Patients Saw Their Virtue

Jo Babin’s striped nursing uniform is so starched that the prim white pinafore on top crackles at a touch.

“When we marched down the hall, you knew it,” Jo says, sizing up the uniform’s short, puffed sleeves, wide white cuffs and stiff-winged hat.

She laughs about the nunlike uniform she and the rest of the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps wore in the 1940s, but she’s kept it close for 53 years.

“We were so proud of our uniforms,” she says. “When I put my hat on, I felt so smart.”

Jo, who lives in Coeur d’Alene, was among 51 women to graduate from Deaconess Hospital’s last cadet corps class in 1948.

Civilian nurses were in short supply during World War II. Stateside hospitals were so understaffed that Congress passed the Nurse Training Act in 1943 to create the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps.

The corps offered three intense years of nursing training, as well as free uniforms and room and board to women who promised to work as registered nurses at least until the end of the war.

Jo graduated from high school in 1945 and signed up. A natural caretaker, nursing had been her aim since childhood. But her father didn’t believe in higher education for girls. Jo was groomed for marriage and motherhood.

“The corps saved me,” she says. “I’ve talked to many women who wouldn’t have been nurses without the corps.”

She intended to take her skills into the military, but the war ended shortly after she enrolled in the program. Jo’s class was the last the government funded - and it was a fun one.

“My roommate got ahold of a dummy once, put a rope around its neck, hung it on a tree and yelled and screamed that someone had committed suicide,” says Marcia Edsall Konshuk, Jo’s classmate from Bayview. “I think she got reprimanded for that.”

Shenanigans were a necessary release for these young women. After six months of studies at Whitworth College, they moved on to the Deaconess Hospital School of Nursing, where studies and work became one.

“We really worked awfully, awfully hard,” Jo says. “We did everything - bedpans, enemas, baths, treatments, medication. Getting tired was a problem.”

The class traveled to Wenatchee for three months to learn about working in small hospitals. That’s where the hard work of nursing became most obvious.

“I had to take care of eight men in one ward,” Marcia says. “All were bedridden and had urinals. The floor was slanted a little, so when I accidentally kicked a urinal, it rolled by eight beds.

“I couldn’t call for an orderly. There weren’t any. I had to mop it up myself.”

There also was only one level of nursing at the time. When the career expanded to include licensed practical nurses in the late 1940s, Jo and her group groused, even though the lesser-trained LPNs shouldered the bulk of the grunt work.

“We resented them terribly,” Jo says. “We didn’t want to be elevated to another level. We wanted to do patient care.”

Cadet corps rules were tough. Students had to keep at least a B average. Frumpy house mothers enforced early curfews designed to discourage liaisons.

“I think that’s why I got married - my rebellious streak,” Jo says.

What the rules discouraged, patients often encouraged. Patients liked the efficient young nurses in their crisp uniforms. One of Marcia’s patients insisted Marcia meet his son. She married the young man and quit the corps a year shy of graduation.

Jo married the son of a patient who wouldn’t rest until the love match was secure. Jo wanted to finish school so much that she endured the wrath of the corps’ board.

Then, pregnancy forced her to take a leave of absence. She finished school, but a few months after the rest of her class.

The happy faces in Jo’s nursing school yearbook belong to Ediths and Irenes, Marthas, Elinors and Ruths. Jo’s isn’t among them because of her late graduation, but it’s among them this weekend as the Deaconess nursing Class of 1948 gathers for its 50th reunion.

None, not even the youngest, works anymore. They range in age from 70 to 85. Now, they compare their long careers in nursing, disdain for what they believe are relaxed nursing standards - no uniforms, no back rubs for patients - and memories of their cadet days.

“Oh my gosh, the mistakes we made in medication made our blood run cold,” Jo says, traveling back half a century in an instant. “And our house mothers! They were so strict we’d have to help each other sneak in late at night. …”