Oral History Program Marjorie Miller Kolander and Katherine Koompin Pavesic Interviewed by Marci Farr 3 October 2010 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Marjorie Miller Kolander and Katherine Koompin Pavesic Interviewed by Marci Farr 3 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: Marjorie Miller Kolander and Katherine Koompin Pavesic, an oral history by Marci Farr, 3 October 2010, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Marjorie Miller Kolander Graduation Photo Class of 1962 Marjorie Miller Kolander October 3, 2010 Katherine Koompin Pavesic Graduation Photo Class of 1962 Katherine Koompin Pavesic October 3, 2010 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Marjorie Miller Kolander and Katherine Koompin Pavesic, conducted by Marci Farr and Sarah Langsdon, on October 3, 2010. In this interview, Marjorie and Katherine discuss their recollections and experiences with the St. Benedict’s School of Nursing. MF: This is Marci Farr. We’re interviewing Marjorie Kolander and Katherine Pavesic. They graduated from St. Benedict’s School of Nursing in 1962. It’s October 3, 2010, and we’re interviewing them in Portland, Oregon. We’re just going to start out and have each of you just tell us a little bit about your families, where you grew up, and also where you attended school. KP: I grew up in eastern Idaho on a farm, and went to high school in Aberdeen, which is a small farm community near Pocatello, which is one of Idaho’s cities. What is the makeup of my family? I have three daughters, all over the age of forty and one step-granddaughter. My children; one lives here with her husband, and two live in California. They all went to school in Idaho; we lived in Idaho for almost thirty years as a family. MF: That’s good. Marge? MK: I grew up in the valley in Eden, Utah, a little tiny town. I went to grade school through the ninth grade up in Huntsville and from there went to Weber High School. I think we had thirty-five kids in our class through first through ninth grade, and five hundred and fifteen in our graduating class, so that was a shock. I have a sister and two brothers, and after high school I went into nursing at St. Benedict’s. Worked there for a few years, joined the Air Force on a dare; met my 2 husband in the Air Force, got married, had three kids back in Portland where he’s from. Still here. My son is forty-three, forty-four; I don’t know. Oldest daughter is forty, the youngest is thirty-nine. Five grandkids. MF: That’s a good thing. So you’re back to Portland. MK: Back to Portland. MF: That’s good. Tell us a little bit about your decision to become a nurse. Was there any reason or anything that happened in your life that made you decide? KP: Well, in high school all my friends were going away to the University of Idaho. I came from a very, very poor family. We did not have the resources to do that. Literally, I think the decision for nursing was a joint one between me and my parents. That was what we could afford. So that’s what we did; that had a lot to do with it. Like you, somebody dared me to go, and we signed up together. She backed out, so I went by myself. MF: A great decision, though. KP: A good decision for me, yes, definitely. MF: Marjorie, why did you decide? MK: When I was in the fifth and sixth grade, I had rheumatic fever quite a bit, and I was in the hospital a lot, and I thought those Dee student nurses looked so cute in their uniforms. Student nurses were just wonderful. So I think it was in the back of my mind. Got out of high school and it was just automatic; I didn’t think about it. That was just it. MF: That was the decision. So why St. Benedict’s? Was it because it was close, or economical? You said economic reasons. 3 KP: Although my family weren’t practicing Catholics, my aunts and uncles all made sure I was raised in the Catholic church. My one cousin had gone to nurses’ training at Gonzaga, which was the other closest of the two Catholic schools. So I decided I would go to the other one. MF: There you go; just because. KP: I liked her, and she was my favorite cousin, but… MF: Put some diversity in there. KP: Yeah – didn’t want to have to live up to her standards. MF: That’s funny. So Marjorie, why did you decide? MK: Well, I think because one of the doctors there, his parents lived right next to us. Dr. Moncliff was his name. He just told me that he thought St. Benedict’s was a really good program, and he recommended that. MF: That’s good. Because Weber had the two-year program. MK: Yes; and he thought the nurses turned out a little bit better from St. Benedict’s. That’s what he told me. MF: There you go. Probably because