Oral History Program Betty Hoke Fernelius Interviewed by Marci Farr 14 September 2010 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Betty Hoke Fernelius Interviewed by Marci Farr 14 September 2010 Copyright © 2010 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in Special Collections. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The St. Benedict’s School of Nursing was founded in 1947 by the Sisters of Mount Benedict. The school operated from April 1947 to 1968. Over the forty-one year period, the school had 605 students and 357 graduates. In 1966, the program became the basis for Weber State College’s Practical Nursing Program. This oral history project was created to capture the memories of the graduates and to add to the history of nursing education in Ogden. The interviews focus on their training, religion, and experiences working with doctors, nurses, nuns, and patients at St. Benedict’s Hospital. This project received funding from the Utah Humanities Council and the Utah Division of State History. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management Special Collections All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Betty Hoke Fernelius, an oral history by Marci Farr, 14 September 2010, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Betty Hoke Fernelius Graduation Photo Class of 1950 Betty Hoke Fernelius 2010 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Betty Hoke Fernelius, conducted by Marci Farr and Sarah Langsdon, on September 14, 2010. In this interview, Betty discusses her recollections and experiences with the St. Benedict’s School of Nursing. MF: This is Marci Farr. We are interviewing Betty Hoke Fernelius. She graduated in 1950 from the St. Benedicts School of Nursing. It is September 14, 2010. We are interviewing her via telephone. Where do you live at? BF: I live in San Carlos, California. MF: San Carlos, that’s right. BF: Just between San Francisco and San Jose. MF: Okay. Will you just share with us a little bit about where you grew up and a little bit about your family and where you attended school at? BF: I was born in 1929 in Denver, Colorado. My mother and father were both widow and widower and they married January 16, 1929. By November when I was born, they had already split up. It was second family...he had girls and my mother had teenage sons so it just didn’t work. It was during the Depression too and you know, things were kind of....so that’s where I stand as far as...my mother raised me and it was difficult during the Depression, very difficult in fact. She never did have a lot of money, so that’s how I ended up in the long run coming to St. Benedict’s. I had two half sisters on my father’s side whom I talk to occasionally but that is it. My mother’s children when she married my father-she had three boys and a daughter. The nearest one to me was eight years and the others were a 2 sister that is ten years older and two brothers in their teens. All of my family is dead now so I’m an orphan. MF: You are the orphan, oh. What made you decide to become a nurse? BF: Well, I went to school with Imogene (xxx) who is also a student. She had left Utah and went back to her native Illinois with her parents. That was during my junior year so I didn’t see her then. They moved back for her senior year. Imogene has wanted to be a nurse all her life from the very beginning of anything, a nurse is what she wanted to be. So I knew I was probably not going to be able to go for anything and she was so adamant about being a nurse so I thought, well I’ll be a nurse too. So that’s what made me decide. MF: Well that’s good. So why did you like St. Benedict’s? Was it because it was close? BF: No, what happened was she and I, after we got out of high school, I had to go to summer school to pick up some course credits. I moved from Denver and somehow the credits didn’t work out and I had to go to summer school. I didn’t know about it and then I met one of the office girls in Kaysville, where I lived, it’s a small town. She told me I was going to have trouble. I knew I had to go to summer school, so I did and I got my credit. Now, the Dee Hospital offered a nursing scholarship to Davis High students but they started in August and I think I probably would have had that because I was on the honor roll and as it turned out some very nice little Japanese girl got it. I don’t know whether she was on it or not, but she got the scholarship. I couldn’t have gotten it anyhow because I didn’t have anything done. 3 MF: So Elsie Okamota? BF: Yeah, I think so. MF: Sarah just saw her today. BF: Oh really? She was a really neat girl. There were a lot of Japanese kids there and they’re parents were mostly farmers. MF: Thank you for sharing that with us. What were your first impressions when you entered nurses training? Was this your first time away from home? BF: Yeah, away from home to live. The way it came about was, Imogene and I went everywhere we could think of. We even tried the army because they had had the cadet nurses. We thought maybe there was something that we could do. But that was gone and you couldn’t do it. That was a neat deal, boy. One day, Mildred Freeman, our friend brought the Ogden paper to us and on the back of the page was a little tiny ad that said the nuns at St. Benedict’s would take students into the nursing school on a loan or scholarship. It was $250.00 and you could go through on that and when you were finished you would pay