Then I graduated and I worked in Manhattan, but while I was in high school I worked in New York. I had a job as a messenger at Jay Thorpe’s on 57th Street right off 5th Avenue. It was a very classy department store like Bonwit-Teller but a smaller one and I saw all kinds of movie stars.

My boss, Mr. Lounds, really liked me. He was a Scot and he would send me to the garment district and I would pick up bags and I would pick up hats and things that were ordered for people – and expensive bags! I mean, people like Ingrid Bergman came in, Gloria Swanson, Danny Kay, so I thought that was great fun, and all these old salesgirls they were so jealous that they waited on them.

I used to laugh, my oldest friend, I met her there. Marilyn was Polish and Irish and we became friends. We worked there and we would go to Horn and Hardart’s (sp?) Automat and then we’d go to Central Park for our lunch. We both did the same thing and then we both went to nursing school. So, I started at 15, so for two years then, but I spent a lot of time. I went to museums in New York and I became more independent and more sophisticated in a way because I was in the big city and I traveled on the subways by myself.

So, I worked during the summer and then I worked on Saturdays to make money just for clothing for school and it got me out of the house. I didn’t have to do those household chores like ironing and scrubbing the floor.

I graduated in ’51. It was just the end of the Cadet Nurse Corps. That was a program that the government would pay for your education. So, some of the classes they were going into the army. Many of them were going into the army. It was an old school. The hospital was old; I mean, it was Victorian and it was in the area of Williamsburg and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? That was in that area.

So, we had a hospital and then we had a maternity division. So, you know, I liked nursing very much but my first night in the operating room was awful. I had never scrubbed and I was terrified, absolutely, but I had a very nice surgeon, Jim Gormaly, and he was so nice.

When They Toss Me an Amputated Leg, I Decide to Go into Teaching

Then one day I was in the operating room. We had this Dr. Pfeiffer and our pastor was his brother and they looked alike. One day they did an amputation and he threw the leg at me and he thought that was the funniest thing. I didn’t think it was funny at all because I dropped the leg, it was heavy. So that is something I have always remembered. The reason I wanted to go into nursing to teach in the operating room was because of that experience. I thought it was the worst thing.

Like that first night, it was a summer night. Oh! We had no air conditioning or anything. But, it was a very nice hospital. The people were good, but as a student I could have 32 patients and I was all alone and I was only 18 years old. If I was on night duty, and we had a supervisor, we would make rounds. I mean, it’s just a wonder that nothing ever happened that was serious.

The first time I was on nights, my first patient died and he was only 40. That was my first night on night duty. That was six months after I was in the program. Because, we went to class all day and then you’d work nights, then go to the morning class. Then go to sleep for a few hours and get up again. We sometimes we didn’t have a day off. We didn’t have a sleeping day. So, nursing was not easy.

After I graduated I worked at French Hospital right near Penn Station. In fact, Babe Ruth died there, but it was a very good hospital and it was run by the French Alliance Society. They had a hospital in Canada, New Orleans, and we had Irish nuns there. It was a French order. They were Daughters of the Holy Cross. We called them the cupcake nuns because they had fluted like a big flute. One of the nuns was my classmate. They were good people.

My youngest brother went to that hospital. While I was on vacation he developed meningitis and a friend of mine, a surgeon, brought him into the hospital. If it hadn’t been for that my brother would have died.


I Move to California

But, I worked there seven years and then I started going to New York University part time. I was going to do public health nursing but then the government cut back on the grants so I moved to California in 1958.

Well, I always wanted to be an aid nurse. I wanted to go into the Navy. But my parents said oh, and “Nice girls don’t do this!”

I said, “Listen, that’s ridiculous.”

I moved out west with an Irish girl. We moved to San Francisco and then I worked at the original Stanford.

Then I started continuing my education. I went to City College, State College, and then to Holy Cross and then to UCSF for my master’s.

Even in those days UC told me, “Oh, your diploma isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”

They didn’t think diploma nurses like me were educated.

But I had taken 12 units at NYU while I lived in New York. We were trained at that time, but we had classes. I mean, we had chemistry and the basics, but there was a big promotion for nursing to be in a college and be college affiliated. So, I could see the big difference because I taught at an ADN (associate degree) program for two years and then I taught at USF.

I started teaching at San Mateo and I taught there for five years and then I went to USF. While I was there I also taught operating room nursing courses.

When I went to USF they formed a union and when I was there one year I was at St. Mary’s Hospital with students. I had 150 students in the operating room. I had to rotate, 13 or 15 students a day which is very hard to watch 15 people at once.

The staff didn’t like it, but… then I went to Letterman. I had students at Letterman Hospital formed a union and I had to apply the first year and the dean said I hadn’t published. I hadn’t had time to publish. And, I hadn’t done any community service. The year that happened I was teaching a course at Davis so that’s how I moved to the VA in Palo Alto. I went there as Director of the OR. I taught OR courses while I was there and then did other teaching in the hospital.

