Oral history interview with Gayle Offenbacher Lewis

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WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Gayle Lewis
INTERVIEWER: Therese Strohmer
DATE: December 22, 2008 [Begin Interview]
TS: This is Therese Strohmer. It’s December 22, 2008, and I’m in Jacksonville, Oregon. And this an oral history interview for the Women’s Veterans Historical Project at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. And I have Gayle Lewis here with me. Gayle, why don’t you go ahead and say your name the way that you’d like it on your transcript?
GL: Gayle Offenbacher Lewis. `
TS: Okay, excellent. Well, Gayle, why don’t we start out by having you tell me about growing up? When and where were you born?
GL: I was born right here in Jackson county. My family lived here in Jacksonville. And I was born in Medford in a little osteopathic hospital. And it was in a Victorian house. It is no longer there. I grew up with a wonderful extended family. I lived next door to my maternal grandparents, and my paternal grandparents lived up on the Applegate River. I had eleven grandparents when I was born, because my mother had both sets of her—both sets of her grandparents were living when I was born. And I had my great grandmothers on my paternal side. So I had lots of aunts and uncles. My mother had many aunts. And then our families dwindled. So I had one aunt who didn’t live in the area, and my mother was an only child. I have a brother who’s two years younger—Curt.
We grew up on Oregon Street, in a little house that’s being renovated now. You can drive by and look at the project. It was in the Medford Mail Tribune a couple of weeks ago, because they have an archeologist working and—
TS: Oh, I saw that. They found the Chinese—[Evidence of the oldest known Chinatown in Oregon, circa 1850].
GL: The Chinese, yeah.
TS: That’s right.2
GL: That’s the house that I grew up in. My grandparents built the house that’s next door. And then they bought that house, my mother said, to control who their neighbors were. In 1958, my—About 1958, I think, My parents built a house about three blocks away on Applegate Street; next door to my great grandparents, who had a walnut orchard that they had planted in the early part of the century. And we took out some of the trees and built our house. And I went to Jacksonville schools, which was an independent school system, until I was a seventh grader; and it [then] consolidated with Medford school districts. So I went from a little-bitty school where we had that sense of community—our own football team and we knew all the kids—the big kids took care of the little kids—into Medford, which was quite a big shock. And I went to a big—bigger junior high, which was about the same size as it is today.
My father was a state policeman. And my mother went back to work when my brother started school; because my grandfather owned a printing shop in Medford. He had his own business, so my mom worked for him in the business office. And we didn’t have baby sitters, because I had a grandmother next door. And I had a grandmother out on the Applegate who was a school teacher. And so the summers were spent out on the ranch.
And in town—in this little town—it was really wonderful in the fifties. You know, those were the days that you could go outside in the morning and not come home until somebody’s mother whistled for you at dark. [Chuckles] And we rode our bicycles all over the valley. We played in the woods. It’s amazing that we’re alive—that we survived growing up here.
Medford School district, I think, had a very good school program. I had wonderful teachers—wonderful teachers growing up and a lot of personal attention. But in high school, I had great opportunity. I was a good student. I was in the band. And I wanted to be a—I was interested in everything, but I really wanted to be a lawyer, I thought. And I wanted to get a degree in history and then be a lawyer. And then the medical TV shows were on. Do you remember Ben Casey [TV series 1961-66]? Dr. Kildare [TV series 1961-66] was the first. I was just in love with Richard Chamberlain and he still looks good.
TS: Yes he does.
GL: And there was a brief show, with Angie Dickinson, about a navy doctor and a navy nurse on a ship. And I think that imprinted me when I was about thirteen. My dad was in the navy. He was a gunners’ mate, and loved the navy, despite having his ship blown out from under him in the Indian Ocean. And one day he came home from work—remember he’s a state policeman, and he knows everybody— he’s very social—he said, “Guess who I had lunch with today?” Well I had no idea, of course. It was the navy recruiter, and that man, I believe, is still alive in Medford. And I work with his daughter, who’s a nurse, so I’m very amused by that.
I remember that day distinctly. My dad had a pamphlet—like your Betty H. Carter project pamphlet—and he said, “Have you thought about the nurse corps?” Well I—you know, I think I was maybe a sophomore in the high school?
TS: Right.3
GL: I said, “Okay, sure Dad.”
And then my mother observed that I was interested in everything medical—that I was full of advice and knowledge. She said, “Why don’t you become a candy striper [hospital volunteer], and see if you like the hospital?”
And they had just built the new Rogue Valley—what was called the Rogue Valley Memorial Hospital—way out in the boonies. So I was a candy striper in high school. And that was okay, but, to tell you the truth, I didn’t much like being in the hospital. But they gave me jobs like switchboard, snack bar—you know, no patient care. [Laughter] Because I was a pretty responsible teenager, they gave me big, responsible jobs. And so, I think my senior year, I decided I would go to nursing school. And I just wanted to go. I wanted to get it done. Then you could go to a three year diploma program and practice nursing. So I thought, “Well I’ll just go to nursing school, and then I can work.”
I remember my father telling me, he said, “Women should be able to take care of themselves in life. You need—” Which I think is very forward thinking in retrospect. I now know why he said that. His mother was independent. She graduated from college when she was sixty-two.
TS: Wow, neat.
GL: Or sixty. Yeah, she had her bachelor’s degree really late. She was part of those teachers after World War II. There weren’t any teachers, and, if they had a teaching certificate at all, they invited them back to teach with the stipulation they would get their degree. Well she spent the next fifteen years getting her degree. [Laughter]
TS: She must have liked school.
GL: Well she had to go. I’m not sure she liked school, but she was a wonderful elementary teacher.
But my father thought that I should be able to take care of myself and so I didn’t go to college to find a man. I went to college to be able to take care of myself in life. And my mother, who did not go to college but should have, because she was very bright and capable—but she was a girl. My mother said, “You need to go—you need to get a degree in nursing.” Because if you weren’t going to be a nurse; you’d be getting a degree in something. So I credit my mother with making me get a degree. [Chuckles] So I went to the University of Oregon in pre-nursing; and that’s where I almost changed to anthropology, because that was a lot more fun, than I thought—than punching the ticket—
TS: Tell us about that—the anthropology.
GL: The anthropology? I wanted to be Margaret Mead [American academic anthropologist], I think. Even as a little girl I liked other countries, I liked other cultures. I was always trying to learn about another culture or somebody different. And the classes didn’t seem like they were studying. It seemed like fun to me. You know, I loved the reading. I loved the memorizing. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to go on a dig in South America or Egypt. 4
Or did I want to go to American Samoa? Or did I want to go to Africa? And I think if I had switched to anthropology, I would have probably would have gone in the Peace Corps. If I hadn’t been a nurse, I would have gone in the Peace Corps, because I just like learning about other people. I’m very poor at languages though. I have a no-good memory. Nothing stays in the brain. It goes though. It has to be written down. And I have no aptitude for music or languages despite being in the band for twelve years. But the band taught me to march, therefore that helped me out when I went in the navy.
So when I got—finished my first year at the University of Oregon—then you go to Portland for the University Of Oregon School Of Nursing, which is now Oregon Health Sciences University [Oregon Hill Health and Science University]. And we lived in the dorm. You know, those were the days when you still were supposed to be single and chaste and live in the dorm.
TS: What was that like?
GL: It was the sixties. It was fine. It was a brand new building. We found it restrictive though, because we had a house mother and hours. And you know when you look at how young people are treated today, how they’re given choice and responsibility, we had to put up with some things that I think were a little demeaning for people who worked in the summer and had cars and took care of their own lives. We had to be in at midnight, and we were punished if we weren’t. And that happened to me after I was twenty-one. I spent my last summer—my last weekend in the dorm, my junior year, confined to quarters; because one of my guests had not gotten in at curfew, and somebody had let her in. You know, they would rather have you stay on the streets in Portland, or be left—perhaps they had no idea what the parties were like. You know, they would rather have a young woman left overnight in an awful, well, already—
TS: [Chuckles] Well, what were the parties like?
GL: It was the sixties. [Laughter]
TS: [Chuckles] What does that mean, Gayle?
GL: That means marijuana, booze, LSD. The University of Oregon, I kind of blocked my experience there. But when I went to a party there I had my own plastic cup with a lid, and I never let anybody give me a drink. And I didn’t—and I learned really quickly that I didn’t want to drink alcohol or smoke pot because I observed that people were not in control. [Laughs] But I liked to party. So I carried my own cup, and I never let anybody give me anything to eat or drink; because those were the days when they were lacing drinks with LSD, and mind expanding drugs. You could get sedatives, stimulants—I don’t remember cocaine being available. But there was stuff around. I wasn’t particularly interested in it, but I didn’t want to be out of it either. So I think it was kind of dangerous times. But I grew up with pretty good self-esteem, a dad who was a policeman—now, some policeman kids go the other way.
