Oral History Program Carol Jeppson Interviewed by Marci Farr 20 October 2010 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Carol Jeppson Interviewed by Marci Farr 20 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: Carol Jeppson, an oral history by Marci Farr, 20 October 2010, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Carol Jeppson Graduation Photo Class of 1960 Carol Jeppson October 20, 2010 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Carol Jeppson, conducted by Marci Farr and Sarah Langsdon, on October 20, 2010. In this interview, Carol discusses her recollections and experiences with the St. Benedict’s School of Nursing. MF: This is Marci Farr. We are interviewing Carol Jeppson. She graduated from St. Benedict’s School of Nursing in 1960. It is October 20, 2010. We are interviewing her at her home in West Bountiful, Utah. So Carol, just start out by telling us a little bit about where you grew up, about your family, and where you attended school. CJ: I was born in Salt Lake City December 29, 1937 at Holy Cross Hospital. I was front breached so my mother had a hard time. I was the first child. We lived in Salt Lake in two different houses until I was seven and a half and then we moved to Bountiful. I went to my kindergarten and first grade in Salt Lake and then Bountiful Stoker School here from second grade to the sixth grade. The old South Davis Junior High which is now Bountiful High is where I went to junior high. Bountiful High School at that time was a two year high school. There was no Woods Cross High School, there was no Viewmont High School like we have now and it was a two year high school. So when bussing wasn’t the thing like it was in the south, they bussed us to Davis. We had to go on number thirty-eight to Davis every day and back. I graduated from Davis High School, I went two years there. I graduated in 1956. My father was a salesman and my mother died when I was eight years old just after we had moved to Bountiful. It was the month of my eighth birthday. 2 Pretty soon two or three people helped us out and then my dad went and talked to his brother’s wife, Harvey and Elva Jeppson. They came and moved in with us in Bountiful and took care of us kids. There were three children, my brother Chuck and my brother Steve, three years apart. That worked out. Dad remarried of almost two years of dating and trying to find a wife that would go with three kids, a ready-made family. There was a man by the name of Russell Cheney and he knew dad and he knew my mother Ilene in California and got them together. She came and got acquainted with us, Dad asked us if we would like to have a new mother since our mother had to go to Heavenly Father, he wanted to know. We said, “Oh yes!” I really needed a mother. I was young and it was almost time for the menstrual time and everything else. I really needed a mother. She was a school teacher; her name was Ilene Persulea McQue, of course, when she married dad it was Jeppson. She came to live with us. She used to talk to the children and say, “You people.” I would say, “Mom we are not people, we are kids.” That kind of helped break the ice. When I got ready to go into MIA with the young people at the church from twelve to eighteen, the Mutual Improvement Association for young women, I needed my mother Ilene to go because it was important. She said, “You know Carol, I am not your real mother.” I said, “Well I need a mother and you are the only one I have!” She just laughed and it kind of helped break the ice with us a little bit. Pretty soon dad— after she began to have children, she had three boys and a girl, Lawrence, Dayne, Wayne, and Alta. I helped them—we all went on missions. I went to Peru South America in ’64 to ’66. Lawrence, Dayne, Wayne, and Alta all went on 3 missions. Chuck and Steve did not. My brother Chuck is inactive in the church but my brother Steve went on some Stake missions and then went into the service. He was a Marine during the time of the Cuban crisis. He was one of the ones going in the boats around Cuba there. He went to Europe and various places as a Marine. He died when he was sixty years old from a heart attack. He had the heart attack, went off into the lake, and drowned. I married in 1966 when I got home from Peru. It was the wrong fella. I was separated for part of that but I was married for about fifteen months. We were married in the Salt Lake Temple and I tried really hard to reconcile but I thought, “I better reconcile because we have this special marriage.” It was a domestic violence situation and I told him, “If he ever laid hands on me again that was the end of the marriage.” Seven weeks later he did almost put me in the hospital so I decided that was enough of that. He went to jail and I moved out and lived a life of my own. I enjoyed the freedom. It was the first time in my life that I ever felt like I had lost my freedom when I got married. You change your name and everything else, I thought, “Gee, what has happened here? Is this supposed to be like this?” He had been a convert to the church and had a lot of good qualities but he had a very violent temper and I couldn’t live with that. On