Oral History Program Eloise Anderson Martineau Interviewed by Marci Farr 6 August 2008 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Eloise Anderson Martineau Interviewed by Marci Farr 6 August 2008 Copyright © 2009 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: Eloise Anderson Martineau, an oral history by Marci Farr, 6 August 2008, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Eloise Anderson Martineau Graduation Photo Class of 1947 Eloise Anderson Martineau September 10, 2008 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Eloise Anderson Martineau. It was conducted August 6, 2008 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 Eloise Anderson Martineau for the Dee School of Nursing. She graduated with the class of 1947. It is August 06, 2008. We are interviewing her at her home in Morgan, Utah. We are just going to start with a few questions about your early life. Tell us about where you were born, where you went to school, your family, stuff like that you would like to let us know about. EM: Alright. MF: Yes go ahead. EM: Well I was born in Bothwell, Utah. My grandfather and his three brothers settled Bothwell. They were all born in Denmark. They came first to Bear River City and then moved to Bothwell. I went the first six grades of school in Tremonton, Utah because the school bus ran past my house to go that way. When I finished the sixth grade, that summer the school bus driver decided to move to Tremonton so he said, “You will have to go to Bothwell to school. And I will pick you up on my way out to pick up the high school kids.” So I went to the seventh and eighth grades in Bothwell. Then I went to Bear River High School and graduated in 1942. Then I went to Utah State for two years. It was then called Utah State Agricultural College. I went two years there and I lived with a girl that I had known for a long time and went to school with. My sister decided that she was ruining my mind. So she said, “You are going into nurse’s training.” And so she 1 “hauled” me to Ogden. I didn’t have a thing to say about where I was going, whether I wanted to go, or anything because you didn’t cross that sister. When you are the tenth child and she is the first one… MF: You do what she says. EM: …she is the boss. I really had no intention of becoming a nurse. I was planning on being a school teacher. I found nursing very exciting and interesting and it was really a very pleasant experience. I planned on using it more than I did but I didn’t. As I said, I am the tenth of a family of eleven births. There were thirteen children. There were two sets of twins and one of each twin passed away in infancy. I lived on a farm and had the usual kind of upbringing that most people had in the 1930’s and ‘40’s. MF: Work hard. EM: Yes. The depression was not a fun thing. I think we are there again. But anyway, I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and I have been very active in the past but I find it more difficult to get places than I used to. So I am not a steady a go-er as I once was. MF: That was great. It wasn’t your decision? EM: My sister made the decision of the Dee Hospital too. MF: What was your first impressions when you got to the Dee. EM: I honestly felt like I was in limbo. This all happened within about two days. We met with Lucille Taylor who was the Superintendent of Nurses at that time. She interviewed me and I was signed up and went home, packed my clothes, and I think went down the next day or the day after to the nursing home. I had never 2 lived in a dormitory before in my life. I got there and here were all these young women. Maybe Dottie told you but we had the biggest class that had ever entered the Dee Nursing School. There were just so many of them. It was overwhelming to me. We were assigned roommates by alphabetical order. I was “A” and the only “A” so I got a roommate whose last name started with a “B.”We got along fairly good except she was gung-ho religious and I wasn’t raised gung-ho. I had a more moderate family. Between religion and her boyfriend who was in the army somewhere…I think we had to live about three months before we could make a change. Then I changed and went to live with another young lady and we got along just fine. She, somehow or another, I don’t remember what happened to her but they told her she had to leave. Then I lived with another young lady and I lived with her the rest of the time. We all got along really well. I think we always lived in the basement. I can’t remember ever living anywhere else except the basement. It was nice, the windows were above ground and it was very nice. Having no idea what on earth I was signing up for… MF: Was it a little bit of culture shock? EM: It was a culture shock. It was all kind of shocks. But I thought, “Well, as long as I am here I guess I better do the best I can do and see what happens.” We really had a nice group of girls. We had one girl that came from Illinois on the train. MF: No. Go ahead. 