TS: That’s true.5
GL: But he gave me enough advice and leeway that I didn’t feel that I had to party to the extent that I would endanger myself. And I always had cab money. I was very prudent. But at nursing school—Medical students were wild too. I don’t care how smart people are, or intellectually—you know, they still make bad choices sometimes. So it was kind of dangerous out there. Yeah. It was good to be alert and not drunk. [Laughs]
TS: Well, so what years—
GL: That was—
TS: —did you go to college?
GL: I went to the University of Oregon in ’64. And 1965, I was “up on the hill” [as] we called it in Portland. And I graduated in ’68.
TS: Okay, can I back up a little bit then? So when you were in high school JFK [John Fitzgerald Kennedy] was president? Did—
GL: I remember that day.
TS: Which day?
GL: The day he was assassinated. I was a junior in high school.
TS: Okay.
GL: I saw him. I felt very fortunate. He came to Medford.
TS: That’s right.
GL: He was a pear-blossom [Marshall of the Pear Blossom Parade, an event held annually in southern Oregon].
TS: That was 1960, right?
GL: I think so.
TS: Yeah.
GL: And I was in the band—it would have been the junior high band—and I knew who he was. I knew he was a senator from Massachusetts, and that he was running for president. And I wasn’t particularly impressed by what I had read up to that point. But I do remember the band was ahead of him. The band broke up, and I remember coming back on the street to watch him go by. So I—You know, it was kind of magic that we, here in Medford, did get to see him. 6
And then that cold November day in homeroom, they just announced it. And I was in the cafeteria. And I thought that boys were joking. They said, “The President’s been shot”. And we were at lunch. And I thought it was—You know, kids come up with these horrible jokes to get people stirred up. And I didn’t take it too seriously until I got to homeroom and they told us. And I think school was let out. So I have a good memory of that.
TS: Do you remember how you were feeling about that, at the time?
GL: I was shocked, dismayed, and not too frightened, because I think that we had a sense that it was an inside—you know, that it was an American thing. It was not like an invasion or a conspiracy. It was just a bad person. I was very sad and very uneasy. And I think kids during the Cold War were very patriotic. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis and being very frightened by that. I spent a lot of time when we built our new house on Applegate Street, which has a daylight basement, building a nuclear bomb shelter in my mind; because we had a perfect house where you could do it. It had a cement basement. It had a cement enclosed room, where we put sawdust for our sawdust furnace. And I spent a lot of time thinking about survival in that house should something bad happen, you know. It was the Cold War “be afraid” mentality. And I remember my mother canned, and we had lots of food. But, you know, if we have lots of food and they drop nuclear bombs on San Diego—because that’s where the ships are—the Californians will come north looking for safety and food. So do I want to keep food that I’ll be killed for? Or do I want to take my chances with surviving in what happens on the land? So I obviously did spend a lot of time thinking about it.
TS: I guess so.
GL: And we did not stockpile food. I felt that it would be folly to do that. It’s just like having a stockpile of guns and ammunition.
TS: They’re going to come get it.
GL: They’re going to come get it. And you better be prepared to kill them. And I wasn’t going to hurt anybody.
TS: That’s interesting.
GL: So we had that Cold War kind of fear. But I don’t remember being afraid personally. Just being—I remember being upset by what it did to the country. And to tell you the truth, I ran with a pretty intellectual group of kids. We were—I was in the top percentage of my class. But I wasn’t in the foreign affairs club. I read Time and Newsweek and World News and Report [U.S. News and World Report] [news magazines], and I watched Walter Cronkite [anchorman for CBS Evening News]. But I don’t remember thinking too much about politics and world affairs. I was getting ready to vote. I was pretty politically astute, locally, because my parents’ attorney was going to run for the state senate, when I was a high school senior. But I don’t remember having any particular thoughts about it except being very sad. 7
TS: Yeah.
GL: And worried.
I did know—let’s see that was ‘63—In 1962 my friend’s brother had joined the army after graduating. And I don’t remember which year he went to Vietnam, but within a year he was in Vietnam. So I was somewhat aware that there was something going on in the mid-east, and that we were doing something. He was on one of those Green Beret [United States Army Special Forces] teams that went out to win the “hearts and minds”.
TS: Oh, yeah.
GL: He was a medic for one of those twelve—I think they were twelve man teams. So I had a little bit of knowledge just because I knew somebody.
TS: Yeah.
GL: But I don’t remember my thoughts, particularly. I remember being worried more during the Cuban Missile Crisis, [about] what would happen to us. I think I might have been ten—nine—
TS: Right.
GL: My husband could tell you, because his dad was on a ship, deployed, so he was really worried. But I remember—
TS: During the missile crisis?
GL: Yes.
TS: Oh, okay, in the quarantine [a naval encirclement of Cuba that attempted to halt the flow of offensive weapons]?
GL: Yes.
TS: Interesting.
GL: So, no—
TS: Okay.
GL: I have no great thoughts about it.
TS: Well so, I guess we’ll go back up to Portland, and you’re in nursing school. So how does that go? How are you enjoying nursing school?
GL: Well, we didn’t have a summer break, so during my freshman year of college, I had appendicitis [during] finals week of winter term. And I was very thin—lost a lot of weight. We didn’t have access to food. Kids now in college have access to food. We did not have access to food. I lived in a poor man’s—poor girl’s sorority which is a co-op. 8
And we ate meals at a scheduled time. And I didn’t have the budget to allow me to eat meals ad lib at the student union. You know, I probably had one hamburger a week. And we didn’t eat a lot of snacks. We didn’t have bags of Cheetos around. So I was very thin. And then when I had my appendix out it disrupted my schedule quite a lot, and I lost a lot of weight. So I was very thin and probably very tired. I didn’t look very good. And when I came home, I could tell my family was worried. They were trying to feed me. But I think I felt okay. I was very chipper.
But we started college on the hill in the summer. We had no break. And it was a very heavy summer. We had organic chemistry, pharmacology, anatomy and physiology. We had psychology. I had a sociology course down at Portland State. We had a full summer.
TS: Sounds like it.
GL: And so I was underweight, tired, and I went right into my summer. So by the time it came to Fall and we started our clinicals—in those days—I don’t think they start them so quickly now, but they put us on the units right away. I was pretty tired. And I fainted at school. They thought I was hypoglycemic, because I was so thin, and hypoglycemia was a new concept. So they made me carry candy. In retrospect, I have that gene that—my brother has it to—that your body gives a vasovagal response to stress—perceived stress. So I may feel pretty fine, and not know that anything is bothering me, but my body says, “Hit the deck, before that rock or that club knocks you out!” You know, “there are arrows on the way”, or whatever. It’s like a playing possum response. So my heart rate drops to below fifty [beats per minute] and I faint.
TS: Oh wow! What did you call that? A vagal—
GL: It’s like a vasovagal—You know, when people have heart attacks when they’re straining, or hold their breath, because their heart rate drops? It’s the vagal nerve [vagus nerve]. And it’s a—You know, it’s a brain response that is unfortunate. So a couple of times [I have fainted]. One time a medical student—or resident—said—I had just made this lady’s bed, in the days when [if] you had a cataract operation you couldn’t move, and had to have your head sand-bagged. And I just made up her bed with her in it. I worked up a sweat, I was a 120 pounder—and he said, “Oh look at this! Look at her eye!” Because he was so fascinated [that] you could see the stitches. We used to really stitch them in. So I lifted up the instrument and looked in to her eye, and hit the floor.
TS: Oh!
GL: So it wasn’t anything terribly traumatic, but my brain said—
TS: A response.
GL: “Whoa!” And it happened to me in other social situations that shouldn’t have made anybody faint. It has happened to me—I know how to control it now. I cough, and I can feel it. So I stop it before I faint. But it’s happened to me in the last few years. My 9
brother, in his fifties, has taken a very expensive ride in an ambulance; because he did it at work. You know, if you’re fifty-five and collapse at work, they think heart attack. So I’ve talked to him. I said, “You know, you’ve had several ambulance rides for similar—I bet you do that too.” So he’s kind of tuned in to it now. I said, “Don’t let them—cough, hold your breath, tell people what’s happening, lie flat. Don’t let them dial 911. It costs too much money.” [laughs]
So I was kind of, you know—not physically—I don’t that I was physically at my peak. And I got pretty discouraged. That year—first year—I saw a lot of very sick people. That was the year—around that year—they started doing kidney transplants. And I was on the urology unit. Then we had the county hospital, and we had very sick people coming there to die. And we did not have ways to prolong people’s lives with technology. I don’t think we save lives now any much better than we did then; we just do a lot of things while we’re waiting. [Chuckles] And so I saw a lot of things that were pretty discouraging.
