Oral History Program Evelyn Wilson Brunson Interviewed by Marci Farr 22 October 2010 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Evelyn Wilson Brunson Interviewed by Marci Farr 22 October 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: Evelyn Wilson Brunson, an oral history by Marci Farr, 22 October 2010, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Evelyn Wilson Brunson Graduation Photo Class of 1966 Evelyn Wilson Brunson October 22, 2010 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Evelyn Wilson Brunson, conducted by Marci Farr and Melissa Johnson, on October 22, 2010. In this interview, Evelyn discusses her recollections and experiences with the St. Benedict’s School of Nursing. MF: This is Marci Farr, and we are interviewing Evelyn Brunson. She graduated from St. Benedict’s School of Nursing in 1966. It is October 22, 2010, and we are interviewing her in her home in Kaysville, Utah. Evelyn, just start a little bit and tell us about where you grew up, a little bit about your family, and about where you attended grade school and high school. EB: I was born and raised in Brigham City, the fourth of five children, and went to Box Elder High School. I had never planned on a nursing career, ever. A good friend, Martha Mortenson and I had taken all secretarial courses in high school, and Marty Mortenson, Marty Bills now, said “Just come over to the hospital and work one night with my mom at the old Cooley Hospital in Brigham.” Her mother was an LPN. So I went over there and worked one night with her, and they just let me do it, just tag her. You’d never see that today. I loved it, absolutely loved it. So then it was a real stretch to get me into St. Benedict’s due to pre-requisites. MF: So how did you get to St. Benedict’s? Was it because that was the option for getting into nurses’ training? EB: That was the closest option with a dorm then. Marty was going there, so that’s how that all kind of worked out. MF: Okay. So was she a few years older than you? 2 EB: No, she was the same age. MF: She was the same year as you. Okay, that’s good to know. Was this your first time being away from home? EB: Yes. MF: How was that, when you first got to training? EB: I really got homesick. Then, of course there were no cell phones. There was a phone in the hall that you could call on, but Brigham City was long distance. So I would call my sister who lived in Clearfield, and she had three little boys, and I just bugged her because I was so homesick. I would just call her up and talk to her. MF: Tell us about your roommate. Who did you room with during training? EB: The first year I roomed with Marty Mortenson, and then the second and third year I actually roomed by myself. I needed more study time, so I just roomed by myself. MF: So how was that? It was probably nice to have your little bit of peace. Or would you rather have had a roommate? EB: No, I would rather not have had a roommate, because the problem was that you would be right in the middle of studying, and a roommate would come in, and two or three others to visit – so I just didn’t get to study. So that was hard for me, to concentrate. I mean, I was very social, but I enjoyed being able to go to study. Then a group of people would go down to the common area and study, but it really wasn’t an effective study time. MF: Right; more talking, chatting. 3 EB: No, it didn’t work out really well. MF: Who were some of your other classmates that you had in training? EB: Let’s see. Mary Weibel; she was from California. So Mary, Marty and I were good friends. Linda Ladett and Linda Smith; Ladett was from California, and Smitty was from Smithfield. Jeanie Campos was from California, and Carmen Maes – just Maes – she was from Wyoming. MF: So you all got along really well? EB: Yes. MF: It wasn’t a big class – your class wasn’t very big. How many were in there? Maybe ten, fifteen girls? EB: Oh no, not starting out. Starting out we had a lot more – we probably had thirty. We dropped – by the end of the first year we had dropped half the class. MF: That is a large drop. Because of grades, do you think, or do you think just not working out? EB: Everything. MF: You still couldn’t be married at this time, right? EB: No, you could be married. MF: Oh, you could? EB: You could be married, because one of the girls, Barbara Hendricks was married. She was the only one then in our class. One of the other girls, who later dropped out, got married while we were in the program. We were so rude. She needed to catch a train, and we put her on the wrong train, after she was married, to go 4 meet her husband. We were really bad. I was not in charge of that, but we did it. It’s terrible. She left the program soon after that. MF: Not because of the train thing. EB: No, not at all. She left for other reasons. Then there was Diane Cafarelli, and Dana Dona; we just called each other by our last names. MF: That is interesting; that’s good. Did you ever try sneaking