Oral history interview with Paula Trivette, 2011

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WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Paula Trivette
INTERVIEWER: Therese Strohmer
DATE: April 10, 2011
[Begin Interview]
TS: This is Therese Strohmer, and today is April 10, 2011. I’m in Greensboro, North Carolina. I’m with Paula Trivette. This is an oral history interview for the Women Veterans Historical Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Paula, how would you like your name to read on your collection?
PT: I would like it to read Lieutenant Colonel, Retired, Paula Jackan Trivette.
TS: Okay, excellent. Well, Paula, why don’t we start out by having you tell me about when and where you were born?
PT: I was born in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, and that was in 1953, March 14, and I am one of seventeen living children of one set of parents, Ignatius and Mary Jane Jackan, who are both deceased now; my dad died in [October 2010—PT corrected later], my mom died two years ago [December 2010—PT clarified later].
TS: Aw. So, you have sixteen siblings?
PT: Sixteen living siblings, yes.
TS: And how does that break down for boys and girls?
PT: It breaks down nine girls and eight boys. There were three sets of twins, so she had all combinations of twins. The first two were a boy and a girl, and boy is one that had died; they were premature; twin girls just a little bit older than I am; twin boys a couple years younger. So, she had all the combinations of twins.
TS: Are you a twin?
PT: I’m not a twin, but I look like one of the twins.2
TS: Do you?
PT: Yes.
TS: Oh, how about that.
PT: I look like this one, this one, and this one.
TS: Which one’s you?
PT: This one. [laughs]
TS: Yeah, you do look like—yeah. Well, how great is that.
PT: And then these are the twin boys.
TS: Okay.
PT: And Rody’s the one that had the twin.
TS: And you have to have matching shirts on, it looks like there.
PT: Well, this is my parents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary, and if I had my druthers, we would had all the siblings wear one color—
TS: Right.
PT: —the spouses wear another color, and the grandkids a third color. But I didn’t win out, so you could wear whatever color you wanted.
TS: Oh! [chuckles] That’s pretty neat.
PT: Yeah.
TS: Well, that’s very interesting. Tell me a little bit—now, the place in Wisconsin Rapids, was that, like, a small town?
PT: It was a town of about eighteen thousand people, I think that’s—might be less; I’m sure it’s less than that now. But we were born and raised Catholic, as you might surmise, raised in the Catholic school, and of course we were very poor, and Mom and Daddy didn’t pay for high school, barely paid for elementary school, so we knew that they would not be paying for college. And if we wanted to go to college, it was going to be on your own dime. So I decided that, yes, I wanted to go to college. I knew I wanted to leave home, go to college, and find—find myself somewhere. [laughter] Less the children.3
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Well, before we get to college—
PT: Okay.
TS: Before get to college, tell me, what did your—what did your folks do, then? I’m sure your mother had to stay at home.
PT: My mother actually stayed at home; she was a stay at home mom with all of us. My dad was actually an engineer; he worked for the Right of Way Department for the state of Wisconsin. And originally, he used to buy and sell property for the state, to put in highways, and then he belonged to the Right of Way Department, where they would actually get the—the highway—permissions to put the highway through. So he had several different jobs through there, but he retired, actually, at the age of fifty-five, which is younger than I am now, still with ten children at home, which—that’s a story in itself—
TS: Yeah, no kidding.
PT: —but we’ll keep them positive, I won’t go there. [both laugh]
TS: So your mom was probably “Oh, wait”, you know?
PT: Yeah.
TS: “Go back to work!”
PT: Right, exactly.
TS: Well, where did you fall in this—
PT: I was a middle child, and I considered myself very fortunate to be in the middle, because I grew up with everybody.
TS: Yeah.
PT: I knew my—my older siblings as well as the younger siblings, whereas the oldest brother, Bob, had gone away to the seminary and my mother was still having children, so I feel that he doesn’t even know the younger ones that he didn’t grow up with, so.
TS: Right, because he was much older than the rest of them.
PT: Right, yes.4
TS: Well, what—So, what was your household like? I mean, how did that run?
PT: Small house we lived in. We had—and this, you’ll find rather interesting. Our house took on several expansions during the eighteen years that I lived there. But as you walk in the back door, there’s just a small porch, which leads you into the kitchen. In the kitchen, there’s a table that would seat eight. You always then would set up two card tables for dinner, and always a couple babies in high chairs. And so—oh, how did it run? My mother ran the house, my dad was gone most of the time. Mornings, we would wake up—if it was during the school year, the older kids got up earlier and you always had a hot breakfast; you had oatmeal or something of that nature. On weekends is the only time you had eggs, but you would have oatmeal or, you know, cream of wheat or something; you’d have a hot breakfast. The first shift would go off to school and then the younger kids would eat and they would go off to school. We lived within three blocks of a—of our elementary school, we went to Catholic school and Catholic high school, and the Catholic high school was about two miles away. So—
TS: Did you just walk to school?
PT: We walked to school.
TS: Both of—both places?
PT: We would—Yes, both places. We would eat our lunch at school, you got a hot meal at school, so they always had hot food there, and then after school we all had jobs, whether they were—well, let’s see. We started—I started babysitting in fourth grade, so we had babysitting jobs that took us—when I was in eighth grade, I started working at a job that was passed along to all of my sisters—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: [chuckles] As you got to a certain age or something?
PT: Romanaski’s Bar.
TS: Is that right? What’d you do there?
PT: Ann Romanski, she owned ten rooms that she would rent out to day workers or weekend workers, and she had some that lived there full time. So after school, you would go and you would make all the beds, clean all the rooms. On weekends, you would do laundry, ironing, scrub floors. It was the very same thing I did at home, but I was getting paid for it, so why the heck not? [laughing] But we all loved Ann Romanski and loved going there, she just was very good to all of us, and it was money for us to pay for our tuition, our books, our uniforms—it was a Catholic high school and we wore uniforms—and books, and so that’s why I say, you know, Mom and Daddy didn’t pay for—for high 5
school, so I knew—I didn’t look at them for—for college money either. So we all had different jobs.
Then from Romanski’s Bar, you then graduated to Judge’s Laundry. Tom Judge owned a laundry in town, and I went to school with his daughter, so after high school we would go and it was a typical—He had gotten several contracts from dormitories where we would wash and mangle all the sheets and fold them; restaurants, the same things with tablecloths and napkins and things of that nature. And then a lot of people had their own family clothing, but mainly the high school kids did the mangling; these big sheets going through this big—
TS: I was going to say, what’s a mangle? What’s a mangle, not sure what that is?
PT: A mangle is a [set of hot rollers where you put a wet sheet through it—PT corrected later]. There’s one person on one end of the mangle, the other [on the opposite end—PT clarified later] —it’s a huge, like—you know, the old-fashioned washers, washing machines—
TS: Right.
PT: —had the wringer?
TS: Right.
PT: It’s like a huge wringer. You put this wet sheet through the wringer, and it dries it; it steams it; it’s very hot; it steams it. As it comes out, there’s two other people on the opposite ends of it coming out, they grab the sheet, fold it, put it on a pile, grab the next one. So, you had—it was a whole system, four people had to—
TS: Had to work together, then.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
PT: —operate this—the mangle. Yeah, you really did. So—But the best part was lunch, because we would go down to the Red Owl Store and buy fresh deli meat. We never had deli meat at home, so we would have ham, it was wonderful, and fresh rolls, we always had white bread in loaves. Our neighbors were bakers, and we always got leftover trays of bakery—Arnold’s Bakery, but God bless them, they were always feeding us. [laughter]
TS: Isn’t that terrific.
PT: It really was. So, that was—from then—from Judge’s Laundry, then I graduated to our local hospital, and I worked in the dietary department there. And that was a lot of fun. We prepared trays, you know, for the patients to go up, and then basically did dishes, so.6
TS: How did you get involved in that?
PT: In that? Actually, let’s see. Who—
TS: This was—
PT: I had a contact.
TS: Was that a hand-me-down job, too? [chuckles]
PT: No, that was not a hand-me-down job.
TS: Okay.
PT: No, that was—and you know, I don’t know how I got that job. Oh, yes I do! Another girl that worked at Judge’s Laundry, she got a job there, and she was working there, and she let me onto it, so—and it beat mangling sheets in the—in the summertime; oh, that was just a nasty job.
TS: Pretty hot.
PT: Very, very hot, but you know, it was—it was money, you did what you did. And then, from there, the same girl had a family that owned a restaurant outside the outskirts of town, and I would go with her on Saturdays; just Saturday. We would go there and worked in the kitchen there, chopping vegetables or doing dishes or whatever. So you know, various different sources of income coming in.
TS: Yeah, and you worked from a very young age.
PT: Oh, yeah. Fourth grade, we started babysitting, and you had your favorite families that you liked to babysit for, and I would always tell them—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Did they ask for—Did they have certain people they called too? That happened in my family; like a family—“Oh, could I please have Paula?”
PT: Oh, absolutely, that’s why I would tell, like, the Crook family—the—and I don’t even—Mr. Crook—I don’t think I ever knew his—his first name, but Mr. Crook worked with my dad in the same—not the same department, but in the building, so he knew we had, you know, tons of kids. And—But I became their babysitter, and I would tell him in July, “If you’re planning to go out New Year’s Eve, get your reservation in now,” because that was a really busy time. [chuckles]7
So I loved going there, they had two little girls that were just delightful. And I actually, then, ended up doing some ironing and cooking—not cooking, ironing and cleaning and stuff for her in the summertime. I would go there, ride my bike across the river, and go work for her.
TS: How nice.
PT: Yeah, we had, you know, people—we were—we were a very highly thought about family; we were all hard workers, and, you know, it was positive for us, because, you know, it was mon—good incomes for us, and for my family as well; we had good reputation and, you know—but we were good workers, so it was a win-win situation for those that hired us and those we worked for.
TS: That’s right. Well, what’d you do for fun?
PT: For fun—[laughs] For fun—
TS: There had to be some of that there.
PT: There was some of that. On Sundays, after we went to church—this was one of the fun things we would do, is we would go on family hikes. And the most favorite place for us all to hike would be to our cemetery in that local town. But the problem was you had to cross a train trestle to get to the cemetery. There was not a sidewalk on this train trestle. Sundays, there weren’t too many trains running, so you were pretty safe in crossing that train trestle. It was the same train trestle, during the summertime, that we would walk across to get to the community swimming pool. Otherwise, we would have to go all the way around town, this way, if we—here’s our house, here’s the train trestle, the pool was right there. Otherwise we did a very circuitous route.
TS: So you’re basically having to walk on the tracks, across?
PT: Right. Yeah, and I would just look there, knowing I was going to fall through. I don’t think—I don’t know how—
TS: How high above the ground was it? Pretty high?
PT: Yeah. You know, I don’t know how thin I thought I was that I could slide through one of those slats. [laughs] But it was—it was the most anxiety-producing time for me; I just hated it. It was almost like you just froze before you’d start walking across those trains—we never had a close—close—
TS: No? You were never worried about a train coming?
PT: No—well, if there was one coming, you could jump to another—right off of the tracks there was an area you could jump to, and just hold on for dear life so you don’t have to jump into the river. But it was—it was scary.8
TS: Yeah? Did anybody have to do that; to jump over?
PT: No, no, we always—because you kind of knew the time the trains came, and so—matter of fact, right after lunch, we would always have to, during the summer time, get down on our knees and say the family rosary before we could go swimming. So while you’re saying the rosary, you hear the train whistle going, so you know, okay, the train’s gone, quick, get over the rosary and get to the pool. [both laughing] So that was one of the fun things we did. We would also, then, in the winter, a lot of skedding—sledding and skiing, water—not water, what do you call it; ice skating.
TS: Ice skating, sure.
PT: And after we all left home to go to school, my father bought a pool table which they dug out our basement and made like a recreation room, but I was already gone to college when this happened. So he put a pool table in down there, and my younger brothers became good pool sharks. And—But the girls, you know, we did a lot of just games at home; kick the can, yeah, cards, yeah.
TS: Wintertime, I know.
PT: Yeah, wintertime, cards; ice skating, though, in the winter; we did a lot of that; sledding, in the winter. That’s when we would walk to—they called it Mosher’s Ma. It was a—When I go back and look at it now, Mosher’s Ma is just a little hill. [laughs] This is what we tobogganed down; you know, we carried our sleds there, our toboggans, and went—but we—
TS: It seemed very formidable when you were a young girl, right?
