Oral history interview with Clara Adams-Ender, 2005

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WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Clara L. Adams-Ender
INTERVIEWER: Hermann J. Trojanowski
DATE: September 10, 2005
[Begin Interview]
HT: Today is September 10, 2005. My name is Hermann Trojanowski. I’m at the home of General Clara L. Adams-Ender in Woodbridge, Virginia, to conduct an oral history interview for the Women Veterans Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
General Adams-Ender, thank you so much. This is a great privilege.
CAE: My pleasure.
HT: Could you give us your full name, and we’ll use that as a test to see how your voice sounds on the machine.
CAE: My full name is Clara L. Adams-Ender.
[Tape recorder turned off]
HT: Again, thank you. Could you tell us a few biographical bits of information about your life, such as when you were born and where you were born?
CAE: Well, I was born in a small town in North Carolina called Willow Springs, North Carolina. It is still there. I found it the other day, a little small post office, still small, and I was born on a farm in that area, a tobacco farm out in Willow Springs, North Carolina. I had, of course, a mother and father, and nine brothers and sisters. There were six girls and four boys in this family, and we were born on a tobacco farm down in that area.
HT: Where is Willow Springs near?
CAE: Willow Springs is near Raleigh, North Carolina, which is the capital city. It’s about twenty miles out of Raleigh.2
HT: South of Raleigh, I guess?
CAE: South, yes, off 401. It’s in Wake County. Yes, it’s in Wake County, but it’s off 401.
HT: Well, tell me a little bit about your family. You mentioned that you had quite a few brothers and sisters.
CAE: Well, I was born into a very large family, and I was the fourth oldest of that family. During this time, of course, America was much an agrarian society, which means that most people lived on farms in those areas, and so they had to have large families in order to be able to help them take care of the farm. So my father and mother had ten children, and we were all employed full time on that farm in tobacco.Tobacco—I don’t know if you know very much about tobacco or not—but tobacco is a very difficult crop.
HT: I do. I grew up on a tobacco farm as well, in Watauga County.
CAE: Oh, really. It is a lot of work, and we did a lot of work there on that farm. I must admit, and I will confess, that I did not always value coming up and growing up in a large family. We lived on a farm and at that time, I’ll tell you, I didn’t know that we were poor, because we always equated being poor with being hungry, and we were never hungry, because you grew everything that you ate. We had a big garden, had an area for a big garden, and my father was a sharecropper. We had an area for a big garden, and we always planted all the fruits, all the vegetables, and everything that we needed to eat, both summer and winter, so we were never hungry, you know.
My mother would talk a little bit about the fact that you can’t get a new doll because your sister needs shoes, but it didn’t register in my head at that time. But as I was saying, I didn’t value too much growing up in a large family until much later, and that was when I started in the work world, because I found that being in the work world it’s very important to know people, and so when I got in the work world I knew at least twelve people, because my sisters and brothers would behave in certain kinds of ways all the time, and I’d see other people doing that when I got in the work world, and I’d say, gee, now, my sister used to act like that. Now, what did I do when she behaved in that fashion? [laughs] So I knew a lot about people, whenever I got into the work world, and that had been a value to me, and I knew where I learned it was in my childhood.
HT: Where did you go to high school?
CAE: I went to high school in the next little town, and its name was Fuquay-Varina. At that time, though, it was Fuquay Springs, because Fuquay-Varina are twin cities, but at that time it was Fuquay Springs Consolidated [High] School. It was called a consolidated school because it was a school that brought together the African American students from not only the little town of Fuquay Springs, but also all of the towns around in that area, because there was just one high school for the whole area, and the school went from grades one through twelve. But the high school was for the whole area, and so they called it Fuquay Consolidated.3
HT: And after high school did you go on to college?
CAE: Yes, I did. I left Fuquay Springs Consolidated High School when I was sixteen, graduated when I was sixteen, went off to college at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, North Carolina. I entered into a nursing program, and I might add it was not of my choosing. My dad chose my career, and we started having discussions about that when I was four years old, because my sister taught me to read, and so I could read when I was four. My oldest sister, my oldest sister who’s five years older than I am, Betty, taught me to read when I was four, and so as a result of that I started to read magazines and so forth, and I saw this lady in Ebony magazine, and she was in these great judicial robes, and I thought that was a great thing. So I asked my mother, “Who is this person?”
And she said, “Oh, that’s a judge.”
And I said, “What do you have to do to be a judge?”
And she said, “First you have to be a lawyer.”
And I said, “That’s fine. That’s what I’ll be.”
And so my father said, “No, no, no, no, no, no. You will not be a lawyer. Lawyers are liars, and that’s best left to men.” That’s literally what he told me. So he decided that I should go to nursing school. Basically what he said was, “You should do something safe in this life, because women ought to do something safe.” And he said, “They just opened that new nursing school up in Greensboro, and you need to apply there.”