And the old hospital did not have air conditioning. That spring, my first year, was a very hot spring in Portland. And that old hospital and the smells and I can remember—I hate to talk about it on paper, but it is a nurse story. [Laughs]
TS: That’s all right.
GL: We had a lady who had a fatty liver disease, and they were saving all of her stool, which was copious. And we saved it in big—those big restaurant ice cream containers—those brown containers. So every time she had a stool, I had to scrape it out of the bedpan and put it in this container. Well it was ninety degrees. The container was in the refrigerator—but how much did it weigh? I don’t know. I’d pull this thing out of the refrigerator, and scrape the specimen in for twenty-four hours. And that almost—That was almost enough, because, apparently, that particular week I wasn’t getting enough satisfaction out of the other things to outweigh what I could see were a future of things that smelt bad and were disgusting. And we had—we reused everything. So the room smelled, because we had to steam all of our metal equipment. So it was fairly unpleasant. And I almost thought, “What am I doing? I’m smart enough. I can do anything that I want. I don’t have to do this.” But it was pretty brief. [Laughs]
TS: [Chuckles] You passed through that.
GL: It was pretty brief. And then that summer I came home. And in the summers in high school, I had been working for the Southern Oregon Historical Society.
TS: Oh, neat.
GL: Yeah. So I had this good job. I could type. [Chuckles] And I knew the Hanley sisters, and they asked if I’d like to work for them. So I was a docent. I was the seventh employee in the summer, and I think the poor historical society is back down to seven, with a lot more to do. But I was their summer charm and personality, I guess. I did a lot of window washing and greeting people and answering questions. And then the summer I came home from college, they had a grant to catalog the newspaper. And the man doing that 10
was a librarian from Ashland [Oregon], and I was his assistant. So he would write in hand, from the microfiche, and I would type the cards. And I understand that they still use those catalog cards from the newspaper at the historical society. They have never managed to put them on disc, or do anything different with them.
TS: Oh, wow.
GL: So I would sit by the window and count log trucks and type on the typewriter. Because I had a very good summer job, and it was very—my summers were very pleasant. You know, it’s very nice here in the summer. I could walk home. The Britt Festival started in ’64. And so at lunch time, I would take my lunch and walk up to the Britt Festival and eat my lunch while the musicians would rehearse.
TS: Could you say what the Britt Festival is?
GL: The Britt Festival is a music festival that started out as classical venue, and it’s outdoors on a hillside. It started out—It was just a platform and a canvas awning to protect the musicians and people sat on the lawn. And today it holds 2,200 people. It has restrooms for the handicapped, concessions, and doubles the population of our town every night that there is a concert in the summer.
TS: Yes, Jacksonville is a small town.
GL: And it’s beyond culture—classical—it’s everything now. You know, we have some large venues. So it makes our town what it is quite frankly. So I would walk there for lunch, or I would walk to my grandmother’s—whose house is right below the Britt Festival—and have lunch with my grandmother, and get off work at five. And I got paid minimum wage. And it was a pretty good job. I was lucky I didn’t have to work at the Arctic Circle [Oregon fast food chain], or pick pears, like some of my friends. And that summer—that was the summer after my junior year—No, the summer after my sophomore year, because that was just kind of a quiet summer. And then in my junior year—By the time I was in my junior year I was committed. And that’s when I joined the navy.
TS: And how did that happen?
GL: I have to stop and think. Isn’t that terrible?
TS: No, it’s fine.
GL: It was 1966—Yeah, it was a long time ago. Well I remember how it happened just like yesterday. In fact, I’ve been in that room since. It was one of those sloped auditoriums in the old hospital at the university. And the recruiters came—
TS: The same recruiter as before?11
GL: No, the navy recruiter my dad was talking to was recruiting men. He was a chief. No, these were the nurse corps recruiters. During the time I was at the University of Oregon my boyfriend was struggling to stay in school. He didn’t—he knew he was going to get drafted. And eventually after that year—when I went away to nursing school and the romance fizzled—he did join the army rather than wait to get drafted, hoping that he’d have a better choice. And I think he became a medic. I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t think he got killed though. And I knew lots of men in college who were really worried, and who were getting drafted. At the nursing school, because it was nursing school, we had four men in our class who didn’t appear to be worried. And the medical students were a little uneasy. But because they were graduate students they weren’t quite so vulnerable. But a lot of them had signed up for the Berry Plan.
TS: The Berry Plan?
TS: Yes. I don’t know how to spell it. I don’t know if it was b-e, or b-a. The Berry Plan signed up physician—medical students to be physicians—and [who then] serve[d] in the military to pay off their debt. So many of the students—the medical students I remember, and know—were signed up for a Berry Plan. And then they would have a choice of services when they finished. And I was dating a medical student who was signed up for the Berry Plan. So that summer of—The spring of ’66, my sophomore year, the recruiters—the nurse corps recruiters, army, air force, navy—and they filled the room. I think most of us went to the—It beat studying. Well maybe it was part of a class. It was probably part of our leadership class. And they came to talk to us about the nurse corps. And the nurse corps had the nurse corps candidate program. If you signed up, they paid for your last two years of college, and you owed them three years. And I was already—you know, coming from a navy family, I was already more interested in the navy.
But the navy recruiter looked so good. They were beautiful women, all three of them. But the uniforms really are part of the marketing. The navy uniform really looks nice. It’s crisp. It’s black. It doesn’t have things on it. The army and the air force, they tend to “boy scout up” their look, and they have all these stuff hanging on them. And the army was that green. And the air force is that blue. I also knew that if you were in the army they put boots and camouflage on you right away. Well the navy nurse corps philosophy was that, “We are angels of mercy, and we are to look like that”. So I knew that I wasn’t going to get boots [Laughs]—yet.
TS: Oh, okay.
GL: Yet. But my girlfriend, Barbara Helzer Cayere—who lives in Alamo, California, and retired from active duty after twenty years—looked at me and said, “Why don’t you go in the Navy with me?” She apparently had been giving it some thought. I didn’t know that. It took me a second. I don’t think I thought about it much at all. I said, “Yeah, that sounds like a really good idea.” Well then, you know, your peers just go crazy.
“What are you doing? That’s five years!”
I said, “Well”—We looked at each other and we said, “Well they’ll pay for our education, and then its three years. And we need jobs—we just know that we’re going to have a job. And it’s a place to go.”12
And I was dating the Berry Plan medical student. And the question to me was, “What if he asks you to marry him?”
I said, “Well, what if he does? I have plans!”
TS: [Laughs] Oh, is this an “out” plan?
GL: Well I have plans. It will work or not. I need to take care of myself.
TS: I see.
GL: And he was very angry, although he was obviously not real committed to me. But he was very angry— that, I think, a woman would choose to do something—that a woman would have a plan, because that was still the generation where, you know, you went with your man. And he said, “Well, I’ll go in the navy with you.”
And I said, “Well, we’ll see how it works.”
Well it did not work. It was real clear to me that it probably wasn’t going to work. So I felt really good about it. I did not consult my parents, because I didn’t want to put them on the spot. I didn’t think that they would have any objections. But I did tell them I was ready to sign-up, and I had done the—got the paper work rolling. And they said, “Oh that’s wonderful.” But they didn’t get excited until I got commissioned, and then my dad was beside himself. He was just beside himself that I would choose to do that. He was just thrilled.
And I don’t think they were so worried about the heat of affording college. You know, college was more affordable then. My mother was angry, because they had no debt other than their home and I had really good grades and a good resume and a good portfolio; but I didn’t get many scholarships because they could afford to send me to school. So—But it did take the heat off as far as my brother, because my brother was headed to college two years behind me. I felt good being independent. I had no money worries. So that summer that I worked at home that I had signed up for the navy, was a very liberating summer.
And then when I went back as a junior, I was very focused. I knew where I was going. I could just kind of let go and study. And it was fun. I didn’t have any money worries. Every Friday, Barbara and I would take the bus down to Pioneer Square, in Portland, where there’s—it’s an old post office building. And the recruiter was there. Their deal with us was that we had to show up every other Friday to pick up our check, because they wanted to know that we were on our feet, alive, healthy. I’m sure that that’s the rationale, rather than just putting our check in the mail. So it was a ritual: ride the bus down, get our checks, go over to Meier and Frank [department store], get some cash, and go out and eat. [Laughs] I took a last trip up those Meier and Frank stairs a couple of years ago; because they have redone that building into some kind of boutique hotel, I think. But I took a memory trip up those stairs because—And I still have those bank books from those—I know—well, you put things in boxes and send them home to mom to store.