it back. So we technically paid for our own education but that’s the opportunity we got then. I will be forever grateful for that. So the very next day, she and I went up and saw Sister Mary Margaret and told her we wanted to be roommates and she wasn’t sure that was a good idea but she conceded. We went straight downtown to the doctor and got our shots. They made me very sick, I remember. Imogene and I and Laura Brown and Dorothy Thompson and Ethel Benson and Rosalynd George were the ones that were left out of, I think, twelve that came in in January. The class had 4 already come in September. We were going to go to summer school to make up the classes that the girls in September had already had so we could all graduate together. The only difference would be that our finishing date would be different. They were through in June, probably right after graduation, and we would go on until the last part of December. Our dates varied depending on whether we took our vacation or not. Imogene did not take her vacation so she finished two weeks earlier than I did. I got out the 29th of November. MF: Well, that’s great. Were you roommates with Imogene the whole time? BF: Yes. MF: Did you get along really well? BF: We were very good friends and we’re really tangled up by marriage too. I don’t know if you want that story right now or not. MF: Go ahead. BF: Into my second year, in July, someone came in and wanted to know if I wanted to go on a blind date that night. I was in the special diet kitchen and at the time I told her I was a mess, leaning over the steam table getting the special diets out and stuff like that. But she talked me into it so I got ready that night. We were going to go up the canyon. I looked out the window to see who was coming. I was interested because after he mentioned his name-Imogene was going with a boy named Glen Fernelius Marshka and his middle name was Fernelius. I thought that was the craziest name and I wanted to go out with someone who’s name was Fernelius. I said, “I got to see this.” As it turns out Keith’s cousin is Glen’s mother. So his father and Glen’s mother’s father were brothers. That 5 meant that when we got married, Keith and I, and when Imogene and Glen got married, that made us second cousins by marriage. MF: Well, there you go. BF: So we stayed in contact all these years. It’s a permanent friendship. MF: That’s a great thing. So do you have any other stories that you remember about Imogene or your other classmates that happened while you were in training? BF: Well, I better finish mine I guess. I met Keith in July, it was just past his birthday, the 19th of July. I saw that man and I had to have him. That was it. As it turned out it really blossomed then. Of course, we couldn’t get married then. Keith was twenty nine and I was nineteen at the time. This relationship was not like it is today where you can just do as you please morally. We didn’t. Sometime in December he says, “Well, why don’t we get married.” And I said well how about the end of the year, December 31st, over that weekend. So we planned to go to Elko and get married and keep it secret for a year! Imogene knew what I was doing but nobody else. So we did! We were married in Elko, Nevada, December 31, 1949. We agreed that nothing would change in our behavior. We would be very careful and if we even needed to go out with somebody else, to keep our secret, then we would. Nothing went wrong until August. Keith’s mother’s sister, an aunt, was in Elko, Nevada to visit a cousin. Keith told me he had a cousin but we didn’t think anything about it because we had asked them not to print anything in the paper. So they didn’t print anything in the Ogden paper but they did print it in the Elko paper. His cousin saw but kept it to herself for some reason because she 6 was confused that she hadn’t heard anything. Bless her heart. So Keith’s aunt comes back and doesn’t go to Keith’s mother, her sister, but she tells her daughter and her son. This is about August or September. Roy, his cousin, went to Don something, who Ethel was going with and he told him about this. So Ethel comes to me in November and says that she heard I got married. I denied it. Then I got to thinking that she’s my friend and I would have a better chance of her keeping my secret that I have of not telling her and her going and telling somebody else. So I took her in my confidence and she said that she wouldn’t say anything. So nobody found it out. I think I only told Sister Berno after because she and I had become friends in a way. She was crazy about Keith. So that’s the story and it’s a miracle nobody found out. MF: That is a great story and it’s a good thing nobody found out because you would have been kicked out. BF: Oh yeah. Now Norah was married and had children when she came in. She had to live with the nuns while her husband and children moved in with her parents. They did take her but it was very strict conditions. MF: What do you remember about the sisters? BF: I remember our first night there. We were nothing but giggles because things were so strange for us. I’m not Catholic and neither is Imogene and so this was all new to us. It didn’t take long for us to learn that there was no giggling and no silliness. They were very protective of the students which I have been forever thankful for. They wanted us to stay on a serious road and taught us that it means a lot and it was a job to do and we had to do it their way. But