Oral History Program Norma Jones Hansen Interviewed by Marci Farr 5 October 2009 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Norma Jones Hansen Interviewed by Marci Farr 5 October 2009 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: Norma Jones Hansen, an oral history by Marci Farr, 5 October 2009, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Norma Jones Hansen Application Photo 1940 October 5, 2009 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Norma Jones Hansen. It was conducted October 5, 2009 and concerns her recollections and experiences with the Dee School of Nursing. The interviewer is Marci Farr. MF: This is Marci Farr. We are interviewing Norma Jones Hansen. She graduated from the Dee School of Nursing in 1943. It is October 5, 2009 and we are interviewing Norma at her home in Ogden, Utah. Norma, could you just tell us a little bit about your early life, where you grew up, where you went to school, and your family? NH: I was born in Ogden on Binford Avenue. I was a premature baby. I understand that it was—in those days, pretty bad. I was an only child. I went to school at Madison and went to Washington and Pingree and then to Lewis and to Ogden High School. My parents were divorced and separated; so I spent a lot of time with my grandparents and some of my aunts and uncles. I would go out to Pleasant View and different places where they had their families. I guess when I have thought about why I wanted to be a nurse—there were two things that helped me decide. One was my uncle had a daughter-inlaw up in Montana who was a nurse. We’d go up every summer to visit with her. She was the most efficient, well organized, nicest lady. She was so hospitable and we had such good times up there that I wanted to be a nurse like her. As I got to be a teenager I wanted to be around other girls. I thought that nursing home would be a good place to be with other girls. It was kind of foolish but that is one reason I went into the Dee School of Nursing. My mother and I went up for me to apply. I had skipped a grade in all this moving around that we did, so I 1 was only seventeen when I graduated from High School. They said I had to be eighteen before I could enter the program so I went to Weber for a year. That was wonderful, at the time I was quite disappointed because a couple of friends of mine went into the program at that time and they were always a year ahead of me. I enjoyed that year at Weber and then I started the nursing program. MF: What were your first impressions when you entered the nursing home? NH: Oh, it was wonderful. I had a roommate and everybody was getting acquainted. I had spent a lot of time on the train. My dad worked for the railroad and I would get a pass and I would go to Los Angeles a lot with my grandmother. But I didn’t know the towns outside of Ogden actually. To this day I don’t know where some of the girls in my class were from, out of Ogden. I thought it was great. My roommate was Yvonne Dimick. She was from Montpelier, Idaho. She had seven brothers and sisters so she taught me a lot about how it would be to be with a family. We got very well acquainted. MF: Oh good. Tell us about some of your other classmates that you were friends with. NH: Ruth Brown and Evelyn Helgeson were roommates. They were some really good friends of mine. Evelyn was the most talented musician. She could sit down and play any song. You could hum a song and she could chord it and play it. She played by ear a lot but she had taught some piano and her mother had taught piano. We had long days, we would start at six in the morning. We had to be to breakfast at six thirty and on the floor at seven. We would be on the floor until about eleven or just before twelve. We would go to the hospital to eat and 2 then we would have to be back down at Weber on Jefferson and 24th St. for our class at one o’clock. We would have class for about two hours and have to be back on the floor at four until seven, get people ready for dinner and that sort of thing. Then from seven till nine we kind of had free time a little bit and Evelyn would go in and play the piano. That was a lot of fun. MF: How did the war impact you being in nurse’s training? NH: Well, I was in the operating room when Pearl Harbor happened. The doctor that I was assisting—I was a student—they called him out and his son had gone down with the U.S.S. Utah. It was pretty devastating. He never really recovered from that. It was before the program for nurses to be paid. MF: The cadet nurses? NH: The cadet corps—just before. So we didn’t have to do anything with the military. In those days you had to put in three full years in the nursing program with two weeks vacation in the summer. There wasn’t any extra time. But the war itself didn’t impact except that almost all of my classmates went into the service when they graduated. MF: Did the war affect any of the doctors? NH: I don’t recall them taking very many from our hospital. I guess the residents probably went but we didn’t have much to do with them. The others were pretty stable in this community and practiced here. MF: That is good to know. What were some of the classes that you took while you were in nurse’s training? 