Oral History Program Regina Urban Turner Interviewed by Marci Farr 11 September 2008 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Regina Urban Turner Interviewed by Marci Farr 11 September 2008 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 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: Regina Urban Turner, an oral history by Marci Farr, 11 September 2008, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Regina Urban Turner Application Photo 1944 Graduation Photo Class of 1947 Regina Urban Turner September 11, 2008 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Regina Urban Turner. It was conducted 11 September, 2008 and includes her recollections and experiences with the Dee School of Nursing. The Interviewer is Marci Farr. MF: This is Marci Farr. We are interviewing Regina Urban Turner at the Comfort Suites Inn in Ogden, Utah. It is September 11, 2008. We are interviewing her for the Dee School of Nursing history project. If you would like to go ahead and read what your thoughts are that would be great. RT: “In January 1944, upon receiving my acceptance to the United States Cadet Nursing Corps I rode the Greyhound bus from Kimberly, Idaho and arrived at the Thomas D. Dee nursing home at 9:45 p.m. The housemother rushed me to my room, introduced me to my roommate, and said, “It’s time for lights out.” The next three years would be filled with unbelievable experiences. After several months of theory, we were placed on hospital duty. I went to the medical floor where there was an epidemic of viral pneumonia. The only available treatment was aspirin, mustard plasters and oxygen tents. We were so excited when sulfa was introduced to the hospital. I remember forgetting to give the soda pill with the sulfa and had to go back later and give one to each patient. Then came penicillin, the miracle drug. At this time we used glass syringes and had to sterilize them by boiling. We sterilized needles by boiling in a teaspoon of water over a Bunson Burner!” “We wore starched white, short sleeved uniforms that buttoned down the front, white cotton hose and white shoes. We wore white caps that had black diagonal ribbons, demoting the years in training. Our cadet uniforms for summer 1 were gray pin striped seersucker suits with red epaulets. Winter suits were lined grey wool with red epaulets and silver buttons. Our hats were grey with a red ribbon around the crown. We also wore a grey woolen overcoat in winter. MF: Yes. Tell us about the doctors. RT: We did not have many doctors practicing in Ogden from 1944 to 1947, because of the military demand during WWII. We made “do” with the help of a few residents and interns. Some of the doctors I remember were: “Doctor Dumke saved my husband’s leg from a gunshot wound when they wanted to amputate. Doctor Lindsey Curtis delivered four of our five children. Doctor Way, an excellent pediatrician, helped keep our young ones healthy. Doctor Noel Tanner, because tonsillectomies were not being done at that time, and I did the operation on one of our boys in his office. Doctor Dean Tanner did many surgeries on my husband’s leg, which he still walks good on. Our thanks to Doctor and Mrs. Stratford for their many hours of participation in the Weber County Sheriffs Junior horseback riding posse, which our oldest son rode in. Doctor “Ole” Olson, cardiologist, who was one of our first professors at Weber College, we all loved him. Eric and Fred were fantastic orderlies. The two covered the whole hospital. I never worked with anybody better.” All of our doctors and nurses were very dedicated and certainly were the foundation of what has become a “miracle age.” MF: They were busy. RT: That is true. I could give you many, many stories about all this but this is just the basics. “Nurses I will never forget: 2 Lucille Taylor, who was superintendent of nurses, believed me when I didn’t get in from a date at 10 p.m. because of a flat tire. The nursing home doors were locked at 10 p.m. “Mrs. Miner, with her “Boston” cup cap and immaculately starched uniform. Very strict, but excellent teacher. Marie Manning, second floor medical taught us a lot about cleaning and treatments. We cleaned lots of cupboards.” “Dorothy Stitzer was my favorite IV and Meds nurse on third floor surgical. Sarah Shaw was a great OB nurse.” “Louise Scoville for her tender care with babies. Jean Frew, my big sister, who watched me swallow a raw egg during initiation, but was there to help me “over the bumps.” And who could forget “Miss Pitty Pat,” our conscientious housemother! She “campused” me because I was whistling in the hall one day, but when told I was being baptized the next day, she was my “bosom friend!” “After graduation I worked about eighteen years in all phases of nursing until our children began high school. My favorite services are still E.R. and surgery, which I was scared to death of in training, but thanks to Miss Funk and Miss Robbins, that fear was overcome. I remember doing the first aortic transplant at the Dee with Doctor Dean Tanner. Also, the terrible accident brought up from the railroad involving a man who had lost his entire lower torso by a train. My three years in training was one of the most rewarding experiences in my life. The people I met, and the friends that I made are truly a blessing in my 3 life that I will never forget. Would I do it over again? Yes. But I am grateful that I had the opportunity back then. It is astounding how far medicine has come. MF: You grew up in Idaho, that is where you are from? RT: Yes. Southern Idaho, Kimberly is a suburb of Twin Falls now. Back then there were about eight hundred people in the little town. MF: So why did you decide to become a nurse? RT: When I graduated from high school I went to Spokane, Washington to Henager Business College. I was very good in shorthand and typing but terrible in bookkeeping. We were losing World War II. I was young and discouraged a bit, and ready to do something else. I had been a campfire girl all through my school years. I was accepted as a counselor at Sweyolaken, a large campfire girl camp on Lake Coeur d’Alene, Idaho when my father needed help in the post office in Kimberly. I returned home. While I was there, one of my friends, Louise Barr who was in nurses training at the Dee Hospital gave me some information on the cadet nursing program. I applied and was accepted at the Dee Hospital. MF: So tell me something about your days off in training. RT: We enjoyed “tanning” on the roof and occasionally a date. We were kept way busy “on duty” and enjoyed whatever time we had off relaxing. We spent a lot of time studying. MF: Everything just to make sure it was ship-shape. There was nothing out of order. RT: We had one RN charge nurse and one RN for medical and treatment nurse a floor of at least thirty to thirty-two patients and these were very ill patients. 