PT: Yeah! We walked everywhere we went, because we didn’t have a car that could take everybody, so you’re not going to just drive a few people there, you know, you’re going to walk or—we had bikes, and we would take turns riding bikes in the summertime. Those that had paper routes—all my brothers had paper routes, and so they needed the bikes for their paper routes. And in the winter, we used this big sled that we had, that they put their papers in the sled—
TS: Oh, neat.
PT: —and they’d sell papers outside of church; you know, after church on Sunday. But we had paper routes, and you know, sometimes I helped them.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Very entrepreneurial.9
PT: Yeah. I mean, it was whatever you could do, and my oldest brother started selling [for the] Artistic Card Company—it was all occasion cards and Christmas cards and—so every summer, people expected—if it wasn’t Bob, then it was going to be somebody else. That was another pass-along job—that Artistic Cards—because you could get your—your name engraved on the cards. Of course, we never had that, we’re—you know, we—that—the rich people, we knew where to go for those.
TS: Yeah, those are the houses that we’re going to sell—
PT: The houses we’re going to go to first.
TS: That’s right.
PT: But, I mean, it was—it was a lot of fun, we did a lot of things, and of course, birthdays, you know, we never had a birthday party for ourselves, because my parents felt like you have enough people here for a party, so—but that was really the only day that I really felt special, you know, that I was—
TS: Singled out.
PT: Singled out for something, and it was your birthday. We never had wrapped presents, they were always—my mother would put a deck of cards or something into a IGA shopping bag, staple that bag shut, and that was your present. And then you open up that bag—same thing at Christmastime, nothing was wrapped, it was in the IGA shopping bags.
TS: Is that right?
PT: And you—you know, put one staple on there, don’t be wasting three or four staples, you just—you know, one staple will do it. Don’t look in that bag.
TS: And did she keep the bags?
PT: Oh, yes, oh yeah. We recycled—you know, you talk about being green, today? Oh, they don’t know green. But we weren’t as bad as our neighbor. My neighbor swore that she washed out her Kleenexes. [laughs]
TS: My mom used to keep the cereal box; the waxed paper, you know, in the cereal box?
PT: Oh, okay, yeah.
TS: In a drawer, and use that.
PT: In a drawer and use that, yup. And we—of course, we didn’t make lunches for school, but you know, you were certainly—days following that, if you had those Ziploc bags, you 10
know, the baggies, well, you better save every—wash those baggies out. I mean, I find myself still doing some of that today. Not so bad, but I think, “Man, this thing doesn’t need to be thrown out. If it’s not greasy or whatever, you can rinse it out, shake it out, whatever.”
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: That’s right, that’s right.
PT: You can do that, so. You know, I’ve got lot—you know, a lot of really good memories of growing up, and you know, all of us sisters, it was kind of the sisters against the brothers. My sisters did—
TS: Well, you had it pretty evened out.
PT: Yeah. The sisters did all the indoor work, it seemed. You know, we did all the—the laundry and the scrubbing the floors and dusting and all that. My brothers did all the yard work and then they had jobs at, you know, car—car—car shops and stuff where they worked.
TS: Did they have to do the snow shoveling?
PT: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That was—everyone did that. Yeah. And we had—actually, what my father did, I don’t know how long ago, I was just a kid—I know we used to have nothing but dirt out in our backyard, so he had the entire backyard paved; blacktopped. So number one, you could play on that, number two, you could park cars on that, because after a while—after a few years, there were lots of cars being parked, and they’re up and down the street and around the corner.
But the interesting thing is, I grew up on [redacted] Hooker Street. And when I was in—I guess going to college, a big—Wisconsin Rapids is a big paper—paper mill city. So this [Consolidated] Papers developed a new plastics plant at the end of Hooker Street. It was only our house that faced Hooker Street, and you had the Hooker Street address. There were other houses that faced 11th Avenue, 10th Avenue. But at the opposite end of the street, which was maybe three blocks, four blocks down, they built this big plastics plant. Dura Beauty was the name of their products. Well, they petitioned to have the name of Hooker Street changed to Dura Beauty Lane. So that is actually what—where—my brother now lives in the house we all grew up in. He lives on Dura Beauty Lane. [chuckles]
TS: They didn’t want to be—have Hooker [St.] on their address.
[Speaking Simultaneously]11
PT: They didn’t want to be [on] Hooker Street and, you know, nine girls grew up on that street. [both laugh]
TS: What an address, there we go.
PT: Yeah, that’s pretty funny. [redacted] Hooker.
TS: Well, tell me a little bit, then, about school. Did you like school?
PT: I loved school.
TS: Did you?
PT: I loved school. And I don’t know if it was just the fact that I loved learning, but, you know, being away and doing something different, and you didn’t have to take care of your little brothers and sisters; you could be away. But we did not go to kindergarten. They had kindergarten, that was not mandatory, but there was no way to get to kindergarten; it was too far for you to walk by yourself.
So, three blocks down, then you went to first grade. And I had—matter of fact, my first grade teacher was not a nun, Barbara Ebson, and Barbara Ebson, bless her heart, when my father—when my mother died two years ago and my father died this October, she was at the funeral home there for both—for both of them. She still remembers our family and she just—she was near and dear to my heart, she got me on the right track. And in first grade I won the spelling contest. And the prize for the spelling contest was a little ceramic dog. I brought this dog home and to this day, I have no idea what happened to that dog. I hid it in a desk on the porch, because I knew someone else was going to want [it]—it was the cutest little ceramic dog, that they were going to want that dog. I went back to get the dog and it was gone and I’ve never found it since.
TS: Oh, no!
PT: And nobody’s ever claimed up to taking my ceramic dog; my prize, my prize, my first prize.
TS: Oh no, so you only had it for like a few hours in your possession?
PT: That’s right, my prize. But so much was that.
Let’s see, in the second grade, I had a nun, and it kind of—she was kind of scary for your first—Sister Octavia. [chuckles] But in third grade, I had Sister Stella. In third grade, you make your first communion. So that was a very special time, but—but a—kind of a very hurtful time, I guess, because in third grade, when you got your—when you made your first communion—well, first of all, I had my own—my first very own dress; my first communion dress; white shoes, white tights, the whole thing.
TS: That was not a hand-me-down?12
PT: That was not a hand-me-down; no, my first dress that was ever not a hand-me-down. And let me tell you in a few minutes what happened to that dress. But we were also given these little communion purses, and it had your prayer book in it and your rosary in it. And those purses, in our classroom, were lined up on the bookshelf, and once they were paid for, you could take them home. Well, guess whose purse sat there and sat there—to me, it seemed like a millennium, for ever and ever. I knew that eventually I would get it, but it just embarrassed me more than anything to see—my purse was still sitting there, all the guys’ prayer books are gone, the—all the girls’ purses, my purse is still there. So finally one day, I just asked Sister Stella if she would please just put it down in the desk until my parents had the money for it. And that just, you know—it embarrassed me—
TS: Right.
PT: —more than anything, and I thought, you know, people—I didn’t realize we were poor, growing up, until that—that event, I knew that we were. Eventually, because all my sisters got theirs, so I knew that I would have mine eventually, but it was just seeing it there every day.
TS: Being the last one.
PT: Being the last one. But you know, like I say, I didn’t realize that we were poor growing up until you look back at it today.
TS: Right.
PT: We never went without food, we always had hand-me-down clothes. So anyway my communion dress—my first non-hand-me-down dress. When we were in—and you can’t see the picture from here; the little picture, right in the center of the wall.
TS: Okay.
PT: That’s our first family portrait we ever had. And my mother took—now, I have one sister, Carol, who’s retarded; physically and mentally retarded. Carol—my mother always told us that she was our ticket to Heaven. If we’re good to Carol, and don’t complain about having to take her places, put her in the wheelchair or dress her, change her diapers or feed her, whatever, that, you know, she is our ticket to Heaven, and we will, you know, be there by the grace of God through Carol.
Well, in her next breath, my mother would say to me, “But you, Paula, will ride to hell on your tongue.” Now, what kind of a thing is that for a mother to say to her daughter? Obviously, I’ve never forgotten that thing to this day. I didn’t think that I had the potty mouth of the family, because if you dare spoke any bad language, you had your mouth washed out with soap. I mean, that was just the way that it was, you didn’t—you didn’t sass back or you would be slapped. You know, we were very respectful of our parents. So anyway—but that’s something I’ve never forgotten.13
So, we have this family picture taken, and Carol is very tiny, my mother is going to use my communion dress for Carol. Well, that was wonderful, she’s an angel, let her wear white. No, she had to dye the thing burnt orange [laughs] and you see this burnt orange dress on Carol. And whatever happened to—I didn’t care what happened to it after that.
TS: After that.
PT: “You ruined my dress, whatever you want to do with it, do with it.” So, my communion dress became Carol’s burnt orange photo dress.
TS: And that’s what it is in that photo?
PT: Yeah.
TS: Okay. [background noise] Good save.
PT: Yeah, it was.
TS: Oh, yeah, it sticks right—I can see it.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
PT: That’s Carol sitting right there; sticks right out, that burnt orange dress. White would have been just fine for her.
TS: What a beautiful picture, though.
PT: And that was our—
TS: Where are you in this picture, here?
PT: Now—Oh, you can’t find me? [chuckles]
TS: Well—
PT: This is me, here, I was in—a sophomore in high school.
TS: Okay.
PT: And as you can see, Bob was the oldest, and then all of us girls, there’s Rody, Marcia—where’s Marcia—Rody, Marcia, Chris, and then [Marjorie] Jo and Maureen are twins, this is Maureen. Marjorie Jo, and then Paula. So all of us girls, kind of the same age grouping of girls.14
TS: Oh, I see.
PT: And then it comes, Bruce—
TS: The younger boys.
PT: Yes. Bruce, and then—but Carol came in between them; there’s Carol. Then David, Tim, Terry, Steve—we had another little girl thrown in there, Lois—yeah, that’s Lois. Where’s Amy? No, this is Lois, Amy, and Jeff.
TS: There you go.
PT: I thought—I know that we’re all on there. [both chuckle]
TS: That’s true. What a great photo.
PT: And they—John Keel Studio had this picture in their studio for ever and ever and ever, because—
TS: Oh, I bet they did.
PT: Now—
TS: What year was this taken, then?
PT: This was—have to look on the back.
TS: Sixty-something.
PT: I have several pictures—oh, I didn’t even—well, let’s see. I graduated in ’71 from high school—
TS: It’s like ’68, ’69.
PT: —so it’s ’68, yup. When my parents had their sixtieth wedding anniversary, this other picture was taken by John Keel, the same photography studio, however, there were too many of us to fit into the studio, so that picture was taken in our high—Assumption High School auditorium, in the gym.
TS: I see, yeah.
PT: It’s a gym floor.
TS: How interesting.15
PT: And we actually had—it said “Assumption” going across the floor in letters, and I had a graphic artist person remove those letters. [laughs]
TS: Now, with—with you having gone to a Catholic school—and so, when you were in—it would have been elementary school when John F. Kennedy was president and then he was assassinated.
PT: Yes, in fact, I was in sixth grade, and I remember a teacher coming in and just announced it to—you know, to the classroom. And everybody was just in tears, and cried and cried and cried, and we got the day off from school to watch the funeral on TV, and of course you prayed, you said a rosary immediately; you know, for him and for the family. Yeah, it was—that and when the Pope died, you know, those were the only two days I remember getting off for school. [laughs]
TS: Yeah.
PT: And any—any extra time, but that—I—and I felt most sorry for Caroline and John-John [John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr.], because those were the images that you see all the time. But the—the pomp and the regalia of the funeral, the solemnity and everything of it, I was very impressed by that, and the horses carriage and everything, that—the whole—the whole ambiance. I think we’re drawn to tradition and I’m a traditionalist, and I like that, and I like order and that type of thing, so. But that really did not feed into—I never thought about the army or the military or anything while I was going to school.
TS: Did you have the duck and cover kind of things for the Cold War, you know, with the—like the Cuban Missile Crisis, would have been—
PT: No. No, we didn’t have that.
TS: No?
PT: Not—Not that I remember. I know we had—what were they? A siren would sound, and then—actually, then we would take cover, but that was—maybe that was the Cold War. I didn’t know whether—but I thought it was something else.
TS: Might have been tornado watches. [chuckles]
PT: Yeah, could have been—no, it wasn’t tornado. But something—we’d have to get down under our desks—
TS: Yeah, for the—
PT: —and then when the siren went off—I thought it was just a—
TS: Some kind of drill or something?16
PT: Yeah, a drill for something; who knows. You know, you just do things mindlessly; you don’t ask questions. “Yes, sister. Yes, sister. No, sister.”
TS: So you liked school. Did you have a favorite subject?