out? EB: A few times. Lena was the house mother. You had to know where Lena was at certain times. But everyone knew where Lena was at certain times, so it’s true, we’d sign out, and we wouldn’t make curfew. We’d come and check back in at the front desk of the hospital, then leave again, then come back later, and somebody would let us in. There was a little – I guess it was for sun tanning – a little fenced area or something, but we’d go in there and hide until somebody would let us in the dorm. MF: That’s good. We’re glad to know about that. What do you remember most about the sisters when you first got to training? EB: It was very foreign to me. Should I just be perfectly honest? It was just extremely foreign. Sister Cassian was director my first year there, and it was her first year there. Sister Cassian was an interesting nun. She was extremely strict; she wanted us to wear white gloves when we went home; dresses and white gloves. No one did, of course. I mean, none of us did it. She’d get really upset with us. Somebody was always in trouble with her, and truly, we weren’t doing anything wrong. 5 The nuns schedule a retreat for the students, and it was a weekend retreat. I usually would go home on weekends; Brigham City’s not that far. My sister would pick me up. She worked at Hillfield, and she would take me home and then bring me back down Sunday night because I didn’t have a car. I agreed to stay for the Catholic retreat, but I asked to go to my own church. Even though I graduated top in my class, and even though I was there at the retreat, Sister Cassian was going to kick me out of the program because I’d asked to go to my own church. MF: Really? Oh my goodness. EB: Yes. I did end up going to Mass but she was upset. Had it not been for the instructors, especially Effie Etcheverry and another tall instructor, I can’t remember her name – I think she would have succeeded. MF: That is so crazy. EB: Now, the other nuns were fantastic. Sister Mary Gerald was so wise. One night we snuck in her room – because she didn’t live in a separate dorm; she lived in the dorm with the students. So we snuck in her room and toilet-papered it. We used so much toilet paper from the bathroom – we just did a number on her room. Bless her heart; she came in, and we were all just laughing and giggling. So she just sat there and rolled up the toilet paper and visited with us. Pretty soon we were all helping her roll up the toilet paper so none of it got wasted. We had to re-roll all that toilet paper. She was delightful. She was probably the best instructor I have ever had. It was because of Sister Mary Gerald, when I went into the Air Force, I also graduated first in the class in flight school from the Air 6 Force, and it was students all around the United States that were at the Air Force at Brooks, in Texas. Some of them of course had college degrees, and some of them had diploma degrees, and I was able to just hold my own, but it was really because of Mary Gerald. She was so dedicated – an excellent instructor. MF: So Sister Berno was gone, because Sister Cassian had taken her place, right? EB: Yes. I do not remember Sister Berno at all. I remember hearing of her, but I don’t remember her. MF: So that’s when that happened. We weren’t sure of the date. That’s good. So did you have any instructors that weren’t nuns? EB: Oh, yeah. Effie Etcheverry and – I’m trying to remember. A tall, dark-headed gal and another shorter gal. Yes, great instructors. Like I say, they saved my bacon. MF: That’s a good thing. What about the doctors? Do you remember any of the doctors? EB: Oh, yes. Van Hook, and who was the orthopedic surgeon? MF: Dr. Swindler? EB: Yes, Swindler. MF: He was still there – he was there forever. EB: Yes. MF: How were they in classes? Did they teach? EB: They taught, yes. Nobody understood what Van Hook was saying – he was a neurologist. Nobody understood, and he’d get so upset with us. We’d scrub with Swindler, and he was just a bear in operating room. So Ladett was scrubbing for him, and at the time, they had a big flu epidemic. It just wiped out the OR. So 7 they brought the students in circulate and with very little supervision to scrub. We were just running the operating room, because the physicians of course wanted to continue. So we were managing far more than we were really competent to manage. So Ladett went in and was scrubbing for Swindler, and she had a bandaid on her hand. She scrubbed, gloved, and was retracting for him, and about halfway through he saw the bandaid through the glove, and he hit the ceiling. She left the OR in tears, and the next morning he came to the dorm. She was not going to go back to the OR ever, because he just exploded at her. He had quite a temper. So anyway, he came over to the dorm and got her and said, you are going to come and scrub for me. He was much nicer to her then; otherwise, I think she would have dropped out of the program. MF: That’s so crazy. EB: It was because