Oral History Program Kaye Lyon Interviewed by Marci Farr 27 October 2010 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Kaye Lyon Interviewed by Marci Farr 27 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: Kaye Lyon, an oral history by Marci Farr, 27 October 2010, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Kaye Lyon Class of 1965 Kaye Lyon October 27, 2010 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Kaye Lyon, conducted by Marci Farr and Sarah Langsdon, on October 27, 2010. In this interview, Kaye discusses her recollections and experiences with the St. Benedict’s School of Nursing. Melissa Johnson was present during the interview. MF: This is Marci Farr. We’re interviewing Kaye Lyon. She graduated from St. Benedict’s School of Nursing in 1965. It’s October 27, 2010, and we’re interviewing her at her house in South Ogden, Utah. Tell us a little bit about your early life; where you grew up, your family, and where you attended school. KL: I grew up in Caliente, Nevada, which is in southern Nevada. It’s about 150 miles north of Vegas. I graduated from high school there, in a class of 32. So it was a very good experience to be in a small group, because I was able to do pretty much what I wanted to do and have a good experience. My dad was a railroader, and Caliente was a railroad town; my mother was a housewife. MF: Any siblings? KL: I have two brothers and a sister. MF: How did you end up in Ogden? How did you make it to St. Benedict’s? KL: Well, I had a friend who was a year ahead of me in school who went to St. Benedict’s. Her name was Maxine Peterson, and she died probably thirty years ago from complications of diabetes. Anyway, she graduated from St. Benedict’s. So I found out about school from her. My father worked on the railroad so I could 2 travel from Caliente to Ogden for free on the train, because I had a pass. That worked out really well. MF: Very nice. So was there any reason why you decided to become a nurse? KL: From the time I can remember, I always wanted to be a nurse. I always wanted to be an operating room nurse, and that’s all I’ve ever done. MF: How interesting – nothing else? KL: Nothing else. When I graduated, I went into the operating room, because at that time at St. Benedict’s they only had technicians, and they really needed RNs. So they pulled myself and Judy Scroggins and Gail, and then RaeAnn Cook. I don’t know whether she responded, or… MF: I’ve heard her name. KL: We all four went into the operating room and received the training so that we could circulate. MF: What were your first impressions when you entered nurses’ training? KL: I was scared. I didn’t know what I’d gotten myself into, and I was a long way from home for the first time - little town girl in the big city. MF: Who was your roommate? KL: My roommate at first was Karen. Oh, heavens, I can’t even remember what her last name was now. I had several roommates. We started out with a class of 32 and ended up graduating only twelve of the original. MF: That’s a considerable drop. KL: Yes. MF: Why do you think most of them dropped out? It just wasn’t what they wanted? 3 KL: I think it was – some of them just found out that it wasn’t what they wanted, but a lot of them didn’t like the regimen. I tell people it was like being in the military, and I don’t think they liked that. MF: Being told what to do and when to do it? KL: Yes. Lights out, what you can and can’t do. So I think that was part of it. MF: Did you get along with your roommates? KL: I did. MF: Didn’t have any crazy issues? KL: I didn’t. I liked them all. MF: What about breaking curfew or anything like that? Did you ever try and sneak out? KL: Oh, multiple times. Just sneaking in after hours. If we were going out on the weekend, we had to sign in and out at the front desk at the hospital. I can remember many times almost down on my hands and knees, creeping underneath the window at the front desk to get past to go down to the tunnel to the nurses’ home. MF: Was this your first time, when you came to St. Benedict’s, being around the nuns? KL: I was raised LDS. MF: What was that like? KL: It was different. I liked them a lot. One thing I remember is the habit. They had a different habit than I had seen even in pictures and stuff. It was very crimped, and they had kind of a bib thing. When they talked it bounced up and down. I had 4 a terrible time for a while not watching that bounce up and down, and paying attention to what they were telling me. MF: That would be a totally different, having no comparison for that. KL: They were very nice, very nice. MF: Who do you remember the most, of the sisters? KL: Sister Berno, I think. She was fun, and she was funny, and I think she liked the students a lot. I think it was my senior year, Sister Cassian came in, and she was a whole new story. MF: That’s what we’ve heard; kind of went downhill from there. KL: She was an ugly lady. MF: Everything you did would be wrong, no matter what you did? KL: It didn’t matter. Luckily, that year I had two rotations. So for almost my whole senior year I was away, which was great. MF: That was a good thing. What were some of your favorite classes that you took while you were in training? KL: I really enjoyed med/surg, of course, and I enjoyed obstetrics a lot. Several years ago one of my co-workers who worked recovery at McKay, wanted to work in the operating room, so she was going to take the operating room class. She asked me about the training and I pulled out some of my old operating room books. They were so out of date – it was just awful. It was funny to go through them and see from the time I had started up to that point, how things had changed. MF: Absolutely. So who were your instructors, do you remember? 