4 And very little to work with. It was not uncommon that we didn’t have enough linen. I remember going to work early just so I could get to the linen room in time to get enough linen that I could take care of my patients. MF: A lot the nurses have said, also, that by the time they were seniors they were a charge nurse, they were in charge of the floor. RT: Yes. MF: There is no way they would allow that now. RT: I don’t imagine. MF: I think that helped your training, don’t you think? RT: Yes. We had three major rooms and I think three minor rooms of surgery and operated from seven o’clock in the morning, they would start operating at eight, until noon or whenever they finished. All four of us, Lois Heap said that she wanted to go back to surgery but the rest of us were so afraid of it. In fact, when I was there as a freshman I would do anything to keep from scrubbing. I was so afraid. I would wash rubber gloves and sterilize and boil instruments and wash instruments. That is how afraid I was of surgery and to be put back when I was a senior just ruined all my plans. We wouldn’t give up because I had too much time in it so we went back to surgery and we did the RN work. We charged, we were responsible for the surgeries. We did the charging, they called it. The students did the scrubbing. But we did the charging and that was…we finished our last six months doing that and I learned so much. I got over being afraid of it real fast. MF: That is good. 5 RT: In fact, we had to do all three shifts. Miss Funk and Miss Robins worked in the day time but we had to take call at night and be responsible for all of it. When we went up they said, “Do not call us, you will just have to handle it yourselves because we can’t work all day and get up at night too.” So one afternoon shift, I was working by myself, and a man came in and he had been whittling with a knife and had sliced his earlobe off. Not clear off, it was just hanging. So I called the resident which was what you had to do and told him what had happened. He said, “I cannot come.” He was covering the whole hospital. He said, “I just cannot come.” I said, “Well what do I do?” Because legally we probably… MF: Weren’t authorized to do it. So where did your capping and pinning ceremony…did you have that in the nurse’s home? RT: It was down fairly close to the college but not in the college. It was a building that they had used before. I think it was on…wasn’t the old Dee on 24th or 25th? MF: 24th. RT: Then it was an old, pretty large house I think. And it was on 25th street closer to town. MF: Did you walk down there? RT: Well, we had graduated, really. We were through training in January so I had gone home and so in June…I had come back though and gotten married and we were married in February and the graduation was in June so we were living in Ogden at the time. So we were here already. MF: Did you know any members of the Dee family while you were at the hospital? 6 RT: No. I didn’t. In fact, yesterday when we went to the luncheon we had a relative that had just had surgery so we walked through the halls of your new hospital. And that is the first time I have seen a picture of anyone in the Dee family. MF: Oh yes isn’t that wonderful. RT: Beautiful. MF: Yes it is a good thing. RT: Really neat. MF: I know up on the fourth floor where the nursery is and they have a little shadow box… you get off the elevator and right there it has all the items for the nurse’s home. They have instruments and a little book and they have pictures and the little bottles of medicine that still have the old labels and books and stuff from the old Dee Hospital. RT: I would love to see that. I might go see that today before I go home. MF: And then on the fifth floor you get off the elevator and it has a picture of Annie Dee because Annie is the one that started the hospital. RT: Yes. MF: It is her and her husband Thomas in 1905 and that is the year he died. It is a picture of her and him in this sleigh. And she has this little cape on and they have the cape sitting on one of these little shelves. RT: Is that right? MF: Yes. RT: And you have done that? MF: It was the foundation did that when they set up the items for the hospital. 7 RT: How neat. MF: So it was kind of fun. So yes, you’ll have to go on every floor and get off and see what they have in their little boxes just to see. RT: I think I will do that. MF: Yes. RT: I love that because all those old instruments. MF: They have it. They do they have everything. It was just so fun. I got off there and I thought oh wow. I don’t know if they have a uniform or if they have a cap, they have something there so you’ll have to check that out. MF: So when did you retire? You said you worked for eighteen years after, right? RT: Maybe I worked a little bit longer. I retired about ’65 or somewhere around there. MF: Do you think nursing has changed over the years, you know, as far as technology and medicines? RT: Definitely. When we went into our relatives room yesterday, I could not believe, he had had a hip replacement and they had all these tubes and everything but he was sitting up in a chair, he had been up walking. And I mean everything was piped into the room. I