3 NH: We took anatomy and physiology and English and nutrition. Our class was one of the last classes to go through the kitchen where we made custards and diets for the patients. We had a really good time. I needed that because I had not done any cooking. I had to learn how to cook a little bit there. MF: That is good. NH: Of course, our teachers at Weber were all faculty there. Then we had our own nursing faculty that taught us some of the classes. MF: Who were some of your teachers? NH: Mrs. Miner was one of them. Lucille… MF: Brewerton? NH: Brewerton, yes. Those were the two major ones I think. MF: Okay. NH: Miner was from the University of Massachusetts. She had one of those cute little lace caps that everybody admired. She was a tiny little lady but she was very strict. MF: When you were at the nurse’s home, did you had curfew right? NH: Oh yes. The evening we had to be in our rooms by nine and to bed by ten. We had night checks. Our housemother would come around and peek and see if everybody was in the right beds and what we were doing, that we were in the right bed. We had one night a month we could be out till eleven or eleven thirty. Otherwise it was pretty strict. I met my future husband when I had been in the program about a year and a half. He didn’t understand this curfew at all. He always thought I was trying to get rid of him. But we got engaged rather early and 4 I was engaged for quite a long time. We still had to observe the curfew all the time. MF: You couldn’t be married at that time, right? NH: No and my roommate got married. She only had about three or four months left and she got married. They found out about it and she was out of the program. MF: They kicked her out. NH: After the war she came back and went through the St. Benedict’s program. It took her two years to finish those three months. She had two little girls. We were very close friends through all that time. I was engaged to my husband and he volunteered to the Navy and he did some interesting things. We had been engaged for about a year and a half and I asked if we could get married when he came home on leave. They decided I could. As far as I know, I was the only one they ever let get married. He was home for five days and I got pregnant. You had to spend the exact number of days—three hundred and sixty days a year for whatever thousand days it was—a long time. So I had to finish all of that. Sometimes I am listed in the class of ’44 but I was really in ’43 that I began. There were eighteen that started in our group and two quit. So there were sixteen of us that graduated. MF: I will have to make sure I check on that, see where you are at. NH: I consider ’43 because those were the people that I was with all the time and got to know so well, even though I knew some in the class ahead of me. We had a choir. We all sang and went around to different wards and places and sang. Then we had dances. We had a lot of men that were going to be pilots for the 5 RAF and they had quite a contingency. We had dances and all these fellows would come to the dances. There was one romance that developed. One of my classmates married one who went over and was an RAF pilot and came back, was a doctor, and she moved to Lubbock, Texas. I was going through there many years later, fifteen to twenty years later, and I looked her up. She was working in the coronary unit when I called her. Her husband had been spraying his roses and died suddenly. He had a anaphylactic shock from the spray. She had been a widow for a few years. She never came back to Ogden. While we were students her mother died and I think her sister died so she had no one to come back to. Her name was Helen Johnson Hale. I’ve often wondered what has happened with her. There was one of our graduates that graduated with me, Francis George, no one ever heard from her. Not a word about where she went or what she did. It kind of leaves you wondering. MF: Your friend Karla Paul. NH: Karla Paul. Yes she was one of my classmates. The only thing I knew about her was she was from Cache Valley and her parents owned a grocery store so she never had to worry about food during the depression. I only saw her once or twice I after we graduated. MF: Yes, she is up in Richmond now. We had good visit with her. NH: I am glad to know that she is well. MF: So a typical day you said started at six. Did you have chapel? NH: Yes we attended Chapel at six-thirty. 