of the three-year program. MK: And we learned hands-on. We didn’t just book-learn. KP: And definitely, for me, that’s a great way to learn. As a result of that, I actually wound up with a Master’s degree in adult education, simply because I believe that style of learning works. MF: Absolutely; when you have your clinical training where it’s every day that you practice what you’re learning in class. That does make a difference. So was this your first time away from home, both of you? What was that like? 4 KP: Let’s see. I went to a parochial school for two years away from home, but not too far; thirty miles. In those days thirty miles was a long way, but otherwise, yes. MF: What were your impressions when you first made it to training? Was it your first time away from home? MK: First time away from home, but it was only a half hour. MF: So you were okay? MK: Wasn’t like it was the end of the earth. MF: What were your impressions, both of you? MK: I don’t know – do I remember? KP: I don’t know if they gave you a chance to get first impressions. We just went right to work. I think within like six weeks. MK: I think you had six weeks, and within six weeks they had us on the floor doing what they called pm care; fresh water, rubbing backs, straighten up beds. I think it was at six weeks, wasn’t it, they started us on that? KP: Yes. MK: So they didn’t give us too much time. MF: Not too much time to feel sorry for yourself and be sad and homesick. KP: Well, even though I lived quite a little ways away, I had a car, so I was able to go home whenever we had a little time off. There was another student, Jackie Blanco, that lived pretty close to where I did, so we would travel back and forth quite a bit. MF: That would be nice, to be able to get back up there. Who were your roommates in training? 5 MK: Oh, a bunch of them. I think I started out with Rosie Richards; Marge Lepley for a while, Annie Taylor for a while, Arnio Rivera. I think Annie was my roommate the most. Because when you go on affiliations, different ones go at different times, you kind of move around. So I think that was the ones during training. MF: And who was yours? KP: Mine was Sherrie Torman, for quite a while. She lived in Ogden, so pretty much I had the room to myself. She didn’t stay at the dorm very much. MF: So she was able to go home? KP: Yes, most of the time. Then Pamela Bertagnolli, who is the one nurse that I have stayed in touch with, and she actually is the godmother to my oldest daughter. Then Erma Whitehead; sometimes I just stayed in her room with her, ‘cause her roommate left really early; I can’t remember who it was. But then Erma left early as well. I think that’s all the roommates I had at St. Benedict’s. MF: Did you get along with your roommates? Any stories about your roommates? MK: I think so. KP: Since Sherrie wasn’t there, we did not get along, but we weren’t close friends. I was really close to Erma, and then of course, Pam. MF: That’s good. Tell us about some of your other classmates that you remember. Was there anything you remember about the other classmates you went to school with? MK: During school? MF: Yes, during nurses’ training. 6 MK: Annie Taylor always had a cold nose. Her nose was always wet, sweaty; I always knew she was healthy if her nose was sweating. Other than that… when we were at Children’s in Denver, Willy – Joyce Willmore – used to go up on the roof of the nurses’ home and holler like coyotes. She’d be up there like coyotes in the middle of the night. Verla Miles, crawling in on her hands and knees past the switchboard because she was late coming in and getting caught by Sister Marguerite, and Kathy was with her. What else do we remember? SL: What were you out doing? KP: Um… what were we doing? MK: I don’t know. KP: In those days, I think you were allowed to drink and drive – for some reason we were able to do that. We were out partying. They did have a curfew – you have that question later – but we had missed it, and if you got caught, it was not good. Fortunately, we were smart enough to not sign out. So we thought, okay, if we sneak in, no one will ever know we were gone. You always had to come in the front door of the hospital, down the hall; then there was an elevator pretty close to the front desk; then you go down to the basement to take the tunnel over to the dorm and back up. The lady at the switchboard, the desk there, was responsible for making us sign in. So we just got on our knees on the front steps, crawled in front of the desk, got to the elevator; reached up, pushed the button, and it opened, and there was the nun! SL: I know you were talking about you went up to