there were so many students in the OR; things were not going well. Jeanie Campos was circulating and I was scrubbing, and we were helping with a vaginal hysterectomy. Now, this is back in the day and it was different. You had to pick the right needle, suture, and needle holder. Of course many different kinds of each are used in one surgery. Each surgeon had their own combinations and right or left directions. The opened suture needed to be stretched and laid in a towel and then labeled. If you didn’t, it would just crumple up and tangle with other sutures into messes the size of basketballs. So the surgeon had two students in there with him, and no graduate. It never should have been done. I can’t remember who the doctor was but he finally lost it. Jeanie’s tray was just like this foot high pile of curled, dry suture. 8 Literally, here’s the tray, and there was just this pile of all different kinds of suture. He had been getting so mad at me, because I kept handing him the wrong suture that Jeanne kept handing to me. Well, I looked at her pile, and she hadn’t laid any suture in towels. She would just open a new package each time he needed a bit of suture. I looked over at her, and I just started to laugh. He picked up the needle holder with a needle on it, and he threw it over his shoulder at me, and he said, “I’ll take it any way but backwards.” He was so mad at us, and we just started to laugh. It was just hysterical. The poor woman – I hope she was okay. Anyway, what do you do? MF: That’s a great story. You just go on. EB: Yeah, you just go on. I mean, we were trying to help. They told us we had to do it, and we weren’t qualified. MF: You’re like, we haven’t been trained that much yet. That is crazy. So what would you do if you had some time off, with your classmates or your roommate? EB: We would play different games on the back lawn- that was fun. We would hang out in the TV room. Then there was a pool room, down across from the administrator’s office, but right in the same building. There was a girl there from Thailand; Sirong Sirongsuman. She was a year older than us, but then she repeated with us, because of the language barrier. Her father was very wealthy, from Thailand. He was going to build her a hospital if she would come back to Thailand to practice. MF: Wow. 9 EB: Yeah. So Sirong and Campos and Maes and I would go down and we’d shoot pool. I didn’t play pool, and they didn’t either. But we’d turn on Flight of the Bumblebee, because there was only classical music down there, and we’d run around the table so fast, trying to keep up with Flight of the Bumblebee. It started out slow, and then it would pick up in tempo, and we would just laugh, and fall down; just silly stuff. We’d walk downtown, and walk back up the hill. MF: That’s good. When you were on your rotations, how long were you on each rotation while you were in the hospital? If you had surgical floor or whatever. EB: Three to four months. MF: You were on three to four months for each of those? EB: Yeah, three to four month rotations. MF: Now, did you have time at Children’s Hospital in Denver at that time, or did you do all of your stuff at St. Benedict’s? EB: Denver, yes. But the psych rotation we did at the University of Utah. MF: So that changed too; you didn’t go to Hastings. EB: No. We were the first year that we didn’t go to Hastings. MF: Okay. Tell us a little bit about Children’s. What was that experience like? EB: Children’s was good; I mean, again, we just learned a lot. Heart-wrenching to see the little ones. I never did work peds after that; didn’t like it. I mean, I loved to rock them, but I don’t like to hurt them. MF: Right; you have to see their misery and pain and know there’s not a lot you could do for them. 10 EB: It was just a different day. Burns were treated so differently and this one little fellow came in; he was about two or three, and he was in a step-down. Not ICU, but a step-down. I had to start an IV in his skull, as we do in children, and he didn’t whimper at all. Just did nothing, just looked at his mom and dad. He had a boot imprint on his stomach and back; bruising from a boot. He died from internal injuries due to abuse and nothing was ever done to the parents. We weren’t asked to testify. But it was a different day back then. The dorms in Denver were interesting. You could sit on your bed and touch your dresser and anything else in your room. You never had to get off your bed. It was a building called Tammen Hall and it was seven or eight floors high. Barbara Hendricks made coffee in her room, which she wasn’t supposed to do. There was a little tiny sink; not a bathroom, but a little tiny sink in your room. So she made coffee in her room and she kept putting the coffee grounds down the drain so she wouldn’t get caught. She wouldn’t put them in the garbage. It plugged up the whole building. She got in a lot of trouble over that one. MF: Call the plumber out. EB: Oh, yeah. MF: When you were at St. Benedict’s, which do you think was your favorite rotation as far as the different hospital floors? EB: I really liked surgical. MF: And you said peds was probably your least favorite at that time? EB: Medical was probably my least, least favorite. 