Oral History Program Patricia Hopkins Brown Interviewed by Marci Farr 24 September 2010 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Patricia Hopkins Brown Interviewed by Marci Farr 24 September 2010 Copyright © 2010 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in Special Collections. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The St. Benedict’s School of Nursing was founded in 1947 by the Sisters of Mount Benedict. The school operated from April 1947 to 1968. Over the forty-one year period, the school had 605 students and 357 graduates. In 1966, the program became the basis for Weber State College’s Practical Nursing Program. This oral history project was created to capture the memories of the graduates and to add to the history of nursing education in Ogden. The interviews focus on their training, religion, and experiences working with doctors, nurses, nuns, and patients at St. Benedict’s Hospital. This project received funding from the Utah Humanities Council and the Utah Division of State History. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management Special Collections All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Patricia Hopkins Brown, an oral history by Marci Farr, 24 September 2010, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Patricia Hopkins Brown Graduation Photo Class of 1958 Patricia Hopkins Brown September 24, 2010 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Patricia Hopkins Brown, conducted by Marci Farr and Sarah Langsdon, on September 24, 2010. In this interview, Patricia discusses her recollections and experiences with the St. Benedict’s School of Nursing. MF: This is Marci Farr; we are interviewing Patricia Hopkins Brown. She graduated from St. Benedict’s School of Nursing in 1958. It is September 24th, 2010, and we are interviewing her at her home in South Ogden. Pat, will you tell us a little bit about your family, your early life, where you grew up, and also where you attended school? PB: I grew up in Ogden; my father worked for the railroad, so we lived down on lower 29th Street, which is a ghetto area now, but it was a blue-collar area. I went to Pingree Grade School; Pingree is no longer intact, it’s been gone for many years. Then I went to Lewis Junior High School, and then I graduated from Ogden High in 1955. I have an older sister who is eleven years older than I am; we were the only two siblings. She went into nurses’ training and graduated from Holy Cross in Salt Lake and was one of the first employees at the old St. Benedict’s Hospital. I think she started working there in 1948. So I was exposed to nurses and nursing. In my day there was very little other than school teaching and nursing that women looked at as professions. Other than getting married at an early age, starting a family, and being a housewife. I think because of the exposure with Helen always being around, I chose to go into nursing school. 2 So I entered right after I graduated in 1955, and at the time there were several of us from my high school class that were going into the nursing program, but I just talked to Sister Berno, who was the director of the school of nursing at the time, and said, “I would like to have a roommate from out of town. Then I could share my family with her, so she wouldn’t be all alone, and we would have something in common.” So she paired me with Naomi Hill, because of the H and H – we just sort of fit. It was a pairing that was just absolutely phenomenal. We got along beautifully, everything was just fine. There was never any acrimony between us at all, and to this day we still see each other and talk, even though right at first she moved – after she graduated, she moved to Nebraska, had seven daughters, and became a widow at an early age, so then she moved back to her home in Nevada. She now lives in Fallon, Nevada; but those associations, living in a dormitory. The room was small, but adequate – there were two twin beds, a desk, two closets, and that was it. That’s all we had in the rooms. MF: That’s good. So you just enjoyed that time together. It was probably nice to have somebody to count on, and the support. PB: It was. We were close, and had very many of the same interests. Her father had worked for the railroad, so there was a similarity in backgrounds of family and everything, but we got along famously. Everything was just very, very good, and like I said, I would bring her home for holidays if she couldn’t go home for holidays or special occasions, or if we really wanted a home-cooked meal. MF: Other than hospital food. 3 PB: We would run home and visit Mom and everything, so it was really a nice thing, it was. MF: Did you ever have any issues with curfew when you went home, do you have any stories? PB: Well, I’m sure you’ve heard them all by now. Yes, we had a curfew, and we had to be in – I think at eight o’clock during the week, I can’t remember for certain – and then