August 3, 1967 we were divorced and I went to the universities and colleges and stuff and finally he kept trying to reconcile. I didn’t want to and my father was very concerned because he didn’t feel like he would change from that behavior. I didn’t either so I went to Colorado and got my bachelor’s and master’s in elementary, bilingual education and a minor in science. They didn’t 4 have a bachelor of arts or a bachelor of nurses at that time over there at Adams State. I got my bachelor of arts and went into teaching Spanish to kids so I taught Spanish to children in Colorado for four and a half years and one year in Utah. I came back to Utah after my father died in 1973. I really enjoyed teaching Spanish to children and adults. It was just a lot of fun. I used a lot of games and dances and songs. I taught myself the guitar. I had learned the language really quite well in Peru. I used to tell them—I had to mention to the community that I was a bona fide to do it because it was forty-three percent Spanish surnamed. They were having a lot of problems at the time and they demanded to have Spanish in the elementary school. So I got out of college that time and I said, “Well my name isn’t Gonzalez or Martinez or Hernandez; I haven’t got black hair or brown skin or light skin or anything else but I speak, read, and write and understand Spanish. And I can teach it because I spent two years in Peru South America and I traveled to Mexico.” During my time teaching Spanish I traveled to Mexico several times and got current stuff and taught that. At that time I was really, really happy about it. I got back in Utah and bilingual education; they were trying to do away with that. I taught bilingual education in Utah in the Jordan School District for about a year. Then I decided to go back into nursing. I came to Bountiful; my family was all here anyway. I still have two brothers in West Bountiful and my sister is up in Bountiful. I decided to go back into nursing. I went in to coronary care/intensive care nursing at South Davis Community Hospital it was at the time, the little hospital here in Bountiful. Then I went up to the new Lakeview when they got it all built and went 5 into that. After my father died I went back to school and I got my bachelor’s in 1970 and my master’s in 1972 in Colorado. I came back and worked in nursing for some time. I loved care of the elderly and I went into care centers and started going into care centers because I thought, “Gee, I have always enjoyed that.” When I have been taking care of patients I was always concerned about the seniors for some reason. I guess because I had lost my parents. My mom Ilene was getting older. Not everybody in this world will have two mothers but I had two mothers and they were really neat mothers. MF: So why did you decide to become a nurse? CJ: My mother’s sister Edna, that was my biological mother, was a licensed practical nurse. I really enjoyed her and she looked after me after my mother died. I said, “I think I want to become a nurse.” She said, “Well if you go into nursing, don’t do like I do and stop with the LPN. The licensed practical nurse is great.” She got active in the state politics and everything to get them licensed with her friends but she said, “Go on and be a registered nurse.” So I started in the fall of 1956 with St. Mark’s Hospital School of Nursing. By the way they always said, “St. Benedict’s Hospital School of Nursing,” because these were hospital-based schools of nursing. At that time they were three year programs. We went all the year round so it was just as good as a four year program because the university students always got summers off a lot of the times. We went all the year round. St. Mark’s began to have a lot of problems. The first year went just great but the second year they got a new director in and she didn’t like Mormons and she didn’t like blacks. We had two blacks in the senior class and a lot of us were 6 LDS. It seems silly to say but that was the situation. She was Catholic and it was Salt Lake City. She probably had some unhappy experiences. Her husband had been a member of the church too but she was having us work ten days on and four days off. We had to go to classes during our times that we were working and on our days off and we began to get sick. A lot of us were having problems. We began to discuss with each other what we ought to do about it. I would have been president of the freshman class. By the time the summer came of my junior year—junior and senior they called us—I knew I had to leave the hospital. They were kicking kids out of my class and I could see the writing on the wall. They had a big meeting with me and were nasty. I said, “You people are very biased.” We didn’t have words like ethnic and racist and all that. All the good instructors they removed and they put in these instructors who thought like the director did. It was really an unhappy situation. I had my psychiatric training at that time and I was really glad because it was a very emotional upset for me. So I left and transferred to St. Benedict’s. They said they would transfer my credits, they didn’t transfer them for six months. My father