6 MF: Then you had breakfast and then went on the floor. NH: Yes. MF: So what was the floor you enjoyed most while in training? NH: Oh I liked any of them. I worked a lot of nights. We took a lot of responsibility in our second and third year. I didn’t have any special one. MF: So tell us about AM care and PM care. NH: AM care—I remember the first one that I gave. You would have a little basin and go in and have them wash their face and hands and brush their teeth. Then you would go back with a bigger basin to give them the bed bath. I had a young girl who had a heart condition and I went back to give her a bed bath and she had died. I was distraught. I went out in the hall calling for an intern and one was going by. You don’t forget your first death, especially a younger person. PM care was pretty much like AM care. You would take a smaller basin in and they would wash their hands and brush their teeth, comb their hair and get ready for supper, and straighten the bed. Of course, most of the patients were in bed all of the time. None of this getting up and walking around, you thought they were going to die. When you think what happens now it is amazing. MF: It is true, they make you get up after surgery. NH: They don’t even keep you in the hospital. I had both my knees done last year and got along beautifully. It was just wonderful, no pain and no pain after the surgery. Everything has improved. MF: It totally has. 7 NH: I am not sure the nursing care has improved. Now I think there is a lot of time not spent with the patient. As students you spent a lot of time with your patients. OB was always fun because the women were always happy and excited about a baby. Of course, they were in bed for at least a week or ten days. It was a whole different world at that time. MF: You said the nursing technology has improved. But the nursing itself… NH: You wonder how they can become acquainted with the patients because we’d get quite well acquainted with them, almost like families. Of course we learned to carry two bedpans at a time—usually just one tray of food. We were supposed to only carry one baby at a time but sometimes we would carry two. You always had that experience, you had one in each arm, turn around and there is a doctor, uh oh. You thought you were going to be kicked out right now. Anyway, it was different but it was fun. MF: You probably depended on your friends as far as getting through school and studying. NH: Yes, we did a lot of studying together and testing each other and all that sort of thing. I enjoyed that because it was so much fun to be with other people my age. MF: If you had a night off, what would you do with your friends? NH: They were a very naïve young group. Some decided to learn to drink beer. None of them had had beer. About six or eight of us went. Some liked it and some didn’t. There was one of our classmates that liked beer. We called her “Slitz.” You better not put that in there but anyway, it was just a new thing to them. We were kind of being brave and… 8 MF: Yes because you are on your own. NH: Yes. MF: Oh that is great. NH: We would go to town, we would walk because nobody had a car. So we would walk. We would go to Evelyn Helgesen’s and have dinner at her house and she (her mother) would read the tea leaves for each of us and tell us all the things like you are going to marry a wealthy man and have so many children. We thought that was a lot of fun. MF: Do you remember any traditions with the Dee School of Nursing for holidays? NH: The war came and we have a lot of the fellows gone. I don’t remember too many traditions. They would bring speakers in. I remember they brought a model in and she talked about how to walk and the clothes to wear and the shoes to wear. Then they had a person come in and talk about your feet and your shoes and how important that was. Traditions—I guess on Christmas morning we sang songs and went through the halls of the hospital singing carols. We did some caroling, the choir would go caroling in the neighborhood around there. MF: At that time were you required to attend church or was it a choice? NH: I don’t know that it was required but I think everyone went. We had a capping ceremony, we had our caps and capes. Our capes were so pretty. We walked from the nurses home down to the chapel down on about Jackson and 23rd, 22nd or 23rd. It had stairs and we had our picture taken on the stairs. That was kind of a special thing. MF: That was after you had been in for… 9 NH: Six months. The idea was you were committed to stay and they were going to keep you. MF: Tell us about your graduation? When did that take place? NH: Well see I graduated with this other group. I don’t remember much about it except that I was so glad to get there. MF: While you were in training were you paid any money at all? Do you remember? NH: No. We paid—my father had to borrow money to pay my tuition and that paid for your uniform, tuition, and books. We were supposed to have a stipend a month if you broke anything—you never got any of it. MF: The thermometers? NH: Yes, that was the usual thing. You would drop a bunch of thermometers and that would take care of that. We didn’t get anything. MF: After you graduated did you stay at the Dee? NH: I had a baby, I had my son. The war was still on. My husband took all of the work to go with the fourth marines in the Navy corpsmen and he came home. They found some problems with his eyes and decided not to operate and send him home. I was so happy and he was so