ten o’clock on weekends. But we learned how to crawl in past the front desk at the hospital, hunker down and get to the elevator somehow, and get in and go through the tunnel. But the switchboard operators would have us sign in – there was a book where we had to sign in at the switchboard, and we got caught a few times, but not too many. MF: How were your interactions with the sisters? PB: Right at first I was intimidated by them. I’d heard stories about how strict they were and everything, but no – the interactions were all very positive. I had one instructor in the first year of nursing that taught pharmacology. It was a class called “Drugs and Solutions”. Math was not my strong suit. I faked it and made it through high school with math, and didn’t really absorb a lot. So I really struggled in that class. She was a nun that loved to be a little bit vindictive. She’d get you up to the board in front of the class and have you work a drugs and solutions problem. Well, there were three of us in the class, myself and two others, that were struggling along about the same, and she’d get the three of us up there to that board and just put us through pure hell. I failed the first exam; I didn’t pass my first drugs and solutions exam, and my roommate was a whiz-bang at math, 4 and understood things, so she tutored me for the – we could always take a follow-up exam – and she tutored me, and I had an A on the follow-up exam. It was just that, I think I was so intimidated by Sister Rebecca that I froze whenever I was in her class. But there were others that were very close; made some good friendships. Kept in touch with many of them after they moved back to Minnesota. Sister Estelle was a wonderful woman, and she taught us anatomy and physiology and chemistry, then became the hospital administrator after she taught the school of nursing. She lost both of her legs, and had to move back to Minnesota, but for one of our reunions we paid her way to come back to Ogden for one of the reunions. I was going through some of my old pictures, and I had a picture of her that said “Returns to Ogden for the last time” or something, but it was a good story. MF: Was there any free time, or activities that you would spend with the sisters? PB: They always were having picnics, or some kind of fun thing, but we worked hard – we didn’t have a lot of free time. We went to work at seven in the morning until ten, so we’d go over to the hospital and give patient care, bed baths and different kinds of things. Then we’d get off duty at ten, go over to the nursing home, and begin classwork. We had classes from ten until four, and then we would go back to work from four until seven. So we weren’t really wanting to go out and kick up our heels too much during that time. It was a pretty hectic schedule. But we managed to party some, and laugh and splash a lot. Not so much with the sisters. I mean, they would have formal kinds of things. One of my friends said, 5 “I’ve never seen anyone that can clear a chicken bone like a nun with a knife and fork.” MF: One of those things you haven’t ever seen. PB: They could do that, and here we are trying to get it. They’re special women; they were very good. MF: What was your favorite class out of the ones you took? PB: I don’t really know, I never thought about having a favorite class. It was just all a matter of learning new things and disease entities. Probably physiology – anatomy and physiology probably were the two favorites. They were all so different than what we’d been exposed to in our high school classes. MF: Was Jeane Barker there? PB: She was there; she graduated from Massachusetts General, and she had this fluffy little organdy cap that she wore back here. You probably have seen pictures of her, I’m sure. Then a long-sleeved, starched uniform, buttons all up [the forearms]. She’d come into the lab where we did our practicing, bathing and patient care and all the things that we would do on a dummy. She would roll up her sleeves, show us how to give a bath, roll down her sleeves, and there never would be a wrinkle. She was just a phenomenal woman. Strangely enough, when I met my husband and we dated – at the tea that my mother-in-law gave for us, before we married, Jeane and her sister came to the tea, and they were my husband’s cousins, and we didn’t know that all the time we dated and did all that. After all that time of admiring Jeane as such a phenomenal woman and such a perfectionist. It was nice. 6 MF: That’s so fun, her sister graduated from the Dee School. We just found that out, and thought it was interesting. Do you remember any of your instructors, or the doctors that would lecture? PB: Yes. We had Dr. Swindler, who was an orthopedic surgeon; he would put the fear of death into all of us. There was a tunnel that connected the hospital to the nursing school. We’d be in the classroom; he had big feet, and wore heavy shoes, and you’d hear this “clomp, clomp, clomp” and we’d all just sit there and wait. He smoked a pipe, and he’d come in with his pipe and he’d call you by name and ask you questions and have you do things – he was gruff on the exterior, but he was a little teddy bear on the inside. You got to know him, and everything was great. But he was one of the instructors. Dr. Gail Keyes was another instructor, and in later life my husband knew Gail on a social level. So we became friends at a social level, so that was an interesting exchange from saying “Dr. Keyes this” and “Dr. Keyes that”, and then to say “Gail” and be friendly with him. There were guest lecturers – they had OB, different doctors gave lectures in OB, but I don’t remember – those were the two that I remember most specifically. MF: That’s good. If you had a night off, some time off, what was something that your classmates would do? PB: Oh, we would drag the ‘vard… one of the gals had a car, so we’d all go – I don’t know how many of us would get in the car, and go for a ride and drive up and down the boulevard. We went to movies, and when we got old enough we went 7 to the bars, and danced, and just had good times. Didn’t drink a lot, it was just the fact that there was some social activities there. My roommate and I were not Catholic, and we were not Mormon. We were Protestants, so we were active in our Protestant young people’s group. So we did a lot with the young people’s group in the church when we had free time. MF: At this time, you had rotations – did you have any out of state, or did you stay at the hospital? PB: We had two out-of-state rotations. The first one was – I guess the end of my junior year – we went to Denver, to Children’s Hospital, and did our pediatric training for three months, and lived in the dorm there. Then we also went to Hastings, Nebraska, for psychiatric affiliation; lived in Hastings and were there. MF: Did they have the polio unit still at the hospital at that time? PB: They had a few cases of polio, but not the whole unit. There were a couple of patients still on respirators. I can remember one fellow – he had a private duty nurse, and I was working nights on orthopedics. He was there, on a special bed that rotated, tilted, rocked him back and forth, and his special duty nurse took care of all of his physical needs. He was there, a very nice person; the thing that I remember about her was that she had this purse that was an alligator purse, but it had an alligator head on it. I mean, a baby alligator head – and I came out of one of the other rooms, and she had put in on the floor just enough so the night light shined on his beady eyes that were there, and I about jumped out of my skin. But no, as far as the active polio cases, they were pretty much over by then. MF: Did you enjoy your rotations? 8 PB: Oh, we had a blast, it was wonderful. We didn’t like the work; it was hard, and we had some tough instructors, but the free time was fun. MF: That would be nice, to have some. PB: Nebraska was so flat; cornfields and milo fields, and the wind blew, and I was never so happy in my life – I hallucinated when I was there, thinking I could see mountains in the distance – but when we got on the train to come home, we all sat at the window, and as soon as got just over the Nebraska-Wyoming border, we could see mountains, and we were so elated that we were back to our mountains again. MF: Did you enjoy pediatrics or psychiatry more? PB: Well, I think we had more fun kind of things with pediatrics, but it wasn’t my favorite rotation from the standpoint of a clinical aspect of it. Then the psych unit – that was something in and of itself. The patients were hardcore psych patients for the most part. I got hit over the head with a chair by one patient; we were getting them ready to go to a dance, and I was trying to tie his necktie, and I didn’t know how to tie a necktie very well. He had a vocabulary of saying “rockabie”, and he’d rock back and forth – well, he picked up the chair and hit me over the head because I didn’t tie his tie right. MF: That would be scary, just to put yourself in that position. PB: Then their food – they had scrapple. I’d never heard of scrapple, it was in their cafeteria – it was fried mush. It wasn’t too palatable. They also served tongue. Sliced tongue. That was a real delicacy for that area of the country; they thought that was great. I didn’t, but they did. They would bring freshly baked Danish 9 pastries to our dorm and leave them every day. We all gained probably ten pounds while we were there – that’s all we lived on. Played pinochle twenty-four hours a day. The patients all wanted to play pinochle. We’d be off-duty, we’d go back to the dorm, and we’d have a game of pinochle. So it went on and on, but it was fun. MF: So when you got back to the hospital and you had your rotations, how long did you rotate on each floor? PB: It varied. My first rotation was before we even finished