3 EM: She came up to the nurse’s home. We never ever saw her. She didn’t like the mountains they told us. She took a shower, packed up her stuff, went back, got on the train and went home. So we never ever met her. MF: Oh wow. EM: We lost quite a few of our members along the way. One woman who came was married and they allowed her to come into nurses training. Her husband was in the army. It was the during World War II. After she had been there a year and a half or so, I think, she decided she wanted to go live with her husband, not to live with us anymore. It probably was a wise decision especially when you have got a husband. Some of the rest of them didn’t like it and left. Some of them like my 2nd roommate, her name was Betty Fox. I thought she was a wonderful nurse. I really did. I liked working with her. I was really shocked. I have no idea what she did. MF: Really? EM: None whatsoever. MF: Did she leave? EM: No she didn’t leave. They kicked her out. She was told to leave in other words. We had a lot of fun at the nurse’s home. Our courses, our nursing courses, were first, we went to the old Weber Campus across from the park between…25th and 26th streets. We went down to, it was called Weber Junior College then. We took science classes and other things related to what you would need about nursing later on. That was the first quarter that we went down there all the time. As I remember the second quarter we went down there for one or two classes 4 but the rest of the classes were held in the auditorium in the nurse’s home. None of us had enough money that we could ride the bus from the old Dee Hospital down town…I think the college was on Adam’s Avenue. So we walked to and from college everyday which was almost twelve blocks. MF: You were hustling back and forth. EM: Oh my yes. MF: That is why we do these things when we are young, right? EM: Yes. It is indeed. It wasn’t near as hard to walk then as it is now. MF: Were some of your instructors doctors? EM: No. We never had a doctor for an instructor. They were all women. At the college we had professors, male professors. They just taught us basic science type classes. When we got into nursing it was all taught by the instructors that were on the Dee nursing schools’ staff. MF: Okay. EM: We had all of those in the nursing home auditorium, we may have had some at the hospital. We never ever saw a doctor to teach us anything at all that I remember. MF: Okay. EM: …that I remember. Now someone might say, “You forgot this Eloise.” The first year was mostly going to school at one place or the other. During this time we learned nursing skills. We had a dummy and we each were the dummies and we practiced on each other if I remember correctly. But we were taught how to give the shots by empty syringe and we pushed it into an orange and that is how we 5 learned to give shots. We didn’t learn how to give IV’s until we got to the hospital training part. The nursing instructors, instructed us in how to do that. The last year we primarily worked at the hospital. MF: You were doing shift work? EM: Yes we did shift work. The second year when we were still having classes in nursing itself, we students usually got the 11 PM to 7 AM shift. I can’t remember what time class started…I think they started about 9 AM. You were so tired to have to go to class after you had been on the floor all night. Although, night shifts were much more quiet than day shifts were but at the same time we were tired. MF: You were up all night. EM: You couldn’t sleep on the job. MF: Exactly. EM: I found that very difficult. I am not a morning person. It was real difficult for me. MF: We interviewed Alta Roskelley, have you met Alta? She graduated in ’36 so she was a few years before you but she said she only worked the night shift one time. She said it was so hard, she would just get so sick so she only made it like one semester doing that. She said she was so sick. She just had the hardest time because every time she would do it she would get sick if she worked overnight. Her body was just having the hardest time adjusting. EM: Well then out of the blue you might have worked all night and then find out you had to go to work at one o’clock in the afternoon or something else. You got very little sleep. 