went down and said, “If you don’t transfer the credits I will get an attorney and you will go to court.” They quickly transferred my credits and Sister Berno and Sister Giovanni and the nuns at St. Benedict’s checked into everything I said, every claim I made, and they realized that what I had said was true. They accepted me into St. Benedict’s Hospital School of Nursing in January of 1959 and started me out on the floors. They gave me a uniform and everything and away I went. I worked there in the school, with classes of course, and we had marvelous obstetrical 7 nursing school training from Sister Mercy. Sister Jobe in orthopedics and Peg Daneen on the third floor surgical, Sister Mary Gerald was on medical floor and she was a strict nurse. Her and Sister Boniface in the dietary were quite strict nun nurses. Being LDS I hadn’t been around Catholic nuns or anything. The priests would come to give communion so I had a lot of things to learn about protocol from going to a Catholic nursing school. I really worked hard with that. Sister Mary Gerald got after me one day and she said, “Miss Jeppson, why do you have so much interest in psychiatric patients.” I said, “I guess it is because I want to go into that field Sister Mary Gerald.” She didn’t have an answer for that. Those nuns were so strict. You had to have your waste baskets all emptied. You had to have the room straightened up, the beds with the patients in them straightened up. There was none of this fooling around or sloppy sloppy at all with the Catholic nuns. They gave me a marvelous education in that and in how to present myself as a good nurse. I used to work extra. I did in Salt Lake at St. Mark’s—the old St. Mark’s which is close to Bountiful here—as well as St. Benedict’s. I worked extra so that we could earn funds. We used to get a stipend but then we got up to our senior year and they cut the stipends. We had to work extra. One day in surgery I had worked—I was first scrub—from seven until eleven. I was supposed to get off at eleven. The instructor or students didn’t let me off. So I didn’t get off until two that day. At three to five I was supposed to do preparations for the surgeries and so forth. I did that. Then there were surgeries in the evening and I didn’t get home until one o’clock in the morning. I was just 8 dead. I hadn’t gotten off like I should have. The next morning I just couldn’t go. I called Sister Berno, the director of students, and said, “Sister Berno,” I told her what the whole situation was, “I can’t get out of bed. I am really tired.” So she called up and she said, “Miss Jeppson will not be in today.” I just love Sister Berno and Sister Giovanni. They were really student oriented. They were very professional nurses. At that time we wore white uniforms. At St. Mark’s I had the old type of uniform that had an apron and all this kind of stuff. St. Benedict’s had a white uniform for the students and the cap. I love St. Benedict’s cap. I used to keep it on with a paperclip. They never used to like that. They wanted us to have a little thing under there but the little comb wouldn’t stay so I just used a paperclip. That did it. I thoroughly enjoyed the students and enjoyed the community of Ogden. While I was waiting my six months while I was up there I worked in the psychiatry of St. Benedict’s Hospital there. It was called neurology and I worked in psychiatric nursing more as a tech or whatever because I wasn’t a student and I wasn’t a registered nurse. I did fine and that is when they did shock treatments. That is when they did insulin coma therapy. Sometimes on the severe patients that were severely depressed and so forth they couldn’t get them out of it. They would give them insulin coma therapy and terminate it with shock. To me it was a rather crude thing but I thought, “This is what they are doing these days, I guess I had better go along with it and see what I have to do and take care of business there and give medicines.” Things have changed, of course, over the course of things. However, psychiatry still has a whole lot of problems. 9 MF: It does. CJ: Social Services was clear out of bounds. I worked clear out at the Utah State Hospital as a registered nurse and that was bad news down there. MF: That would be hard. Who was your roommate? Did you have a roommate when you were at St. Benedict’s? CJ: Greigo was one. A lot of times I was by myself. The thing in nursing school at that time—you couldn’t be married and go to school. Some of them got married secretly and still went to school. I don’t remember any others. MF: So that was Frances? CJ: Frances Greigo. I don’t remember all of them. I really enjoyed the nursing students that I graduated with in 1960. I should have graduated in 1959, you see, but because of the delay and so forth and the rebelliousness of the old school—St. Mark’s went completely out of it before St. Benedict’s did I think. I think it was in the 60’s or 70’s they sent me a note that St. Benedict’s Hospital School of Nursing was going to close. I thought, “Gee, that is sad.” I love 3000 Polk Avenue. We just loved it up there. It was close to the mountains and we could hike up in the mountains. We