11 MF: Why do you think that? Just because they were in there for so long they came to die, maybe? EB: It was just a different feel. Your goal back then was more palative care on medical than it is now. On surgical it was get them up, get them going, get them better, get them home. MF: That’s true; that would be hard, because you see them every day and you become attached. Talk to them and get to know them personally, then have to come in one day and they’re gone. EB: Yeah. I’ve got another funny story for you – do you want it? MF: Oh, yes, absolutely. EB: When I was on surgical rotation and this guy came in who was really ill. It was something in his gut – I can’t remember what it was – but he had been ill for days. It was probably a bowel obstruction or something. I can’t remember now, but he was really ill. Full beard on, hadn’t bathed – was just so ill. So they took him to surgery and we recovered him in his room. Once again, I think it was Campos that was with me. So while he was sound asleep from the anesthesia – because then, people didn’t recover as quickly. We bathed him and shaved him while he was out, because he was just so ill, and got him all fixed up. His wife walked in the room and just stopped at the doorway and said, “What did you do?” We thought, what? He had had a moustache ever since she had known him, and his beard had grown so long we just shaved everything off. He was a good sport about it when he woke up, but it wasn’t good. MF: That’s awesome. 12 EB: We just shaved him clean. MF: She probably didn’t recognize him. That’s a good story. Tell us a little bit about your capping ceremony. Do you remember about that? EB: I can’t remember that. I thought, wow, we must have had one. I know I was eager to get a cap; I know I wanted a black stripe on my cap – which, of course, St. Benedict’s caps didn’t have. MF: The Dee School did. EB: Yeah, and we all loved those black stripes on those square caps. Ours were little round jobbers. No, I really can’t remember my capping ceremony. MF: That’s okay. I remember – we talked to Judy. She said she was so excited when she got capped that she slept in it all night. She was so proud. EB: That sounds like Judy. MF: I just thought, well, that’s a good thing. You should be proud. That was a major accomplishment. EB: That’s right. You had to have something on your head to get caught in all that traction gear. MF: What do you think was your greatest challenge while you were in nurses’ training? EB: Has anyone talked to you about when Cafarelli got shot? MF: Someone mentioned it – I don’t know who told us about that, but just had said something about it, but not into detail. I can’t remember who we talked to about that. 13 EB: That was really difficult for me, and it was so scary. It was so traumatic for the whole class. I had been gone on the weekend, and I had come back and it was Sunday night. Everybody was playing Red Rover, Red Rover out on the back lawn. I went out on the back lawn and started to play, so we hadn’t talked; we were just playing a game. Dez was an x-ray student from Colorado. She had been expelled the previous Friday or Saturday from St. Benedict’s. I didn’t know anything of it, because I wasn’t there at the time. As we were downstairs playing Red Rover, she came down the back stairs of the dorm that led right onto the grass, and ‘pop-pop-pop’. I thought it was silly – I mean, I thought it was a game. You know? I was looking at her thinking, what are you doing? She had a gun, and she just came down the stairs, ‘pop-pop-pop’, and I turned around, and no one else was on the grass, except for Cafarelli, who was on the ground close to me. I started to walk over to her, and I was still confused, thinking, what’s going on here? But looking at Cafarelli’s face – there wasn’t any blood or anything, but looking at her face, I knew something was really wrong. I started to go over to her, and Dez said, “If you touch her, I will shoot you.” I stood there for a moment, and she commanded me to go back in the dorm. So I did, and I left Cafarelli out there. That took me a long, long time to get over, that I left her out there. But years later, looking back on it, there was nothing else I could have done. I couldn’t have helped her. So then – she held Cafarelli out on the lawn for about three hours. Cafarelli had numerous wounds. She’d been hit low abdomen – part of her ovary 14 was gone, numerous punctures in her bowel. So all this time she’s just oozing into her peritoneum, and just getting sicker and sicker by the moment. They brought Cafarelli’s folks up. The reason that Dez was holding her out there was to get Dona to come. She wanted to talk to Dona. She’d made an inappropriate advance to