So he literally stood over me as I finished my application and went off to that school, because I reasoned that it was better to have a college education in nursing than not to have a college education, because my parents always valued education. They said, “If you have education, nobody can ever take that from you,” and so they always worked a lot to make sure that we all got educated. So I was the second one in my family to go off to school. My oldest sister had gone off to college, and my brothers had then gone into the military, one into the Air Force and the other one into the [U.S.] Navy, and so I was the next one to go off to college. So I went to college and then graduated from that school four years later.
HT: And when was that?
CAE: I went off to college in 1956, but I was out for one year because my dad didn’t have the money to send me, and so I took a year and worked. My sister had gone to New Jersey, so I worked for a year, and then when I went back in 1958, I graduated ’61.
HT: What was college life like for you at A&T?
CAE: College life for me was wonderful. It was wonderful because I could go to school every day, and my only responsibility was to go to school. It was great. That was the first time I had had so few responsibilities in my life, because when we grew up we learned early that you have to be able to do things and to do work, in order to be able to not only help yourself but to support the whole family, and so all of us had chores at the house that had to be done, after all the field work had been done. So we did the field work for the family, and then we did our own individual chores to make sure that we knew how to work well.4
I tell people often that my father taught me how to be a workaholic many years ago, and I didn’t learn until later that I didn’t really have to do that all my lifetime. But I learned how to never, ever be around with my hands idle and doing nothing, and so I enjoyed being at college and being in an area where I could just go to school and that was my full responsibility, to go to school to make grades so’s I could graduate.
HT: Did you enjoy attending the nursing program?
CAE: Yes, yes. I enjoyed attending the nursing program because I found out something about my ambition, and that was that it was not so much that it was necessary for me to be a lawyer. It was that I needed to have something challenging in my life. I needed to have something that I could say, “Today I’m going to work, and at the end of the day I know I’ve done a full day’s work, and I feel within myself that I made a difference in the lives of somebody.” And I’ll tell you, you could do that in nursing. That is very, very easy to do if you’re paying attention and dealing with the folks that are there and need the help that you have to give.
HT: So you were in Greensboro A&T before students from A&T started a sit-in situation in
downtown Greensboro. What do you remember from that period of time? That must have been February of 1960.
CAE: Oh yes, I remember that period of time very well, because I was involved in the sit-ins, and we had many, many briefings where we used to have to go to, because the students had decided that we needed to do something in order to be able to show our, express our feelings about the importance of civil rights in this country, and that’s basically what that was about, the civil rights of African Americans.
And so we had to go to the briefings, and these four that have been known as the Greensboro Four, as they became known as, I only knew one of the fellows very well. I knew Ezell Blair, Jr., very well, because he was in some classes with me, and I used to see him on campus all the time. He was a very talkative fellow, and very outgoing, and so he got to know a lot of people around, so we knew him very well. But the four of them would get us together. They would talk about the fact that we were participating in these sit-ins, or doing these sit-ins because of our own civil rights, and as a result of that we needed to make sure that we did them in the appropriate fashion. And one of the appropriate fashions, of course, was that we would do whatever that we did in a non-violent manner. And it was very interesting, because I have always said to—
[Tape recorder turned off.]
HT: We were talking about the civil rights sit-ins in 1960 before we turned off the tape.
CAE: Yes. And we were talking about the fact that we were to do this, and we were to conduct ourselves as adults, and we were to do these sit-ins in non-violent manner. Now, I will tell you I have since then heard more of Martin Luther King’s philosophy and what went 5
on as he was discussing this with the folks. Of course he was leading in the larger civil rights movement, but I can imagine that he had quite a time trying to tell the brothers about doing things non-violently. When people push you, spit on you, curse you and do those kinds of things, it’s very difficult not to raise your hand, but that was what it was all about. But in reality, when you think about it, it’s quite a powerful thing to be able to sit and do nothing while people do that. Well, I’ll tell you, the Greensboro Four had a little bit of a problem discussing this with the brothers that was with us, because they said, “Now, now tell us that again. You want us to do what?” [laughs]
They said, “If somebody raises their hand and strikes you, you’re to just sit there,” and that’s what we were prepared to do. Luckily, nothing happened to us, and as a matter of fact the actual sit-ins only lasted about three weeks. I just met with one of those Greensboro Four. We got together about two years ago, and he said that later on they really got the feeling that we probably didn’t have any problems, because it was determined by the leadership there in Greensboro and in much of the South that civil rights was going to come, either by law or by force, and so he kind of felt that they were told that they shouldn’t bother with the students.
HT: Did you participate in any sit-ins?
CAE: I did. I went down.
