had a barber shop down stairs. They would lean on the railing and talk about the war and what was going on. You couldn't buy sheets and pillow cases-only once in a great while, diaper flannel, and all these babies came. The flannel was being used for the service men. So every time a store would get flannel in, the women would line up from the counter and clear out and down the sidewalk waiting in line to buy this flannel. Sheets and pillow cases and towels weren't the quality that we had before. They were nothing like they are now. They were made of a cheaper material. They just didn't last very long. We couldn't buy nice table linens. The first time that I ever thought about the war was when I was still in high school. We heard rumors of war. We thought it was something in the distance. We didn't think that it would affect us at all. When we ordered our class rings from Germany, they were to have 4 rubies or a red stone. I think it was a ruby. They didn't come, and we waited and waited, and finally they told us that because Germany was at war, they wouldn't be able to supply our rings. So we had to take a cheaper black stone, from somewhere in the United States. When they went to publish our year book, there was something there to do with the quality of the paper. We didn't get a nice year book that year. I understand later on that some of the high schools didn't even have year books. I know when I was in nursing that we had only one the three years that I was there. Due to the lack of printing or something, we just couldn't get it. When you were in school it was things like that that meant quite a bit. MH: When did you graduate from Nursing? LP: I graduated from nursing in 1943. Three years before I graduated, they put me as head nurse on the medical floor. We received a classification, and I was classified as 1A essential. That meant that we couldn't leave that job. We couldn't transfer, for example, to work in a doctor’s office or industry where they used nurses. We had to stay right there at the hospital or else we could be drafted. MH: Did any of you get drafted? LP: Not that I know of , but a lot of them joined. They also had a real good time. But the rest of us stayed right there and worked. It was a good thing because there weren’t very many nurses. They needed them pretty bad. We actually didn't have a great shortage. We didn't have all the women that we could have used. We had enough to change part of the bedding every day. Before the war they had all the liner that they wanted and after the war they had all the linen they wanted. But I never worked under that situation. MH: How come do you think that happened? Just because the war took it all? 5 LP: I think that they had never had the demand for the beds for the soldiers before for the hospitals for the military. They could take everything that they could buy that was already manufactured. I think it was the first time that they had mended as much as they had before. If a sheet tore they would make it into a draw sheet which is a half sheet which goes around the bed. Before this they would have never thought of doing that. You didn't change the blankets and bedspread every day. Then we also had to save any scrape of soap. They use a lot of liquid green soap in the hospital. Before, when the bottles would get down to the end, you would just empty them out and wash them and send them down for more. Then you had to put everything into one bottle and save every speck of it. This was also in the days before plastic tubing and we didn't have any nylon. The rubber tubing does wear out and get hard and crack. Some of the tubing was a problem. MH: You say that we didn't have nylon? LP: No, we didn't have nylon or plastic. They were invented during the war. MH: That means that women didn't have nylons during the war? LP: No, you wore silk stockings - or cotton. They were hard to get because the silk came from Japan or over there from those countries. MH: Doesn't silk wear for a long time? LP: No, it ran very fast. They started during the war to manufacture synthetics. That is where we got a lot of our stockings ) and some of the shoes were made from synthetics instead of the leather. That was the first time that we had ever seen that. They were a cheaper shoe and they didn't hold up in water and they didn't wear very long. They didn't feel good, they were stiff, and they never seemed to make them very pretty. You could tell immediately that they were real cheap. 6 I think that they manufactured nylon first for the parachutes. I think it was a necessity. Weren't the old parachutes made out of silk that came from Japan, and then they had to do something different, I think that was when nylon was first invented. When we would go home we would go past what is known as the DDO now, and the prisoners were kept in the North West corner. This was the closest corner to home. You would see them and they were always just standing around. They weren't belligerent or anything. The only time I saw them is that they were always dressed in blue fatigues like army fatigues. They had POW written in white across there back. They would be out cleaning up the area and shoveling. They always seemed to be happy. They sometimes would be singing. They would stop and watch everybody that went by. They