I had a good life. I mean, while I was at the Palo Alto Medical Clinic, I went to Europe but the hospital would not give me a leave of absence. I just went over on vacation and I wanted a leave of absence and they refused to give it to me, and then when I came back they started me at rock bottom and that was with seven years experience.

So, I went to UC and worked in the dental school in the Maxillofacial Department. Then I was going back to school and then I went back to PMC and worked in the OR again. I also worked sometimes in the recovery room. I also worked on the floors at PMC when I came back from Europe because I just couldn’t get in the operating room again. I think I really like teaching. I liked the operating room, I did, but I also liked the clinical teaching.

What stands out the most to me with all of these work experiences was when I first worked in the operating room as a new graduate. I really learned a lot and I worked with some excellent surgeons.

I worked with one surgeon that used nothing but hand signals. He didn’t talk, and the hand signals were done by a famous neurologist of Montreal, a neurosurgeon, and so I had to do all of these things.

I remember one of my colleagues one day (Laughs), he went like this and she just took the tray and moved it. Well, he wanted something else. It was what they call a lap sponge, a towel to put in, and she thought he was finished (Laughs).

He was very intimidating but after a while he was very good.

He’d say, “I want you, Peggy. I don’t want those others.”

I had some nice friends there. This one surgeon, Henry Liebowitz, he was in the army and he was prisoner of war. He was very gruff but he was very good. He would invite the nurses to his home and everything. He had a wife who graduated from Vassar and she was very uppity. She wasn’t too happy that he would bring staff, but you know…But, they had a lovely home at Glenn Cove right on Long Island Sound. He just was a wonderful person and he’d invite us to the armory, me and another gal.

So, the nice thing about working in Manhattan was I spent a lot of time. I could stay at the hospital and sleep there so I could go out in the city and I didn’t have to commute all the way to Long Island every day. So that was a plus.

I met some very nice people and they had a reunion and it was the best reunion. Everybody was so happy to see everybody else. Of all the hospitals I worked at I would say that was the best experience for me. It gave me a lot of confidence because I was really kind of a shy young girl but I was confident of myself in my profession.

I didn’t want to stay in one spot and always do the same thing so I knew that education was the only way I could do it. I could travel, I could go to Europe, I could work, I could do public health – you could not do public health unless you had a degree. So, my education was good. I was single, I could do it. I put myself through school. The only time I had a grant was in graduate school. I had to go back out and do teaching and many of my classmates did not do that.

I am glad I am in the profession because I’ve kept abreast of everything. I just gave up my license this year because I thought it’s, you know, it’s expensive, but I’m always interested and people contact me.


I Work with Amazing 100-year-olds in the Deep South

I lived in Georgia and I became involved in with the Centenarian program for the university, so my background was good. I could get into that very easily and my teaching background helped me. I would teach patients and their families about things so that it was easier for them.

Well, at that time there were only about 300 centenarians and Duke University. That was probably in ’93 or ’94. I did it for about three years and I tested at the university. I participated in longitudinal testing, 65 and up, but then I went out in the field for centenarians and the first subject that I had was this woman who was a pianist and a composer and a very interesting woman.

I would go in every week just to – it was a huge manual. We’d do psychological testing, math, sociology, demographics of the family, nutrition, minor physical assessment…ah, just cultural things and all their experiences. Trying to figure out what makes centenarians tick, basically, and why did they live that long? One of the things – some of them they ate fat back and they smoked, they chewed tobacco, I mean, did all kinds of things.

There were more women than men but most of them – they all had a sense of humor. If they were depressed you could pick it up right away.

I had some problems with some people and I just didn’t continue. I had one man who was a Baptist minister and he had a stroke and he was just so angry that – his wife would sit next to him and she wouldn’t talk at all. He was so rude to her I couldn’t believe it.

I met people who worked so hard and had such tragedies in their lives that, you know, they felt that they had no control and that life would move on. Some of them remarried, people who were part Indian or black and sometimes lived in horrendous places. I just learned a lot about the south and the impact on women, in particular, in the south.

I was in the south. I was in Georgia. I went all over Georgia. I even went to Florida. I went to Jacksonville and I went into some of the religious; the Methodist community.

I went into some places (Laughs) and it was just another world. I mean, they are just living on the edge.

It was an experience that I treasure because it allowed me to look at people in a different way. The students that I taught, they always thought that people who were old were ill, but many of them were not.

They had problems of, you know, the systems changing and progressive things. The biggest problem they had was with age. They lost their hearing and their vision so it really isolated them. They could no longer drive and it isolated them from people coming in.

If they had an extended family it was very good, but the churches were very good, and I have to say that the Catholic Church – but there aren’t that many Catholics in the south, but their own people were their support systems. I just found it very rewarding. For some of them, like, I went to an audiologist to see if I could get a hearing device or something with amplification so I could take it in and help them understand me and they could get more out of it for themselves. So, I did that quite a bit. I played golf while I was there, but I played golf in California too. I haven’t played for a while because of some health issues.