could play softball and do all kinds of things. It was a really beautiful setting up there. One time I was late coming in at night and there was a night supervisor going under. We went under the tunnel. I got past the desk up there—I don’t know what she was doing but I got past the desk. I was down under the tunnel and there was Sister Mary Margaret, the night supervisor, coming the other way. She said, “Good evening Miss Jeppson.” I said, “Good evening, Sister.” And that was all because I was late. I was a good 10 student and didn’t get into trouble and stuff like that. I did well—when I passed my state board examinations in 1960 (in the summer of 1960) I went to the state capitol. We went into the House of Representatives to take our boards. We had two days and we had five different fields that we had to take them in to become a registered nurse. There was Miss Vote who was the director of nursing at the St. Mark’s Hospital. She said, “Miss Jeppson, what are you doing here?” I said, “Miss Vote, I have come to take my state board examinations from St. Benedict’s Hospital School of Nursing.” She didn’t say another word. I took my boards, passed them with flying colors. We had to have a 400 at that time, a base of 400 up to 700 and mine were all in the fives and sixes and on just missed 700 or something like that. I was pretty adequate. Between the two schools I got an excellent nursing education. Like I said, I had already had psychiatry. The obstetrics was great. We also went to the children’s hospital in Denver for our pediatrics which was marvelous. I got a D on my first test and I thought, “What is the matter here?” Come to find out that the instructor really hated students because some darn student had stolen her man. I thought, “Oh boy I guess I am going to have to really study.” I passed it really, really well, especially on the boards. It was the last affiliation I had before I took my boards. We also went to the tuberculosis sanitarium in Ogden to get our communicable disease nursing. Being hospital based we had really a lot of good experience with a lot of different places for the students. When I came later on in the 70’s—I worked and took care of the elderly in the care centers. I was at Hill Haven and the old Temple Gardens in Bonneville and Salt Lake and various 11 other places working because I just loved it. There are a lot of problems there but I still loved it and I still went with it. It got to be 1980 and we moved into this home here. Arlene and I have been roommates for a long time. She is a really good gal. She was working for the state of Utah and we are good LDS women and have very beneficial to this area. I play the piano quite well, I play for a band now every Friday in senior centers. I accompanied a Catholic friend of mine at St. Benedict’s who sang the Ave Maria for Sister Mary Margaret who was administrator—M1 they called her. I thought that was quite interesting that a Catholic would sing Ave Maria and the pianist was a Mormon. It got to be 1980 and things were changing in nursing really fast and they were trying to do away with licensed practical nursing, nursing students, certification, licensing, closed down the schools. There were eight hundred schools in the country. This stuff starting coming across my desk. I went down to Richfield. I got a job and went down to Richfield and was an instructor and a year later I was the director down there. I had to get the school all certified and everything with the state. Peterson from the state board of nursing came down to the graduation. It was her current program that was new in the state. That proved to be ominous because later on when the politics got really bad we were on totally opposite poles. They made me a department head director down there and I was there four and a half years. My friend Jean Smith out in the Uintah Basin area vocational center was leaving. She was a new diabetic and had real problems with her legs and had to leave right in the middle of the year. Richfield didn’t like that but I went to the Uintah Basin in the middle of the year. I was 12 there for four and a half years. While I was there all of a sudden this entry level into nursing went full blown. I was a registered nurse and had a bachelor’s and master’s although they weren’t in nursing they needed me really badly in these positions. That is what I did and I took a lot of extra things. I got involved in the politics and boy that was another whole experience that I could go on but maybe you have more questions. MF: Do you remember any of your instructors that weren’t the Sisters? Was Jean Morton still there at that time? CJ: I don’t remember that name. The nuns taught us on the floors really well, very thoroughly—Sister Mary Gerald, Sister Jobe in orthopedics, Sister Mercy in obstetrics and all the parts of obstetrics. I don’t remember—oh, Mrs. Ekins who was later something else—she got her doctorate and was in… MF: Was it Verla Ekins? CJ: Yes, Verla Ekins. She was one of the instructors there. We had for medical ethics a priest teach us. Some of us used to read our Book of Mormon in our medical ethics class. Silly students, silly kids, immature. MF: Who were some of the doctors? CJ: Doctor Swindler. I don’t know…that is a long time ago. We had really good doctors. They were very conscientious. It was a teaching hospital—we had one Doctor McQuarrie who was the worst I have ever run into in my whole career. We had doctors that taught interns there. We had interns there as well as students. I don’t remember any of the other doctors. 