would never yell at them. They just watched what was going on. Sometimes when you went by you would see then marching, or doing calisthenics or something. They all seemed happy. MH: Their morale seemed really well? LP: Very well from what I saw. MH: Did any escape at all? LP: None that I knew of. They were never a problem hear in Ogden. I don't remember anyone who was ever frightened of them. We had a few Japanese brought in from the coast. I think that people were more unfriendly to the Japanese than they were to the Italian and German prisoners of war, even though these Japanese were free American people that had lived here for years. They weren't prisoners exactly. MH: What did they do? 7 LP: The ones that I knew of lived out their close to where Willard Bay is. It was called Tokyo Road. They had a lot of little shacks that they put up and they lived there. They worked on the farm. It was about a 400 acre farm. They just farmed and sold the produce. MH: Did they have any of their own land? LP: There was a Japanese man living there first that had lived here for a long time. So they just put them out there with him. They started up a place where you could gamble and have plenty to drink. Then a lot of the Americans were real friendly then. They would go out and gamble with them and drink and have a good time. I think in Ogden they hated to be seen with the Japanese. One day we went down town and there were probably six or eight of us, and there were two Japanese nurses with us. They were our friends and we had worked with them every day. It didn't even dawn on me that they were any different until that day we went down and as we were walking along the streets in Ogden people made very unkind remarks to these two girls and to us for being with them. They called us Jap lovers, I felt terrible. I was embarrassed for the two girls. I felt rather stupid having people call me names. I never had been called anything like that before. I didn't think people around here would be that way. MH: These Japanese nurses, were they watched very closely? LP: No, they were not. They were up from Tremonton. They had been born and raised there and spent their whole lives in this area. I don't think that they ever thought that they were ever much different either. I know some of the patients didn't like Japanese taking care of them. We also had two Japanese interns. One was from Riverdale. He had been very well known in high school, and at Weber College, before he had gone to medical school. Anyone who knew him or his family thought a lot of them . His family was very active in 8 farm bureau and different things like that. He was the valedictorian of his class. The other Japanese intern was from the California coast. Of course not having been raised here he was a little bit different. The people did resent him quite a bit. Then occasionally the intern and the two Japanese nurses would be on duty in surgery at the same time. It wasn't planned that way. It just happened. Some of the patients, when they started out of the anesthetic and saw all the Japanese around them, thought that they had been suddenly transferred to Japan or something. They got a little upset about that. So there was a little resentment. But they didn't seem to resent the German or the Italians at all. In fact I thought that they treated them a little better than they should have done. I thought a prisoner of war should be treated well. I thought they should have good food and good treatment. But I don't think that they should be treated as if they were a guest. I think they could have made them work. MH: They didn't work at all then? LP: Just on the base cleaning up I think. I know some way or another some seemed to have saved money. One or two that I know that have come back had enough money to pay for their wives to go from here to over there to be married in that country. They didn't take very long in coming back here with their families. They didn't go outside the second street area. Whether they got a monthly compensation I don't know. MH: How do you feel about some of these people coming back? LP: I think it depends upon the person themselves. The only one that I knew close was an Italian. He was a very arrogant, bossy, and loud-mouth person anyway. I don't think you would have liked him or liked to be around him, even if he hadn't been a prisoner of war. To me he seemed like a person who thought that he had privileges that other people don't 9 have. He doesn't seem to think that the laws pertain to him. He had 27 pheasants in his freezer that were out of season. There were gun laws on where you could shoot. He and his kids shot anywhere they wanted to. They seemed to hunt anytime they wanted too. He was just not a nice person to be around. Whether he would have been that way if he was a prisoner of war or not I don't know. I think he probably would have been. If they were a good person and came here and do good for the country. I think it is fine. We grew up with resentment for Germans because of World War I. I think that most of the people in the country didn't like Germans, from the time of World War I. I think that I grew up with a bad thought any time you just thought of a German. MH: So you didn't really care for the Germans as a whole? LP: I really didn't ever know