TS: I’m a saver, so I understand. 13
GL: And, well, they’re history. So I pulled those out. And I tell you what I spent—you know in those days when I picked up my checks—It seems to me that when I was a senior, it was a $120 every other week. Now, that was quite a bit of money, quite frankly. I bought—if I wanted something nice, I bought it. We went out to eat on Sundays. There were about ten of us in the military by then—nurse corps—either army or navy. And so we could afford to go out to lunch at the Red Lion in Portland. We all had cars. Everybody had to have a car when you’re a senior, because our experience required us to drive around. I commuted to Salem [Oregon]. And we could afford cars. My friend Barbara leased her car. Which I think is very interesting.
TS: For that time, sure.
GL: Yeah. She just leased her car, because she didn’t know what kind of car she wanted. My dad, however, went out and picked out a car for me. I had a ’65 [Chevrolet] Malibu Super Sport. [Laughs] A very nice car which I wish I had still had it. But the navy allowed me to have a lovely first car. It was used. It wasn’t new. But it was fairly new and it was, you know, a car.
TS: Well now, when you—Okay, so you were talking about your peers were, like, wondering what the heck—
GL: “What are you doing?!”
TS: Was it because it was the military or was it—what do you think that was?
GL: It was the commitment. I think a lot of it was the commitment. I didn’t feel any adverse reaction because I was going in the military. We were nurses and so that is the difference. I mean, nurses are able to compartmentalize. We did not like the war, we did not understand the war, but none of us had time to get on the street and protest, which I regret. Because I should have been on the street protesting when I could, because as soon as I put the uniform on—no more talking about it. And they were just appalled that we would make that commitment. And it was into the unknown. I don’t think there was very much knowledge about what happened in the military, or what the military was like. And I never thought of myself as very adventurous. In fact, if I hadn’t done that I think I would still be living in Portland. I don’t think I would have gone anywhere, just because of the comfort zone of being an Oregonian. But I didn’t feel anything either one way or the other about going into the military. Most of them just didn’t want to do it. Now, one of my good friends—I have a picture of her in here—went to Vietnam as a civilian for a church organization: a civilian humanitarian. So she has in-country time. And she would not have gone in the military because of her ethic. But she, like me, felt like “we need to do something”.
And I felt a sense of—because I had a brother, especially—I just felt a sense of “I need to do something”. Just by the luck of being a girl, both—I had second cousins—both of my cousins were in Vietnam in the army and I had second cousins in Germany. I wrote to all of these guys. I had quite the correspondence list. And I just felt, “Well, you know, these men don’t want to be there particularly. And they’re getting hurt. And they 14
need nurses. And I’m going.” And I was able to compartmentalize. I didn’t feel like I was supporting the war by going. I felt like I was taking care of people who had no choice in going, people who were doing a job. And it’s exactly the way I feel today. Our troops aren’t asked. When you sign that line, they own you, and that’s shocking to people as you probably recall.
“Wait, but no, I don’t want to do that.”
“Well, we’re sorry!”
I don’t know if they use that line anymore, “the needs of the navy”. Or—You know, I can’t tell you how many time I saw that; because I always pushed the envelope to get what I thought I deserved and wanted. But I saw that line several times. But you know, I just felt really a sense that I had to participate, and that by participating I was not supporting the war—that I was doing a job my government needed me to do based on someone else’s decision. When I was—My first year in Boston we did have nurses who did go on the street, incognito, and that was very risky to do that, as a military person.
TS: You mean to protest?
GL: Yes. Or they would go to hippie parties. You know, I believe I was in Boston for Woodstock.
TS: Sixty-eight?
GL: Yes it was [The Woodstock Music Festival, properly called “Woodstock Music and Art Fair”, was held August 15-19, 1969]. Or it was just before I got there. But, you know, those were the Woodstock years. We had corpsmen who lived in apartments and smoked pot and had peace signs and wore wigs over their long hair. So, you know, there were—
TS: They wore wigs over their long hair—at work?
GL: Yes. We did that into the seventies. It was very bizarre.
TS: Is that right? Interesting, I hadn’t heard that.
GL: They would grow their hair and wear—it was really goofy. [Laughter] It was very silly. I don’t think I have any pictures of any of my troops here in Medford with wigs, but I do remember them in Virginia. I was in the reserves in Virginia.
TS: So how was it then that you got—So you finished your schooling?
GL: Yes.
TS: And then how did it start that you were then in the—
GL: Oh, I got commissioned in December of my senior year.
TS: Okay.15
GL: And we went downtown. It was December 7, wasn’t that wonderful? And we got commissioned together. I think there were five of us. And then we went to the Trader Vic’s [a Polynesian themed restaurant chain] in Portland for Mai Tais. It seemed quite appropriate—we were going into the navy.
TS: I would think so.
GL: And my pay went up. And I was a commissioned officer. And then in June we took our boards. The first week in June—June 14, I think. My friend Barbara and I got in my car and drove across country to Newport, Rhode Island, for what I call “charm school”. It was Nurse Corps Officer Candidate School. We were already officers, so they had to treat us with some deference. But we didn’t have uniforms. We didn’t know a thing. I knew more than some because I had been studying. And I was—already kind of had that military—
TS: Your dad was in the navy.
GL: Yes. My dad was in the navy and I could march. So I was really ahead of the game. But we also had the WAVES [Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service] officer candidates there.
TS: So you were together. The nurses corps and the—
GL: We lived in the same quarters, but because we were officers we were in charge. And I remember having to pull duty on July 4thweekend with a bad cold. I probably had strep throat, and [was] not feeling well at all. And we were in charge of the WAVES. And some of them probably didn’t do well in the navy. And I remember thinking, “Why are we babysitting these women who are college graduates? And why are they getting into trouble? Why don’t they just do what they’re supposed to?” You know, but they weren’t in their beds and they were acting up and they—you know, I remember just wanting to get on with it. Officer Candidate School, or Nurse Corps Officer School, was fun for me. It’s very important for people in the military to have a good sense of humor. I think that’s what saved me, because I can be goofy and put things in perspective and I could always find the funny. I could also put it in the larger context. You know, the stupid thing they’re telling you—the stupid thing you’re going to do, like wear a girdle—don’t have a tantrum, just laugh, and go on with things. Because you won’t be wearing a girdle. Humor them during this archaic lecture, chuckle, and move on.
And we had inspections and rigors. And we’re all, “Excuse me, we’re nurse corps. We’re officers. Why are we doing this?” And the rationale is always that you need to know what the troops do. And I had no problem with it. I knew, you know. I think that it was six or eight weeks. I don’t know how long it was. And I would tell these women who were balking, “Just do it! Get up, and do it! It will pass. You will be in charge someday.”
One of the—we had these old barracks that had probably linoleum flooring. And so this woman got—this is my friend Barbara—and this woman who was older—she had 16
practiced for a few years. She was twenty-five, I think—older. She was in as a JG [lieutenant junior grade]. She got us in to lots of trouble. We decided that we would polish the floors. You know, we had to clean everything. So she went downtown and got bowling alley wax.
TS: Oh oh.
GL: Oh oh! Our floors were hazardous.
TS: I bet they were [laughter].
GL: But what could they do but compliment us.
TS: On how shiny they were.
GL: Oh my goodness. Because they were really old and we had so much fun doing it and laughing at midnight, on hands and knees with our rags, buffing up that floor. And they did have trouble standing on it in their high heels for inspection [laughter].
TS: That would have probably been fun to watch.
GL: It was. It was funny. So my good sense of humor—That was a very heady time, because we were not—we had quite a bit of free time. One of my first memories was going into the officers’ club. They called it Com Closed because it was a lunch place for people—working people—the instructors, administrators. But because we were officers we ate there too. We didn’t have uniforms yet. So when you came in the front door you got in line to go through the buffet—and you walked past tables of men in uniform, older men, who really looked you over—kind of the meat-market. And when you got to the end of the line—That first day I remember saying, “Look at that, a fountain, like at a wedding! Look they have punch!” It was manhattans [cocktail] for lunch. A manhattan fountain in the com-closed at lunch, that’s how the military used to work. And but, it still had its World War II décor: the big drapes, long drapes, to the floor with palm trees on them. Very lovely. And it was just a strange place to be. And I was amused by it. And then we were waited on by stewards. And that was amusing if you grew up in a little town and did all your—you know, you don’t have help. You take care of yourself. So that was a little adjustment. And then adjusting to the scrutiny from a lot of men was kind of a shock, which we got over pretty quickly. And we managed to party pretty hard in Newport, Rhode Island. And my husband happened to be there at the same time in officer candidate school on the other side of the bridge. So it was very annoying to him to hear the stories of what fun that I had. I was dating instructors.
TS: Your now-husband was there.
GL: My now-husband.
TS: But you didn’t know each other?17
GL: No.