13 MF: Which rotation when you were at the hospital do you think was your favorite? You talked about psych. CJ: I liked psych and I liked obstetrics. When I got out as a registered nurse I got a reciprocity, we called at that time, went to Colorado Springs and worked at Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs. Boy that was a fun place for a young nurse. The Air Force Base was right next door and Peterson Field up the way, the Air Force Academy and there was Fort Carson. You could have all kinds of guys around there. It was a lot of fun. MF: Which one was your least favorite as far as your rotations? CJ: I didn’t like dietary. Sister Boniface and I had a set to and I knew it was my fault so I went in and apologized. She got all tearful and I got all tearful, we forgave each other and I said, “You are really a nice lady. You do a good job with the students and I appreciate that because I am sure it will help out with the board exams.” But I didn’t really like it. Sister Mercy I really liked a lot. I learned a lot from Sister Mary Gerald on medical. And Peg Daneen wasn’t a nun or anything, she was a regular registered nurse up on surgical and she taught me a lot too. MF: I am sure you can see the difference between St. Mark’s and St. Benedict’s as far as how they treated you, the religion aspect didn’t matter and the training— you were there to be trained as a nurse. It didn’t have any effect as far as that. It was probably nice to have that respect. CJ: Although they wouldn’t have liked to have known this, I went on Mormon missions. In 1990 and 1991 I went to the Frankfurt, Germany temple mission for the church. They came from Spain and I did translating and a lot of things there. 14 When I went as a medical welfare missionary to Chile and Argentina so I wasn’t too awful far from Vina del Mar where the miners—they got thirty-three miners out from a deep hole there in the earth. I think that is great because Chile is a beautiful country. It is just marvelous. It goes all the way down south America, the coast there. Because I was a medical welfare missionary, after eleven months they needed help over in Argentina and I spoke Spanish very fluently by then and had an excellent accent. Of course, I found out that in Argentina it was a little different then Chile. They have a lot of Europeans over there, a lot of people from the Second World War and Germany and various things. It was a marvelous experience there. I was a medical welfare missionary there and I was working with Catholics. I don’t know what the nuns would have liked that. We had a lot of good experience. We talked with Catholic nuns down there and the priests. I could speak with them and we taught them a little bit about what the church was about. They were very nice and very courteous. MF: What do you think was your greatest challenge while you were in nurses’ training? CJ: Getting out of St. Mark’s. That first year was great. Like I said, we had really good humble instructors that were religious instructors. One was a Mormon and one was a Protestant. They both worked really well together. They just did a really good job with the students. When we got into our junior year and this change over of instructors—I can remember their names still. They are probably dead by now but it was really hard working with people that couldn’t—as a young person, as a teenager and in your twenties, a lot of times religion is an important 15 thing to you. We would talk about things—we would talk with the people that were members and ones that weren’t. We would talk about life and all kinds of facets like that so it was really great. The bad experience with this director and her instructors was the worst part of it. MF: So tell us about the capping ceremony. Do you remember your capping ceremony? CJ: Yes. I was capped at the St. Mark’s cathedral in Salt Lake. I was a freshman president. I got a scholarship of one hundred dollars at capping. It was April 12, 1957. MF: Tell us about graduation at St. Joseph’s. CJ: St. Joseph’s? MF: The cathedral in Ogden. CJ: Oh yes. I couldn’t remember that, where it was for sure. It was very nice. There were people there and they gave us a whole bouquet of long stem red roses. Like I said, we had to genuflect at the Archbishop there. We got through that okay. He smiled at me and I smiled at him. It was very, very nice. These things were very spiritual. It was spiritual at St. Mark’s Cathedral as well. It was a very good year. Our first year at St. Mark’s we also went to Westminster College. We had a year at Westminster College as well as all of our nursing classes and experience in the hospital. At St. Benedict’s when the students got finished with their freshman year they went on to charge on the night shift. You see, there was a nursing shortage