they were 7 fun too. I remember that we went out and climbed trees once on Arbor Day and they’d come out and play ball with us too. They’d reach down and pull their habits up and pin them on their chest so they could run around the bases just like we did. They loved parties. You had to have a formal dance and they liked nothing better than to see us all dressed up in formal dresses. They liked to have fun. MF: That’s fun to see that because I don’t think that would be a normal perception of the nuns. BF: No. But they were all business too. I have never in my life had a teacher better than Sister Estelle’s. I was on the honor roll in high school. When we took chemistry and we were partners and they let partners use their books for tests, we both had a terrible time. He let us come in after school for extra work and he gave us a C-. He did pass us. If we hadn’t had good grades that would have made a difference. Within a week in Sister Sill’s chemistry class, it was like a curtain was drawn and it was just perfectly clear. I knew exactly what to do and how to balance equations and I thought that is the difference between a teacher and a good teacher. MF: That does make a difference if you can understand what they’re trying to explain. BF: Yes, she was really something. They all were. The only one that all of us had a problem with was Sister Mary Gerald. She taught something like ethics and everybody failed the test. In my mind, I didn’t feel that was right. We had to do extra work and she did pass everybody after that. But the other nuns were wonderful teachers. The doctor’s gave our lectures on everything. Miss Barton, 8 she’s the one in the picture in the paper with the cute little cap with the black stripe around it, she graduated. MF: So is that Jean Barton? BF: Yes. MF: We just interviewed her yesterday. BF: Did you? MF: Yes. BF: She, to me, is the perfect nurse. She dresses just meticulously. She graduated from Massachusetts General which is probably the best nursing school in the country. Her uniform was always perfect, never a spot on it. She wore cuffs up over her long sleeves like the nuns do. She was just a beautiful person. She was so kind and nice. Miss Camira was more business-like but was still an excellent person too. Anything we did to the patient in the line of treatments we had to do to each other. The Levine tube to put down for suction, we swallowed the Levine tube. Everybody did but one girl. There was another army nurse, a black nurse, on a medical floor. She had been in the army too and she was again, very meticulous about her appearance. She was more withdrawn than Miss Camira. Miss Camira was very nice. MF: What would you do with your classmates if you had a night off? BF: We only had one day a week off. Up to the time we got our caps, we had every weekend, but after that, we had one day a week off. Even if you had the day off you still had to go to classes. On Saturday and Sunday we worked eight hours. It was split shift. The morning and the afternoon. If you were on nights, you worked 9 the night shift, you came home and slept a little bit but then had to be up by ten for classes. You stopped at 11:30 for lunch and a nap if you were lucky and back at two or one for classes. At three you’d go back for afternoon care. Sometimes we had night lectures so you slept maybe two or three hours a day. It’s not like that now. They soon decided that you couldn’t do that. Our training was different but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. We got the best and we learned a lot. We were given a lot of responsibility. In the course of a year we were already on night shift on the medical floor. We had to have six months on the medical floor, six months on the surgical floor, and a lot of months on OB. We did six weeks in the diet kitchen, eight weeks in surgery, two weeks in the formula lab and three or four months in the psychiatric unit. MF: Which was your favorite of the rotations? BF: OB. I ended up a nursery nurse. After I finished I worked six months at the LDS Hospital as a graduate nurse because we didn’t take our state boards until March and we didn’t find out about them until May or June. So it was six months we were working for $190.00 a month. Imogene was in pediatrics and I was in the nursery. My husband and I were having a heck of a time making it because he was on the GI Bill and going to school at the University. Then he went down looking for a job after he finished his post graduate work at the training school in American Fork. Do you know about that? MF: I’ve never heard of that. BF: In American Fork, the state has a training school for mentally retarded children and adults. No babies. They are dependants of the state. When they found out I 10 was a nurse, he was hired. I went down there. There were 800 patients. I was just barely a registered nurse. The nurse there was pregnant and she was leaving and she was the only one. I worked that way, the only one, on call, every night of my life, in the five years that I was there. MF: To deal with 800 patients. BF: Anything that happened-I was it. I did everything there. I diagnosed. I would give medication. We had a lot of epileptics. If they went into status, which is one seizure after another and it doesn’t stop, I’m the one that went over and stopped it with the medication. If a kid put his fist through the window and cut his arm, I sewed him. I was good too. That’s the kind of thing I did down