5 KL: I remember Janice Hassell, she taught med/surg to us, and she was wonderful. Of course, she wasn’t very much older than we were. Mrs. Etcheverry taught us obstetrics, and she was great. MF: We talked to Janice the other day and interviewed her. She’s so funny. KL: She is a fun lady. MF: Who were some of the doctors you were in the operating room with when you were on your rotations? KL: I remember Dr. Swindler. He was funny, and I really enjoyed him. He was intimidating. And then Dean Tanner, he was great. He liked to teach. Dr. Grua was a really good teacher; I’m trying to think who else was there. It’s been so long ago. I do remember – I used to work with - Dr. Mossinger assisted one of the general surgeons. So I worked with Dr. Mossinger, I worked with Mossinger the ENT, and I worked with Dr. Mossinger, his son, the general surgeon; so grandfather, son, and grandson. So that’s been fun. MF: If you had some time off, what you and your classmates or your roommate, what would you do? KL: Oh, the usual teenage kinds of things. Ride up and down the boulevard and wave at guys, and we did a lot up the canyon, those kinds of things. MF: Did you have any time that you spent with the sisters in a social setting? Was there any parties? KL: Yes. We always had a barbecue in the fall; we always had a Halloween party. At some point we usually had a picnic up old Snow Basin road. They really liked to barbecue, and they liked to have a good time. Some of them liked to play 6 baseball, and that was funny, because they’d hike up their habits so that they could run. MF: That’s great. That probably was nice, to see them in that aspect, because you don’t think that the sisters would participate in that kind of thing. KL: Right. They were fun, and they enjoyed it. They just really were fun. MF: Did you ever notice – as far as religion, was that ever an issue while you were there? KL: I don’t think so, for some of the time that I attended Mass and I investigated the Catholic church for a while, and very much enjoyed their religion and that aspect of it. I liked the ritual. MF: Did it help you understand the LDS religion any more? KL: It actually made me realize that the religion that I had was what I needed. MF: Tell us about your rotations. When you were in the hospital at St. Benedict’s, how long were you on each floor, and which one do you think was your favorite? You said operating room; which of the others? KL: I liked the surgical floor, and I liked the orthopedic floor; I can’t remember how long. My class, when we started, we started out kind of with the old program; you’ve probably talked about how there was really no time off, but the year I started, about three months into it, they kind of changed the program a little bit to conform more with Weber. So we actually had more time off. We didn’t have to work evenings and stuff like the classes previous to us did. So it was a different kind of experience; although we had the same rotations and stuff, I don’t think we had the patient load that the previous classes had. 7 MF: That probably made a difference, since you had so many classes you had to take care of; do your classes plus do your patients. KL: The classes previous to us were actually on call for surgery. We were not on call or that kind of thing. So it was a change. MF: So which one was probably your least favorite rotation at the hospital? KL: Medical floor. I disliked it with a passion. MF: Why, do you think? KL: Because the patients didn’t ever change. I liked the surgical floor. Get in there, get out, get better. MF: Instead of going in circles, you felt like you had a beginning and an end. Did you have any experiences with patients while you were on floors that stand out in your mind? KL: I don’t. MF: Tell us about your rotations. You did go to Children’s? KL: Yes, we went to Children’s, in Denver. MF: Did you go to Hastings? KL: No, we went to Montana, to Warm Springs. MF: Okay. Tell us about those rotations. KL: Warm Springs was interesting, to say the least. To live in a mental institution. We had classes, and we had half of our time on a critical ward and half of our time on a long-term ward. Then we each had a patient that we were to go visit each day. My patient had been in the facility for – oh, I bet fifteen years. At the time, she was an old lady; she probably was forty. I look back and think, oh my gosh. We 8 had to go visit them, and you know, I was – what – I must have been nineteen. Here I’m trying to talk to this woman who is pretty much non-verbal, and trying to talk to her. What do I say that might help? In the old days, they only had Thorazine, and that had just barely come out. She did the rocking, and it was really intimidating. I was quite introverted, and I didn’t like my psych rotation at all. I got really good grades with the bookwork, and I enjoyed that a lot, but I got horrible grades trying to relate to the patients, the clinical stuff. MF: That would be hard; but if you’ve never had a background, you’ve never had that experience, that would be hard to have to go, okay, how am I supposed to talk to this person? What about Children’s? How long were you there? KL: We were there for three months, and we rotated through the different wards. One that I remember the most was the croups and those kinds of things. Basically what we did was just babysit. You know, you sat with the kids and rocked them; that was when they had the big tents for the croup. That was hard for me too, because I had a hard time with kids and them hurting. Especially the kids in the ward where - there were several kids when I was there that had been abused, and they had been there for quite some time. Nobody wanted them, and that was hard. MF: Did you enjoy that time, being away from the school? KL: I did, yes. Denver was a very, very good experience. I think we were there in the winter, and it was nice; we enjoyed it. 9 MF: Tell us about your capping ceremony; do you remember about capping and where it was held? KL: I think it was held in the cafeteria. That was three months in, and to be able to finally put on my cap was so wonderful. We went through and had the little Florence NightinGail lamps that we lit, and had a dinner, and I can remember going back to the