Dona, and that’s why Dez had gotten kicked out of school. So she held Cafarelli out there, because Cafarelli and Dona were best friends, and she held Cafarelli out there to get them to bring Dana back. They wouldn’t bring her back. So we were sequestered in the dorm, but nobody was answering the phones in the office. Now it’s on the news, so Mary and I went down to the desk and we were talking to media and talking to parents, saying everything’s okay, and whatever. But Dez would shoot up to the different dorm windows, or if she thought she saw someone she would shoot. So poor Cafarelli’s folks were on the grounds, and they just kept hearing more shots; but they wouldn’t let them see her. The dorm was in an L shape, and on the other side were more buildings and trees. Then the open side was partially blocked off too, with another building. So you couldn’t see the back of the grounds at all. So the only way to see what was going on were from the windows, or from on top of the building. Well, we found out after that they had sharpshooters on top of the building. Then they brought in a psychiatrist, and he told Kathleen Motichka, a senior, what to say. She started to talk to Dez over a microphone, and talked her in. Again, this is a different day. So Cafarelli went to surgery. Cafarelli was a cheerleader, a tiny little thing. They said, had her abdomen not been so tight, she 15 would have bled out. So they took her to surgery, put her in a room, but right next to her, on the same floor, was Dez. And they didn’t arrest her, because of the nuns. She was in the hospital that night with Cafarelli. When Cafarelli’s folks saw that, it was just – but anyway, that’s where she was. MF: What a crazy story. EB: It was. MF: I can’t even imagine that something like that could – that’s like today’s stuff, like a normal day – but back then, that’s just… EB: It would never have happened. And to keep those girls on the same floor would never have happened. But then, it was just a different day. Then - Cafarelli didn’t go to Denver, because Dez was from Colorado, and she was sent to some type of reform thing in Denver. It was either Dana or Cafarelli that didn’t go to Denver. I can’t remember which one. I think it was Dana that ended up going to the University of Utah for her peds rotation, because Cafarelli was at Mass in Denver, and was in a little alcove and was lighting candles, and Dez was right behind her. So then Dana didn’t go. I think that’s the way it was; it was Dana that didn’t go and Cafarelli that was at Mass. Dana was never the same after that. She just had many problems. It was a rough little episode. MF: It would take a while to get over something like that. EB: Very scary. MF: Yes, very scary. Tell us about graduation. When was graduation held? 16 EB: Graduation was held at St. Joseph’s in Ogden, and it was just so exciting. You could always tell the really new students, because their neck and arms were so chafed from the uniforms. Has anyone talked to you about the uniforms? MF: They’ve just told us they were starched. EB: Oh – they were so starched. So it was just a dress, with a button-down front, and a belt that then buttoned over with two buttons. Short-sleeved, and a collar. But you had to get calluses built up, because you were just raw. I mean, they were starched. You put those babies on, and that skirt was just out straight, and it didn’t move. So you wore the uniform for one day, and the next day they were just crumpled, but you had to wear them for more than one day. Anyway, so we all had on our uniforms and our caps, and it was just grand. Walked across the front and got our diploma; the physicians were there, and other nurses were there, and families were there. It was just grand. MF: That’s great; it was a great accomplishment, to be done. You survived. EB: Yes, we survived – only the tough survived. MF: Did you stay at St. Benedict’s after you graduated? EB: I did. Loved surgical, but the director of the hospital at that time wanted me to go to psych. So I worked psych for – oh, I started there and worked there for a long time. Connie Van Hook – have you interviewed her? MF: We haven’t. We talked to her older sister, Joan, though. EB: She was a flight nurse for the Air Force Reserve and my husband was in the Air Force. I joined the Air Force Reserves and did that, and then I just stayed at St. Benedict’s until – I took a year off, and I was going to go back, but in that year I 17 got pregnant. So then I didn’t go back. Then I went back to Ogden Regional and just worked the med/surg floor a couple nights a week, and then we went to Egypt. Then when I came back I started doing home care, and I did home care the majority of the time. MF: So have you retired? EB: I have retired. MF: When did you retire? EB: I retired before we went on our mission, so – seven years ago. A long time ago; it doesn’t seem that long. MF: Well, that’s great. Thanks for letting us come visit with you. EB: Thank you.