the Hermitage a lot. 7 KP: That was just a group of about five or six of us. MK: I didn’t go there until after we graduated. KP: Yvonne, the one we were trying to talk into coming, she and I and Tony and Connie pretty much lived up there. We did live up there, actually, after we graduated. We got a little house up there, so we could just walk to and from the Hermitage. The guys that ran it were just really nice. They were like dads. They all knew who we were – well, they didn’t know we were too young to be drinking. You guys were telling this, and I had forgotten, but we were in a car wreck with my car, and they published our names and ages in the paper. MF: Busted! KP: Busted. MF: What do you remember first about the sisters, when you first came in contact with them? You had been at a school, so you probably were familiar with the sisters as far as their strictness. Tell us a little bit about what you thought. KP: Actually, the whole idea of ‘in-loco-parents’ was that they really did act as parents for us, and were as strict – not as strict as my parents, but pretty strict. So I think, for the most part, they did try and nurture us being away from home and being in their environment. Some were very, very sweet and very, very nice. There were nuns that I really adored and spent a lot of time talking to; there were others that I would go into the bathroom in order to avoid them, so I didn’t have to pass them in the hall. MF: Who were your favorites? Tell us about that. 8 KP: I was trying to think – I liked Sister Estelle; I liked Sister Giovanni. Who was the nun that got married? Sister Martha. She was my favorite. MK: Was she there when we were students? I think – didn’t she come after we graduated? KP: She was there when we were students. MK: Was she? KP: Yes, because she would talk a lot to me about my parents, because they weren’t married in the church, which was kind of cute, but it was important to her. For the most part, I think they did the best they could with the group that they had. MF: The group of girls. That’s true; I’m sure that would be quite a few girls to keep track of. KP: In my experience with Franciscan nuns, who were very staid and nun-like, these nuns were real people sometimes. Not all the time, but sometimes. MF: More of the human aspect. KP: Sometimes they played baseball with us; softball, on a softball team. They had great parties, out in the back, with barbecue outside. They tried really hard, I think. I don’t know – did anybody leave because they were really unhappy? MK: I don’t think so. KP: I think it was home situation, or grades, or some other thing. MF: Marj, what do you think? Who did you enjoy? MK: I think Sister Estelle was my favorite. Sister Mercy I really liked; Sister Venora, our chemistry teacher; I really liked her. She was very motherly. I didn’t have trouble with Sister Berno, and a lot of the girls did, but – in fact, I was accused of 9 being a spy for Sister Berno by one of our classmates, and I won’t go into saying who. Sister Berno used to want me to go down, like I told you, and play my flute for her all the time. KP: I didn’t know that, or I’d have never liked you. MK: I know – that’s why she said I was a spy. I was not. But I didn’t have any trouble with her, and I liked Sister Giovanni. Sister Giovanni was very nice. Sister Mary Gerald; I really liked her. They were good nuns, so it was good. MF: Seeing them out playing baseball probably helped so they seemed more real and human and approachable, I guess is what I’m trying to say. KP: Seeing them flying down a hill on a toboggan, with their habits flying, or driving up the mountain in their purple Jeep with polka dots. MF: We wish we had a picture of that. Wouldn’t that be great. KP: I don’t know that any of us would have had a picture. MF: So now we’ll be on the lookout. SL: We’ll have to look at the monastery. They have thousands and thousands of photos. KP: They had kind of a retreat where they went that was up in the mountains, and I don’t even know if we knew where it was. Did we ever go there? I can’t remember. MK: No. KP: But they did have time that they could escape from us for a while. Yes, we did go – oh, you didn’t go with us. We had a retreat up there, where you went and didn’t talk for the whole week or whatever. That was at their cabin. 