our first year of training. My roommate and I got the assignment of being in the OR. We hadn’t even finished our first year of curriculum, and had to start scrubbing in surgery and doing all these things. That was very frightening, because we would be on call, we worked regular shifts and then be on call and be called in for emergency surgeries and things. It was challenging, but by the end of it it was great. You know, when we learned what we were supposed to be doing. But the rotations were different. It just depended on where we were needed. The hospital had very few RNs as paid employees. We were the staff. I mean, the student nurses staffed the hospital, and somebody did a master schedule and said, “We need somebody here for this length of time.” But I spent most of my rotation or a good portion of it on the medical unit. I love medical nursing, and I spent the majority of it there. MF: So it was probably interesting just to see as far as the different skill set you learned. You learned everything in the hospital, and you would be able to move around because you knew what to do. 10 PB: You knew what to do – basic nursing and that was it. MF: Do you remember any patients that you cared for, any experiences that you can remember about certain patients? PB: Probably the patients I remember are patients after I graduated and started working. I worked in the coronary care unit and became very close to the patients that were in that unit. But from a standpoint of when I was a student, not really. Not any that I remember real well. MF: Do you remember about your capping ceremony, where that took place, will you tell us a little bit about that? PB: Oh, yes. It took place in the library of the hospital; well, no, I guess it was not the library. It took place in the formal lounge on the main floor of the nurses’ home. We were all seated, and then they would call you up. Jeane was Florence Nightingale, and she had the lamps, and one of the sisters was there with the cap and the cape. There was usually another person there that was – I can’t remember what her role was now, it was Marina Bladdage for most of the time she was there. There was a picture in the paper not long ago and it said, “an unknown person” in the capping ceremony. A little friend of mine from Minnesota, that just turned ninety, came back and visited and she worked at the hospital. She said, “Pat, you tell them that was Marina Bladdage in that picture.” So now it won’t be unknown. But it was a very formal kind of thing. I’ve got a picture here – I lost some of my pictures, but I found a picture here. This is my class just before we received our caps. So we were all seated, and then they would call us up. MF: That’s great. So did you get your capes when you enrolled in nurses’ training? 11 PB: No, we got the capes when we got the caps. MF: Okay. Good to know. So that was probably a monumental day. PB: It was so special. You had completed pure agony for six months. You had been through the mill, and if you made it to capping, you pretty well were ingratiated into the system and were going to be okay. But those first six months were really tough. There was such a thing about nurses wearing caps. I became the director of nursing at the hospital, and I was a stickler for my nurses to wear their caps, and there was beginning to be the uprising that “We don’t need caps to make us nurses, we can be a nurse without a cap.” Not in my department, you can’t. One of the supervisors and I used to just stand toe to toe and do that. Finally I relented and said, “You’re right.” But it came with such a sacrifice. It was so special, and there was such pomp and circumstance with the procedure, and when the young women who graduated from Weber State – they just bought their caps. There was nothing. No ceremony, nothing that made it special in any way, shape, or form. So there was that dichotomy. So some nurses, they cherished that, and other nurses, it was just part of the process. MF: When was – ’56? Was that the first class? PB: ’55 or ’56, it was while I was in training. MF: They just had the two years, right, and you had three. PB: We had three. We called them Weber Wonders. MF: I’m sure you were glad, though, for your training as far as having the extra year. Plus all your clinical experience. 