PT: I loved—I loved music. [laughs] You know, we had to go to—go to church—every day before class started, you went to church. And all of my sisters, we all sang in the church choir, but the music in elementary school was music on the air. At one o’ clock on Wednesdays, they would tune a radio station on that had music on the air, and for half an hour you’d have a music program that you would sing along with, and that was our—our music in there. But I loved math, I liked the sciences. History, I just never could relate to, and I hate that, because I think, you know, had it made more sense to me—I just didn’t—you know, I didn’t think that these people—George Washington, was real. I thought it was just something like, you know, a novel, a story.
TS: Like a fictional character?
PT: A fictional character. So I never—but I hated reading. And I think—I probably—at that time, probably was dyslexic, and didn’t know it. But we used to have to do these silent reading tests; you’d read a couple paragraphs and answer a series of questions. Oh, I would get so sick in there. Sometimes I would just have to leave and, you know, just, “I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” and throw up. This is making me just ill. It made me ill. Because I knew I wasn’t a good reader. Instead of working at becoming a better reader, I just tried to avoid it.
TS: Right.
PT: And you know, my mother, bless her heart, she probably didn’t know who can read and who can’t, here, you know? You just—you go to your sisters or brothers for what you need, and you know, they’ll help you with your projects or whatever you have.
So—But Chris was the artist. I did not have artistic ability, and I have more today than what I ever had before, but in different areas. But you know, she could draw beautifully and paint and, you know, she was very creative. I do a lot of handwork now, but I still don’t have the creative streak that—that she had.
TS: Well, did you have an idea as a little girl, like, what you thought you might want to be when you grew up
PT: Well, you know, it was very limited during that time. Women became teachers, was pretty much it, you know, or nurses. And I really didn’t even think about nursing, because I never had any affiliation with the hospital; nursing. We never went to the doctor; you know, I was never sick. And there was a school nurse, and that—you know, was only there for shots or they would do eye tests and stuff, and I just thought, “That’s no fun.” I didn’t think about that, so, you know, I guess I thought “Yeah, I guess I’ll be a teacher.” But that—really I didn’t want to be a teacher, but I had to do—you know, figure out something. I knew I would marry and have children one day. I thought that that 17
would—you know, I would be a mother, that’s what people did; you went to school and you got degrees, then you got married and had children. And then you raised your children, hopefully, to have something more than you did. So.
TS: You had said earlier that you had—you’d known that you wanted to go to college.
PT: Right, I knew I wanted to go to college because I wanted to get away from home. I wasn’t going to live home forever and be a slave to the house; that was—that was the ticket there, you know. And my older brothers and sisters set the stage. My older brother went to—went to college, Marcia went to college, Chris—you know, my older brothers and sisters, they went to college. And they loved it. They came home—you know, they—I think they liked the college life. Maybe not so much that.
And of course, my brother Bob, I told you, went to a Catholic seminary. But this is the ticket of this one. My father had gone to a Catholic seminary. He had a year and a half or so to go before he would have been ordained a Catholic priest, that’s when he met my mother, at The Preway [Appliance—PT corrected later] shop where they build appliances, refrigerators, and stoves, and she was a secretary there. But he belonged to a bowling league—or my mother did. My mother belonged to a bowling league, and some—somebody couldn’t make it, so they invited my dad to fill in. And so, that’s how my mom and dad met. And so I thought, here, you know, he had gone to a Catholic seminary and then he meets my mother and then I guess he felt like he had to have his own parish.
TS: [chuckles]
PT: Oh, you talk about one of the fun things we did; we would play church! My oldest brother Bob, of course we played church, and he would be the priest, my—all of us girls would be the choir, my brothers would be the altar boys, and all the little kids would be the congregation, and we’d make hosts out of, you know, bread; you’d stamp out the bread and the grape juice for the wine. And that was always great fun; we always did that on a rainy day.
And we would play store. That was another thing we played. Empty the shelves of anything there was, and some of the things you would open—we loved malted milk powder. Oh my gosh, and you open one of those things and we’d just eat that powder until it was gone. Stick to your teeth and your mouth and everything. That was the best, that powder.
TS: So, that’s what you did, a lot of—within the family, just entertaining yourself and keeping yourself—
PT: Right, yeah. And then we had friends that owned a farm, the Ruckinskis, Bertha and Don. And their farm was, what, three miles out of town. And they—Every year that I can remember, they gave my parents land to garden. So, we would go out there every summer to plant the garden, to weed the garden, to harvest the garden.
Bertha Rucinsnki—I must have been, oh, maybe third or fourth grade, and she had a stroke, and she was confined to a wheelchair. I mean, for years—I mean, she lived 18
twenty, thirty years in the wheelchair. But I was amazed at what she could do in her wheelchair, and she canned everything and you know, she had young strapping sons, and one daughter, Marie, who, you know, worked the farm for her and her husband.
But I loved Bertha, and they had a raspberry patch, and I loved raspberries, and we would go and every time we went up to garden, we’d go steal a few raspberries, and of course she knew we were doing that and she’d—“Go ahead.” And they had a swimming pit; a pit down from the farm that we’d go and swim; after we were done working, you could go and swim in this pit. That was kind of scary, because you don’t know what’s in the pit, but everybody else did, so you did too. And occasionally she’d let—they would—we would ride horses, [and] we’d go up in the hay mounds. So that was a lot of fun, they were very good to us.
But in gardening, we would go [every day to the farm—PT corrected later]. Well, then they would slaughter a cow in the fall, and we would get the meat from that; my parents would buy that. And in the spring, we had friends that owned property in Rudolph, home of the [Rudolph] Grotto chuckles], and there’s also the cheese factory there. And we would raise, like, a hundred chickens, and then we had the biggest picnic table because my parents—my father and some friends built this outdoor picnic table for us. And so we slaughtered all the chickens there, and everybody had their job. Of course, my dad would chop off the heads, and then somebody else would—they had a de-feathering machine, and pass it on down. I got the job of de-gutting, you know, and pass it on down. So that was, you know, just an event.
The funniest thing in the summertime, that I still—we look back and laugh our heads off now, but it wasn’t funny in the summer, because we had to do it, but all of the winter hats and boots and mittens, and what—everything, my mother would wash those, and we had to hang all that winter stuff out on the clotheslines. And I’m sure people thought “What the heck is wrong with Mrs. Jackan? She’s got her winter crap out on the lines.” But we hung all that stuff up to wash it and dry it, get it ready for the next season. So that’s what we did, and you know, we laugh at it now, thinking people must have thought we were crazy.
As well as, in the wintertime, before you could go to school, you better get all the laundry hung out, whether you hung it in the basement—it was a very small little basement; washer—you know, wringer washer machine. We had a dryer, but you didn’t use that dryer, only in an emergency use that dryer, because that cost money to run that dryer. So we would hang everything out, outside, and come back from school, take it all down, and iron inside. In the summertime, you want to get your tan, we’d take the ironing boards outside and [chuckling] plug the iron into the garage—we had a chicken coop—or not a chicken coop, a rabbit hutch, attached to the garage. And we would get up on top of that rabbit hutch and do our ironing up there on the rabbit hutch, but it was hotter up there.
TS: In the sun.
PT: In the sun, so you’d get your tan. So yeah, those were fun things. [both chuckle]
TS: Well, tell me a little bit, then, about high school, and where you got to thinking about what you were going to do, you know, after high school.19
PT: Okay. High school—it was Assumption High School. My—All of my older siblings except Bob, who went to the seminary right out of eighth grade, had gone to Assumption High School. So the Jackan name was a very well-known name at Assumption High School. And we wore uniforms, which I was very proud to be able to wear a uniform. We walked to school. A few exceptional days, my father would drop us off on his way to work, those of us that were going, but otherwise we walked there. And I loved high school. We had nuns and priests that ran the high school, and I had friends then, and you know, we all had jobs then. And my friends from—from our elementary school, we walked across the street—or across the bridge—the river to the rich side of town, is where the high school was. We lived on the poor side of the tracks, and the river. And so we would—but it was adjoining of our school, St. Laurence School was where I went, St. Peter and Paul was across the river with St. Vincent’s; those were the wealthier parishes in our town. Then St. Mary’s and St. Laurence were the ones on the other side. But I had—I had a lot of friends; at least I felt like I had, you know, friends in high school. And I even had—they surprised me with a surprise birthday party, and that was the neatest thing for me. And we had sleepovers and—
TS: Were those presents wrapped, in that?
PT: Oh, yes, those presents were wrapped!
TS: Okay, just checking.
PT: Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Martha Hipskin would have my party for me. But I’m getting ready now where I’m going to have my fortieth high school reunion, so I’ve been getting a lot of Facebook, and you know, chatter over this fortieth reunion. I’m looking forward to going. I’m taking my husband with me, but he won’t have to participate in all the things, because he did not grow up with this group of people.
TS: Right.
PT: And so he won’t. But some of those same people, you know—I was never a cheerleader. PE—I went to PE; I always felt—considered myself kind of klutzy in that department. I just wasn’t real athletic, because we didn’t have time to participate in any sports. My one regret is I was never a Girl Scout. My mother said she’d teach us everything we need to know about Girl Scouting. Well, you know, folding diapers and washing and cleaning, there’s more to Girl Scouts than that, I know there is. [both chuckle] So that was my—you know, my regret; I wished—but we had to come home after school and, you know, take care of the kids and do the house chores until we got our own jobs, and then we went to work those jobs after school. So I, you know, never really participated in a lot of athletics. A lot of music, and I received some—even awards with my music, and when I graduated, I actually received the bishop’s medal for being, I guess, the most Christian-like of them or whatever. But that was a great honor; I felt, you know, very proud, and had to give a speech. That was a nerve-wracking thing, because at that point, I was not—I didn’t consider myself a good public speaker, either.20
TS: How many were in your high school?
PT: We—In our graduating class, we had maybe a hundred. So it’s, like, three, four hundred people; four hundred. I think there’s more now. Now they don’t call it Assumption High School anymore, they call it—Area something.
But what I want to tell you, though—I’m going to get this out because my father, upon my mother’s death—you know, we grew up in a very poor, poor family, but upon my mother’s death—and it is now the WRACS, Wisconsin Rapids Area Catholic Schools, it’s all combined. But my father gave this gift to our high school, and we all gasped.
TS: Oh. Why don’t you read what that says so—for the tape.
PT: This says “Wisconsin Rapids Area” —this is March 28, 2009, and it says “Jackan family gives fifty thousand dollar gift.” Where [a] fifty thousand dollar gift came from—you know, I guess growing up they didn’t have that money, but apparently over the years, my father apparently made some good investments and—and I thought, “Whoa!” But the—
TS: So everybody in your—all your siblings were kind of surprised that he left this gift?
PT: Oh, yes. But I’ll tell you another reason—here, and there’s a picture of my mom and dad. “Scholarship, attribute to wife in appreciation of Assumption.” And he established this as a memorial fund for my mom when she died. Well, one thing I didn’t tell you, growing up when we had all these jobs, ten percent of every penny we made—of every dollar we made—ten percent of every dollar we made—went into “The Fund.” None of us had any idea what “The Fund” was. It started off as what my dad said was my mother’s sugar fund, when the price of sugar skyrocketed, that in order for her to buy sugar, we’re going to contribute to this fund. So when you think about ten percent of Bob, Rody, Marcia, Allan, Chris, Joan, Maureen[?], Paula, probably down to Bruce and David.
TS: So ten.
PT: Ten people, working jobs, ten percent of every dollar going into that fund from the time I was babysitting in fourth grade until I went to college, that’s lots of years of ten percent accumulating, so you know, somewhere along the line—but I never knew that we had a penny to spare anywhere. [chuckles] At least, growing up, we didn’t. But—But that was certainly a tribute for my dad, to my mom, so.
TS: Well, terrific.
PT: So that was one thing there, too.
TS: That’s really terrific.21
PT: When my parents had their sixtieth wedding anniversary, we had a big anniversary party for them, with invitations and everything, so that was a neat thing.
TS: Well, tell me how—when you decided what you were going to do for college.
PT: For college. Well, I knew that, as I told you before, they—my parents didn’t have money for high school, for uniforms, for books, or tuition. And so if I went to college, it was going to be on my own dime. I knew that I was smart enough to apply for financial aid, and I would get scholarships. As a matter of fact, I had a laundry list of scholarships that I did receive upon graduation, they were listed. But then, ah-hah, I came upon—there was a girl that graduated, let’s see, about four years before I—five years before I did, she was in my brother Allan’s class, and she was on the very same scholarship that I ended up getting. It was a four-year nursing scholarship, offered by the army, and it was called the WRAIN program; Walter Reed Army Institute of Nursing Program. And—I can’t think of her name offhand here right now, but she had gotten the scholarship, and I thought, “Boy, that’s something to get. I wonder if that scholarship is still available?”.