10 MK: That was the Catholic girls. MF: The Catholic girls did that? Okay. That would be interesting. Tell us about your favorite classes. What were your favorite classes while you were in training? MK: I really liked Sister Estelle’s anatomy and physiology. I enjoyed that. And I think the OB/GYN, which I never went into later, I really enjoyed that. Other classes – gee, I don’t know. Dr. Swindler put the fear of God in me in the orthopedics class, he scared the heck out of us. But I think Sister Estelle’s classes I really liked the best. MF: Was Jeane Barker, Jeane Morton, was she still there? KP: That doesn’t sound familiar. MK: We had Verla Ekins, was the main – she was a graduate of St. Benedict’s. SL: She must have – Jeane left in ’58. MF: ’58, that’s right. MK: And we went in in ’59. KP: What was Wheeler’s first name? MK: Ruth Wheeler; she was a clinical instructor. She was very good. KP: She was very nice; she made it very easy. MK: And Rosemary Ferrel. KP: Rosemary Sullivan? MK: Yes. It was Ferrel, and then she got married. KP: She’s the one – she was our basketball coach and our softball coach, in addition to teaching some of the classes. 11 MF: So how long did you have classes? Were they six months, or was it a year? How long into your program? MK: We started out – the first six weeks was a full day of classes. Then, after six weeks, we did am/pm cares. That was our first nursing duties. Then, for a while we did split shifts. We would work in the morning; bed baths, and all that, then go to class the middle of the day; then we’d go back about dinner time and take care of people. So it was long days, and you had classes in between. KP: Then those of us kids who didn’t have a lot of money would also work extra on the weekends and stuff. MF: So you would get paid like a student aide? KP: Right, we would get extra money to support our cigarette habit. MF: Tell us about your classes; which ones did you enjoy? KP: Actually, I like classes, so I don’t know if I had any favorites or un-favorites. I did ask Dr. Swindler what the difference between a swindler and a chisler was. He never liked me much after that. I don’t know if I had any real favorite, but I did like anatomy, and I also liked our practicum; you know, the classes where we practiced on each other. Now they have these wonderful dummies; we just had old Mrs. Chase, who was like a slab. So we had to practice on each other to get the real feeling. MF: So how was that? Kind of intimidating at first, or was it okay because you knew it had to be done? 12 MK: I wouldn’t say it was intimidating. I remember the Levin tube. I was telling Kathy on Monday; I think I was the last one to get put down, and one of the first ones to do it. So you’re sitting there watching people puke, practicing Levins. KP: We did everything – enemas, we didn’t have to do enemas. MK: We just positioned. I think for enemas and catheterizations we just had to be in position. But we were covered up, and pretend. They were good at that point. MF: We’re fine, no demonstration needed. Tell us what you would do – you mentioned the Hermitage for a night off, if you had some time off after work. KP: I thought that was funnier when you said some time off. It’s like, if we got off work at midnight, we left and went somewhere – well, you didn’t. MK: I went to bed. I was a nerd. KP: So, some of us. MK: The wild Catholics. KP: As soon as we were off work, we would leave, even if we had to work at six a.m. MF: You would still go, just to get out. KP: Factor that in; you could easily work until midnight and be back to work by seven. Right? MK: Yes. KP: What were things to do? Eat out, drink out. There were places. It was close to the air force base, so there was lots of camaraderie there. Then one time the nuns – again, the Catholics got to do this – it was not a good experience, but they loaded us all in a bus and took us to Utah State. The Newman Club had a club on campus there, which are the Catholic boys. They thought it would be good if 13 they paired us up with some Catholic boys in the state. They were all just really nerdy. MF: So not a good idea? KP: No. We came home early – that was probably my first early night. MF: That’s a great thing. Tell us about your rotations, when you ended up in Colorado for Children’s Hospital at Denver. Did you have Hastings, or did you do Warm Springs? KP: Hastings. MF: Tell us a little bit about that. KP: Let’s see. Colorado, I was there with Tony and Yvonne. So I was there – I don’t know why they kept us together. You would have thought they would have split us up, but I went with those guys. Actually, it was kind of nice because we were there in early winter, before Christmas, and we would go to downtown Denver, where they had the ice-skating rink, and watch the kids ice skate and stuff. That truly was far away, like you couldn’t get home necessarily. MF: That’s true. So was that different, being that far away from home? KP: It was very different, and the school was much, much bigger. The dorm was huge. It seemed like there were several hundred students. So it was really big, and it was very impersonal, I found, anyway, compared to what we were used to. I don’t know that we ever got close to the faculty. It was pretty – our time there was short, so they didn’t have a lot of time to screw around. MF: That’s true. Probably had to get there, get your training, make sure you had your hours and everything. 