one. I just think that I didn't ever want too. Around our home an Italian was a bad word. So I didn't care for them. There are a few Italians that live around here that I think resembled the hippies of today. They drank and they carried on and raced around in cars. They didn't dress like the rest of us. They were just a wild bunch. They were trying to date all the girls. Of course living in a sheltered community like I did, they weren't welcome. They were teenagers as I was growing up. The families just kept coming around. We just didn't care for them. We were never allowed to date one. That was before I grew up and found out that there were different types of Italians. MH: What was Ogden like at that period of time? LP: At the start of the war it was very peaceful. You could go to town and you knew people. You always met ten or twelve people you knew real close and you saw other people that you knew otherwise. You could always speak to people. There were no parking meters and there was no problem at all in parking. It was just like old home week just coming into 10 town. They had the theaters going. You felt safe to go anywhere in town. They didn't have the city county building. I don't remember what was there. There were several spots along the street that people would congregate and talk. It was just a nice quiet town. Then as Hill Field grew bigger and strangers came in, they brought their way of living here. You began to go down town and you didn't know so many people. Then after a while, you went down and knew anyone you were lucky. Everyone was hurrying and you couldn't find your parking place. Then it got so that you didn't dare walk around some of the places in town. Twenty-Fifth Street was always bad. The Paramount was on Kiesel between 24 and 25 streets. It was a theater and a very popular one. At the start of the war everyone always went there. Then as the war went further along you were afraid to go to some of those places. I think, too, that we got a lot of influence from people that weren't L.D.S. The town had always been predominately L.D.S. They had to open up a lot of clubs to entertain the soldiers because they came from a way of life where they did go to night clubs and drink. This is what they had known. A lot of those places weren't here so they began to open up a few more. I know at the hospital that the men that run these clubs would, if one of their girls got sick, they would bring them up to the hospital and try to get some of the nurses to go down and work for them. Once in a while it got to be kind of a problem. The town really changed. It was almost like a strange city. MH: What were some of the names of these clubs? Are they still around or are they closed down? 11 LP: They are closed down. One was the United Nations Club. It was on the corner of Kiesel and 25th St. I think it was just around on Kiesel. I don't remember the ones up and down the street. I guess they did a booming business. MH: Was prostitution high? LP: Yes. MH: These were some of the girls that came in? LP: Yes. MH: Did you do a lot of treating for them for venereal disease? LP: No. I think that these clubs opened in the winter and they brought the girls from other places. They weren't use to this climate. They had quite a few with colds and pneumonia. I don't know if they even checked them for venereal disease. They probably didn't unless they had the symptoms. It was still a nice town. The soldiers would stand on the street corners; of course they didn't have a lot of places to meet girls or go on dates with them. I guess a lot of them at that time would go to the White City ball room. That was one place that they could meet them, then the theaters on the street comers. That was one thing that was a lot different for us was the soldiers standing on the streets and street corners. You wanted your own boys from here to be treated good, yet you didn't know what they were like-the ones that were here, and we always were warned not to get friendly with them, and not to go out with soldiers. I don't know if they did this in all towns or if it was just around here. MH: Who warned you not to do this? LP: It was usually your parents or at the hospital it was your supervisors, and the house mother’s would warn you against them. 12 MH: There was quite lot of problem with them? LP: There was quite a problem with them. I think the reason was that a lot of them were not going to be here very long. They would always give the same story that they were going overseas, that they needed someone to be kind to them. I think maybe that their morals might have been different from where they came from and from what ours were. Also the church warns you against getting involved with nonmembers. You wanted to be friendly to them, and when you saw them on the streets you wanted to say high to them or speak to them at least and then go on your way. You didn't dare because they might follow you and try to strike up an acquaintance. Of course most of the time I was up at the hospital, so I didn't get so much involved. Some of the girls did get involved. They had a Belgian doctor that came, and he was working with the prisoners of war. He would do abortions quite freely in Hotel Ben Lomond. MH: Did he ever get caught? LP: No, he was shipped out. MH: For what reason? LP: I imagine it was a routine move. The only reason that we knew anything about him was that a few of the girls were involved with him. They were in my class and they had to take time off. They both had abortions. Then they came back later. Why this Belgian doctor was here, I don't know. He couldn't have been a prisoner of war. One thing that we did have happen at the hospital, to show how dumb we all were, we had a boy from Ogden come there. When he came he went into the lab to work. He said that he was a lab technician. He wore a Lieutenants uniform. He was a very good looking kid and he came from a very nice family in Ogden. He was raised on the east bench. Be 13 worked at the hospital for nine months, approximately. He did lab work beautifully. He dated all the girls, and all the interns liked him. The doctors liked him. He worked real hard and everybody had a good time and enjoyed his company, and then we found out that he wasn't even in the army and he had got ahold of this uniform some way with second Lt. Bars on it. Everybody thought that he was in the army, and he even told the draft board that he was. He had been away to school and he had taken some lab work. He was studying to be a lab technician. He had just enough that he could get by with. He worked and worked and then all of a sudden, somebody decided that he should have been assigned to a unit or he shouldn't have all that time off so that he could work at the hospital and still wear his uniform,. So they got checking and found that he had not been in the army at all. So he went to prison. MH: He was a draft dodger? LP: Yes, he was, but he had this uniform, and while we were so dumb to wonder why he wasn't. I think he told us that he was with a unit at Hill Field. We never knew it, and he wasn't a qualified lab technician either. But he did do beautiful work. MH: How did he get on there? LP: In those days it wasn't hard. When I went there, they had seven interns, and then the next year they had two interns. It was because as the boys came out of medical school, they sent them to the Army to do their intern there. I think two was the least that we ever had. In 1945 and 1944 we had four interns. They had to do the work that seven or ten had to do before. There were a lot of times that you didn't have an intern to help you. It was during this time that nurses were first allowed to do I.V. treatments. They never had been allowed to before. It had been done by an intern or a doctor. We had to learn. 14 MH: Who taught you? LP: A doctor taught some of the nurses down here and then they taught us. We had to be checked three times to make sure that we knew how, and then we were allowed to go ahead. It was only the supervisors and nurses that were allowed to do it for a year or two. Then the senior students were allowed too. Now the nurses do it all the time. We just didn't have enough doctors to do the work. Nurses had to do a lot of things that they had never had to do before. We didn't have the L.P.N.'s like they do now. We didn't have as many aids as they have now. The registered nurse did everything. She, now, more or less, does the complicated treatments and the medications. The others do all the work such as baths and changing beds and cleaning rooms. MH: You were the head nurse on the floor at that time. What floor was it, and what were some of the jobs that you did? LP: I was on the second floor which was the medical section. You had to take out all the work assignments. You hat to count the hours to make sure that you had the nurses to cover every shift for the week and each one of them had their day off. If it was a holiday, then they had their holiday and day off. You had to make sure that you had three on the three-to-eleven shift and two on the night shift, and the rest on the day shift. Then you had to make sure that the assignments were made during the day. You had one on the medications and treatments—that was oral medications. You had one on I .V.'s and medications, and the rest you put on patients. You had to make sure that their trays were passed in the morning, breakfast and lunch trays and the evening trays. You had to make sure that the temperatures were taken and recorded. As the doctors came in, you went with him to see the patients and took down the orders, or had him take down the orders. 15 Then you checked them and put them on the card index for each patient and informed each nurse of any change on their medication. Then you had to see that all of the lights were answered when they were turned on and that the linen was taken off the elevator and put away on the shelves. You had to make sure that the patients had their fresh water and had to answer any complaints that the patients had. MH: What was the most common complaint that you ad? LP: That the coffee was cold. They seemed to complain a lot about food, or that we were too slow answering lights. Even though a light would come on and you would go right down to the room. Then a lot of them would say that I know that you are shorthanded because of the war. We will try to be patient. They kind of went along with it too. But we were never short of food or never short of juice or anything like that. Even though it was war we always had citrus fruits and juices and that. We had everything that we