dorm and getting ready for bed, and still having my cap on, because I did not want to take it off. MF: That’s what Judy said; “We all slept in our caps.” KL: Pretty much. MF: That’s a great thing. KL: Worked hard for that cap. MF: Be prideful; there’s nothing wrong with that. What do you think was probably your greatest challenge while you were in nurses’ training? KL: My greatest challenge – like I said, I was really an introvert – and coming from a small town – I think my biggest problem was just trying to relate to people, trying to talk to the instructors. I liked to hang back. So that was my biggest. MF: Tell us about graduation. Where was graduation held? KL: Graduation was at St. Joseph’s. We all had uniforms made especially for graduation. They were long-sleeved, fitted, sheath type of dress, with a little Peter Pan collar. We had our pin at the neck, and felt absolutely elegant, because it was not the student uniform. That was neat, and the uniforms – they tailored them all for us, and it was really nice. MF: So your family was all able to come? 10 KL: They were. MF: That was probably a great thing. What was that like, walking down the aisle? Did you do that, walk down the aisle? KL: Yes, we did. I think they had a Mass as part of it, but I can’t remember – but we all had the blue capes, and it was neat. It was like, yahoo, I did it! MF: Blood, sweat, and tears? KL: Yes. MF: That’s a great thing. What did you do after graduation? Did you stay at St. Benedict’s? Tell us about your nursing career. KL: I did stay at St. Benedict’s. Like I said, they needed operating room nurses. I was so glad, because that’s what I wanted to do. I worked in the operating room at St. Benedict’s for a little over a year. Then I met my husband and we got married, and we moved up to Logan so he could finish his schooling. I worked in a nursing home for about eight months – Sunrise. My father-in-law actually had been the architect for that facility, so he helped me get a job there, because I couldn’t find a job in Logan, because at that time it was really quite small. So I worked in the nursing home there, and then my husband joined the military and we went back to New York. I had two babies, and I didn’t work for about five years while my kids were little. Then, when we came back here, I actually applied with Gail at St. Benedict’s. We wanted to work part time – we wanted to take a shift – I said, let me work three days, and you work four, and alternate. They wouldn’t let us do that. But it was the same supervisor we had worked for before. So Dr. Nellis, 11 Noel Nellis, happened to be in my ward, and he helped me get a job at McKay in the operating room. And that’s where I’ve been until four years ago when I retired. I went from the operating room at the McKay to the surgical center at the McKay. I helped open the surgical center, and worked there for twenty-one years. I retired four years ago from there. MF: Was Virginia Tanner there? KL: Yes, she was. MF: She’s one of our Dee nurses – she was a supervisor? KL: Yes, she was one of our supervisors – wonderful lady. And like I said, Darlene and I worked together for a lot of years. We went from the operating room to the surgical center together. And Judy – I worked with Judy for a little bit, because she worked with Dr. McMaster’s, and I scrubbed for McMaster. She was his assistant, so that was fun. MF: Were there any questions you wanted to ask? MJ: I was wondering if you were there when the shooting happened. KL: Yes, I was. MJ: Were you a student there, or was it when you were working? KL: I was a student. We were at one of our barbecues, and the student who did the shooting was a medical records student. I really do not know the circumstances, but they had asked her to leave the program. She was very, very angry with Sister Cassian. She came down into the backyard of the nursing home with a gun, and was actually gunning for Sister Cassian, but – the name of the little gal – was a couple of years younger than I was, that actually got shot. 12 MF: Was it Cafarelli? KL: Cafarelli, yes, that’s right. She laid out on that lawn for quite some time, in a hostage kind of situation, and Gail and I had happened to be kind of in the background and saw the shooting. I can remember we both kind of ran for one of these trees. The tree was about that big around (maybe a foot wide), and we were both trying to hide behind that tree. We finally went upstairs to the dorm, and watched the whole thing from the dorm, but that was scary, really, really scary. I think she laid out there for over an hour or more while somebody tried to talk – what was her name? Des. To put the gun away. She had shot her through the abdomen, so she had to have surgery. That was definitely one to remember. MF: Well, thanks for letting us come and visit with you; we appreciate it. KL: It was a good experience. MF: I’m sure with your training, you could do anything in the hospital and not be uncomfortable, because you were trained so well. That clinical work – I think that makes all the difference. KL: You know, and talking about; we learned to scrub and stuff in the operating room, which was wonderful for me, but even those who chose not to work in that environment, it gives you that sterile technique, and I have been with my husband; my husband’s had a couple of surgeries and stuff, and sitting on the floor and watching some of those young nurses; their sterile technique sucks – I’m sorry. They don’t have any sense of what’s – it’s sad to me that there isn’t that kind of training any more. 13 MF: They don’t have that where it’s just – get to know the whole hospital and what’s expected and how to make it work. KL: Well, and that’s three years where that’s all we did, was nursing; nothing else. MF: True, and that’s probably what made the difference; you didn’t have to worry about English, didn’t get your Shakespeare training. KL: Nope, none of that. MF: All about nursing. Well, thank you for letting us come. KL: Thank you.