So I did some, you know, looking around and searching. I think I’d even called her and—to find out, you know, what was I getting into. And she said it certainly was worthwhile. So I decided to apply for that. I had no idea if I wanted to be a nurse, nor if I wanted to be in the army. This is back in the ‘70s, when being in the army wasn’t a great thing for women, but oh, for the price of an education. And I just thought, “Hey, if I can get this scholarship and I get a degree, if I want to change my mind and do something else later, that’s great, but at least I will have a degree in something; I will have some letters behind my name.”
So I applied for the scholarship, and in typical—as I look back at it now, typical military tradition, I thought months and months and months went by, and I heard nothing. Then all of a sudden, an envelope comes in the mail, and I’m told that I have been—am being offered this fully funded scholarship; “Do you want the scholarship? We need to know within five working days.”
So I thought, “Well, I’m a gambling girl. I guess, okay, yeah, I’ll apply for it and go for it and do it. It’s, you know, someone’s paying for my school.” So I applied for the scholarship—or, I accepted the scholarship, and that was a turning point in my entire life. Number one, I thought, “I’m smart enough to get a four-year nursing scholarship,” so you know—I never—I knew I was smart, but you know, I just thought I really have to work hard at things. And I still do, to this day, you know. I have a memory, but it’s not as long as others, but I’m resourceful and know where I can go and get what I need.
TS: Was it kind of like you felt a little bit lost within the crowd of your family, as far as that goes?
PT: Well, that—I think—in time, I think I became the “rich” sister, because all of my other siblings worked their way through school, and I didn’t have to work through school, I was being paid to go to school, because I actually received three hundred dollars a month, you know, for whatever. My books were paid for, so it was like spending money for me. So I had sent a portion of that money home, which—I wanted it to go to my brothers and sisters for their lunches or whatever. And so every month, I sent half my paycheck home. 22
Well, I’m sure that none of my siblings ever knew that that money had gone home; I’m sure it went into “The Fund.”
TS: Right.
PT: And—But when I married, and the first month the check didn’t come, I got a phone call, “Where’s the check?”
And this was right after I’d gotten married, and you know, I explained to my dad that, you know, we have financial responsibilities now, and you know, Bill is not sending money home to his family, and you know, da-da-da. So I think that caused a lot of hard feelings on his part, for a long time, you know. So then I felt like I was a dollar sign. So that—that’s a period where, you know, I tend to want to—work your way through the past, and just focus on the future, and let that part go.
But anyway, so back to high school. When I got the scholarship, I was very proud of the fact that I had the scholarship. I had no idea what I was getting into, other than that I knew that after two years, I could go wherever I wanted the first two years, and so really I was just being paid to go to school and be a normal college—
TS: Go to anywhere you wanted for school?
PT: Anywhere I wanted, for college. So I went to Viterbo, it’s V-I-T-E-R-B-O College, in La Crosse, Wisconsin. I had already applied for that school. They were initially a all-girl’s school; it became co-ed a couple years before I went there. But it was a small college, and I thought I would do better in a smaller environment. So I went to that college, and I knew after two years, that I would then go out to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C. That was the scary part for me. Get on a plane and go, I had—the only time I had ever been on an airplane before was to fly from Wisconsin Rapids to Milwaukee for my physical for the army, and my swearing-in ceremony. Other than that, I had never been on a plane. And then, what do I do when I get there? You’re all by yourself, you don’t know a soul. So that was a real growth time for me. Of course, the one thing my parents always taught me, when you see someone, especially in a small hometown, you say hello; you know, “How do you do, Mrs. So-and-so?” whatever. In Washington D.C., I learned very quickly you don’t do that. And then I felt—I felt very stand-offish, I guess, because you’re used to being friendly to people, but you know, if you say hello to any Joe Blow on the street, they, you know, think you’re looking to get picked up, [chuckles] and I said that’s not quite what I’m here for, and so I just—I became—kind of withdrew a lot, and I could see myself becoming more of an introvert than an extrovert, at that time.
But once I got to Walter Reed—and you know, just the prestige of being at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, that was enough—I had—the greatest thing, I had my own private room. I shared a bathroom with a suitemate, and I’d never had a room to myself, I never had a drawer to myself. Growing up at home, we had a chest of drawers, the top drawer was bras, the second drawer was socks, the third drawer was underwear, you wore whatever was there that fit you. So some days, you go to school really endowed, other days you’re like Twiggy. [both chuckle] And sometimes your shoes were big, sometimes your shoes were squeezed in, so you just, you know, did whatever. This—Now I had my 23
own dresser, my own desk, my own bed. So that was—you know, I thought, like, “I’m in high cotton now.”
But I worked very hard. Number one, I did not want to lose the scholarship, because I knew that, you know, I had too much riding on it. And so I was a very—I was always a very serious student; I took studying very seriously. And I thought, you know, “I don’t know if nursing’s for me—if I want to be a nurse—but I’m going to be a nurse when I finish this after four years,” because I just told myself, “I will graduate, and I’ll do well.”
Well, the more I got into nursing, the more I thought “Hey, this is really kind of interesting,” taking anatomy and physiology and all the, you know, courses that I had never taken before. I said “This is really a lot of interest,” that I had in this. So I decided this nursing thing might work after all, for me. And I owed the army only three years payback from the four years of school, which is a very lucrative program. My husband and son went to West Point, they get four years funded—fully funded—but they owe five years payback. And then I came out as a first lieutenant, they graduated from West Point and were second lieutenants, so I thought, “This is—This is a good deal.” [both chuckle] So—
TS: What did your family think about this decision you made?
PT: Well, I think my parents were glad, you know, I had—financially, it’s a good thing. I think that they were leery for me, not knowing—because I didn’t know what I was getting into. And my sisters, you know, we just really never talked about it, and you know, I don’t know if they were proud of me or not, but I think there was more jealousy, maybe, or envy, because I wasn’t have to—going to have to work through school. But when I look back at it now, I would have traded them[?] over and over, because, you know, it was a gut-wrenching thing for me. I really worked hard and I studied hard, but I missed a lot by being gone from home, you know, and that—I realized I missed my family, I missed my sister having their first baby, and you know, I missed all the things that I just couldn’t rush home on the weekend for; I was in Washington D.C. and they’re all back in Wisconsin.
TS: It’s not a day trip.
PT: It was not a day trip. But then, you know, I had others—my brother Bob was in the army, and they were proud of him, and my brother commissioned me in the military. When my parents came up for the commissioning, I knew they were very proud. And they were there in the Rose Garden right across from Walter Reed, and I think it was a very, very proud time for them. Of course, then when I got my job—the job—the position at the White House, then, oh my goodness, you know. [laughs] Then I might as well be the President of the United States of America myself, you know; they were very proud.
TS: That’s right.
PT: And—But to the point where, when I was promoted to lieutenant colonel, I invited my parents to come out for that, and I told them that it would be—it would not—I said, “The 24
president will not be promoting me, he does not do that. He does not promote anyone because that’s what he would spend his entire job doing,” is promoting people. But I said, “I will be promoted on the grounds of the White House.” It was in the Old Executive Office Building [now referred to as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building], and I said—and you know, “I’m sure that, you know, I can get you a tour.” But they were only going to come if they were going to get to meet the president, and I said, “Sorry.”
And then, once again, I felt like, you know, I’m a—I’m not their daughter, they weren’t coming for me. They were coming because of the position that I had, or maybe they’d get to see the president. As it turned out, President [George Herbert Walker] Bush Sr. knew that my parents were there and he invited them to come to the Oval Office for a tour. And I’ve got lots of pictures of all that time.
TS: So, they did come?
PT: So they did come, yeah, and they were there. And I think they were very proud, so. All in all, I think they were proud of me, you know, and my accomplishments, and they could—they could talk about their family in a positive light. You know, and long story short, none of us were ever in jail, nobody’s ever been strung out on drugs, we’re all—had good productive lives, we all, you know, made something of ourselves. And so, for that alone, they should be very pleased. But I think it was really out of fear that you disbehave—that you misbehaved, growing up, that you just didn’t do that.
TS: Right.
PT: So you had the fear of God in you. “You better shape up or ship out,” is one of my dad’s favorite expressions. [chuckles] Okay.
TS: Well, did you—I was thinking about when you were saying that you pretty much had your nose to the grindstone.
PT: Right, yes, I did.
TS: But you’re growing up in a time when there’s, like, a lot going on, in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s—
PT: Yeah.
TS: —with the counterculture, Vietnam War—
PT: Right. Yeah.
TS: And you know, what—how—what were your thoughts at that time, you know?
PT: Okay. At that—now, I had a brother—my oldest brother Bob—he graduated, did not continue studies at the seminary. And he went to Vietnam. I was in college—my first year of college then. And that was a scary time for me; I thought, “What am I getting 25
into? Am I going to have to go and fight a war?” Prior to that, I think growing up at home, we were so sheltered. You know, we didn’t have the TV on, we didn’t have the radio on, there was a newspaper, but Dad read the paper after dinner, and so it’s like, you know, you weren’t into reading the newspaper. So really, current events bypassed me. It’s incredible, I love reading back now to see what was happening when I was growing up. I had no idea, because you didn’t look further than your back yard or, you know, your own hometown; who you babysat for or whatever. There just was no discussion at the table of current events or what was going on then. So it wasn’t until I went to college, and then it was a rude awakening. And I remember going on a tour of the Arlington Cemetery when President [Gerald Rudolph “Jerry”, Jr.] Ford’s motorcade came by. And that was the first thing that—“Oh! My gosh, I’m right here where all this is happening.” And you know, being that—so close to Washington D.C. and living in that area, that’s really when I became more historical. I wanted to go back and see these places and, you know, Civil War places and World War I and II and go overseas and, you know, I had much more interest in that. I realized these were real things happening in my country. [chuckles] And so—I mean, I have to claim ignorance. I mean, it’s just I was a dumb kid growing up. I mean—
TS: Did you—Were—Well, but during the ‘60s—the late ‘60s when you were—you would have been in high school, I think.
PT: Right.
TS: We had—There were some, you know, the—
PT: Martin Luther King [Jr.] assassination, remembered that.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy—
PT: Right, Kennedy and those things. And those I remember, and you know, but it wasn’t anything that said, “Oh, I want to go fight for my country,” or, you know—it was just, “How bad is that, to have—to have that happen,” or “What’s happening to our country?” It was more—you know, because I never feared for my life or my country, or you know—I felt—I always felt very safe, and all of a sudden that safety and security is blown away. And I remember, I would tell people, you know, when I had the position at the White House, if I was standing in the Rose Garden, and I just—you know, I couldn’t have been more proud to be there, until then you look up at the rooftops, and you see Secret Service agents with Uzis. And you think, “Oh my God. But if somebody can take out the president, they can take me out.” And so, then it became, you know, “What—what is this country? Why do we have to have all these extra security measures?” But I felt very vulnerable, then, at that point, as well.26
TS: Did you then—and did you have anything about, like—well, I guess, like, did you have any heroes at that time, growing up?
PT: You know, I really didn’t. [chuckles] I think, you know, the Pope was your hero, the nuns were your heroes, the priests were your heroes, and you know, it was—religious icons were your heroes, and that was the culture that you grew up in. It was much more of a Catholic culture and not politicians.
TS: But did you have any—were you aware at all of the Civil Rights movement that was happening?
PT: You know, not until the assassination of Martin Luther King. And I remem—I was babysitting neighbors at the time that happened, and I just thought “Oh my gosh.” You know, it was just more fearful; I better go lock the doors, and you know, you didn’t want to go outside, and you realize, “What’s—” you know, “What is this coming to?”
But growing up in Wisconsin, not too many blacks. I mean, it was a rare time you’d ever see—Milwaukee certainly had more, but in my hometown, Wisconsin Rapids, I mean, a black person would be a sheer oddity. I mean, it was pretty much pure—pure white in growing up. And so, I never considered myself to be biased or—what’s the word, prejudiced against the blacks, because I’m not, but I never grew up with them, never had to live with them, and you know, it was, you know, just—
TS: In nursing school, did you run across anybody?
PT: Yes; off the record.
TS: Okay. [chuckles]
PT: [chuckles] Off the record.
TS: Well, here, I’ll turn that off for a second.
[Recording Paused]
TS: What he told me about it, so—okay. Okay, so you’re in a new culture in Washington D.C.