14 KP: Then we went from there to Hastings, which was really scarey. I mean, after seeing the movies that they always showed about state hospitals. This was what, a fifteen hundred bed state mental hospital? MK: Yes. It was huge. KP: Again, I don’t know that we got close to the faculty, but being from Idaho and knowing what cold is like – you don’t know what cold is like. MF: Oh, I’m sure, in Nebraska. KP: It was snow covered and flat. It looked like you could flip a dime and it would roll as far as you could see. Connie and I drew mountains on the windows, and we used to sing “When It’s Springtime in the Rockies”. It was so flat that they didn’t have to lock the doors of the facility. They would trim the trees up, and if the patients left, you could see them run for however far, and they would just drive out and get them and bring them back. MF: That would probably be such an interesting – such a different training, I mean as far as the psychiatric, to be able to have that full time and be able to see it for so many months. Is there anything you remember from that as scary experiences? KP: I remember there was a guy named Orly Powell; this guy is burned into my mind. He had no teeth, and he had the biggest mouth I’ve ever seen. Skinny little guy; weighed about ninety pounds. In those days you hadn’t heard about anorexia or bulimia. This guy was definitely a bulimic, but they called him a compulsive eater. He would take sandwiches; handsful of sandwiches, and put them in his mouth and eat them, and then go and regurgitate it. So they were trying to cure him of this. 15 First they put him in the kitchen, to work in the kitchen help. They thought if they put him with the food all the time, that he would – you know. So he would just eat it right out of the big basins that they would go around and clean up with. He would just eat that, and then go throw up. So then the trick was to block the door so he couldn’t go to the bathroom. Then he would just throw up on the floor. Next they put him in a padded room with nothing, and they looked in, and he was eating his socks. So I don’t know what ever happened to this fellow, but I just thought, you know, in this day and age we talk about bulimia and anorexia. It’s nothing like what this guy was going through. MF: It’s probably one of those things you just don’t talk about, so there was just no way to even help him. KP: We would send him to other units, other divisions of the facility for their parties and stuff; we’d get these phone calls – “Orly’s over here, and he’s eaten all of the food that we had for the party.” That I remember. And my case study was a guy that thought he was Charlie Starkweather, the serial killer that went through the Midwest. So that was pretty scary – he was very scary. MF: That would make you nervous, because you just have no idea. That’s probably the thing, is that there was no way to know what their reactions were going to be. Marj, do you remember anything from that time? MK: Well, as I told you about Denver, I was there in the springtime; beautiful time for Denver, and Willy going up on the roof howling like a coyote at night. I was there with Joyce, and Elaine, and I can’t remember who else. I remember this one 16 baby that the mother had taken and thrown against the wall. Every bone in its little body was broken. That was very traumatic. But Denver – I had a cousin that lived close to Denver, and she used to come get me on the weekends. So I spent a lot of time with her. LouAnn Marocchi lived in Denver then, and she would come be nice to the poor little students once in a while; she was living there for a while. Nebraska; part of our time there was on a chronic ward. People had been there for years and years and years; the other part of the time was on the acute ward. When I was on the acute ward, there was another girl who had – she was from Nebraska somewhere – one of the student nurses had long, blonde hair, and I had long, black hair. It was black then. Anyway, this one patient kept attacking the two of us. I don’t know why. Always grabbing us and knocking us down. We thought it was because of our hair, because hers was so blonde, mine was so dark. Then on the chronic ward, the one