TS: No? Interesting—
GL: And in June, we went for his fortieth reunion back to Newport. So I got to go too. And I was very excited. I didn’t know any of these men. But I feel like I know them, because we had the same experience. And I looked at all the places that had been razed. And the Newport College, they should shut it down. It’s a taxpayer drain, that was our impression when we look at it—that it’s wasteful—but it’s kind of sad to realize that you’re so old it’s not there anymore. We don’t need to train that many people. You know, they were training a hundred or so nurses.
TS: For the war?
GL: Yeah, every eight weeks, just churning them out. And all of us in my class—Well this woman had gone to college on the program, but there were would be a few of the old people who were direct commission. But a lot of us were just candidates. And a lot of them were very shocked. They were not prepared for the military at all and were very eager to get out. You couldn’t be married—well, you could be married but they didn’t care. They weren’t going to accommodate you. You could have—
TS: You mean for like your quarters and things.
GL: No. There was no accommodation whatsoever and you couldn’t have a dependent. That’s another one of my stories. So they expected you to be single, and if you got pregnant you were gone. So I can remember two women trying to get pregnant really fast, because they wanted to get out of their deal. Well you can imagine those of us who considered ourselves taxpayers were not happy that they were going to take advantage of their educational benefit, and then not serve. On the other hand, we really didn’t want to be working alongside them. So there were a lot of us who fairly organizationally oriented. You know, we were into it. We were going to go save lives.
TS: So did you know what to expect when you were done with Norfolk—was it Newport?
GL: Newport. Did I know what to expect? Well they gave us big hospitals. We had choices. We could ask where we wanted to go. And the big hospitals, the training hospitals, were: Philadelphia, Portsmouth, San Diego, and Boston, were the big ones—and Oakland. And I wanted to go. If you’re going to go in the navy, see the world. So I think Boston might have been top on my list, or maybe San Diego was first because it’s a lovely climate. So I was really happy to get Boston. And Barbara and I were on the buddy system, so they sent us together.
TS: Oh good.18
GL: So you could go with a buddy. But you know, in the military you—it’s your family. You can go by yourself and you have friends there and you have family there. There’s somebody who knows somebody that you know. You all have the same experience and background, so you are not alone, and somebody will take care of you when you get there.
TS: Do you think that’s different from the civilian world?
GL: Oh, absolutely. You know, if I had stayed in—My girl friend who went overseas the next year, Susan, who did the humanitarian work, first went to Denver. And when she went work at the big hospital in Denver she went with a friend; but they didn’t do anything to acclimate you to the environment, or help you find a place to live. She had to find a place to live. You know, you had to make your own friends when you show up on the unit. There was no corporate system to take people in. And I notice it where I work. I work at a big hospital, now. When new people come to us there is no organized way, no buddy system, no welcoming arms to take people in. I think the military is very comforting in that way, that they really take care of each other. I assume they still do it. I still communicate with people in the military. And you always have a family.
And I tell young people going in, “There nothing easier than being in the military, really. You have to stay healthy and fit. Sleep. Get up alert. Look good. Show up. And say, ‘Yes, Sir!’ If you do what they give you to do, and smile,” and I said, “Then you’ll have food to eat, a roof over your head, and some time to relax. And you’ll make some of the best friends of your life. It’s not too hard."
TS: Anyone from your state is like your best friend.
GL: Right! You know, and it’s not—and I think it’s a wonderfully comforting organization to be in. It was for me. And you just pass it on. You know, people just pass it on. I can remember being welcomed and then doing the same thing for somebody else, when it was my turn. Or meeting my mentor and being some—well, we were assigned—In Boston when a new nurse was coming in, you were assigned to take care of [that] nurse for whatever they thought that they needed. So already, you’re assigned to be their best friend.
TS: That’s like the sponsor program.
GL: Yes. So it wasn’t—I know I did not know what to expect, to tell you the truth, except I had been trained in a big hospital. So I wasn’t spooked by the big hospital. But it was different, though. We had big open wards. I went to Boston for my fortieth year trek, to look again, to close the door. The hospital is gone. There’s a veterans hospital on another hill that I thought about going to look at, because it looks like the same kind of building. You know, the buildings built in the early part of the century, in the 1890s, had big sun porches on the end and then big open bays. And when I look at the pictures of me in those open bays—oh, that was a long time ago. But it would be like—if you think about it, 1968 was only twenty years from ’48. Well now, we’re twenty years from ’88? 19
TS: Yes.
GL: So it wasn’t that far away for it to look so ancient. And there had been no time to update it. So it was a pretty ancient hospital: Chelsea Naval Hospital, in Boston, up on the hill overlooking the Charles River. We lived in quarters that are still there and they’ve been converted to apartments. And I think that building was built for the War of 1812. And it has thick granite walls three feet thick. And so our room had twelve foot ceilings and a big window seat, a big shelf, so that you could curl up in the window and look out over at Bunker Hill across the Charles River. It was magic place. It still is, but it’s apartments now.
TS: Interesting.
GL: Magic place to live. And the quarters were very grim. They hadn’t been updated since the ‘40s. And they were female quarters only. And we had stewards, which were in those days were mainly Filipino and the occasional African American—but pretty much Filipino. So you had them living downstairs in their little hole. [They] were supposed to clean for us and watch over us; mostly they were just there [laughs]. And we weren’t allowed to have men upstairs, and yeah, well—
TS: Yeah. So did—was being at the hospital in Boston—in Viet—now are you active?
GL: Yes, active duty.
TS: Now, how did you feel about being on active duty compared to like all of your training, and going through that?
GL: Well, it was different. When I was training you had no reference. The only reason you knew that you were on active duty: you had this green check and an ID card and you went down to see the recruiter. But it didn’t really hit home until you were putting your uniform on. And in Boston and in Newport, you couldn’t go off base in your uniform, because of the anti-war sentiment. So we led double lives. And then the military required that you have a hat on when you go through the gate to get saluted. So you’d take your hat off and put on your coat or something. We would go to work in Boston—We soon moved off, out of nurses quarters, because it was—well, restrictive. You didn’t have your own stuff. They had rules. Everybody knew what you were doing. It was convenient. And in retrospect, I wished I had stayed there. But we moved out and that was another experience. We lived in a wonderful place, but it added stress to our lives to live off base. But when we came on base, we had to have our uniforms on but not our caps. They didn’t want us identified riding around in our cars as military, because we were targets. As soon as you came through the gate, you know, you’d put your cap on and go to work.
And the same way in Newport. I remember going to the Jazz Festival in Newport. And it wasn’t too hard for the women to look like we weren’t civilians, but the men really had—they really, yeah. So sometimes they’d have alerts in Newport. And you’d think that that would be a safe town.20
TS: Even as a nurse?
GL: Yes, just because we were military.
TS: Yeah?
GL: Yes.
[End of CD1—Begin CD 2]
TS: Did you ever feel anybody—
GL: No. I did have an experience in the eighties I’m happy to talk about.
TS: Yeah?
GL: —with a wacko on a metro train. But I didn’t feel anything. You know, we just did what we had to do. It just seemed kind of silly.
TS: Go ahead and talk about the eighties. What happened there?
GL: Oh, the eighties? I was in Washington, D.C., on one of my trips. And I believe I was working at BUMED [Bureau of Medicine and Surgery] for two weeks. And my friend—
TS: You’re in the reserve at this time?
GL: I’m in the reserves and I’m doing my two weeks of active duty. I think I’m a commander, I believe. And I was staying up in Maryland with my friend who was on active duty at Bethesda [Naval Medical Center]. And so, I would ride the Metro [subway system] into downtown down to K Street, where the BUMED sits on the Potomac—pretty near the Potomac—in the old naval observatory. And I was on the train in my bridge-coat. You know, in the seventies, we didn’t— you weren’t seen in your uniform; but by the eighties, the Reagan years, the focus on national defense was starting to rise. And they were talking about missile defense systems, so rattling our sword. So I had my bridge coat on. And I had—I was wearing my boonies to walk in, but I had my heels in a canvas bag that said “Navy Nurse Corps” on it. And my brief case. And I wore a beret. You wore a beret in the eighties, didn’t you?
TS: Yes.
GL: I had my beret on, because it was a much more practical hat to travel around in. And I was sitting on the Metro, and a man with a bag sat down next to me. And started a rant about—asking me questions about being a baby killer. “How do I feel about being a baby killer?” Well the bridge coat—you know it just has my rank on it—and I didn’t answer 21
him. I made eye contact because I’m a nurse, I guess. And he was harassing me and it was—his voice was rising and his posture was getting a little threatening. And then he saw me bag that said, “nurse corps”. And he said, “Oh, you’re a nurse. I’m sorry.” But the train had come to stop and there were men standing around me. The train was full—I’m commuting—and the men—I stopped— two men just moved right up to me and touched me and moved me right off of the train. So I got off the train and got on later.