PT: Right.
TS: And you’re—you’re new to the army, too. Now, did you—as a—as a—in the training program, for college, did you have to do any army things?
PT: We had to do nothing army. [both chuckle] I felt like I was just going to nursing school the first two years, in La Crosse—at Viterbo College, in La Crosse, I was just going, 27
doing my—I was a nursing student, as far as I felt. Now, upon arrival at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, that changed everything, but not so much. We did wear uniforms to class, we lived in Delano Hall, and all of our instructors were military instructors that matriculated from the University of Maryland. So, they all wore uniforms, we wore uniforms. We would have [extraneous comment about cat redacted]—we would have instructors, we would do—have a field day where we would go to the field and fire our weapons, set up tents, and that type of thing.
TS: Oh, that’s a little army.
PT: So that was a little bit army. But compared to the real army, and going, you know, to war or a simulated war, it was not so much. Medic—Nursing corps and medical corps are not your visual army people. Now, that certainly has changed today, with all of the wars, but—and certainly with Vietnam, but going through school, I never felt like I was in the army, except when my paycheck came and I had a paycheck; “Thank you, Mr. Army.” [chuckles]
TS: So did you ever have, like, a basic training?
PT: We did have basic training. Once we graduated from school, when we were commissioned first lieutenants, and we went for six weeks, I believe. I went to San Antonio, to the basic training program there, before I was stationed at Brooke Army Medical Center. And once again, though, that was more—more classes, more theory and concepts, and we did a few military things, but it’s not like we went out for six weeks to the woods and played guns and that type of a thing. Matter of fact, it was very rare—you know, we would have to fire weapons, but just for training purposes, and then I never touched another one until I had to go and do it again.
TS: So was the—
PT: But we did have physical—you know, PT tests; every quarter, PT tests. And my goal was to max my PT test, and I maxed every single PT test I ever took. Now, when I was pregnant with our sons I didn’t have to take the test, but I did max every one, so I told my sons, this is a standard I want you to—[laughs] to achieve.
TS: Max out.
PT: If your mother could max a PT test, you all will too. [laughing] So.
TS: Well, had your father been in the military?
PT: My father was not in the military. He would have loved to have been in the military, and that would have been a great deal for our family. We would have had a much larger quarters to live in—house to live in than what we had, you know, and I think the whole perspective of growing up would have been totally different. My father had polio as a child, and he had one leg shorter than the other leg, and so he never qualified, and he was 28
deaf in his left ear, so he never qualified for the military. But he—he worshipped the military, and he was very proud of all of us, in our family, that served the military, and many of us did, as a means of education. Two of my brothers went to West Point, and my oldest brother, Bob, was an—I think he was on an ROTC scholarship—no, it wasn’t ROTC, he was on a—some kind of officer program; scholarship program. And—but we all really made something of our lives, those of us that—military, you know, was a good match for many of us. Some stayed in not as long as others. I had—
TS: Did any of your sisters?
PT: My sister Rody was in the air force. She retired from the air force and she is down in Florida doing pretty much the same job she was doing in the military; is what she’s doing now. And then, that’s—I’m the only girl, other than Rody, but many of my sisters married military. Matter of fact, if I can run down the list, Bob is retired army, Rody’s retired air force, Marcia’s married to retired air force, Allan spent a few years in the army, I think he served maybe three years and—no, he was air force, at MacDill Air Force Base, and then he was in Panama; my parents visited him in Panama. That’s Allan, Chris, no military connection whatsoever, so she’s one of the rare ones. Marjorie is married to retired military, Maureen, no military connection, so that’s two no military. Then I was military, retired; Bruce, army retired; and then after that, no military. [laughter] All the younger ones didn’t go. Younger ones did not go and serve. So the older generation, myself and above, went—younger brother, myself, that did.
TS: And the younger ones are mostly the boys, right?
PT: Right, yeah.
TS: Interesting.
PT: Oh, wait, Steve, sorry! My brother Steve—after David, the twins, Tim and Terry, no military, then Steve, graduated from West Point, actually. Sorry, Steve.
TS: Oh, yeah, don’t want to skip him.
PT: I—I always looked up to you, I think[?] you’re my older brother. [both laugh]
TS: There you go. Well, when you were in—so you’re—when you’re in your final years of college—
PT: Okay.
TS: —and—also, what kinds of things did you do on your off time, in that—had you been away from home before, ever?
PT: No, not—well, just the two years when I was in La Crosse, two hours away, only, but I had never been away. What I did in my off time was I traveled. We would take—you 29
know, we had groups of friends that there was—what was it—the Citadel wasn’t too far away, and several of the girls had boyfriends at the Citadel. So we would go on, you know, dates and hikes and picnics and stuff with them at the Citadel.
But on weekends, we would travel, you know, into town and go through all the museums. I mean, that was just a gold mine for me; get on a bus and go down to the Smithsonian, and the [United States] Capitol, and you know, every—just—historically, just a gold mine. And that’s when I started getting more interested in history, realizing this is where all this took place and ever—this was real, and the presidents in the White House and everything.
So—Let’s see, we took—oh, I remember going—we did a camping—winter camping trip out—up in the Shenandoah mountains and so—just took advantage. Didn’t do any—I didn’t do any foreign travel, but on spring break, several of the nurses would go, you know, overseas on some foreign travel. I did come home so my parents could go down to Panama to visit with my brother. So I, you know, would fly home so they could have the opportunity to do that. But I didn’t feel a need to have to go overseas at that time. There’s so much in America that I’d never seen that I was content to—to do that.
TS: Were you homesick at all?
PT: You know, I can’t say I was. I was—yeah, I missed everybody, I missed not being there for the babies and births and stuff, but you know, I thought, “I’ve got so much to do,” and you just keep yourself busy and occupied. But I would write my parents and I would, you know, get letters from them and—or from my mom, my dad was never a writer. And my sisters were all in college, and you know, I just looked at it as—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Everyone started doing their own thing.
PT: Yeah, you’re doing your own thing, and so I thought, you know, I kept plenty busy and I dated, you know, quite a bit then, and matter of fact, that got discouraging, because, you know, one time—I would go out probably with anybody on a first date. And nine out of ten times, I never wanted to date them a second time. I thought, “What is this, what are these shmucks?” [both laugh] My first date with my husband, I knew I would marry that man. I didn’t know when, but I thought “This is the man I’ve been looking for all—through all these other toads I had to kiss to get to the one handsome prince.”
TS: What was different about him?
PT: He was interested in me. He wasn’t interested in getting me to bed. And nine out of ten guys, to me, that’s all that they wanted, and I just wasn’t into—into that at the time. But really, you could talk to Bill, and he was just so interested in you, and I thought, “Here’s somebody that’s not blowing their own horn,” you know, and—I mean, he would rarely ever talk about himself, and just a real gentleman, and—you know, one that opens the 30
door for you, and he still does to this day. And a matter of fact, every day I will wake up, there’ll be a note on the kitchen table, because—if he’s gone off to work already, he’ll have left me a little love note, and I come home and there’s a love note I mean, he’s just the—they broke the mold after him; he’s the nicest man.
TS: Aww. Well, then, did you—when did you meet him? I know you told me earlier.
PT: At my first assignment in San Antonio, Texas, in 1976.
TS: Nineteen seventy-six.
PT: So, I—I was in—’75 to ’78, in San Antonio, Texas.
TS: That’s right.
PT: And we had—I was in basic training down there, and all of my—you know, our whole class was in basic training, and two of my friends who were later stationed at Fort Polk, Louisiana, came up to visit me, and they said they wanted to look up this guy, Bill Trivette, that they had met at basic training. And I still can’t figure out why I never met him at basic training, but I said, you know, “That’s fine.” At this time, I’m taking a sabbatical from men, I’d had it with the dating game, I just—you know, “Let me go do my thing here by myself; don’t need this aggravation in my life.”
And so they came, and we decided we’d go to church on Sunday and then out to brunch. My roommate, Julianna, pretty much monopolized the conversation while we were out at—at brunch, so I never really got to talk to him much, but I’m taking a sabbatical from men. Well, then, three days later, I get a phone call at work.
“I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Bill Trivette.”
“Oh, yes, I remember you. [unclear]”—all excited, “Yeah, I remember you!”
So he invites me out for a date on April 15, which turned out to be his birthday, and I remember that’s income tax day, April 15. We went to My Place restaurant. And I knew, at that table, that this was the man that I would marry; by the time the evening was over, that’s the man I would marry. He asked me to marry him two [weeks —PT corrected later] later. [chuckles] We married six months after that. Had two weeks—no, it wasn’t two months; two weeks later, he asked me to marry him.
TS: Two weeks after the date?
[Speaking Simultaneously]
PT: Two weeks after we first met, after our first date., in the library. We married six months later, and then you try to tell your children, “Do not do what your parents did.”
TS: “Don’t do what we did.”31
PT: Yes, exactly. But you know, I told my older son, Evan, I said “The difference between me and you is that I had dated a million men. You have not dated but a handful of girls. There’s no rush.” But he married the girl that he was telling me about, and they—she is perfect for him. [both chuckle] So I’ve been so wrong in his adult life, to his—to his benefit.
TS: Well now, tell me when you—okay, so you—you’ve got this scholarship for the Army Nursing Corps.
PT: Got the scholarship, yes.
TS: You knew that you had a three-year—two—a three year commitment.
PT: I owed them a three-year commitment.
TS: And so, did you think, “Okay, I’ll do that, see what it’s like, and then—”
PT: Yeah, you know, if it worked, then I would stay in longer. And so my first assignment was in San Antonio. Bill was in the military, he was going to law school at the time, but he had—he was on what was called excess leave program, where they gave him time to go to school, but he had to pay his own tuition. So he found a nurse to pay his tuition for him. He’s still paying me back today from that. [laughter]
But—so then, you know, the deal that we struck up—once we married and we’re in the military, the deal was that I would stay in the military as long as I was enjoying it, and I did; I loved it then; I thought “This is the perfect match for me.” It just felt like I belonged to some—to something, somebody. And I thought “I will stay in as long as it doesn’t interfere with our married life.” That was not even a consideration until our children were born. And then I thought “If this is going to be something that’s going to divide—I’m going to be stationed here, you’re going to be stationed there—then it’s time to get out. I want our family to be raised together.”
And so, pretty much—you know, we had a good combination; he was army JAG [Judge Advocate General’s Corps] and I was a nurse, so every post, while you’re young, needs a lawyer and a nurse, so we could—we requested assignments that we knew would be feasible for us, and something for Bill to progress in. And me too, but pretty much in—in the nurse corps, you can do it wherever you are. There’s certain courses that you need to attend, and I did one by correspondence; the advanced course I did by correspondence. And then, you know, as you go further up, then it’s, you know, shorter courses, and you couldn’t[?] get away with that. But, you know, if he’s being stationed in Germany and I’m going to be in the States, well, that just isn’t going to work. And so, the deal[?] [unclear] then I would get out. Twenty-three years, it worked.
TS: Yeah, it worked. So, you got married at your first duty station?
PT: San Antonio.
TS: Tell me how you ended up at that duty station. Did you apply for it?32
PT: Yes.
TS: Okay.
PT: When we’re in school, you can—you fill out what’s called a dream sheet, and you list three places that you would—no, five places you can list, and they tell you the top three are what they’ll look at. But they tell you, the place you really want to go, to make as your third choice. [laughs] But you know, at this point, I hadn’t met Bill. I didn’t—you know, I didn’t know—I wanted to go any—you know, where I wanted to go, so I just thought, “Oh, let me try a major medical center.” I like the warmth, I like San Antonio, that just sounded good to me; San Antonio, Texas, I requested. I did some place in each of the coasts, I did one place Midwest, and it really did not matter to me where my first assignment was. You knew when talking to people, “Oh, yeah, this is a good place to go, that’s not a—you don’t want to go to Fort Polk, Louisiana,” you know. But that’s actually a nice place, if you’re a real family person, outdoorsy; people loved it there. And I never was stationed there, but the—that’s the rumor mill, was that that’s not a bad place to be.
So it really didn’t matter to me, you know, where I went, so I—on my dream sheet, I think—I don’t know what order I had it, but San Antonio, Texas, was one of my choices, and I received one of my choices, so I was very excited. My friend Margaret Proventure, at that time—or Margaret Dapra, was there at the time, and she was going with me, and Patty Dollar—Patty Dover was her maiden name through school, she was going there. She had gotten married right after college, so she was Patty Dollar. So the three of us were there; “This’ll be a lot of fun.” And the three of us all lived in the same apartment complex, and Patty was married.