6 MF: Oh I am sure. And no free time. You didn’t have a lot of free time either. EM: Well if we weren’t in class we had free time or were on duty. But most of that was spent at the nursing home. The majority of us did not live in Ogden. So there was no family to go to. But the girls that did live in Ogden could not go home either, except on days we might have free time. They had to live at the nursing home. They could go home on their days off but they were not to go home before that and any other time. MF: At that time were you required to attend church on Sundays if you didn’t… EM: No. We were never ever assigned. We never had to worry about going to church. You could go if you wanted to. MF: So it was a choice, okay. EM: And, of course, we had members that were not Latter-Day Saints. It was not a church oriented place. Everyone that wanted to become a nurse I felt was very welcome to come for training at the “Dee.” MF: So there was no discrimination. EM: We always had at least one oriental girl. They were usually Japanese girls in each class. Some classes had two. But we only had one in our class. Most every class had at least one Japanese. There was never any race discrimination or anything like that that I knew of. MF: That is good. So everybody felt like they got along, there was never a problem with that. EM: It was never a problem. MF: That is good. Especially during the war, since you came in during the war. 7 EM: On VJ day, we all walked down to the corner of 25th street and Washington where there was this big celebration. Yoshiko Iwamoto Oka was our Japanese classmate. She was just a sweet, lovely person. She went with us. We didn’t think a thing about it. MF: It didn’t even matter. EM: Didn’t enter our minds. After we got…oh it was years later Yo said, “You know when we went to that VJ day? Did you feel that you were being harassed in any way or belittled in any way?” And I said, “No, why?” She said, “I just felt like I was in the middle of the biggest mess. I just felt everybody wanted to spit on me.” And she was raised up in Cache Valley, she belonged to the L.D.S. church. She said, “I have never felt like this before in my life.” I never had many Japanese friends. I slept in white girls houses and they slept in mine. She just had a terrible feeling that night and we never thought a thing of it. It never even phased any of us. MF: Wow. EM: You just really felt sorry. MF: I am sure. EM: Our class, I don’t know about the rest of them, but we were so terribly close. I went in in June. There had been a group go in in January. We were all in the same year and graduated together. But those girls didn’t want anything much to do with us to speak of and stayed very much to themselves. There were a few that did but our part of the class became so close, we really did. MF: You had to rely on each other. 8 EM: Oh you did. As I said, I wasn’t a morning person and I would tell at least three people to be sure I was up and going and if the third one forgot I was really in a mess. Late for everything. MF: What did you usually do on your days off? If you had a day off what was something that you would do? EM: We were in the Cadet Nurse program and were given the huge sum of seven dollars a month. We got paid every three months. MF: Oh my goodness. EM: We would usually…some of the girls would go to movies. I rarely ever went to a movie. We would go up by Rainbow Gardens where the stable is. We would go up and rent horses and ride around the canyon or we would go up and have a picnic. I have got some pictures of us up there roasting weenies. MF: That is perfect. EM: We spent our pay check usually in two days time, at least I did. My parents had the idea that I was being paid money, so I didn’t need any. I was one of those that rarely had any extra money. We would usually do something as a group on our days off if we went anywhere. Even if it was just to go downtown window shopping because we didn’t have enough money to do anything else. We always had a fun time. Anybody and everybody was welcome to come and go with us. One time we did take the bus. I don’t know how we got the money to take the bus. We went out to the hot springs in North Ogden, we had a wonderful day out there. But we only went once. We only had enough money to go once. We must have done that after we got paid one time. 9 MF: That is great. EM: We had a lot of fun at the nursing home, we really didn’t need to go anywhere. MF: You always had a good time. We have heard fudge stories. EM: Well I was one of the fudge makers. My friend Myrla Paskett, who I had known since I was twelve because my sister married her brother. I didn’t know she was coming into training and she didn’t know I was. But she and I were always getting into trouble. One time, Joyce Mordaunt had gone to bed because she was working eleven to seven and we had a little bad habit if the patients didn’t want their sleeping tablet we would stick it in our pockets but we would write down that they took their sleeping pill. We found Joyce, she just couldn’t sleep. I can’t remember if we gave her one or two seconal and when she woke up…I mean, we got her up to get her to work and she could not function. We tried to get her to vomit. She wouldn’t behave herself and vomit stuff so we mixed up some concoction of I think it was soda and vinegar and some other things trying to make her vomit. Well that didn’t work. She was working in the nursery. But anyway, we couldn’t find her clothes. She was in somebody else’s room. So anybody that had something to contribute would help dress her. I was up in the nursery and she brought a baby up about two o’clock in the morning and she said, “Eloise, whose clothes have I got on? None of this stuff is mine. What happened to me?” I said, “Well Jo, we just couldn’t get you moving and we couldn’t find your clothes so we just put whatever would fit on you.” We have laughed about that lots of times. MF: That is fabulous. That is a great story. 