12 PB: You couldn’t have a nurse that was a three-year nursing graduate put up against somebody that was a two-year without seeing the difference in their clinical application. It was there. MF: It made a difference, I’m sure. What do you think was your greatest challenge while you were in nurses’ training? PB: I think just keeping up with the demands of the working and the classwork. But you know, I never saw it as a challenge; it was just part of life, and it was part of what I had chosen to do. We used to complain, and we always got the night shift. I mean, it was invariable that you worked the eleven to seven shift, and that was the one thing that was not the best. I didn’t enjoy that. MF: That’s what Jo said, that was probably her hardest thing, was the night shift. PB: Because then you got off duty and you went to school, you had your classes. So it was a challenge. MF: Tell us a little bit about graduation. Where was graduation held? PB: It was held at St. Joseph’s Church, and I had some pictures, and I tore my house apart the other day looking for my pictures and I’ve misplaced them, but – it was a very formal ceremony, and we wore our capes. We had special uniforms we all picked out – I mean, each class picked out their own graduation uniform. I have donated mine to the nuns – I’ve given my cape, my uniform, and my cap – I don’t know that I gave my pins or not – to the sisters. But they were always long-sleeved, starched, and big wide belts around. But you wore your graduation uniform, and your cape, and your cape was folded back so it was the red, white, and blue; and you had your cap. Then they gave you a bouquet of red roses. 13 They’d call you up to the lectern and confer the graduation diploma on you – and the bishop of the church was there, and for those non-Catholics, we had to learn how to genuflect and bend down like you were kissing his ring. Very, very formal. After the graduation we had a nice reception in the basement of the church with our families and everything, but very special. MF: I’m sure you remembered that for years. All that sacrifice. SL: Did you have to walk down from the hospital to St. Joe’s? PB: I think we walked a block – I can’t remember now. We had a parade, a parade of the graduates. I know my sister did. I remember her graduation so vividly – she walked from Holy Cross Hospital down to the Cathedral of the Madeleine, and I don’t know whether I have her graduation and mine mixed up or not, but it seemed to me that we had some kind of a formal entrance that we – but it wasn’t from the hospital down. MF: That’s quite a walk. PB: I think we just gathered and marched in, and they played “Pomp and Circumstance”, of course, and that was bone-chilling. They had taught you – it was just like getting married – walk with this much space between the two of you. Those little nuns were very well-versed in etiquette and planned things beautifully. Everything was always very well done. MF: So did you stay at St. Benedict’s? Tell us a little bit about after graduation. PB: I lived at St. Benedict’s for almost forty years. Yes, I stayed on. The sister that was in charge of the medical floor was a very difficult woman. Had a quick temper, but she was a wonderful person. She and I got along beautifully. If she 14 was having one of her bad days, I would say, “Why don’t you go back over to the convent and come back later, and everything will be fine.” But I just had this terrific relationship, and everybody would say, “Sister Mary Gerald’s going to be there. Are you going to be there?” And I’d say yeah; she didn’t scare me a bit, but she scared a lot of people. She became a long-time friend. Communicated with her after she was back in St. Cloud for a long time, but medical was my favorite; she was the head nurse on the medical unit, and I became her assistant head nurse, and then moved into the head nurse position at that time. Then it was in the early ’60s that coronary care nursing was just evolving and coming. A friend of mine arranged that I should go to class over in Salt Lake, at LDS Hospital, to learn about coronary care nursing. So I did, and we took four rooms at the end of the medical unit and closed them off and got monitoring equipment and put the monitoring equipment in, and I became the head nurse in the coronary unit. Then I moved into the director of continuing education just prior to the move to the new hospital. I had the privilege of orienting every employee in that new hospital to the physical plant, how things worked, where things were. I said, “I could walk the halls of the new hospital almost as well backward as I could forward” because I took so many people on tours and walked backwards and pointed things out this way and that way. So I did. I stayed with them for a long time. It was a wonderful working opportunity for me. MF: When did you retire? PB: Retired in 1992. My husband had retired in 1990, and so the day I turned fifty-five I said, “I’m out of here, I’m gone.” Things were changing, and it was becoming a 15 business, a very bottom-line oriented business, and weren’t able to give the kind of nursing care that I held so close to my heart. MF: That you were trained in. That would make it hard, because as far as the technology, and time for that but not for the patient. PB: But it was time. I had served my time and I think served it well. I got out of there on that very day. MF: That’s good. Did you have anything else you wanted to ask her? SL: No. MF: Well, we appreciate you letting us come visit with you and sharing your memories with us.