needed. The only thing that we were short of was penicillin. That was another thing that we had to do was to keep count of the drugs such as morphine, demurral, and any of the narcotics. MH: Why did you keep close track of it? LP: Every shift had to count them. Any patient who received anything, you put down the patient's name and drug. Then at the end of your shift, you had to count them. The head nurse on the day shift or the supervisor would have to go down to the pharmacy and check the amount of drugs with the pharmacy record. If one pill was missing you had to trace it down. They were very strict then. I think that they still are in the hospital. We didn't have a drug problem like we do now, so it wasn't too hard. MH: Was there ever anybody that took any? LP: Not that I knew of. Occasionally a nurse might drop one and you might have to resolve it. 16 MH: Seems kind of funny that we would be short of penicillin when it would be so easy to get access to it. LP: It had just been discovered by Fleming. And they had just started to manufacture it. Of course, then it went to the soldiers. Sulfa was a relatively new drug then, too. So we used more of the sulfa. Sulfa and the sulfa powder, as much as the Army, Navy, and Marines needed, they got. Then we got all that was left. We always had Sulfa; also we had plenty of I.V.’s. There was always blood even though there wasn't a blood bank. We got it all the time when a patient needed it. MH: What were some of the things that you noticed that changed during the war? LP: Mostly the amount of time that a patient spent in bed. You never heard of anyone getting up. When I first started nurses training, I had a hernia patient that was one of my 21 patients for the day. He had been operated on 14 days previous, and he got up out of bed and walked to the closet to get his robe because he was tired of lying in bed. That was where I found him and I had to write a 3000 word theme as to what might have happened to him because of getting up. Then, a few months later, they were up the first day. New mothers were allowed to get up. In fact, they had to go home so we could use their bed. Many a day the doctors would come in and say, “Which patients are well enough to go home?” because they needed the beds. That was the first time that we started to put them in the halls and the cloak room. When you ran out of bed space, you put them wherever you could until someone went home, then you could put them in a room. The wards were made for eleven patients, and then pretty soon you would have fifteen. Then you would have to make more space for them. They would always be along one wall. During the war you had to make units along the other wall too. Some of the rooms would have two beds 17 put in them instead of one. That is one thing that we did run out of was space. It was because people came into Ogden because of Second Street and the Arsenal and Hill Field. Ogden wasn't prepared to take care of them. At least in the hospital they weren't. MH: Was St. Benedicts open then? LP: No. I think it opened in 1945. The Dee was the only one here. Also, Hill Field didn't have their hospital at that time. It opened later, so we really had to take care of everyone. MH: That sounds like it was pretty hectic. LP: They did it though. Sometimes they would work a double shift there was a special patient. They always had special duty nurses until that time, and they didn't have them. So you would work your day shift, and then you would do special duty in the afternoon or at night. One thing that you couldn't buy was coke. You couldn't buy cigarettes or cigars very often. You had to stand in line until you could get them. Dad smoked cigars, so all the nurses would go down and we would each buy us one cigar each. Every time he would come up we would give him a supply of cigars. You couldn't buy both. They also cut down on the amount of Coffee for a while. You could not buy a coke. When I had my appendix out, they would sneak them out of the arsenal under a coat. They had them on the bases, and they would bring cokes up to the hospital for me to drink. I think that sometimes sugar got a little hard to get. Same of the people had trouble with their food stamps. I imagine at first that you would be used to buying everything that you wanted, and then your food stamps would run out. The stuff was in the stores but you couldn't buy anything. MH: I guess that World War II wasn't the easiest time to get along with. It kind of amazes me that their material isn't as good as ours is now. 18 LP: One thing that they learned in the battle field was to use tourniquets. I understand that they would put a tourniquet on a kids arm and leave him, and his arm would die from lack of blood, so then it would have to be amputated. That was the first time that they didn't have you put on a tourniquet. They would have you use pressure points more. That was when they learned to let patients get up because the boys out on the field would get up and go on even though they were injured. People found out that they could, which did away with a lot of blood clots and people getting so run down. It was one good thing that came out of the war. MH: Is there anything more that you would like to add? I would like to thank you for telling me about World War II. 19