10 EM: We got into a lot of trouble sometimes. We had two housemothers that were so ornery. They snooped into everything and we’d get our privileges taken away from us. MF: I didn’t bring my paper that says who we have interviewed so I can’t remember. EM: Well there is Lois Shepherd. MF: We are interviewing her next week. EM: Lois was one of those good little girls. Oh. And Dorothy and Yo Oka. Did she call Yo? MF: We haven’t. We need to call her. EM: She was the Japanese girl in our class and she is such a love. They were all good church girls. They would find a ward to go to. And I didn’t care whether I went or not. I had lived on a farm and we had about four miles to go to the church and if there wasn’t somebody to drive we didn’t go. My mother never learned to drive with this brood of children. MF: Oh I am sure. EM: She just said it made her so nervous. I started driving when I was eleven to take her to church. MF: There you go. EM: You could do that in those days. MF: Yes it was fine. EM: But these two housemothers were so nosey and critical, to me, anyway. Probably they weren’t to some of the other girls but I was kind of a defiant 11 individual. She would go in our rooms, they would, both of them, and they would go through all the drawers. MF: Oh really? EM: Everywhere. Our clothes closets, everything. I was living with Leola Wright. They found cigarettes hidden in her drawer where she had her underwear. And I didn’t even know she smoked. I think I got in trouble because I didn’t tell them that she was smoking cigarettes. She went off somewhere to smoke. The girls that smoked usually…there was a stairway that you could get up to the roof and they would go up on the roof and smoke. I never took the habit up so I don’t have any idea who went up. But they partied up there too. We had this big men’s ward, ward B that had about fifteen men. It was a huge ward. Most of them were alcoholics. They would have their family bring booze that they would give to the older nurses. I never had that experience at all. They all scared me. I was scared to death to go into this big men’s ward but I did what I had to do. In the mornings, we were on the bottom in the basement and you would look out your window and here were all these empty booze bottles that they had thrown out onto the lawn. MF: Oh my word. EM: I don’t know if those people got in trouble or not. MF: We heard some people would go on the roof and go sunbathing. EM: What? 12 MF: We heard some ladies say that they would go up and get a suntan on the roof. They would put their towels out up on the roof of the nurses’ home and go suntan. EM: Well I am sure they suntanned too. MF: Yes they did that. EM: I never ever went up to the roof. Never ever. I went to the roof over by the…on the pediatric ward. I went there because we would take some of the children out there just to get air, so to speak. Then we had one child who was a multinational child. Usually they could adopt children out. We had a lot of children that were homeless. This little boy, he was the cutest little thing, but nobody wanted him because he was black and he was Hispanic and he had some white in him and who knows what all else. That was when people were very, very racial about people of other nationalities. I thought this was a really bad thing. MF: Terrible thing. EM: But we have come a long way in that. But it is still out there. MF: That is too bad that it is. EM: But anyway, we didn’t lack for fun. We would study and go to the difference classmates’ rooms to study. We had linoleum floors and those were the days that you had these big round skirts. We would sit on the floor and we would put the books beside us, spread our skirts out, put them over the books, and then we would play hearts, a card game. We would listen to see if anybody was coming down the hall. And if we heard anybody the cards went under the skirt, the books came out, and we… 13 MF: You were studying. EM: …we were studying. Oh dear. MF: That is great. EM: But we have lost almost more people in our class than almost any of them. I don’t really know why but anyway. MF: Was Lois Murray, Lois Heap… EM: Lois was in the class ahead of ours. She went in in January. We went in in June—graduated together in June of 1947. EM: You are not a Dee graduate are you? MF: No I just have a book. EM: I was looking for my book that had the history stuff but I can’t find it. I used to know where things were. I don’t know if her name