That was probably my worst experience in uniform. I was never spit on or—because I’m a woman. Actually in my uniform, in the airports, I was mistaken for flight crew. And they asked me where was the Delta [airline] going, you know, because the navy uniform is so un-military looking. I mean it just looks like a nice suit.
TS: Right.
GL: So but that was probably my worst experience—very, very scary experience, you know?
TS: Yeah.
GL: Not knowing who was there with me. But in my younger days in Boston, I don’t feel that—
TS: Even at the height of the anti-war—
GL: No, and I stayed away from the protests. And I never had anybody who was anti-war say anything to me that was personal. And of course, I empathized with them. I didn’t think that it was a good thing to do. I thought it was a horrible thing, a bad war, and we needed to get out. So I think it’s because we were nurses. We were pretty much—insulated.
TS: Well you said you that you compartmentalized.
GL: Yeah, you compartmentalize it. You can say, “I can do this because it’s my job.” I wasn’t hurting people. I wasn’t loading bombs.
TS: How did you feel about Johnson—President [Lyndon B.] Johnson?
GL: I didn’t like him. You know, I just—I thought he was kind of a blowhard. And I didn’t think that he was very presidential or gentlemanly. I kind of knew a little bit about him. I had read and studied about his early politics, and I just thought that he was kind of a slimy politician. However, when he gave his speech “I will not seek” [refers to Johnson’s speech announcing that he would not run for re-election] I was feeling a little better about him. But I don’t think I would have been happy with any president. I was, you know, pretty unhappy. I voted for Paul [corrected to “John” by veteran later] Anderson [John Anderson was an independent candidate for President in 1980], after—what election was that?
TS: That was eighties I think?22
GL: Was it? Yeah because, I was pretty disenchanted with presidential politics. And, you know, I think going through the [President Richard M.] Nixon-Johnson years did me in. [President Ronald W.] Reagan finished me. [Laughter] I’m not a Reagan woman.
TS: Did you find yourself though, because you were in the military—because you were talking about before when you were in high school, and you said you didn’t—you read the Time and Newsweek, but you didn’t really—
GL: In college, we were very isolated. And I’ve thought about this. I tried to read Time Magazine. I think I had—I’ve always had a subscription to Time Magazine. We didn’t have television. We didn’t have internet. There was a television in the dorm in the lounge that was in a very unfriendly room. I remember watching the news occasionally in college. My husband and I talked about our “lost years”. Sixty-eight—Well, Sixty-nine was a “lost year”, because I was overseas on Guam. Sixty-eight was—I can remember almost every day, but I didn’t have enough time to do any in-depth reading. Now I will read. I will find out who has written a long article, and I will read it. I was just getting, you know, the sound bites and what Time Magazine fed me. And we were very busy. That was just a horrendous year.
TS: What was happening where you were working at that time?
GL: Well I graduated in June. But, you know, Bobby Kennedy was—I saw Bobby Kennedy the day before he was assassinated. We were having our baccalaureate program at the Benson [Hotel] in Portland. And he was campaigning in Portland. And he was staying in the Benson and his dog came through the dining room. And so we said, “Whose dog?”
And then somebody else said, “Well Bobby Kennedy’s here.”
And then his staff said he was coming through the back—you know how they always come through the kitchen?
TS: Yes.
GL: He was heading towards the banquet room through the kitchen. One of his staffers said to him, “This is a room full of newly graduated nurses. You need to talk to them.” So Bobby Kennedy, who was exhausted by the way—he appeared very exhausted, spoke to us for a few minutes and he was assassinated the next day. And so that left quite an impression.
And that summer before, Portland had had a lot of race riots. And I had to circumvent those race riots to get to work. I worked my last summer in Portland at a small hospital, so—and I worked night shift. So going to work at night, I had to go around neighborhoods. You know, there were places—you could see fires burning in Portland. And I think people may have forgotten that, now when you—
TS: Yeah, you don’t really think of Portland as one of the cities.
GL: Portland did not have many black people, but, boy, they were mad! [Laughs] 23
TS: Well how did you feel though—back to when Robert Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, was assassinated? After, I mean, you saw him the day before. That had to be really—
GL: It was. It was just shocking, you know, to live in a time where it happens. But I was so busy, you know. I was taking my boards the next week. And then, I think I was—I was home—I don’t remember—I don’t know. It’s just so hard to recall it. It was just kind of a stunned feeling. But I don’t—I think I would feel—I would have much stronger feelings now than I did then. Young people are pretty much kind of insulated from that; we kind of roll with the punches.
TS: Right.
GL: And I was pretty pro-Robert Kennedy. But I just remember being shocked.
TS: Being shocked? Because when we talk about now, 1968, some people say that that was a real turning point year, a pivotal year in many different ways.
GL: Well, it was. So much happened to people my age, you know. That’s the year that I graduated from college. And so I went from college, Martin Luther King being assassinated, Robert Kennedy being assassinated, and right away I get in my car and I drive across country and I’m put in to a social situation that is totally bizarre and unique, and then a new work situation in a culture that is totally different. Boston is not Oregon. I had people say to me, “Barbara” —now they called us the “Gold Dust Twins” because we looked like California girls. You know, we were blonde and we fit their—they would ask us did we surf. I had a woman in New England say to me—actually say to me, “Oregon, isn’t that right next to Ohio?”
TS: Oh, my gosh.
GL: So people did not have a concept of Oregon. And of course we had Governor Tom McCall then, so he was—and he’s from—his family is from Massachusetts—so people were pretty tuned into who governor McCall was. So we took a lot of grief about that, you know. So it was pretty entertaining, but your question was about?
TS: Just 1968.
GL: Oh, 1968. Oh, the things that happened to me. Yes. That’s the first time I saw a person die. I survived the flu epidemic in 1968. I’m a flu epidemic survivor. Have you had your flu shot? Boston was hit with the Hong Kong Flu at Christmastime forty years ago.
TS: Oh really?
GL: And it just whipped through the city. And I got it on Christmas. So I’d worked Christmas Eve and doubled back. You know, I worked 3 to 11 and went home, slept. There was snow on the ground, which I hated. I’m from Oregon and we don’t like snow. I came back to work in the morning, and every patient who could go somewhere was gone. You 24
know, a lot of them were in that hospital because—well, they were sent there to that hospital because they were from New England. So many of them, if they were able to be out of there, they were gone, but if they that didn’t have families or they were sick, they were still there. So we had kind of a skeleton crew. Christmas morning, I had two big units that were separated by a long hallway in the center of the hospital. And I was walking that hallway. And the corpsman on one unit called over to the other corpsman on the other unit. And they were on the phone looking at each other talking. And he said, “Ask her what’s wrong with her.”
TS: Was he talking about you?
GL: Yes. He said, “Ask Ms. Offenbacher what’s wrong with her. Why is she walking funny?”
And I said, “Well I think I’m okay, but I hurt. My hips really hurt. “
And so the corpsman took my temperature. He just popped a thermometer in my mouth. My temperature was 104. I didn’t feel too bad yet. And we knew the flu was around. I believe I’d been immunized. I believe we had the vaccine in October. And I thought, “Oh oh”. And I don’t know if it was true in the eighties, but in the sixties you were dead or alive. Either you could work or you were sick and you were hospitalized. So you didn’t complain. Because if you complained, then they were going to take you off duty and put you in a hospital room. But I had—it was Christmas—my first Christmas away from home, ever.
TS: Oh, yeah.
GL: And my Christmas presents hadn’t been opened. We were going to have Christmas, my roommates and I, when I got home. Well I could barely get home. I didn’t—I told the corpsman, I said, “Don’t you tell anybody. You didn’t see that thermometer.” And was not 2:30. I was so sick that by the time I got home—my roommates—I remember lying on the floor, and my roommates opened my presents for me and showed me what they were.
TS: Oh, my gosh. Well, I’m going to lose this.
[Sound of object falling]
GL: Well—there you go. And she said, “I’ll get you off the floor and take you to sick call”. And you had to be in uniform to go to sick call, of course. So at 4 AM, in the snow, in Boston, the day after Christmas, I went to the hospital. And I don’t remember the next few days, because they sedated me for pain.
TS: Oh no.25
GL: They sedated and hydrated us. I remember being put in a little room, and there was me in the room. When I woke-up, the room was so full that I could barely get between the beds. We could barely get out of bed and go to the bathroom. So it just rippled through the hospital. So I wonder how many people I exposed. And then in the next six weeks—of course it takes a long time to recover from this flu—I had tickets to the ballet to see Mikhail Baryshnikov and Margot Fonteyn do Swan Lake. They had the flu and I saw their understudies. I had tickets to see Angela Lansbury in Madam of the Cha—she had the flu, and I saw her understudy. [Miss Lansbury was touring with the Broadway musical Mame in 1968.]