disappointed. Ninety percent of the corpsmen were killed in Iwo Jima. I was glad he came home. I stayed home taking care of the baby until I started taking care of friends who needed private duty care. They didn’t have intensive care areas but we had private duty nurses. I started going back just taking care of some friends. I received five dollars for an eight hour shift; that was an increase from what we had been getting. I can’t remember what it was before but when we got five dollars for eight hours we 10 thought we had it made. I remember this one older lady that had been working for awhile and she said, “You will never make that kind of money, five whole dollars for eight hours.” We would work seven days a week. We were called on a case and worked until the patient got well or died and we took care of all the critical patients. We bought a home and of course, you know, we had expenses and another baby. I just kept working in private duty for awhile. MF: That was just at the hospital, right? NH: That was at the hospital. Occasionally we would go to the home but that was very rare. I worked mostly nights. MF: That is good. NH: Try to be there with the children during the day. MF: When did you retire? NH: I don’t know for sure. MF: I don’t think you have retired yet, have you? NH: Yes from nursing I have. All the time—when I was doing private duty my best friend was the Director of Nurses at the old Dee Hospital. One of my classmates helped them remodel the room just inside the 24th street door for the emergency room. Up to that time the emergencies were taken on the elevator to the fourth floor to the operating room. They had a couple of rooms up there. So she worked remodeling this area for the emergency room. The day before it opened she quit. So my friend came and said, “Will you do this temporarily until I can find somebody?” So I did it temporarily for eight years. I enjoyed it. It was very different. We had interns twenty-four hours a day for six weeks. We got to know 11 the interns really well. Mr. Knapp was the administrator or head of the hospital. He was encouraging people to go back to school and they were very good about it. So that is when I started back to school part-time and went back to get my bachelors degree. Then I got a scholarship and went on and got my masters degree. MF: Oh good. NH: When I got my master’s degree I got this wonderful offer to go to Weber State but I continued working at the Dee Hospital as a supervisor part-time for thirty-five years. MF: Did you teach at Weber? NH: I taught at Weber. MF: How long did you teach? NH: Twenty-three years. I started in ’65 and I retired twenty-three years after that, ’88 or something like that. I continued working at McKay until they cut out supervisors. I was supervisor on weekends; Friday and Saturday nights and summers forever. When they cut the supervisors I went out to BHI, the Behavioral Institute and that was a really different kind of nursing. I quite enjoyed that. I worked nights out there for six years. I think I must have retired about ’94 or ’95 completely. MF: You had quite a bit of training everywhere. You did pretty much everything. NH: I did. I really enjoyed it and we had students at the Davis Hospital. It was interesting—I could get out to the Davis Hospital in about the same length of time as I could go to the old St. Benedict’s. I had students at both places, all three 12 places, McKay Dee, Davis and Ogden Regional. I really taught mostly orthopedic nursing. MF: Oh good. NH: I enjoyed that. Teaching was a real challenge. I learned a lot all the time I was teaching. We had such good faculty to work with and the best students. The thing I liked about it was the students were so motivated. They were there because they wanted to learn and they were there because it was hard to get into and they knew that. The thing about nursing, you have to love it. You shouldn’t be in it if not. It was interesting how many students would get into it and decide they didn’t like it. They would usually finish the nursing but then they would do something else. That always kind of surprised me that they wouldn’t know before that but I know any number of them who left nursing completely. MF: Wow that is interesting. NH: Of course, if they don’t like people—and a few people didn’t like people—then there were places in nursing you didn’t have to be with people—like in the operating room or different places. But anyway, I have to say—I mentioned that we were the last class to go through the kitchen. I think we were the last class that went through the lab. That was an interesting experience. Of course, we did washing glassware and helping the technician. I liked the lab. I went on and taught venipunctures for years. I would take the students—I would have them meet me at six in the morning and we would pick up the blood for the lab all over the hospital. I thought that was a good experience for them and I liked that. MF: That is good. 13 NH: In fact, I was thinking that I wouldn’t mind going and doing something rambunctious