thing that stands out in my mind, a lot of these people had been there, I’m sure, thirty or forty years, and they don’t hardly talk at all; their hair’s cut like this, and they’ve got sack dresses on. You sit around a lot of time playing cards with patients. I remember this one time – this was in the fall of the year, and there were a lot of big old gray squirrels running around. There was a gray squirrel in the window, and this one patient who never talked; she never talked, just sat there in her chair rocking back and forth, back and forth. She said, out of the clear blue, “Look at all those damn squirrels, trying to get all these nuts in here.” I thought, you know, she’s not crazy. That was my standout about that ward. 17 MF: That probably was interesting, to see these people, as far as trying to help them. I mean, there was just no – the drugs and everything hadn’t come out yet. Had the drugs started to come out at that time? KP: They had Thorazine, was the drug of choice. At that point they were still doing electric shock therapy and what they called insulin-induced shock. So I mean, it was pretty primitive, I think. The other thing is, it was a huge complex with a farm and stuff all attached. So it was all connected with tunnels, and it would take thirty minutes to go through the tunnel to find the cafeteria, and you had to follow the pipes; the pipes were painted, and you memorized what colors of pipe. I remember in the spring, when the snow melted, I looked out and the lunch kitchen was right across the road from where we were. But you couldn’t go outside; it was just too cold. MF: I’m sure; absolutely. It’s bitter cold there. That’s crazy. Tell us about – when you were back at St. Benedict’s – about the rotations. You were on each floor for so many months, right, as far as the medical or surgical. Tell us about that; which one did you enjoy the most? MK: Medical was always my favorite. I always loved medical. I didn’t really care for surgery; I detested psych, I didn’t like that at all. No, I think medical was my favorite. Surgery was okay; peds was – I liked peds then. After my kids were born, I did not like peds. But yeah, I think medical was my favorite. MF: What do you think, Kathy? KP: I think medical was mine – maybe it had to do with the instructors, who made it comfortable. 18 MK: Sister Mary Gerald, and Mrs. Wheeler. MF: Maybe so – grasped the concept, and just felt like it was something that you became comfortable with. When you were done, did it help you to have experience in all of the rotations? Did that help you, as far as your confidence when you finally were done with nurses’ training? KP: I think it did. I think what it did allow you to do, though, is get a job wherever. You could really kind of choose. We didn’t have a lot of emergency room, but I did a lot of emergency room after. I guess I like the stress, I don’t know. Seemed like the thing to do at the time. MF: The every day change. KP: When I was still working there, I did do some time in the psych unit in the hospital, which I thought was very interesting. It was not anything like the state hospital. These primarily were young women in depression. Most of them young, LDS women who were really having a difficult time adjusting to their life. So it was easy for a nurse; I thought it was easy, anyway. MF: Do you have a patient that you remember? Anyone that you took care of for a while, or an experience that you had while you were in nurses’ training? MK: At St. Benedict’s? MF: Yes; or wherever. MK: I remember that one – on second medical. You don’t remember her? We were students, I’m sure. She was right there by the desk, and her whole back was just bedsores. It was just awful. 19 KP: I remember her. It was when we were there – well, no, she was there when we were on nights after graduation. MK: Maybe that was it. But that’s the one – she was there for a long, long time, and that’s the one that I really remember. I can’t remember if she made it or not, and I can’t remember her name. MF: Did you have any that you remember? KP: We had a little boy I remember; this, again, may have been when we were on nights, because I think I remember it at nighttime. He would have seizures that lasted thirty seconds every two minutes. I mean, almost constant seizures. So it took, really, a lot of intensive care and a lot of time. In those days they didn’t have intensive care units, so after I graduated I did private duty – they called it private duty nursing. They would just have a nurse sit with the patients. All of those patients were out on the floor as part of your caseload, a number of patients that you had to work on that day. MF: That would be hard, to have to have that and take care of. Tell us a little bit about your capping ceremony. Do you remember when it was held, how far into training you were when you had capping? KP: Six months, isn’t it? MK: Six months, I think. MF: Do you remember anything about that ceremony at all? KP: No. MK: It was in the library, and we had our capes with the red showing. KP: We had little Florence Nightingale lamps. 