TS: So everybody was getting it.
GL: I slept through Swan Lake, because I was just getting off of being sick and it’s very soothing and it wasn’t Margot Fonteyn [chuckles]. So yeah, I’m a proponent of flu shots, because I don’t think people understand how bad the flu is.
TS: Yeah.
GL: So that happened to me in ’68. And in ’69, I went overseas.
TS: So how did it come that you went to Guam?
GL: Well, they trained us. They kept—the navy—the army sent people to—sent nurses to—Texas, I think. I want to say Fort Hood. They sent them to Texas for six to eight weeks of training, gave them boots, and sent them to Vietnam; because the army had more hospitals in-country. The navy had Da Nang and the two hospital ships. So they trained us for a year. We were expected to spend a year in one of the big hospitals. And it was, you know—they kind of gave us an internship which was actually “trial by fire”. And then you knew you’d go. They gave you a little “dream sheet” which I can still see in my mind’s eye. And I think Guam was my third choice.
And I was familiar with Guam, because I had a pen-pal, a sailor, when I was in high school, who was friends of a friend’s boyfriend. So I had seen pictures of Guam. He had sent me things from Guam. I knew about Guam. And I think I wanted the tropical paradise. So it was third, because, really I wanted to go to Japan for the cultural experience.
TS: Okay.
GL: —or Naples for the cultural experience. So I think I had Japan and Italy and Guam, but I would have been happy with anything. And they called me in and asked me if I’d like to go to the ship, because apparently I was a good enough young nurse that they thought that I could handle the ship. And I turned it down. And I don’t regret it because my life is the way it is because of what I got from Guam. But in retrospect, don’t turn it down. And my advice to people going into the military: if they offer you something that seems a little uncomfortable, a little “out of your box”, do it!26
TS: Why?
GL: Because you will learn something wonderful. It will, you know—may change your life. It will be the best opportunity. They are probably asking you because it’s a very challenging thing that nobody wants to do. [Laughs]
TS: That’s true.
GL: And I kind of wish I had done it, because the people who served on the ships have a—got wonderful experience. And I say “wonderful”, and it’s not a good word. They had an amazing life-changing experience, and they’re all good friends still, because there were so few of them.
TS: And you’re talking about the ships that are off Vietnam. The—
GL: Yes, the mercy hospitals—
TS: Where they were bringing the—
GL: Yes, yeah.
TS: —the men to.
GL: Yes. And when I went to Boston I was put on a forty bed unit—a medical unit. We had cancer patients, heart patients, and those are the patients that I saw die. We didn’t—and the other—it was a dual unit, the other half of the unit was communicable disease. So we had a hepatitis unit, and those were the days where we isolated them. It was really awful. And every time we had a new specialist in, they had a different idea about how we should isolate them. But basically, it was very barbaric treatment. And we saw a lot of communicable disease that we didn’t know what it was. We saw a lot of tropical disease. So everything was a mystery, so it was very intriguing. So one unit had cancer treatment, and the other unit had communicable disease.
And I was there six weeks. And the lieutenant commander, who was a woman—she was probably in her thirties. She seemed elderly to me; she had gray hair.
TS: [Chuckles] Yeah.
GL: She had gray at the temples, lovely woman, went to Da Nang. And I took over that ward. And I was six weeks out of college. And then there were three of us. And so usually on a day shift it would be a nurse and her five corpsmen. And on evenings that nurse would usually cover five or six units and the corpsmen: who were eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds right out of high school. And our job was to bring them to speed, because they were going to Vietnam, and that was the worst part of being there. Every Monday morning at muster, they would announce who had orders to Vietnam. So the weekends were very hard. And a lot of the corpsmen, you know, they were just so worried about Monday. A lot of them drank or acted out. You know, some of the ones who didn’t drink just had 27
trouble functioning on the job. It was—because that was our job; bring them up to speed, so that they could go.
One of the things that we did, to bring them to speed, was prepare the body. And because I was on the cancer ward and the medical ward, occasionally we got a body to prepare. And so whenever that happened, “no grieving here, we’re having a class”. So you would call all over the hospital and say, “Free-up the corpsmen and to come on down, because we’re going to prepare the body.” And when I think back, I was twenty-two years old, and that’s one the things that I had to do—got to do—what do you call that? I don’t know. And we tried not to get too attached to the corpsmen, because they were going. I remember three years later, when I got to Bremerton on my last tour on active duty, there was a corpsman in the pharmacy who had been a corpsman on my unit in Boston— who went to Vietnam and came back. It made me cry to see him. Because when they left, you didn’t know. Those—the corpsmen were not likely to come back, because that was the most risky job.
TS: Right.
GL: So that was probably the hardest thing to do. His name is Doggett, his last name. I should look for him now that I’m thinking of him.
TS: Doggett?
GL: Yeah.
TS: That’s interesting. I remember one of the nurses told me that—I can’t remember if she was in Korea, or if she was in Vietnam—but she was talking about she couldn’t remember their names—or maybe it was one of the doughnut dollies [American red cross workers], because they knew them all by their nicknames.
GL: Yeah they did.
TS: This was in Vietnam.
GL: Yeah, they gave them nicknames. Well I think, I’m not very good with names anyway, but I truly think that part of us did not want to know. There was a man I worked with here at Rogue Valley [Medical Center] who was on my unit in Boston. He was one of those corpsmen. And he recognized me one night, when I said something about—he was respiratory therapist I think— “lets swab the deck”. And he took a good look at me. And we realized—and I looked at him—but, you know, thirty years later—twenty-five years later, we really didn’t look the same. And who would expect us to be here?
TS: Right.
GL: And he had, had a drinking problem then. And, you know, he talked about how his life had spiraled. But I didn’t remember his name, because—I know his name now— because I don’t think we wanted to get attached to them. And we really didn’t have a lot of time to 28
get attached to them, because it seemed to me that we had them about twelve weeks before they kind of rotated through. It was—you just didn’t get attached.
TS: Right.
GL: It was like fostering a pet. You know, they’re going to go someday so don’t get used to them.
TS: Yeah, don’t get too attached.
GL: No, don’t get attached. And, you know, we had the fraternization rules, so you, you know, you had to get attached in a motherly way.
TS: That’s right. Well tell me about Guam then.
GL: So Barbara and I—
TS: You’re still hanging out with Barbara?
GL: Oh yeah, we’re still friends. And I have two friends from Guam who live here.
TS: In this area in Rogue Valley?
GL: Yes. My mother says, “You went to Guam and brought three people home.” I brought my husband; my neighbor, who’s retired from the navy, next door; and the woman who is restoring the house. We were all stationed on Guam together. That’s what the military does for people. They make family for you.
TS: That’s right.
GL: So we knew that we’d be getting orders in the summer. I got orders about the same week men landed on the moon. I know this because I was working nights, and they landed on the moon while I was on nights. And I set my alarm—I was by myself, in my nightie, with my TV with the rabbit ears. And I remember running out into my driveway hoping that the lady next door was home, so that we could whoop-it together. But she had little kids and they weren’t home. So I experienced it by myself. And that same week we had a two week block of nightshifts that we did fourteen days in a row. During that same time period my envelope came with my orders to Guam. Barbara had gotten her orders a few weeks before me—two or three weeks before—and we were kind of tired of each other. We didn’t care if we went together.
TS: Yeah.
GL: So it wasn’t so important that we go together, but we did. I got orders too. So we made the trip together to Guam. All of my stuff got sent home. All the stuff that my parents had shipped to Boston got shipped back to be put in their basement. And that was August.29
TS: So it was ’69?
GL: August of ’69. And we all came home to Oregon. And we had a big family party here, so that people could look at me and say, “Hi”, and send me off. We flew out of Travis [Air Force Base, California]. And Barbara and I—in the Travis terminal—looked over and saw a woman sitting with two enlisted men. And Barbara said, “Is that a navy nurse?”
And I said, “I think it is.”
And she said, “Don’t you think that we should ask her to join us?”
That was Marty.
TS: [Chuckles] She’s pointing to her neighbor—that’s for the transcriber.
GL: She’s my neighbor who lives next door, who bought the house next door. And so Marty got on the plane with us and the three of us got to Guam together in the middle of the night. And getting off that plane at four in the morning and that humidity and the fragrance, I shall never forget it. And the people waiting for us had been partying. So we started out by getting in rickety cars with drunk people driving through the dark. You know, there were no streets lamps. We just drove through the jungle. And all I can remember, really, is the smell of the place.
TS: Can you describe that at all?