TS: You didn’t have to—you didn’t live on base at all?
PT: No. They really didn’t have base housing for—well, they had some officer—visiting officer quarters, but not—so, I had an apartment, and you received BOQ, it’s base officer quarters—monetary allowance, since you couldn’t live on post, so that you could pay for your apartment off post. And so, that was fine by me. But my husband was actually—he was living in a dorm on post, because he was—why was he? Because he was in school, I guess the deal was. But he chose to do that, and I thought—Julianna, who was one of my classmates from nursing school, had asked me to room with her, so we shared an apartment then. And Werner was her last—Werner, W-E-R-N-E-R, was her maiden name.
TS: So you never had to live in any kind of barracks?
PT: You know, I never did.
TS: Or even dorms, then, really.
PT: No.33
TS: Because you said you had your own room.
PT: I had my own—well, the nursing quarters at Walter Reed, that was considered dorm living; Delano Hall was a nursing dorm for the nurses.
TS: But you had, like, a suite, right?
PT: Right, had a suite, so—I mean, I never—yeah, I never had the barracks thing where you have one bathroom that you share with—you know, like at Romansky’s Bar; ten rooms, one bathroom.
TS: Now, what about the food? Did you have—did you eat on the base or—
PT: We ate in the hospital. We ate hospital food, so we would go from our dormitory, just walk up the street to the hospital, which was just a little—a beautiful jaunt in the—in the spring, with everything in bloom. That’s the most glorious place to be in the springtime, Washington D.C.; all the azaleas and everything in bloom; just beautiful. So it was a—just a nice pleasant five-minute walk up to the hospital, you ate in the hospital mess.
And that was when—I actually became anorexic in college, before I got to Walter Reed, it was. But I went—when all my sisters went to school, they all gained weight. I thought, “I don’t need to gain weight when I go to school,” so I just thought, “Okay, I’m just going to cut out junk food.” So I quit eating junk food and then, before you know it, you’re just losing weight and losing weight. I weighed ninety-five pounds at the end of my second year of college, and—but so when I went to Walter Reed, you know, they thought I was anorexic, and I had—I was actually wearing a brace when I got there. Actually, Patty tells me that she thought that I had leukemia, and I had some bone cancer or something, because I had this brace on. Working out at the garden, my parents had gone on this trip to Panama.
TS: Right.
PT: And I told them I’d take care of the garden while they were gone. The week went by and they were getting ready to come home, and I hadn’t been out to the garden, so.
TS: Oh, no.
PT: I ride my bike out there, and I’m just on my knees the whole time, kind of squatted down, and it wasn’t until five o’ clock in the evening, I get up to ride my bike home, that I’m realizing I keep picking up this leg, and this leg just was like it had fallen asleep, and I thought, “Oh, come on.” And that leg just wouldn’t get any better, and it kept falling asleep. I had to keep picking up my leg. I went out to Walter Reed—I had gone to the doctor’s at home, and they said, you know, “I think you’ve compressed a peroneal nerve in—” in my leg, so I’m wearing this special orthopedic shoe and—and brace, you know, and they said hopefully, you know, it would regenerate itself, because it wasn’t complete—it would have been a matter of time. Had I worked an extra hour, I’d probably be limping to this day.34
TS: Oh, is that right?
PT: Yeah. So when I got out there, you know, she saw this skinny little rail[?] person wearing a brace and it’s funny how you come across to people. And we were like night and day apart from each other. It truly was a case of opposites attract, because Patty was very laid back, very Southern, she had Dr. Pepper for breakfast, she was a junk food junkie. Here, I’m as type A as they come; I’m up and moving and on the ball; I wouldn’t think of having a soda, and don’t eat candy bars; not with—for meals, anyway. And she loves soap operas; I never waste my time on soap operas. And we’re still great friends to this day.
TS: Oh, that’s terrific.
PT: Yeah.
TS: Well, what kind of nursing did you do when you got to your first assignment?
PT: Okay. I tell people that when I arrived in San Antonio, Texas, I was assigned to the surgical intensive care unit; right off the bat; I’d never even worked as a basic nurse. So, I’m in surgical ICU and I fell in love with intensive care nursing, and at the same time, I intensely fell in love with a guy by the name of Bill Trivette. [laughs] So—But surgical ICU, I just loved it; I thought “Oh, this is wonderful.” Now, I never realized—I mean, it was such a totally different world for me, and I think I’m kind of slow in putting the pieces of the puzzle together and figuring out how all this works and who the players are and whatnot, so I think it took me longer. My first efficiency report, I should have taken more personally, but it was not a good one, and I just thought, “Oh, I guess I need to do better, and what do I need to do better at?”
Well, when it came time to get promoted, you look back, and they said, “This can be a disqualifying thing for your promotion, because you didn’t do so hot.”
I said, “That’s my very first officer—my very first OER [officer evaluation report].” And I didn’t take it—I mean, I took it to heart, but I wasn’t offended by it or anything. Obviously, I need to, you know—
TS: Where was that one at?
PT: In San Antonio. At Brooke Army Medical Center, the surgical intensive care unit.
TS: So, it wasn’t a stellar one, necessarily?
PT: Oh, not at all.
TS: Oh.
PT: If anything—I had gotten one like that further down the line, I’d probably be, you know, out of the army. But—Maybe not. But my head nurse at the time was Glenda Warnock35
and she was not a person that you could approach. She was a very unapproachable person. And—but all the other nurses—I loved the nurses I worked with, and so, I guess that I must have said something about this OER, and—“I’m not sure what I’m not doing right, but somebody help me figure out what I need to be doing better.” And so—A matter of fact, I feared her, you know, when I first went to work for her, and fortunately I was put on evenings and nights, so I didn’t have to do a lot with her. But then she became a supervisor, and it turns out she lived right up the street from my husband and I, when we got married, and tragically, she was killed in a car accident right in her neighborhood. So—but that was after supervisor, and I thought, you know, she was just starting to kind of come around to people. And it was just tragic that she had died.
But my efficiency reports after that were just walk on water. I had very good [OERs]—So, I guess I learned, you know, what you’ve got to do to punch your ticket to—to go the distance for what you did. But—But they were all surgical intensive care patients, open heart patients—
TS: I was going to ask what kind of surgery you saw.
PT: Open heart surgery, brain surgery. The first person that ever died was a twelve year old girl, and she had fallen backwards off the slide in—where did they have the killings, in Texas?
TS: Waco?
PT: Not Waco. [coughs] Just recently—not recently, a few years back. The—Fort Hood; Fort Hood killings. [The Fort Hood shooting was a mass murder and terrorist attack by Nidal Malik Hasan, a 39-year-old U.S. Army major serving as a psychiatrist]
TS: Oh, on the—right, okay.
PT: Yeah. She was from Fort Hood, fallen off the slide, and they airvaced her to Brooke Army Medical Center, but she had a tremendous brain injury and she ended up dying. That was my first death. That affected me more than anything. I thought, at twelve years old, I mean, my heart just bled for her. And I just remember in nursing school, you know, you could deal with older people dying, but when it’s young like that—that was a hard thing to go by.
But doing resuscitations on patients, all that stuff just—it really—just emotionally, just took—[it] seemed to take so much out of me. And they tell you in nursing, you know, don’t get too close to your patients, don’t—you can’t help but get close to your patients. I mean, you are their everything; you know, they’re the ones clinging to you, and then you don’t save them, you feel like a real shmuck. But you know, over time you realize—you know, when I was just new to nursing, everything was just so godly, and the doctors were gods and everybody was—was a god.
But I just—death was a hard thing to come by, originally. And it still is, you know? I—Matter of fact, most recently in my job now, you know, there’s a lady who was dying, she was a no-code patient [meaning an order not to resuscitate], but she was going to die. And there was no one there in the room, none of her family had come, and so I just 36
went in that room and I held her hand and just talked to her, and I thought “You’re not dying by yourself.” I said “You know, you’ve had a wonderful life and family,” and you know, I just talked to her like I would want somebody to be with me and tell me I made a hill of beans difference to someone in this world.
So, it’s—you know, I feel in many respects, I was so new to nursing—and I mean I would cry at the drop of a hat if a doctor would say something to me; “Why isn’t this done or that done?”; I’d start crying. [chuckles] I need to toughen up my skin. But over time—Now, I’ve been—I was an army nurse for twenty three years, and I’ve been a nurse now in town for eighteen years, and many times I think, you know, “Am I getting too calloused in this now? It just doesn’t—it affects me, but not the way that it did, you know, early on.” And I always—I threaten to retire from this job whenever I get really irritated with things, so that’s just—“I don’t need this aggravation anymore!” But.
TS: Well, I imagine that nursing itself has changed since you, you know, were—started in the ‘70s.
PT: Right.
TS: How do you think it’s changed? Even if you want to talk specifically about the military and then going to your civilian—
PT: Okay. Well, of course, military nurse, you know, you mentorsee many more wars and people are going into combat much more than—I mean, I never saw combat as a nurse in the twenty three years that I was in—in the military. Which is a blessing and not a blessing, you know? I feel like I should have served sometimes. You almost feel guilty that you didn’t and others did. But—
TS: But at Walter Reed, were you caring for people who had?
[Speaking Simultaneously]
PT: But at Walter Reed, well, that’s where you’re caring for people who had. And that was—you know, I would hear the stories of Vietnam; you know, in bringing back all the amputees and, you know, working in the intensive care unit, what have you; the people who are so tragically maimed and, you know, head injuries and whatnot. You know, so much—in Vietnam, you know, not as many lived as what they do now. And I think I’m glad that I’m not there right now, but I understand that, you know, just the prosthetics are such a blessing today that, you know, they didn’t have before.
Now, I actually dated a fellow, while I was in nursing school, who was an amputee from the Vietnam War. And he would just unstrap his leg and, you know, go and—that was—I never knew that he was an amputee until very later into our relationship.
TS: Because he had pants on, and—37
PT: Yeah. Always wore pants, and he never even walked with a limp or anything, so you could imagine the rude awakening.
TS: Yeah, that would be surprising!
PT: What a surprise!
TS: Well, what did you like—what did you like best about your time in—in San Antonio?
PT: Of course meeting my husband.
TS: Well, yes.
PT: Getting married in San Antonio, in the military. I think the fact that, you know, everything was brand new—and you’re talking military; my military assignment? That the army forces you to be all you can be. Right now, in civilian life, I feel like a nurse is a nurse is a nurse. I don’t get paid a penny more to do one type of nursing over another type of nursing, to be an administrator over a bedside care provider, whatever. In the army, you are forced to advance, you know. You might be a bedside nurse for a while, but then ultimately, if you want to stay in the military, you will become a charge nurse, you will become a head nurse, you will become an area administrator, you—you know, you just—you branch out, and you’re pretty much forced to be all you can be. You know, I think I would have been perfectly content to just take care of patients at the bedside, and I never would have stretched myself out. So I love the military for that; to making me see that I’m—to give me a better self-image, I think, than what I had.
TS: Did you have any mentors?
PT: Initially, yes. You’re given—well, Diane Williams was my mentor at Brooke. She was a really—neuro nursing was her bag. And I just wanted to be like her. She was a civilian, but she, to me, had it all together. That she had the personality for the job, she was smart, she was savvy, she cared for people, she was advancing, she—I believe she got her doctorate, she was published, she did a lot of things. Mentor as far as being assigned—I had someone—a nurse—resource nurse, and I guess that would be considered a mentor, to help me learn the ropes at each station where I was.
TS: But even informally. I mean, not maybe somebody that was assigned to you, but somebody that, like, you looked up to, and you—
PT: Oh, yeah. Oh, and Diane was certainly that person, then I had other military people. You know, I had—some of the administrators were wonderful, and you know, helped me figure this out, or even the head nurses, when I was in the head nurse position. Then as a head nurses you were a great group of people. And you cussed and discussed off of each other, you have head nurse meetings, and you get together and, you know, come up with whatever plan you needed for whatever was going on.38
Matter of fact, when I was at—in Colorado Springs, we were building a new hospital, so they had all the head nurses getting together to help devise the plans for the intensive care units for the new hospital, and you know, what you wanted to see and have done and different—I was the—I was the SOAP nurse; [chuckles] the subjective, objective, and assessment planning. So I was a SOAP nurse, and then you had all these, you know, plans, and I was a go-to girl for that. So I would—I remember going to El Paso, Texas, as the expert on the—the SOAP nursing and care plans and that types of things. So you did have people that—but actually, one person in particular that, you know, said, “I’m your mentor,” nobody really was assigned at that time. Now, that’s different today. I think they actually are assigned a mentor.