20 MK: That was a long time ago. KP: It wasn’t really memorable, actually. I mean, getting our cap was a big deal, but the actual ceremony… MK: Did we have spaghetti afterwards? Seems like we did. KP: I don’t remember. MF: We had one lady who said she was so proud she slept with her cap on, because she was so excited. Tell us – what was your greatest challenge while you were in nurses’ training? KP: Getting through the boards. The whole thing was stressful, knowing that you had that to look forward to. Actually, I only passed my boards by one point. All the other guys that I hung out with, they had to wait and take it a second time. MK: It seemed like a few of the smartest didn’t make it. KP: I wasn’t the smartest, for sure, but I made it by one point and I thought, “Good enough for me.” MK: Well, they were multiple choice; and if I remember right, it was like, two were right, and two were wrong, but one might be a little bit more right than the other. MF: They were trying to trick you. KP: Right. So you couldn’t guess. Oh, and if you guessed and got it wrong, you were deducted half a point. So there was no reward for guessing at all. MF: That’s not good. MK: That was stressful. It was two days of boards when we went down. MF: So was that in Salt Lake? 21 MK: Yes, in Salt Lake – at the capitol. Were we in the Representatives’ building, or in the Senate? One of them. But it was at the capitol. MF: Tell us about graduation – what do you remember the most about graduation? MK: I remember one thing – the nuns were not going to let us play Pomp and Circumstance. Remember that? They were going to change the music going in. We all rebelled, so we got our Pomp and Circumstance. SL: What were they going to change it to? MK: I don’t remember, but I know it wasn’t Pomp and Circumstance. MF: We deserve this. KP: Hail to the nuns. MK: That was pretty neat, wasn’t it. All the students, the undergraduates, they were there with their student uniforms and their capes, the blue and red capes on, and it was very pretty. It was very, very nice. KP: We were told we could not party afterwards, or we would not get our diplomas. But we did anyway, and we all got our diplomas. MK: But a lot of the diplomas weren’t signed – isn’t that right? They weren’t signed yet, because some of us didn’t have all of the hours in. But mine was all signed, because I was able to go to work the very next day as a graduate nurse. We didn’t have our RNs yet then. But that was pretty. MF: Your families all came, were they able to? KP: Actually, my mom and dad both came. It was very nice. And my brother. MF: That’s a great thing, you made it. Tell us about your career after. What did you both do after you were out of nurses’ training. Did you stay at St. Benedict’s? 22 KP: I stayed from the graduation until March the next spring. A bunch of us all worked night duty, because it paid better. Then, when I left there I went back to Idaho and worked at the general hospital there; emergency room, mostly. Married my husband in the fall, and then he went away to graduate school. So my theory was, you get a degree in nursing just so you can work to get your husband through school, so he can get a decent job. Then you can go back to school and do what you want to do. So I worked summers in Idaho and school year in Colorado at the Memorial Hospital there, and sometimes in the clinic. Then from there – what did I do? Then we moved to Pocatello; he got a job there, and I didn’t have to work, and I had my babies, so I just worked enough to be able to stay home with my kids and go to school at the same time. I was going to go back into nursing and get a BA or BS, but none of my classes were accepted except the two classes we had from Weber State because they were ‘college classes’ in that was sociology and – what was the other one? Something else. That was it. They wouldn’t even accept first aid and stuff. So I changed my major then to social work, and actually wound up getting a degree in anthropology and social science. When my kids were kind of grown enough, we had moved to Boise, and I began working in Head Start. At first as the health coordinator, and then I was the state director of training, and eventually became