GL: It’s fragrance of jasmine and tropical flowers and warm mud. And I still drink jasmine tea, because it transports me. And they took us to the hospital to check-in, and then took us to our quarters. And we didn’t know where they were. We had no advanced pictures. Now with the internet we’d know what our room looked like. We’d have all this information, but we had no information. And the junior nurse quarters were on the beach—if you’re Guamanian I think you say, “Asaun”. We called it “Asan”. And now it’s the Pacific Park—Pacific War Memorial Park [War in the Pacific National Historical Park], now.
But it’s a crescent on the beach with palm trees. And a crescent of Barrow’s Barracks: the two story World War II structures. And they were converted into quarters for us. And there was an extension of the hospital there. They called it the annex, and it housed a thousand people—patients. And these are not bedridden patients. These are up-and-about walking wounded. And today when you hear about the troubles at Walter Reed [Army Medical Center] that they’re having I know exactly what they’re talking about, because we struggled with that. “And why haven’t they fixed it?” that’s the question, because we struggled with it forty years ago. Of people who are walking wounded—they cannot go to duty, they’re going to need ongoing care, they’re going to need some kind of board or dispensation. But they’re basically up and around with health problems, chronic health problems, or injuries that keep them from performing their duty, but don’t make them bedridden or needing nursing care twenty-four hours a day—kind of like a halfway house. Although they did have a fair number of surgical patients down there. They did have an operating room. Our post office was there. And we had our own club and bar—the nurses.30
So the first night there we went to bed at four in the morning, in a hospital bed, in an un-air conditioned room with a tile floor. Woke up in the morning [thinking], “Well this is stark accommodation. It’s like girl scout camp.” But we had our own bathroom and two rooms. So we had lots of privacy. And air-conditioning went in that week. They were just in the process of getting the air conditioners in for us. I went to the end of the hallway and opened the door, and I was in paradise. I was looking out on the beach and Camel Rock and there’s a break so that the big waves are out, but, you know, I was in a tropical paradise. I was in heaven. I could not believe that I had been transported there. I hadn’t been to work yet. [Laughs]
TS: What was the name of the place in Guam where you were?
GL: Asan: A-s-a-n.
TS: Okay.
GL: It was a town—a little village—south of the capital which we called “Agana”, and now I believe they call it in Chamorra “Hagåtña” if you look at it on Google Earth. And the hospital was up on the cliff, overlooking the ocean. It was wonderful.
TS: So you were feeling pretty good about it?
GL: Oh yes! How exciting! The big plane ride, dropped into a tropical paradise, with all these fun people [laughs]. The first day, of course, we were jet lagged. It took twenty-two—thirty hours to get there. And my friends, Marty and Barbara, and I were on the same floor. And Carol, who I brought home to Jacksonville, had already been there about a week—or a few days. So she was already oriented.
So the first night—the first day, they took us to Cocoa Beach, which is a white sand, private beach. It was not Cocoa Beach, I called it that because of the coconuts—[It was] Tarague Beach at Anderson Air Force Base. A beautiful private beach—did you get to go there?—with white sands. And we spent the afternoon there getting our first sunburn. They warned us, “Don’t get sunburned.” And then—in the military, a sunburn is a court martial offense. If you can’t go to work because of a sunburn, then you’re in trouble. So we were pretty careful.
And that night, the first night, we had dinner at the Crosswinds; which was the pilots’ club at the air station. Every night, on the island, there was steak night at a club and they rotated them. Sunday night was steak night at the Crosswinds. Monday night was steak night at the nurses club down on the beach. And we hadn’t been there yet, because we didn’t have to check-in—it was Labor Day Weekend.
They didn’t have anything for us to do. So that first trip down to the club, our first club, I met my husband. That first trip [chuckles]—because his ship’s men were being moved into nurses’ quarters. Well, I think they were still living on the ship then. They were decommissioning their ship. And the men would come there to eat, because there were women there, of course. And so we had steak and met that ship’s company. You know, it was an LST [Landing Ship, Tank], so I think there were six or seven of them 31
there for dinner. My husband was among them, but I didn’t date him right away because he was slow.
TS: He was slow?
GL: Yes, he’s not outgoing. I dated the outgoing one for a month or so, until we figured it out. So I thought that I was in paradise. Our own club, drinks were a quarter [laughs]. The military encouraged drinking, because they didn’t have other ways of comforting us, quite frankly. We never got debriefed. Nobody ever said, “We’re sorry.” It was, “Go back to work!” You know the differences—there was no attention to our mental health. Zero. So if you were a drinker, and you were having trouble, you were going to drink. Or if you were going to act out—if you were going to seek sex for comfort—you could have that too. But there was no mental health for us.
TS: Did you recognize that at the time, or is this like in retrospect?
GL: I knew it at the time. We had chaplains. They didn’t help us. We lived with a navy chaplain, who was a Seabees [navy construction battalion] chaplain. He lived in quarters with us. He was a priest. He had a great experience [laughs]—poor man. And he helped his people. But the Seabees weren’t dealing with death and mayhem. They were dealing with women trouble, financial trouble. But those of us in the medical field, no. And I thought—We didn’t even comfort each other, particularly. It was “deep breath, and do it.”
Now my friend Carol, if you would talk to her—she has written a lot. She is a very introspective, sensitive woman. And she handled it differently than I did, and she got out of the military. Because she worked intensive care, and so she dealt with it differently. I kind of ignored it, I think, and laughed. Thank goodness that I learned. My first week there I can remember thinking, “I am not going to be able to drink and do this”, because every night it was those quarter drinks. So I stopped drinking except when I wasn’t going to have to function. No. Then I didn’t drink to excess because A: I didn’t like to be out of control, and B: I wasn’t going to be able to function. So it wasn’t comforting to me to drink. So I never did that. But I laughed a lot. You know, I acted out a lot. I didn’t get in trouble, but I had fun.
TS: Yeah.
GL: And we talked to each other occasionally—I don’t remember—and, to tell you the truth, I don’t remember much comforting. It was stiff upper lip, very military, straight back, and we didn’t talk about it when we had patients who were having difficulty. I can remember two patients we had who were having quite a bit of difficulty. And I can remember standing in the utility room talking with one of the younger nurses and the corpsman about how we could approach it. But we weren’t very good at it. We didn’t have a plan for emotional support.
And on Guam they came twenty-four hours from the field to us—the bad casualties. We had people who were injured and lived on Guam, or injured on Guam, or injured on ships. But our mission for casualties—those men who came from Da Nang32
with a stop in the Philippines—not getting off the plane—the plane just landed in the Philippines, and then to us. So they were twenty-four hours post-Da Nang. So you had less than forty-eight hours post-injury, and then they came to us. And they were on a triage unit overnight—“casualty receiving,” I think they called it. I don’t even remember. I’ve been in the military long enough that they’ve changed the names. And then they came to our units. In that triage they decided who’s going into intensive care, who’s getting surgery tomorrow—well who’s getting surgery now—but who’s getting surgery tomorrow, who’s walking wounded and could go there, and so-on and so-forth. So everybody—they were kind of sorted. Then on these big wards, in the morning, they would bring us our patients. It was like playing that game where you move the blocks around, the little key chain game, where there’s only one space and you want to move everything around. So we were always moving beds around to find that one space that was right.
So in the mornings we would get ten patients out of casualty receiving for each unit. My particular unit was traumatic orthopedics, and it was amputees mostly. So we would get those ten patients—the ten bad ones. But before they got there, we had to move ten off. We had to decide which ten were ready to go to the sleeping porch. And then I’d move the beds around. And you could hear them coming. And I can still hear them. We used glass IV bottles and they all had the striker frames: the metal frames on their beds, you know, to give them bars to help move themselves. So you could hear them coming, “Clang, clang, clang,” while we’re making rounds, trying to decide who we’re going to move. And then we had those patients, those amputee patients were there for about ten days, and then they were shipped to the States. So in those ten days they got debridement, dressing, changes, antibiotics, and moved out.
So our experience with them was very short. And few of them got depressed before they left. They were still in the denial. Few of them got angry. They’re all in the denial stage when we have them. So we didn’t have too many taking depressive dives, unless we kept them longer than the ten days. And we did have some that weren’t stable enough for transport, or they had injuries that they thought that they could work on a little bit more before they moved them. Occasionally we’d get one that gave us a hint of what happened to people when they go to Oak Knoll and/or Philadelphia, where that’s the next step or a young nurse. You go get trained. You go overseas. And then you go to one of those places, where they have wards of amputees. And that’s where the men were very depressed and their other problems started surfacing.
So we were kind of the honeymoon. And we jollied them. You know, so it was very playful on the units. The corpsmen were very playful. Our job was to keep these guys “up”— keep them “up,” until we could get them out.
TS: Right.
GL: So there was a lot of cajoling and humoring. So [laughs] —
TS: But how was it—because you talked about maybe people who weren’t dealing with it so much emotionally, but what did you think about it when you were first there? Do you remember— [Continues in Part Two]