because it is a real challenge. When you are standing in the grocery store you are looking at people’s arms and thinking, “I could get that one.” In other words you never leave it. MF: That is true. It is probably just something that is going to stay with you. NH: I think that is a problem probably for your children. I know when I was in charge of the Emergency Room, my youngest son—I always said, “Be careful, don’t do this.” Finally, he said, “I am not going to have an accident like you are always seeing every day.” I think it was hard on my family. Now the personnel know what is in the ambulance, what has been done for them, everything about them. We just had things arrive at the door. It was quite a challenge many times to handle whatever came in the door. MF: Did you know any of the members of the Dee family at all? NH: Elizabeth Stewart was our pink lady in the emergency room for years. Just the nicest person you would ever want to meet. She was always just a sweet, wonderful lady. I got to know her very well. I thought so much of her. MF: She did a lot of good for the community. NH: Oh yes. Her husband was just as nice as she was. MF: I know she wanted to be a nurse but never had the opportunity. That was her way of giving back. NH: She loved being in with the patients and doing whatever she could for them. 14 MF: That is nice to hear that. Did you have any memories you have thought of while we have been talking about your time while you were in training? Is there anything else that has come to mind? NH: The one thing I think often is I dropped a dinner tray once when I was getting my trays in line. I didn’t know what to do. I walked away and this lady came and reprimanded me for walking away and not picking it up. I had never had anything like that happen. I was devastated. Isn’t that funny? I think your mind is like a camera. You have all kinds of pictures that flash back to you sometimes. It is usually something really good or really bad. But that is the bad thing that I often remember being at—I just didn’t know what to do. MF: That would be hard because you are like, “What do I do now?” NH: Of course, I enjoyed the food. It was always nice. I enjoyed it because when you are an only child—we ate very well but we didn’t have a lot of choices—I used to go to Ruth Brown, her maiden name was Donaldson, and there were twelve children in her family. I loved to go to her home because they always had jell-o and cake. We didn’t make a cake because there was only three of us and jell-o was kind of a special thing. Isn’t that funny, the things that you remember? MF: We are very glad we got to interview Ruth and talk and visit with her. It was fun to have her reminisce the things that she told us. NH: Her background was so fantastic. She had a wonderful mind. Her siblings were special—all of them are wonderful people. Her mom and dad—her dad was an amazing man. Seventeen children. MF: Isn’t that amazing? 15 NH: Yes it is hard to believe but her home was so full of activities and fun. I lived in an apartment. My father wouldn’t buy a home. That is why when my family wanted me to go into a condominium, that is an apartment—I don’t want to do that. It is nice to have a home of your own. MF: What do you think was one of your greatest challenges while in nurse’s training? NH: I was thinking about that the other day, yesterday as a matter of fact. When I thought about going into nursing there was one thing that really worried me. I bet I spent nights worrying about it—how to make a bed with a patient in it. MF: Yes. NH: Just the idea—I could not imagine how you would ever do that. I was putting my sheets on the bed. I worried so much about that and yet it was such a simple thing. MF: You had never done it before. NH: No, I never had. I couldn’t figure out how you would ever do something like that. We did the usual things. We had to sterilize the IV tubing and we did all the working in the stock department where we would have to sharpen the needles. I remember once I dropped a little medicine glass and was cut. I have still got the scar right there from the little medicine glass that cut me. We gave a lot of labor to the hospital. The hospital nursing programs did all the care—we were running the hospitals actually. When the girls graduated, many of them didn’t have jobs before the war. They went into public health or private duty. The war changed the whole country as far as the needs for people. The Bushnell Hospital—about the time I was a senior, is when they started going up there. Of course, you 16 know they did all the experimental work with penicillin at the Bushnell Hospital. We were one of the first hospitals to use it here and we would give like ten or fifteen thousand units every three hours. That was a big amount. Then three or four or five years later it was a million units. At the time they didn’t know what it was going to do. Sulfa came just before penicillin. We had a friend whose baby died from sulfonamide poisoning. We didn’t know about that. We didn’t know much about the