the executive director for the state of Idaho. So most of my adult life was with Head Start. When I was training director, and also executive director, I did a lot; there was a short stint in there when I was the chief of staff for the Senate Democrats in Idaho. Easy job, 23 because there aren’t many Democrats in Idaho. Then from that I retired, actually, from that job. So the training part I liked a lot, and then I did some consulting, which was going to other Head Start programs and doing federal program audits. And always with the health component. My foundation in nursing actually helped me because most of my work was health education and public health which was not really part of our nurses training. MF: Didn’t have any of that, absolutely none. KP: No, it was all clinical. But I learned a lot. While I was doing some of those jobs, I also finished a Master’s degree in adult education. Now I’m retired, living here; I worked one year as a volunteer ombudsman for the senior assisted living, and in Oregon it’s a job where you have to be trained, and it’s almost like a full-time volunteer job. They need to actually make it a program and pay for it. MF: Absolutely, because of how many hours you put in. Well, that’s good. KP: And we travel a lot; Max and I have been able to travel, because he’s an archeologist. It’s a great experience traveling with him. MF: How fun – go discover the world. That’s a great thing. Marj, tell us a little bit about what you did after training. MK: Well, I worked nights with Kathy until she left. I stayed on nights I think for two more years at St. Benedict’s on second medical. I think I was on days for maybe six months or so; then, like I told you, I joined the Air Force on a dare, because people said I wouldn’t dare leave Utah. I wouldn’t leave Utah, I wouldn’t leave the valley. I said I would. Went downtown that day and I signed up. So I was in the Air Force, where I met my dear husband – probably at happy hour, courtyard 24 Charlie’s or someplace – anyway, I was only in the Air Force two years, because back in those days, they didn’t like pregnant nurses. Now it doesn’t matter, but women in those days. KP: Even in hospitals. MK: Right, but in the Air Force, it should have been as soon as you get pregnant you were out, but my chief nurse was pretty cool. She said, “As long as you can get your uniform on and look halfway decent you can stay.” Because I didn’t really want to get out that soon. That was in upstate New York. Then we were transferred outside of Boston, where my husband finished up his Air Force career – he was in for I think eight years. Came back to Portland ‘cause that’s where he’s from. I went to work – oh, and while I was in Boston my son was born – then we were in Portland and I worked nights at Bess Kaiser; the old Bess Kaiser Hospital, which is no longer a Hospital, it’s a big Adidas plant now. Worked nights there for I think six years. My daughters were born during this time. Then I decided to quit; it was killing me, staying up all day and all night. I was home for a month, missed my work, and went back to work on the day shift in a clinic for a cardiologist who had just come to Kaiser. So I ended up working with him there for four years, which was really very interesting. I got to do the angiograms, and he taught me how to do the echocardiography, I did those. Then, when he left Kaiser, I went with him, and I became a PA – I was a PA in his practice. Kind of PA, office manager, everything rolled into one. I was with him for a total of twenty-five years. Really a good, good job that I really enjoyed. Then my husband retired, and I got tired of getting up in the morning and going to work 25 when he was laying in bed, so I decided to retire too. Since then, we travel a lot; we try to get to Europe at least once a year, and a bunch of other places, so it’s been good. It’s a good life. MF: Absolutely. Well, we appreciate you letting us come visit with both of you. KP: I might add that while they were in the Air Force, I was an anti-war protester doing all the parades, and was a draft counselor to help young men in my community stay home out of the service. MK: But you know, that was a hard time too, because my husband was still in the Air Force when my brother was a Navy medic, and he was killed over in Danai. But my attitude as far as – when you start out, you’re really gung-ho, you believe everything they tell you – but my attitude changed dramatically by the time I was out. I was in her camp at the end. MF: That’s good. Thank you for sharing your stories with us; we appreciate your hospitality. It’s been wonderful to get to know both of you.