at the time. They didn’t have enough nurses to cover all the bases. I have 16 worked through a lot of nursing shortages ever since then. This is why I didn’t want to have LPN’s done away with. Boy, I went all over the country from the Uintah Basin. Keith Burquist, my administrator, let me go all over the country to Chicago and Washington D.C. and Kansas City to fight for LPN’s. The main thing that got—there was a lot of fallout from that right here in Utah. Anne Peterson lost her job—her boss lost his job, the department head lost his job, there was a covertly man, Dave North I think was his name, that was helping us from the Board of Regents. That apparently was a no-no. His boss, who was a woman, fired him. He was a PhD—when she found out that he had been helping us with all the political things and the know-how that we needed to have. He went down to Provo for a year and had a bad experience and committed suicide. I thought, “My gosh we have got House Bill 180 through our legislature?” We had a lot of coalition when Weber State College and vocational education— everybody helping us with all this thing. We got House Bill 180 passed that stopped the state board of nursing from doing away with practical nursing programs and licensed practical nursing in the state of Utah. It happened all over the whole country. We were involved all over the whole country with light minded nurses who felt the same way. It was quite an experience. I was glad that I did it. One time I was supposed to go back to the Basin. I had been on a weekend. This big mountain just came down and closed the roads. I called my boss up and I said, “Keith, I can’t get home to the Basin. Can I stay down a week and lobby for my bill.” He said, “Yes.” Boy, did I have fun with that. Delma 17 Stuart from the Licensed Practical Nursing Association of Utah helped me with that. Doctor Karen Beaver and Doctor Gerry Hansen of Weber State College helped with that. They were my buddies. The Department head Stringham helped with that and Doctor Butterfield—we went in meetings all over. They wanted to know for sure if what everything I was saying was true. In fact, it got in the legislature—I probably shouldn’t say this but one of them asked me, he said, “Do you have a temple recommend?” I said, “Yes I do.” That is all he asked. They are not supposed to ask that either. It was quite an experience because I had no background whatsoever in school, my back experience, or anything else to know what to do to try to get a bill passed the legislature, both houses. Jimmy Ardelich helped me with it and Glade Sourds from Vernal helped with it, he was on the reals committee. Boy, thank heavens I had key people because it vastly passed the House of Representatives. It was just maybe two or three votes that were against it. Twenty-seven out of twenty-nine senators passed it so you can see how important it was. They could see that we had nursing shortages. There are a lot of places that registered nurses don’t want to work—care of the handicapped, care of the elderly, a lot of fields where nurses work that registered nurses don’t want to. You have got to have help there. So LPN’s filled a lot of slots. I couldn’t understand why some of my colleagues just couldn’t go on with that. I got every reason I possibly could. I had to go for a subcommittee in the state capitol there. There was Anne Peterson, the executive secretary for the board of nursing. My colleagues and coalition said, “Carol you have got to go up there and sit and tell them your side.” I said, “Man she gives me my license.” 18 They said, “Carol you have got to do it.” So I did. I went up and sat down right by her. We were on totally opposite poles like I said. I pulled out the American Nurses Association material with a picture of the current president and I said, “This is what American Nurses Association wants to do. You decide. I have already decided but you decide.” So they listened and I told them everything that I could think of. It came right out of committee, went right onto the floor, it was just great. I never had such a marvelous experience in my whole life. MF: So when did you retire? CJ: I was still working when I was sixty-nine part time. I was taking care of my uncle in Salt Lake. I had a really bad accident that almost took my life. It was in Salt Lake up on seventh east right there by the—where they used to have the trains but they made it into a bunch of stores and stuff. I can’t think of what it is called right now. But anyway… MF: Trolley Square. CJ: Trolley Square, yes that is it. I was turning left, there were three lanes to go across so I got across two of them and there was a car speeding down the last lane, didn’t see me, and we collided. We both went to LDS hospital and spent five hours up there. It was rather miserable. It is not fun being a patient. I have been in two or three accidents that have been pretty severe. I am very glad that my colleagues and the doctors are there and take care of business. It is great to be the patient and they know you are a registered nurse so they are right on their toes. MF: That is right. Well we appreciate you letting us come to visit with you.