But there’s always somebody—when I got, you know, advanced, I would always find a new nurse and tuck her under my wing, and say, “I’ll help you, because I know what you’re going through.” And that’s something that—
TS: So you did that throughout your career?
PT: I did that throughout my career. And I still do that now, outside of my career, at—because I think that so many times, you know, new nurses, what—you’re put on night shift. And who do you learn off of night shift? There’s nobody with experience on night shift, so.
TS: There isn’t?
PT: Not as a rule, so—well, more so now, but I still work nights. I work 7p[m] to 7a[m] for that reason; that there’s someone that, you know—that is experienced on those shifts and that can help those that are new and coming on, and—
TS: Do you think that—in some ways, that the military—I’ve heard this, I guess, put a couple different ways, but you’re never given a job or a task or something that, whoever is asking you to do that, doesn’t think you can do. Like you say, pushing you to your limit in some ways. Maybe giving you more responsibility than you think you can do—
PT: Yeah.
TS: —but the person, you know, that’s behind you kind of thinks, you know, you can do it.
PT: Yeah, and I think that—yeah, I think that’s very true, that—I think they did it to me because I think they felt like I had the intelligence, that I could do this, that I’m—I’m a cut—a cut above, so to speak, and that I could do it. But I didn’t look at it that way when they were doing that, you know. I thought, “Well, this is what I’ve got to do next, so this is what I’m going to do, and if I want to stay in the army—” which I did, you know, I’ve decided this is a good—it’s a good life for me, it’s a good match for me, and so I’m, you know, punching my ticket along the way. And—
TS: I hear that expression a lot, punching my ticket.39
PT: Yeah.
TS: Can you explain what that means?
PT: Sure. Let’s see. Put easily, when—everyone gets a report card in the army; it’s called Officer Efficiency Report. In order to attend certain courses, like the—well, the advanced course would be a ticket you have to punch. If you are aspiring to be Chief of the [Army] Nurse Corps, if you’re aspiring to be in any position, administratively, or something above, you know, basic nursing, certain things you have to do, and to get—to continue getting good report cards for the army, you have to attend the advanced course, you have to attend this course, you have to have walk on water efficiency reports, you have to remain within the army’s height and weight restrictions, health fitness advocate, all these little things. So it’s like you’re just, you know—punch your ticket, I did this course, I got my ticket punched, so I can continue on. It’s not an actual punching of a ticket, it’s more just a—a figure of speech.
TS: Right. But it’s also—so it’s not just what you do in your job, it’s the education.
PT: No, the education. Exactly. And that’s one thing; the military is all about education. I mean, you know, now to try to go to an education class, you know, you have to pay for your own, if you can get the time off to go, and it’s just—
TS: Now as—you mean, in the civilian world?
PT: Now, in the civilian world—whereas in the military world, they’re all for education; “Go to this course, go to that course,” you know, “We’re going to send you to this, we’re going to send you there, you need to, you know—”
TS: Do you think there’s any misconception about that from, like, people who are in the civilian world, about the kind of training, I guess, to some extent, that people in the military receive on these kinds of—
PT: Well, I think many civilians have no clue what military life is like, and it depends upon their frame of reference; who have they met that’s military? And if you’ve met somebody that’s a real slacker—because wherever you go in life, you’ve got the good, the bad, the ugly. If you have met a slacker, or someone that is rotund, a smoker, whatever, you know, your—your preconceived idea is going to be formed because of that person. Whereas you meet someone who’s hard-charging, who is a go-getter, you know, who has shown—you know, that they—they’re going to work for a living—and I would never, ever ask any of my nurses to do something that I, in turn, wouldn’t do. If we’re going to clean—if we’re going to clean the unit today, I’m going to be right there cleaning the unit with them, from whatever. And I think, you know, you’re in it—it’s much more family-conscious in the military, than what the civilian world is. And I really miss that.
TS: Yeah. I have a friend who just retired and he said—just, actually, yesterday, and he said, “I’m worried about when I go to a job and it’s a nine to five job, and I see it’s, you know, 40
four minutes till five, and maybe another half hour we’ll get through this job and get it done. And in the military, there’s no question you would stay and do it.”
PT: Yeah, yeah.
TS: “But,” he says, “I worry that they’re going to check out at five o’ clock, and—”
PT: Yeah, and they will! I mean, you know—right now, I mean, if you dare work any overtime, you better tell them why in the world you had to stay to work, you know, past your shift. Because there’s always going to be work, there’s always going to be people. [unclear]
TS: How much overtime do you get paid in the military?
PT: In—none. [laughs] What do you mean? No such a critter, you know? So it’s—you know, you just—you do it. But I think there’s much more sense of commitment and duty to your military, you know, job.
TS: The mission that you’re trying to get done.
PT: And your mission, yeah.
TS: Yeah. It’s just an interesting concept that, you know, I think it’s hard to articulate and get across.
PT: Yeah. Well, you know, when it was made known that I was coming to my current assignment at Moses Cone Hospital, they knew it was an army nurse coming, and my friends will tell me to this day, the preconceived notion they had in their head about this big battleax coming in, that’s going to change everything, and it’s going to be—just destroy the whole unit, and then they see me coming in and I’m friendly and I’m outgoing and I’m—you know, I’m going to stand back and see, “What have I gotten into here?”. It was the hardest transition I’ve ever made in my lifetime, going to civilian nursing. [chuckling]
TS: Yeah? That’s a fact.
PT: So, you know, I think it depends upon who you know in the military and what that experience has been, and you know, positively—you look on it a bit more positive.
TS: Well, did you—at what—okay, at what point—I know you said when you got married, you and your husband talked about how you were going to stay in.
PT: Right, yes.
TS: So at what point did you think, you know, “I kind of like this military, and I think I want to stay”?41
PT: Right. That was actually—all along, I felt like I wanted to stay. Once I was on my first assignment I kind of figured out, you know, the military and kind of figured out my role and kind of where I was headed. I really saw myself one day as being chief of a hospital, probably smaller hospital or something. But you know, that didn’t happen, but you know, that was what I was driving for, but my concern was, do I have what it takes to be one of those? Because those that I had envisioned, or those that I had seen, that were my mentors, they were wonderful in what they did. And Jeri Graham, I got to put her name in there—Jeri Graham, God bless her heart, [colonel-—PT corrected later], retired. She was a nurse midwife in the army, [chuckles] she delivered our second son at [The 97th General Hospital in Frankfurt, Germany—PT added later]. We have been friends ever since, and she is just—she is the go-getter, and I always told her she was going to be Chief of the [Army Nurses] Corps one day. Well, she retired sooner than that, but she was chief of the retired Army Nurse Corps, and she is still just a go-getter to this day. And Jeri—if there was a mentor, Jeri would be my mentor, and Mary Jo Romano. They’re two of my—Mary Jo was—she was actually a supervisor for me when we were in Germany, and I think overseas, you tend to really bind with friends, because you are away from family much more so, and you know, you really become great friends with the friends that you meet there.
TS: Well, now, that was your next assignment, right, Germany? After—after—
PT: No, Fort Car—after Fort Carson.
TS: Oh, it was Fort Carson—
PT: I was in San Antonio, and then Fort Carson.
TS: Oh yeah, well let’s get to Fort Carson, then.
PT: Fort Carson, Colorado, I am head nurse—
TS: And did you apply for this and—
PT: See, that’s the thing, you don’t apply, no.
TS: Okay. I don’t mean for head nurse, I mean for Fort Carson.
PT: Oh, for Fort Carson. When it gets, I guess, two years that you’ve been at [your current assignment, fill out your dream sheet for your upcoming assignment—PT corrected later]. So that’s when my husband and I worked cahoots together so that, you know, we would—we put the same places down, and—and he would tell his corps he’s married to so-and-so, and these are the places that we would like to go.
TS: Did they have, like, the joint assignment at that time?42
PT: You know, they didn’t at that time.
TS: Okay.
PT: So—I always felt that the JAG Corps was very much in tune to helping us stay together. The Army Nurse Corps, on the other hand, didn’t issue you a spouse. They’re not responsible for your spouse, nor for your family, nor for whatever. So I just thought, if I get stationed somewhere, it’s going to be Bill’s branch—and this actually happened to us; it’s going to be his branch that is going to have to go to bat to have things changed.
TS: Trying to get him to catch up to wherever you were assigned.
PT: Wherever I was. For example, we were coming back from Germany, I’m to be stationed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, he is being stationed in Washington State. Well, there’s only a country apart, we have a newborn baby, and a four year old; you know, this is not going to work. The Nurse Corps—Army Nurse Corps, no. The JAG Corps gets him reassigned to the Pentagon, and then he had several different jobs throughout that area during my stay at Walter Reed and then at—subsequently, at the White House, because they were so thrilled that I was there, they were going to do whatever they could in their power to keep him in the area as long as—as I was there.
TS: Well, that’s terrific.
PT: And then retirement followed, so. [chuckles]
TS: There you go.
PT: Yeah. So you know, it worked out for us, but I think—I think the army got smart in realizing that’s how they’re losing good people, by not putting them together. And they’re much, much more family-oriented now than they ever were in the years that we served.
TS: The army?
PT: The army is, yeah, definitely.
TS: It’s interesting that you say that the Army Nurses Corps wasn’t willing to really be as flexible as the JAG was.
PT: Right, as the JAG Corps.
TS: Because you would think, for gender, you know, that woman follows the man.
PT: Yes.
TS: But that’s not the case.43
PT: Nope, not the case.
TS: Why do you think that was?
PT: You know, I really don’t know. That’s just something that, you know, the Nurse Corps, their philosophy was pretty much, we didn’t issue you a spouse, and so we’re not responsible for him, but you know, if you want to keep a good nurse in, you know, help me, help me here. So—
TS: Interesting.
PT: Yeah.
TS: So you’re in Colorado.
PT: In Colorado.
TS: Were you still in the surgical unit?
PT: I then became the head of the surgical unit, at Colorado—in Colorado Springs. I was initially, for about six months, the assistant head nurse, and then I became the head nurse. And in Colorado, it was a small—much smaller place, as a community hospital, as opposed to the one at Brooke Army Medical Center. So that was actually a nice place to begin my head nurse position.
TS: And you had started to say—I interrupted you earlier when you said you don’t—it’s not a position that you apply for; for head nurse.
PT: Right, you do not apply for it. Yeah. You’re just told “You will be,” [chuckles]—“You’re going—”
TS: You’re assigned it.
PT: “You are being assigned as the head nurse of the surgical intensive care unit and so that’s what you do. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts to say, “No, no, I don’t want to do that.”
“You will be that, and unless you prove that you cannot be that,” and that’s not a good thing either, so—
TS: That’s right.
PT: But actually, that was a—really a wonderful job for me, because it was small enough where I could, kind of, learn the job and I had great staff there. And we would fly out anything that was beyond the capability of our smaller medical—of our community hospital, to Brooke Army Medical Center—actually, Fitzsimmons in Denver is where we would fly [more critical patients—PT corrected later] out. And we would also get 44
patients—PT corrected later] in from [the larger medical centers—PT corrected later], you know, incoming—“Incoming!” Actually, in Germany is where I really learned a lot about the air command and how that all works and transporting patients abroad. So for a long time, I thought “Oh, I’d like to be a flight nurse.” But then I had children and that just wasn’t going to work into the picture, but I thought that would be a cool thing to do. And I still do. I think that to do that would be fun.
TS: Well now, as you’re—as a head nurse, you’re doing a little bit more of the managing—well, maybe not a little, maybe a lot more on the managing side—
PT: Right.
TS: —with, I guess, people and personalities?
PT: People; people and personalities.
TS: How was that?
PT: Civilian and military.
TS: Okay.
PT: Yes. And you have your—your chief warrant officer that worked—not warrant officer, chief enlisted person—your chief tech that is kind of your right hand man. And he handles the enlisted side of the house, pretty much, but when it comes to writing reports, you know, you’re the one that it falls down upon. I think that—I think I was a very good head nurse. I cared for my people and they knew that I cared for them. As my husband always taught me, he says, “A good scout leader eats last.” [chuckles] You take care of your troops, you take care of your people, and the last—you’re the last person to be concerned over.