there. My husband always wanted to get down to the Bay Area and when San Mateo County’s supervisor came to University of Utah to recruit, he had a very good friend who was a professor there and she called Keith and said they’re hiring if you want to come up and check this. So he went up and they were glad to get him. By this time he had five years experience. So that’s when we came. It would have been July of 1956 or 1957. Now, where were we? I got a couple stories. One of them may not be allowed. MF: Oh come on. We like the ones that aren’t allowed. You’ve got to tell that story. BF: Okay, I was working on a medical floor. I’m a student nurse, nineteen years old. We did baths in those days. If they were in the hospital they got a bed bath. They didn’t go to a shower or something. I had this man in room 202 I’ll never forget. He was by himself in the room. I was bathing him and there’s a certain way that you bathe them. When you get ready to do their legs, you bring the blanket over 11 and you tuck it in around so nothing is seen as far as the man’s genitalia. As I was tucking the blanket around to wash his leg, he looked at me and he said, “What’s the matter? Are you afraid you going to touch something?” [laughter] I don’t know what type of family he had or where he came from but I just left the room and I was almost in tears. I was naive enough that I knew what he said was wrong but not exactly. I went to the desk to Sister Cassian who was the supervisor (she a beautiful woman, the most beautiful nun I’d ever seen) and she wanted to know what was the matter. I told her what he’d said to me and down she goes to Sister Mary Margaret’s office. Sister Mary Margaret came up and if you’ve ever known Sister Mary Margaret, you’d know you don’t tangle with her because she was the administrator of the world. She could do everything. Like at Christmas if we got a present, it was because she’d talked some business into giving it to us. Our flowers at graduation or when we got married she got donated from the florist. That’s just the type of person she was. She walked into that room and she dressed him down and told him that she was responsible for sixty some women that were our ages, and she said this is something that we don’t tolerate and I hate to think that any man in Ogden would do this. She said, “You call your family and tell them to come get you because you’re not staying in this hospital. You can go to Dee.” He begged her and he begged her to please, please let him stay. He said he’d apologize but she wouldn’t let me in the room. After she said, “Well, you’re going home. I’m talking to the doctor and you’re going out of here as soon as you can go. There will not 12 be another student nurse in here to take care of you. You’ll be taken care of by the orderlies.” Well, we only had one orderly and that was Bob and he worked with us. So he got his care during the day, but except for his care, the student nurses didn’t go in there anymore. That’s the type of protection that we got. MF: So did you have any rotations? BF: No, our last year they had a couple of openings at the (xxx). We were about finished but Rosalynd George and Laura Brown got to take it. I think probably because their parents paid their tuition right away and we owed ours still. But as far as disease, we did have the polio epidemic there. We took care of polio patients. We had no problem with that part of our training to get that experience. Also, for psychiatry, Doctor O’Garman had the psychiatric unit on a private patient basis in the basement. They had anywhere from, I think maybe, ten to fifteen or twenty patients at a time. In those days they were on insulin treatment which is not done now. MF: That’s true. Did that kind of procedure make you nervous? BF: No. You do what you do. I’m surprised what nineteen year olds can do. We were there either with another student at night or we were there in the daytime to be oriented. At four thirty we would start and we’d draw up the insulin and some of them would get shock treatment. At 5:30 we would give the ones that just got insulin, insulin. There was a lock up room down the hall for a person who might be hard to handle. The doctor told us when we were there the first time, never to turn our back on the patients. And then at 4:30 we’d go in and put a waist restraint on them that’s hooked to the bed and we’d take their temperature and 13 we’d check their vital signs every fifteen minutes. By the time we left at seven they’d be out and in convulsions some of them. At seven the ones that got the electric shock, the doctor would bring his little black box for. I was there for some of those-he’d have everybody there when he was doing it because it takes everybody to throw yourself over the person- one over the knees, one over the chest, one over the middle and then he’d hit the button and a second would go by and then a wham! and they’d stiffen. Then they’d start to shake and it would wear down and that was it. Then the day people would pass a Levine tube and give them Glyco, they called it, it was a sugar that you mix so many ounces of that with so many ounces of coffee. Then you’d tube that stuff in them. It’s a predigested sugar more or less so it absorbs very quickly. When they’d come around then they’d have a shower and then a big breakfast. It was awful when you think of it. MF: How long where you doing the psych training? BF: I think it was no more than four months. Colleen Creedon