can’t believe it. Two months ago I had a heart oblation where they take scopes up into your heart for arrhythmia, they zap the electrical system that had shorted out, the scar tissue forms a rerouting up the system and I am well. And it just put at least twenty years on my life. MF: That is so amazing. RT: I can’t believe it because we had these old oxygen tanks like they use for welding. And like I said mustard plasters and we had really nothing to work with. 8 Most of our care was nursing care. We gave…everybody in the hospital got their face washed in the morning for breakfast, face and hands. They got a bed bath and a back rub and a lot of attention, you know, a lot of help and that was our part. MF: And that is your legacy. RT: Very little medicine that would work. MF: Well we appreciate you letting us come visit you before you left to go back to Colorado. We appreciate that. RT: Well we are going back tomorrow. We are going to take a day. MF: That will be nice. You won’t have to be rushed. RT: Yes I think I’ll go back to the hospital. I have to see those instruments. MF: Yes it is just where we walked in to go to the luncheon, you turned left, if you just keep walking straight at the visitors, elevators just right there. Then they also have the foundation room. I don’t know if you have been in that. RT: No. MF: You walk in the hospital and you head back down, the opposite way of the lunch room and head back down the opposite way they have the old doors from the hospital and they have stuck them in this room and they have items from the hospital. So you’ll have to go check that out too. RT: Oh my goodness. MF: I stumbled on that room. RT: Do you have a picture of the old hospital? 9 MF: We do have a picture of that. We have that on a CD. The Dee family had some pictures we were able to scan those. RT: In the pictures that you had of that old hospital, did it have awnings out from the windows in the front. MF: I think on the side one it did. I am trying to think. I don’t remember, I haven’t looked at it for a few days. RT: The reason I ask is because I ran across a picture and I really do think it was one of the old Dee hospitals but I couldn’t swear about it. I don’t even remember where I found it. Years ago when one of the alumni books was made, you know, they needed that picture so I gave it to them. But I have always had a feeling maybe I didn’t give them the right picture. I would really, really like to verify that is it. MF: I have it at home on my computer so I will check that out see what I have got. RT: The one that I have looks just like the old Dee but it has some awnings on the front and the light posts up, you know? MF: Yes. I’ll have to check that out. RT: Do you have the nursing home? Yesterday somebody was asking me about the old nursing home and, you know, these things you just take for granted when they are happening. MF: Exactly. RT: And of course, one reason we don’t have pictures is because nobody had cameras. MF: That is true. 10 RT: I mean us kids that went through the training, we argue about whether it was five or fifteen dollars that we got the first year we were in. The second year we got, I think, twenty. And then the third, thirty, and we were really rich with thirty dollars. You know, nobody had money to like on our days off we either had to walk clear down town or ride the bus and the bus was probably ten cents but we just didn’t have ten cents for the bus. MF: That is true. RT: So we did the things that needed to be done. I think a lot of our satisfaction came from experiences with the patients. MF: Probably, because you had the personal time you were able to spend with them. RT: You did. MF: Now, it is like they come and tend the machine and that is it. They don’t worry about the patient in the bed as much as you did because you made a point to make them comfortable. RT: That is what we had to work with. MF: That is true. And plus, they were in the hospital a lot longer than they are now. Which makes a difference. RT: Oh definitely. I was in, I think, fourteen days when I had my first baby. But this Doctor Oley that I mentioned, he was…Doctor Oley Olsen was his name. He was such a wonderful person. When we were first started our classes at Weber State we had to walk down to the college and go to classes. There was a man in the hospital that was dying from cancer. And it was a terribly severe case. We had to do the dressings on him. It was just so bad it broke us all in. 11 MF: Oh I bet. RT: You know, very fast. MF: I bet. RT: Doctor Oley was giving us our class and we asked him, you could call him Doctor Oley, he was that sweet, and we said, “Why can’t you overdose or something and put him out of his misery? You don’t even treat animals that way.” And he says, I will never forget this, he said, “You girls, I am with you.” He said, “I think it should be done.” And he said, “If it is your desire I will write the order for you.” And he said, “I will do that for you.” But he said, “You are the ones that have to do it.” That was the answer, you know. I will never forget that. Can you imagine? MF: That would be so hard. RT: That was it, we had nothing to work with. MF: That is true. RT: We just had to swab it out. MF: Oh that would be hard. RT: It was a terrible thing. I was eighteen, I think I turned nineteen in February when we came in in January. But at eighteen you don’t know very much really. We were given much responsibility and had to make important decisions. But I think that the most important thing that I learned in nurses training was compassion and the desire to do the best that you could with the facilities that you had. At age 85, I still have many memories of our “training period,” including 12 the many people who so responsibly helped us enter the nursing profession. God Bless Nurses. MF: You have never experienced anything like that, to walk in there, that is a whole other part of the world that you have never seen. That would be hard. Well we appreciate you letting us have a few minutes of your time. 13