And you would hold monthly staff meetings, and you make it so that it’s convenient for the staff; civilians and military. And of course baking goods for them was always a good thing, too, until they think you’re a walking delicatessen, you should always be bringing things in [to eat]! So, the best way to their hearts is through their stomach. You learn that early on. But it was a—it was a transition year, you know, certainly for me, but one that—that I felt like I really enjoyed, and the smaller places are much more family oriented, and because we were a surgical unit, we dealt with a lot of different [departments—PT corrected later]. We dealt with the anesthesia people, you dealt with pediatrics, [and general surgery—PT corrected later]. Nurses and doctors and everybody would come through to see their patients, and then you’d transport—once you’d cured them, you send them over to theirs. But I—I loved my assignment in Colorado Springs, I thought it was great.
TS: Do you have any kind of memorable story from there that you’d like to share?45
PT: Yeah, I can tell you [laughing]—when—when I was running a race, I was the token female—now, this isn’t work related, it is somewhat work related—the token female on the Fort Carson’s running team, we were doing a ten mile run through Garden of the Gods. I had trained with a physical therapist; I knew I could run this race no problem. We had trained about three weeks before the race, because I wasn’t going to humiliate myself and not be able to end this race. The night before the race, our neighbor had my husband, my trainer—who was Lou Martino, who was head of the physical therapy department at Fort Carson; the three of us are on the team. Our neighbor has us over for dinner, the carbohydrate loading meal the night before, and I usually don’t eat a lot before I run. In the morning, wake up and go—I’m a nervous type person, so I’m so nervous.
They had twenty port-a-toilets in a row. I’m going in one, out, in, out, in, out, thinking, “Oh my god, how am I going to run this race?” you know. I wasn’t thinking about getting dehydrated. But at the seven-mile mark, I knew something was wrong, because one of the anesthesiologists passed me, and I knew I ran faster than he did. I had trained—I had run some with him, so I knew I ran faster than him. That’s all I remember till I woke up in a big MASH tent. And my husband’s standing over me, and I said to him, “Your eyes look like caves.” I had passed out on this race; my fear—my biggest fear. And apparently I had a respiratory arrest, so they had torn off this T-shirt I had and ended up—of course, I ended up going to the hospital, to my own unit, to the surgical ICU. So I became a patient in my unit.
And I said, “Now, you all take good care of me!”
They said, “We’ll do as you taught us, ma’am!” So that was it and I ended up in the hospital for three days.
TS: So what had happened?
PT: I think I had gotten dehydrated, just from all the diarrhea that I had before—you know, just being nervous before the race, and I just passed out at the mile mark—because I remember passing that seven-mile mark—having him pass me at the seven-mile mark, and then I don’t remember anything.
TS: And then that was it. How about that.
PT: So, that—I taught my staff well, they helped me through. [laughing]
TS: Yeah, “Here’s a test for you, take care of me!”
PT: Yes, yes, and they did—they did well.
TS: Well, was there anything in particularly difficult about being a head nurse?
PT: Personalities of people. And that was—once again, you have to be very, very careful, especially when you’re dealing with some of the more seasoned nurses or nurse techs that are there. I had one nurse tech in particular who was a minority, and so you have to make sure that you’re not calling the race card. So, I learned early on to document—to 46
document, document, document—so that you have factual things, and not just to say, “Well, you know, she’s—she’s not doing a very good job.”
TS: Right.
PT: And so, that was—but it’s like a cold day in hell, I should say, to try to get rid of someone who’s not functioning up to par, unless you have—
TS: The documentation.
PT: —the documentation. Yeah, it just doesn’t happen, so—and that made it ugly. I mean, I—you know, I don’t like to see people lose jobs, I don’t like to be the bad guy that’s, you know, got the ball rolling to have them lose their job, but on the other hand, if they’re being paid and are not doing the service that they need to be doing—
TS: Was that civilian and—
PT: That was—It was civilian and military.
TS: Military.
PT: Yeah. This particular one was a civilian nurse.
TS: Was that harder—I have heard that sometimes that was harder to—not deal with, but that was more problematic, because there’s no chain of command.
PT: Right. Because you are their—I mean, you’re their boss.
TS: So, you’re the supervisor, but there’s not that military—
PT: Right, exactly; right, exactly; no military chain of command. Exactly. And so, that was harder, but a lot of the nurses I had there had been there, you know, forever, and that’s—this is the way we’ve always done it, you know, and not real change agents, and that makes it difficult, too.
TS: You’re looking at a period—so we’re in the late ‘70s, early ’80s, when you’re there—
PT: Yes.
TS: —and what—and in the Army Nurses Corps, women had been in the Army Nurses Corps, you know, World War II and on—
PT: Yes.
TS: And even before. But were you getting different—were you a seeing different—not—I’m not quite sure of the right word to use, but—we’re getting to the end of the all-47
volunteer—or, getting to the beginning of the all-volunteer forces, you know, when you first came in.
PT: Yes.
TS: And so you’re seeing different types—more—you know, more variety of women and men that are coming into the career of the army that you’re having to deal with, that you hadn’t maybe had to deal with before?
PT: You know, I never—never looked at it that way, but I always looked at it—well, not always, but I think many people started coming in—I think the common notation was, if you can’t get a job on the outside, you join the military. Well, that’s not true in the medical field, because you won’t last in the medical field if you can’t cut the mustard. Whereas, you know, that may be true in enlisted out in the field; if you don’t have a job, you can’t get a job, join the army and you’ll have one. So from that standpoint, I think that certainly—I think nurses coming into the army were those that were very proud of the fact that they were able to advance more than what they ever would in the civilian role. I don’t know if people considered it a challenge coming into the military—if they’re looking for a challenge—but many—many came in as a means of travel opportunities, retirement benefits, and that type of thing. But as far as, you know—I think nursing is very different from other aspects of the military, because you almost feel like you’re not in the military, you know? [chuckles] Other than, yes, you do have someone to answer to, and you know, rungs up the ladder, but I didn’t—I never considered my time in the military as—as my husband would, or some—someone in the field, as a field—as a field officer. You know, I considered myself more of a nurse than I did an officer, if that makes any sense.
TS: Yes. Nurse came first, not the soldier.
PT: Nurse came first, right, yes. And that—And that’s, I guess, the mindset that I had about all my other nurses.
TS: Well, I guess, actually, one of the changes that you hear about in the ‘70s is that you had—there was a lot of drug issues going on, as patients and maybe coworkers, necessarily, and that that was a culture that was changing too.
PT: Well, it had to change, because in the military you have to take drug tests—you do drug testing—and it can be a very random thing or a scheduled thing. And you know, three strikes you’re out; one strike, you’re out.
TS: Right.
PT: And so, I didn’t have that much trouble. Now, I did have several that had HIV/AIDS [Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome], and you could just—you could see them dying in front of you pretty much, and that was a disheartening thing.48
TS: Was it soldiers?
PT: Soldiers, yeah. One of my corpsmen was one that, you know—he—he was a very big burly fellow, and very good and very resourceful, and had a lot of energy, and just over the two years, you know, he becomes a stick figure, he’s just not cutting the mustard, he develops this pneumonia, he’s out of work a lot, he’s gone more than he’s there, then he’s put on, you know, medical leave, and before you know it, he’s dead. And, you know—so that was—but do you want that type of a person in your medical environment? You know, should I have known beforehand? Because no one, until he died, actually told me he had HIV/AIDS. I think that—
TS: This in the early ‘80s, late ‘70s, when it was first—
PT: Yeah, early ‘80s; early ‘80s.
TS: So that’s when, really, it was first coming to the surface too.
PT: Yes. And I guess it’s patient confidentiality is, you know, what they said, but—
TS: So, dealing with the blood issues and—
PT: Yeah, and all that. Oh, and that was one thing that—you know, you didn’t wear gloves all the time when I first came into nursing, and now, I mean, I won’t walk into a patient room without washing my hands and gloving. You know, you just don’t—so I think it’s a societal thing, too. But I think a lot of it, also, is overboard on some of the isolation issues that—you know, that they have, but the infection control people at Moses Cone would be the first ones to disagree with me, so. [laughs]
TS: Okay. Well now, how—then how did you—so you—after you were the head nurse, then you—then you went to Germany.
PT: Then we went to Germany.
TS: And so, how—how did you—that—
PT: That transition?
TS: Yeah.
PT: Into the overseas tour, or whatever?
TS: However you want to tell me.
PT: Okay. Now, I had one son and pregnant—49
TS: Oh, okay.
PT: Now we’re throwing a child into the mix. [laughs]
TS: So you had a son at—when you were in Fort Carson?
PT: At Fort Carson; Evan was born at Fort Carson. So, we—and I had—one of—actually, one of my retired LPNs [licensed practical nurse] is the person who took care of him for me so I could continue nursing. Then we go to Germany. Childcare is my number-one main issue, and ultimately, we solved that problem in having a nanny from Sweden come, and she’s still is in communications with us to this very day, and she’s just a dear. But she used to hand-knit sweaters for the boys, you know, when they were little. Every year for Christmas she’d have a hand-knit sweater for them. They don’t appreciate those like I do; [chuckles] “Do it for me!”
TS: Well, how did you—that come about?
PT: Well, how it came about is, we were stationed at Frankfurt Army Medical Center, which is a big medical center, and you are given a point of contact, a—what did they call it—a host family. So we actually had two host families; my husband had a host family with the JAG Corps and we had a host family with the Nurse Corps. And so they will—you know, they’ll know if you have children, because you’ll write them in advance, “What are your concerns, I want to know.”
And I said “Child—Childcare is my main concern.”
When you first get there, there is daycare available, and so that’s where we did put Evan; he was just an infant then, he was ten months old. So we put him into daycare there until we got more established, because we weren’t sure where we were going to be living at the time, housing—you know, we waited in maid’s quarters—we lived in maid’s quarters for probably close to a year. And actually, what that—what the maid’s quarters are, is when—these were—in Frankfurt—of course this is all, you know, World War II airy buildings, and they had these humongous—they’re like apartments, but on the third story of the apartment—first—no, first, second, and third floors were housing apartments where you could be given your apartment to stay. The fourth floor above that is where the maids worked during the war who maintained these apartments, so they had all these little—little rooms, and one common sitting room, and a common kitchen. Well, so temporarily, that’s your living quarters until you are given an apartment. Well, we had like ten rooms in this thing, you know, upstairs, my husband and I and the baby. So when we got a nanny, you know, of course she had plenty—plenty of room to go to too. But it turns out that—we loved that, because you had space. Depending upon which housing area you live in, you may be living in a shoebox, you may be living in sprawling suburbia. So to get on a housing list to get some decent housing could take a long time. And our housing was okay— [extraneous comments redacted]
[Recording Paused]50
PT: Sorry about that interruption, I meant to tell you that.
TS: Oh, that’s okay, we just had a little—
PT: Yeah, needed a break.
TS: We’re back on now, so we had a little break, and we—we were in Germany, and you were telling me a little bit about that. Now, how was—was it—did you have any kind of cultural shock, I guess, to go from the United States to Germany?
PT: Very much cultural shock.
TS: Okay.
PT: Everything closes on Wednesday afternoon. It’s like they take a siesta; you can’t do anything on a Wednesday afternoon. The language barrier—of course, on—on the military post there’s no language barrier; we’re doing, you know, English-speaking jobs. But to go out shopping or whatever is German, and we did learn a fair amount of German. Our son, we had in a German preschool and, you know, that worked out okay for him during that time. Driving, kilometers instead of miles, and doing all the conversions and everything, grams to kilograms, that’s, you know, just a cultural shock in that regard. But the love of the Germans for the great outdoors, and how they can turn a little plot of land into just a beautiful array of vegetables or flowers or whatnot, they have a real love for that. And of course, the beer and the wine, can’t beat that either. We took advantage as much as we could of Germany and the—attending parades and parties, and traveling and doing as much as what we could. And I had a great job in Germany that allowed me to have, like, seven days off in a row, and so we would travel—take advantage of the foreign travel then. I think my husband, more than anyone, really loved to travel, and so I would be the one to plan all the trips and schedule them because he had a much more demanding job in Germany; ruthless boss he had at the time, who we loved dearly, but it was just—it about killed my husband; his job over there at the time.
TS: Was he at Frankfurt also?
PT: He was at—Well, he was initially at Frankfurt, at Drake Kaserne, and then he went out to Hanau, and that was about a forty-five mile drive. And Hanau was actually better for him, but Drake Kaserne could have killed him. And we were—he was just walking distance—walk across the street from our apartment, and he’s right there. So it was very convenient for him in that regard, but you know, we always wanted to live closer to where I work so that I didn’t have as much of the commute as he did, and of course then when he was in Hanau, he had a, probably, forty-five minutes to an hour commute or whatever. But he’s always been a workaholic, so he would go in early and stay late or whatever. But—
TS: Now, what was—what were your ranks at this time?End of Part One.
Interview continues in Part Two.