antibiotics. Those were the first two that we used. MF: That has probably made a difference as far as people’s health. NH: Survival. MF: Yes. NH: I can remember terrible lung things. They would make openings into the lung and have drainage tubes and irrigating their wounds. We just didn’t have the knowledge. We had a lot of equipment that we had to sterilize and have available. At night we would have to call an intern to start an IV. MF: Oh they didn’t let you do that? NH: Oh no. We didn’t do that. We gave IM’s but we didn’t give any kind of IV medication at all. We had to call an intern and get them out of bed. MF: That is interesting. NH: They would get grumpy sometimes—understandably when they were on twentyfour hour call. We had some interesting experiences with the residents. One man was from back East, he was putting his time in and he was so superior. He didn’t really like medicine at all. He had a patient come in and he had to do an 17 emergency tracheostomy. He became a doctor in a flash, suddenly. He saved a life and it was just like a light bulb went on and he was a different man. MF: Wow. NH: It was the most amazing experience to get to know him as well as we did before and then have him suddenly change like that. MF: That is interesting. NH: Then we had another resident who was a Quaker. He came to work one day and he was all scratched and abraised. He had taken his family up to Snow Basin for a picnic and he said, “I’ll walk over the mountain. I have to be to the hospital. I’ll just go over and down to the hospital, to the old Dee.” He found out that mountain wasn’t just a little hill. He ended up scraping and falling down it. The amazing thing about him was, he was committed to give some time to the government. He chose the Indian service. They said he would be on an island in the Aleutians. It was an island where they didn’t have services of any kind. They would have to drop mail and supplies—his wife had to get all the food, the clothing, and everything for their four children for the year that he would be on that island. I have often wondered how they came out. We all thought that was amazing that that was what he chose and she went along and was going to have those four little children on an island in the Aleutians. MF: Wow. NH: I think it was a two year commitment he had to give to the government. MF: That would be interesting. 18 NH: It was interesting. Then of course there was one doctor, Doctor Hyde, I have to say his name because he is the only one of all the residents we ever had who came out of his education without debt. He had quite a family. I can’t remember how many children he had, but his wife was telling us how when he was in school in Chicago, how they would come out home to Utah and get bags of beans and she would figure out ways to cook them. They would go down to Price and get sacks of coal. They would go on the tracks and pick up the coal. He came out of his education not owing a penny. MF: Wow. NH: But he had more common sense than anybody you ever met. Such a wonderful way with patients. He was a special person. MF: That is probably nice for you as a nurse to work with such great doctors. It probably made it so much better. NH: It was. There are some—they each have their own personalities of course. There are some that you think so much of and some that you—you never say anything negative but you kind of roll your eyes a little bit when someone says, “Oh aren’t they wonderful?” You realize they are human. MF: Yes they are. NH: Time is one of the most important things you have whatever age of life you are in. The time you can spend with people is what they remember. It isn’t even what you do with them or for them or to them but it is that you cared enough to be there for that length of time. I guess that is what we actually did as students. We couldn’t at the desks—where we did our charting. If the doctors came in, of 19 course you stood up and waited on them and all those wonderful things. We didn’t congregate there. Sometimes at night we would have doctors come around in the middle of the night and want to visit about something or other. Most of the time we would be in the patient’s rooms. We had wards. We had the two twelve bed wards, men’s and women’s. We had several four bed wards or six bed wards and you would get in there working for one patient and go from one to the other. You did spend time with the people. When you would take a tray in you didn’t just let it down, you had to be sure they could reach everything and everything was available. I have often thought being a waitress is a good thing to do before you go into nursing to take care of people because people come in a restaurant they are hungry and unhappy many times. You kind of have to baby them a little bit, give them a little extra attention. That is what all of us want. MF: That is true. We appreciate you letting us come visit with you today. NH: Oh, I have enjoyed it. I will probably think of a lot of things I would have talked about but it is nice to think about them. I