was really Geraldine or if she just became Gerry. She was from Jerome, Idaho. Have you met with her? MF: We did meet with her. I was thinking when you said that. EM: That is amazing. Because Gerry doesn’t often come to the fall alumni meeting. MF: Luncheon. EM: We used to always have dinners but then as people got older it was difficult for the older ladies to come so we started having luncheons. Gerry has come to one I think. I haven’t missed very many of them. Within the last ten to fifteen years I am sure she has only come once. I used to bowl. We used to bowl in a league—my husband and I and she and her husband bowled in that league and I said, “Gerry are you coming to the luncheon?” Or the dinner or whatever it was. 14 She said, “Oh, who wants to do that? I am not even interested in that kind of stuff.” So when you said you interviewed her, I am amazed. MF: It was a good interview too. I am really surprised. She was just so friendly. EM: Oh she is. MF: We did interview her and Dorothy. Dorothy is the only other one from your class. There is somebody from your class that lives in Colorado. Regina? Is there a Regina? EM: Oh Regina, yes. MF: Yes, she is in your class. We have got to call her and set up a time. Oh and Ann. I am going to be interviewing her. EM: Oh are you? MF: Yes. So we have got a couple from your class that we are going to be doing. EM: We didn’t know her name was Anna until years and years after we graduated because she always went by Ann. She and Myrla Pasckett were first cousins and neither one of them knew they were coming to the Dee to go into nurses’ training either. MF: Yes so we have got a couple from your class that we will be doing. EM: Oh Corinne? Did Corinne call you? MF: We haven’t called her. Dorothy gave us her number. EM: Well I was going to call Myrla and tell her to call and I haven’t got around to that yet. There are three of us, three of our class members in Salt Lake and I was going to call them. But Margie, she is the girl that I lived with when I went to Utah State. Her name was Marjorie Miller then. 15 MF: We have got quite a few from your class. EM: Oh that is good. MF: Yes we are very excited about that. EM: We have lost Margaret and Alice just in the last year. MF: I know she said somebody had just died. Lois said she went to somebody’s funeral like a week before we came and interviewed her. I don’t remember who she said died. If it was Margaret? I can’t remember which one she said. EM: It must have been Margaret. MF: It must have been her. EM: Because I didn’t go with them down there. We usually get together and go. MF: I think that is who she said was the one that passed away. EM: It might have been Al…oh no Alice was earlier this spring when it was so blasted cold. MF: Oh it was terrible. It was a terrible winter. EM: It was really bad. MF: So we have got quite a good representation from your class. EM: That is good. MF: We are very excited to have who we have. EM: That is really good. I was going to call Nona Bunderson, I went to high school with her. She is from Stone, Idaho. She and her brothers lived with families in Bothwell. Went to Bear River during the week and went home to Stone for the weekend. MF: Yes, I know. 16 EM: Margie Long, Marjorie Miller Long. I have known her…I knew her even went I went to Tremonton to school because my sister taught school in Bothwell. Years ago you used to have plays and little musicals and things that the students did. When Maurine was having something at school with the pupils the family would go, those of us that could. So I have known her for a long time and she is the one that my sister didn’t want me living with over to Logan. MF: Because she was corrupting you, right? EM: Oh dear. MF: That is a great story. EM: It was really funny. Then of course she knew Nona too because we were all in the same class at Bear River. She and Nona lived together. They never much had to do with any of the rest of us. MF: Really? It was just those two together. EM: Just the two of them. They didn’t have any fun I swear. MF: That is why you had the best times. EM: We really had a good time, we honestly did. And then Mecham, oh dear, Marilyn…and she is from Morgan. She lives in Salt Lake City. MF: Oh okay. EM: I didn’t call her because as a class we have gotten together every so often and invited everybody that could come. When she came to the last one a couple of years ago she had to bring her daughter to drive her. I thought, “Well gee, I don’t know if she could even come.” You know? MF: Yes, that is too bad. 17 EM: What did I do with the other? Okay. I wanted to tell you and maybe Dottie told you we had a chorus group of all of the students. We went to the hospital and did Christmas carols all during the holidays. That was the only tradition I remember doing with the hospital. MF: That is good because I have asked everybody else and they said they don’t remember anything. EM: Oh really? MF: That is good you had your choir. I remember Faye Ball, Faye Longhurst, do you remember her? EM: I know Faye. Her sister just lives down the street from me here in Morgan. MF: She was part of the choir. EM: Yes—we were a pretty good choir. I wanted to tell you about PM care. MF: Yes, tell us about that. EM: Maybe Dottie told you PM care…I haven’t been in the hospital very many times but they would come in and say, “Do you need some water?” and leave. Oh my goodness, putting people to bed was an absolute ritual. Maybe Dottie told you already but if they wanted to brush their teeth you took in water so they could wash their face and hands and get themselves ready for bed. Then you got fresh water for them, straightened up the bed, and then you would say, “Would you like a back rub?” And most everybody would want a back rub. MF: Yes EM: That took a lot of time. It was really a ritual to put people to bed. It really was. I learned how to give good back rubs. 18 MF: Times have changed haven’t they? They don’t do that now. EM: They don’t do much of anything. MF: They pretty much make sure the machines are running right. EM: That is about all they do. We, when somebody went home, completely cleaned the room. If the walls needed washing, we washed them and we scoured, and we disinfected the bed—we did something with the mattress. We were not only nurses… MF: You were housekeeping. EM: …we were the housekeepers too. I had a terrible time. I had one of those stomachs that does not like foul smells, it doesn’t matter what it is. I would take the bedpans, we always had a cover for them, and I would run down the hall with it out like ahead of me. Everybody would say, “Here comes Eloise! Get the doors open! Get the water running! Get the toilet running!” I thought they would kick me out because I had…. MF: A queasy stomach. EM: And I still have it. It has not left me. Anyway…maybe Dorothy told you about the capping. When we got our caps? Oh that was a really wonderful thing. I can’t remember…I think we got our…I got pictures in that book. That is what I got that out for. MF: No we don’t have that one. EM: This was in the Ogden Standard Examiner. This is a picture of all of us that started in June. If you would like a copy I would be more than happy to share it. MF: Sure, yes if you could do that that would be great. 19 EM: I could give you a copy. That tells everybody who started except the girl who went back to Illinois. She didn’t even stay for a picture. We got our caps in the nurses’ home in the auditorium. MF: Okay. EM: Oh heavens I have got two of them. I noticed there were things I had that she had…I think this is the original and this is the copy she made. I will let you take this. MF: We can get this back. Are you coming to the luncheon in September? EM: Oh yes I will be there. MF: Do you want us to give it to you then? Would that be alright? EM: That will be fine. MF: Okay perfect. Dorothy did mention that she doesn’t have a copy of your capping ceremony. She can’t find her big picture that you had of your class. EM: Well my daughter didn’t get everything in this book exactly in order. This is our picture after we got our caps. MF: Okay because Dorothy said she doesn’t have a picture of that so maybe you can talk to her and she can get a copy. She said she has been looking for that and she hasn’t been able to find it. EM: I took this apart to get some pictures out of it and…oh here…here is the Ogden Standard…February 23, 1945. MF: Oh that is great. EM: Most of the time we went down to the institute on the old Weber campus where the family history center is now for our nursing programs. This is the program, 20 this is the invitation I think…if you want any of these I will be happy to get copies for you. MF: Sure. If you could do that, that would be really great. We would appreciate that. EM: This is the only picture I had of me taken in that cadet nurse…this tells about them and this is the little boy I was telling you about. MF: Oh so cute. EM: I kept all my cap stripes. This is the candle that we used in our capping ceremony. I thought my daughter would take them out. I wrote the histories on them and I thought she would re-write them and she just left everything the way I wrote it. But I am minus some pictures that I took out to give copies of to other people. I have got two of those capping pictures. MF: Okay, so talk to Dorothy. She did say that she was so upset she had misplaced her pictures when she moved. EM: This is an original here. If I can get it out. This is our graduation pictures. I have to show you my Dinah Shore Montgomery and her husband George, they stopped in Cedar City to eat on their way to Montana. By the time they got to Ogden they were vomiting and they had gotten food poisoning. They came to the emergency room and of course, all of us that were in that area just swarmed them and got their autograph. We had to have a piece of paper and I just grabbed anything. MF: That is great. How fun. EM: This is our graduation announcement. MF: LeGrande Richards, very cool. Wow Lucille Taylor, that is great. 