was in there with me. She was the next class to come in. She was a lot of fun. We were there at Christmas time and we had a lady down in lock up. The funny thing is, she was in Keith’s parents ward, and she was nuttier than a fruitcake and really out of it. She was thinking her husband was cheating on her and she’d put a ladder to the house and go up and look in the windows and just crazy stuff. She was down there too and was hard to handle. I remember Colleen and I would go down with her meals and sit with her while she ate. It was Christmas so we thought we’d do 14 her hair and we put curlers in. When we checked she had taken them out and was flushing them down the toilet and dipping her head in the toilet. It was awful! MF: Oh, that’s not good. BF: We recorded that but very carefully. The doctor would want to know that. We had a young man just out of high school and he was very handsome and very strong and athletic. He was six foot tall-a man in a young man’s body. The doctor said to watch him very closely. We did but nothing happened. I remember we had a hard time getting him under with the insulin and it took almost four hundred units of insulin to put him in a depth three which is the level of consciousness that we wanted them. That had to be hard, you know? MF: Wow. That is so interesting. BF: He told us on the electric shock machine, that the Japanese started doing it for the mentally ill. The way they did it was they just hooked them up to a regular electric cord and then plugged them in to the wall and jerk it out. I’m not kidding you! You can imagine. We had scarlet fever that had run through there too and by that time I had trained one of the ladies who was very smart. We got through a scarlet fever epidemic. Of course, penicillin takes care of that. That’s all we had at that time. MF: Scary stuff-just having primitive treatments. BF: I know. I think we had the most unique and the best education that you could have possibly had. You were prepared to handle anything. MF: You were trained in every part of the hospital. 15 BF: Yes. While, I’m thinking of this- I’ll tell you know before I forget. I was working at Sequoia, a hospital in Redwood City for twenty two years in the nursery and the OB. Up in the nursery one night a nurse came in, a young lady, and she had a cap on. Of course, a lot of people wear that because it’s one you can get out of a catalogue. Ours were a little different. The ones that the nuns made were nicer than the ones that you buy. This young lady walks in and as I get closer to her I said you’re from St. Benedict’s in Ogden? She said yes. So that’s the only time I ever run into a classmate or a person from St. Benedict’s. It was about that time I realized most of the young ones I was working with- that I was old enough to be their mother. That was a hard one to take too when that suddenly dawned on me. MF: That would be. So where was your graduation held? BF: The capping was held at the chapel at the hospital there. We came in and it was done by the nuns and they gave you your cap. The graduation was done at the Catholic Church and I don’t remember the name. MF: St. Joseph’s? BF: The Bishop from Salt Lake was there too. We had our capes by then, which my daughter later used when she was in college to wear around to keep her warm. She took all the stuff off of it and it’s hanging in my closet now. Anyhow, we had our capes and we marched from the hospital with the flowers in our arms all the way down to the church. Then we went up and they called your names and you went up in front of the Bishop and he’d say something. That was kind of difficult for me because we had to kiss his ring. I did it. They didn’t force us to go to church or anything like that. I was going downtown to the church and I’m not a 16 Mormon either. I was going down to the Baptist church. Now I’m sorry to say, I’m an Atheist. I don’t go anywhere. MF: So that was probably wonderful to be done with your nurses training and graduate and be able to wear your cap proudly. BF: Yes. We were taught you never wear your cap outside in the streets or anywhere. You keep it at work. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen- I don’t think they wear them anymore. My daughter is a registered nurse and she works up in the city at California Medical Center and they don’t wear uniforms or anything. They wear scrubs. Before I left Sequoia I was still wearing my cap and the uniform. I was in Peds though. In the nursery we put on scrubs but we did wear our caps. MF: So when did you retire from nursing? BF: I don’t remember the exact date to tell you the truth. It was somewhere around 1976. I did private duty. I didn’t want to work full time or nights anymore. I worked nights most of my life. I did private duty where I was just up the street from where I live now- a little negro boy that was handicapped and couldn’t walk and was in there for twenty minutes. But it was November and it was freezing cold, but he made it. He has a speech impediment and he can’t walk and he only has use of his right arm. But he’s got a lot in that head. He’s probably pushing forty now. I haven’t been there for a long time. Anyhow, I worked there for ten years until it got too big for me to handle. That was it. My husband and I took up golf and we built and house and used to go up and play golf all the time. Anyhow, that was the end of the nursing. 17 MF: Well, that’s good. We appreciate you sharing your story with us.