remember in diet kitchen, the class we took down at Weber, the lady there was very conservative with everything and food and things like that. One day she said to me, “Make a hard cooked egg.” The only hard cooked egg I had ever had was a fried egg. That is not what she had in mind. It is semantics too a lot. Like our students when I taught nursing, I thought they missed a lot of that getting together. They had a student nurse association and I was the advisor to it for maybe ten years or so. I went all over the country with them to their meetings and things. There they had the 20 opportunity to get to know each other in a different setting, a social setting and away from the hospital, I guess you could say. I thought that was pretty good. I don’t think if it is still functioning. It was a good thing then. MF: That is probably what the Weber nurses didn’t get—that close association where you are with somebody 24/7 for three years. You have to rely on the other person instead of just going to class and doing your clinicals and stuff. It probably did make a difference. NH: Yes we walked up and down 24th street and picked out which house we thought we would like to have. We would look at each one as we would go up and down and talk about our future husbands and families. We had one neat lady from Delta and she was from a big family. She had to work to make the money to come to our program. She worked in a home in Salt Lake as a cook and maid. She could cook—she would go to Delta and bring back squash or meats and cook a meal for all of us—for sixteen of us. MF: Wow. NH: It was so easy. She would make rolls and she could just do everything. She was just such a special gal. MF: Is that Maxine? NH: Maxine. MF: Maxine Jackson? NH: Yes. How did you know about her? MF: We have interviewed her daughter Saundra. NH: Maxine died? 21 MF: Yes. NH: I think she was up in Cache Valley when she died in a nursing home or something. MF: 2006? I can’t remember. NH: What about her daughter? What is she doing? MF: She lives down the street a little bit. She is just above Harrison. NH: Really? What is her name? MF: Her name is Saundra Stauffer. NH: Stauffer? MF: Yes I’ll have to get her address for you. NH: I wonder if she is related to Marie Stauffer. MF: I don’t know. NH: Marie was one from Cache Valley. I didn’t know Maxine had a family here in town. MF: Yes she has a daughter. I’ll make sure I get her address. NH: That would be fun. I would like to talk with her about Maxine. I admired all the things that she could do. It was just so easy for her—such a neat lady. MF: Yes she called and we interviewed her in October. NH: We had one gal in our class who had had a baby and gave it away. When we talked about the commitment you have—how you feel about a baby before it’s born and after it’s born she had a completely different perspective then all the rest of us who had never had any experience at all like that. That was a good thing for us to find that perspective. 22 MF: That is true. NH: But most of us were just really young—eighteen and she was probably twenty. You get a group of eighteen year olds and I don’t know what they would be now but then we were very naïve and innocent and eager to please and be nurses. That was the focus of all of the students that we have been involved with. I don’t think there has been more than ten who really didn’t want nursing and didn’t like it that stayed and finished and got into something else. MF: That is interesting. You can either do it or you can’t. It isn’t that people don’t have the compassion but being able to deal with the emotion part of it. That is probably what is hard. NH: Yes. You can do almost anything when you can see that it is going to help somebody. The most frustrating thing is when you can’t help them. There is nothing you can do. That is very difficult for the nurses and the family. In private duty we got so involved with the families, you almost had to be part of the family. We would stay with them until they got better or died. We had the last big polio epidemic in ’56 I think and I took care of a young man named Raymon and he was from Cache Valley. He was a student body officer at Utah State, was married and had a baby and his wife was going to have another baby. He was paralyzed from the neck down. His family did so many things, creative things, to keep him going. He was a brilliant boy. I flew with him to California, they sent him down to El Centro for rehabilitation. I flew down with him and went back and picked him up and they had not done anything that they should have done. I kept track of him and he had got his master’s. He worked at the nuclear center in 23 Las Vegas. His wife left him and then he died. He lived for about fifteen or twenty years. Doctor Hale, our nose and throat man, he called me and told me he had died. Some patients you don’t forget. They are just special people and make so much special efforts. Polio was terrible. It is wonderful not to have to deal with it now. MF: Well we appreciate you letting us come. Thank you. 24