21 EM: June the 9th, I got married on June the 6th, that is why I didn’t work anywhere. I met my husband at the hospital. MF: The rest is history? EM: Then I have got all the dances that we had. MF: Oh good. EM: All the little things there. This was our SP Baccalaureate services. You are welcome to take any of these things. She has copied. I haven’t looked at this very good. She copied all these things and then these are the originals that she has put back here. I suppose you have got a picture of the hospital. MF: You talked about capping ceremony. Where was graduation held? EM: Graduation was down at the institute. We walked from the nurse’s home down to the institute. The classes before us got capes but they quit giving the capes after the Cadet Nurse Corp. came along. But we couldn’t wear our nurse corp. uniforms because we were graduating… MF: From the school. EM: Yes, this is the first long sleeve uniform, white uniform. There wasn’t anything particularly exciting about that. When we got our caps and our first stripe, that was a much more impressive ceremony than— MF: Than graduation. EM: Graduation is a blur. It really is. Because I got married a couple of days after we graduated and I was planning a wedding. Let me see. What was our rate of pay? I told you about that. 22 MF: Yes you did tell us about that. Did you stay at the hospital after graduation? What did you do after with your nursing career? EM: Well I went to work. My husband came to intern at the Dee and they were allowing some of the girls to get married. The fellow that was interning with him was married and had a family. But I didn’t want to get married until after we graduated. So after we moved up here I went to work at the hospital for three months so we could pay the income tax. MF: There you go. EM: That is the only time I worked in a nursing institution. I worked in his office. MF: So was he up here? Did he have his doctor’s office up here? EM: Yes. This was it. MF: This was the doctors office? EM: We lived in the house on the corner and we built this office and we had always planned that when we got older and retired we would just remodel this and make it a nice small home for he and I. MF: Yes. EM: He passed away in 1995. I decided…all the bedrooms were upstairs over there and I decided I really needed to live where I didn’t have to go up and down the stairs. MF: Exactly. One level. EM: Well no, I have a full basement, my granddaughter says, “Grandma, it isn’t a basement, it is downstairs.” The only person I knew in the Dee family was Mrs. Stewart. 23 MF: Oh okay, Elizabeth. EM: I was the president of the… MF: Of the alumni? EM: …nursing group back in the 80’s. I was so timid. We had to go see her. She was our mentor. We were having this convention and we used to have them for three days and have activities all three days. She would help us pay the cost. So we went to her home to talk to her and see if she would help us with the reunion and she was a very lovely lady. Then she came to the reunion and that is the only time I remember her being to one of the reunions. Everybody made such a fuss over her and she was just loving the whole thing. It was just really quite wonderful. I didn’t retire. I went to work at Wal-Mart. My husband had a very large bleeding ulcer in 1990. He nearly bled to death and he kept saying, “I don’t think I’ll ever get out of this house again.” And I thought, “Well if you aren’t, I am” so I went to Wal-Mart to work. And I worked for ten years and then I… I wish I had stayed but anyway, that is another story. The hospital itself was a fun place to work. As soon as the older girls graduated and stayed to work and we had been in training with them but they were the bosses, that was fine. After you got that cap something happened, you were just so superior. Some of them were really superior. Did Dottie tell you about Miss Scoville? MF: I think a little bit. Go ahead and tell us. EM: Well she never married and she just lived around the corner from the hospital. She taught us Obstetrics and Gynecology. She had a very difficult time. 24 MF: Yes. EM: She knew how to say…“this,” I think was the word. We used to count how many times she said that word in place of saying something else. She was a sweet lady. She was always very nice…it was difficult for her to teach this class where she had never married… MF: Never had children. EM: …and never had children. I thought she was old when we went in nurse’s training but I think she worked for about twenty more years. MF: Oh my goodness. I think she graduated in 1916. That is the class she graduated from. That was quite a few years. EM: It really was. Then we had Miss Rasmussen. Did Dottie tell you about Miss Rasmussen? MF: No. EM: Miss Rasmussen came from Sweden. I think she joined the L.D.S. church over there. So many people wanted to come to Utah. I don’t know how long she was at the Dee before we went into nurse’s training but usually she was the eleven to seven administrative nurse. At about two o’clock in the morning they would always bring us out a little light lunch. A sandwich or something. We would always know when “Rassy” was the charge nurse because we got the sandwiches that she would always prepare and send up. It was cheese, white potent cheese, which I love, but she put mustard on it because that is what they did in Sweden. We would always know when the lunch came who had prepared it. Because… 25 MF: The mustard. EM: …of the cheese and mustard. One night when she was on duty, she came up to the floor, I don’t remember which floor we were on, the second floor, ward B was on the second floor and there was another big ward that was exactly like it, it was Ward A, they never had any patients in ward A. MF: Really? EM: That is where they stored the extra beds. My husband to be at that time had gone skiing and he came limping down to the floor and he said, “Can you give me a backrub?” I said, “I can’t do that.” Whoever was with me, I have forgotten who I was with and she said, “Oh go ahead. There won’t be that much going on and if I need you I will come and get you.” So here I am giving John this nice backrub and who walks in but Miss Rasmussen. “Vell, vat’s going on here?” My goodness it was a very innocent thing I was doing. I felt like I had really committed a crime. MF: That is a great story. EM: I didn’t do that again. We really had a lot of fun together and we helped each other in our class. The patient-nurse association is no longer applicable. They go to the hospital and do a few things but they don’t make any lasting friendships or get acquainted. Some of them don’t even know your name. MF: It is too bad. EM: It is too bad. It is a lost and a beautiful art. The hospital did a lot of welfare work. It really did. If people came in and they couldn’t pay, that was fine. MF: They were taken care of. 26 EM: Yes. There were so many poor little families at that time, it was very rewarding. MF: That is good. EM: Another thing that happened when I was on the maternity ward…we had a woman come in in labor. I was in the delivery room but she had scabies. MF: Oh my gosh. EM: They put her on a cart and she was purposely left in the hall. They delivered the baby, the doctors did. And she was immediately taken home so we would not have an outbreak of scabies in the hospital. My most exciting time in the delivery room was when I delivered a baby in the toilet. MF: Oh my word. EM: We had a German male nurse. He was famous for his enemas. They were “high, hot, and hell of a lot!” We took this literally. Of course, in those days before you had a baby you got a bowel cleansing. MF: Yes. EM: This woman was hardly dilated. I had checked her. She was about a three. I gave her an enema. I didn’t give them as high as he did. She said, “Oh it is coming, it is coming, it is coming!” And I said, “Oh! Let’s get to the bathroom.” She sat down and out came the baby. She stood up and I fished the baby out of the toilet water and I milked his trachea to get it to cry and I grabbed a nurses button to get some help. MF: Oh my goodness. EM: We got her into the delivery room to delivery the placenta. And it was a little girl as I remember. She was so thrilled. “Oh just what I wanted! I wanted a little 27 girl.” She was just so excited. I thought sure I would really get a chewing out because of what happened but I didn’t and she got along fine. MF: She was fine. Everything was good. EM: That was really about the most exciting thing that happened to me those three years. It was a fun time, you learned a lot of things. We learned a lot, we worked hard, and we all came out better people because of it. MF: That is good. Because of your training. EM: It was a wonderful experience even though I didn’t know I was going and I haven’t used it a whole…I have used it a lot but I didn’t work a lot in a hospital situation. I am proud of what I did. MF: It is hard work. EM: It was hard work and I loved my nursing classmates. I really did. We just had that kind of bonding. It is with us still today. MF: Exactly. EM: We have never lost it. I have always called them my classmates nursing sisters because that is what they were to me. My sister that was closest to me was ten years older than me so I really and truly wanted a sister closer to my age. MF: That was good to have somebody your age. EM: We really were a very good group of friends…those good Latter-Day Saint girls that get into all the trouble that some of us did. MF: It was innocent so it is all good. Well we appreciate you taking time for us to come visit with you. We appreciate that. We appreciate you letting us come visit with you. 28 EM: Thank you for coming. 29