HT: Woolworth’s?
CAE: Right. Went down and sat down. We would go down in groups of four to six, and we would exchange with the group that was leaving, and they would tell us about what had gone on during the time that they were there. We’d sit for an hour or so at the time. There was a leader, as far as our group was concerned, and he went down and he announced to the—a manager had come out, of course, by this time—
HT: Mr. [Clarence L.] Harris.
CAE: —and he said, “We would like to be served at this lunch counter,” you know.
And the manager said, “We don’t serve Negroes here.” And, of course, that was a polite way of saying other derogatory terms that we knew about.
And the young man said—and, of course, we’d practiced many of these comebacks that we needed to deal with—and he said, “No sir, and I don’t eat them either. So how about a hamburger and a Coke?” And, of course, we had to sit there and show our somber faces.
And he said, “No, we will not serve you at this counter.” And then he went on away, and we’d sit there for our period of time, on four to six stools in this area, and then we’d go away and the next group would come. But during our periods of sitting there we just kind of looked around and made sure that we watched what was going on, but we had no problems.
HT: Were there quite a few female students participating in the sit-ins at that time, or was it mainly males?6
CAE: Yes, there were quite a few female students, because there were more female students around A&T than there were male students, and so there were quite a few of us there, yes.
HT: I know currently there’s an International Civil Rights Museum being built in Greensboro where the Woolworth’s was. How do you feel about the progress being made?
CAE: Oh, I think that’s great. I think that it was—and I’m sure the Woolworth people had to do that, in order to be able to leave that as a legacy. They either had to sell that property to somebody, or they gave it to them, in terms of making sure that that happened. The lunch counter itself is up at the Smithsonian [Institute]. But I think it’s a great thing, because I believe that we still need to record the information about certain times in our lives in this country that may not be the most pleasant times, but they were a part of our history, and we’ve got to still remember where we’re coming from, and where we’ve come from, because that gives us some direction. Someone said this years ago. I didn’t say this. I’ve never said anything this profound. They said that it’s important to remember the history of where you’ve come from, so that you know where you’re going.
HT: That’s very true, very true, yes. So you graduated in 1961, and what was the next step in
your career?
CAE: Well, during the time that I was at A&T, after I finished my sophomore year—at the beginning of my junior year at A&T I joined the army. I joined the army during that year because they had money. I needed—I really was looking for an opportunity to be able to earn some money, because my father paid my tuition and room and board. But he told me when I went off to college, and he made it very clear to me, he said, “All of your spending money you’re going to have to get for yourself.” And I knew this put quite a strain on him to be able to do this. As a matter of fact, my oldest sister and I talk about this sometimes, we will be forever grateful to a white man whose name was Walter Myatt, and he owned the grocery store there in Willow Springs. He would lend out sums of money for a period of time—because sharecroppers only got money in the fall, and he would lend out money for a period of time so that they could do the various things they needed to do, and then you’d pay him back whenever you sold the tobacco or whatever you had to do at that time.
And he was the one who loaned Daddy some money early, in order to be able to get us to pay the initial tuition and to do those things until his crops came in and that got going. So it was very important for me to try and do something so that I could help that situation. I was coming home one night after having been working in a lady’s house, because I worked as a maid in her house. I cleaned the house for her and did those things on a weekly basis, and she paid me fifty cents an hour to do this, and I would spend time—I found that much of it was just talking to her, being able to talk and deal with her, too. But I spent a lot of time just sitting and talking with her, listening to her, because when I went down she always said she knew about students. She had at least one daughter that I knew about who went on to be a lawyer, and she’s a lawyer in Greensboro now. She said, “Students are always hungry.”7
[Tape recorder turned off.]
HT: You had mentioned something about Walter Myatt.
CAE: Yes, I talked about him lending my father the money for us to go to school, yes. And whenever, of course, my father got settled in and he got his money, then he could pay him back. But I know what I was telling you. I was telling you about having to do all these jobs in order to be able to get my spending money, because one of the things that happens to college students all the time is they’re hungry. And I was hungry, and I had never been in a position where I was hungry and didn’t have food to eat, you see, because on the farm you may not have had what you wanted, but you had food. And so I said, oh, I’ve got to do something different than this.
So I was coming home from one night at Mrs. Alexander’s house and I saw this sign at the student union that said, “The Army Nurse Corps needs you.” And there was this woman standing there in her army uniform, and I thought she looked real sharp, and so I said, “Oh, I’m going in to see her. I’ll bet they have money.” So I went in there and I talked to the lady, and she told me about all these benefits and all that stuff, and she talked to me about a lot of things. I didn’t remember too much of it, because I knew they were going to send me some money, and she told me how much money I would be making, and it was two hundred and fifty dollars a month. I thought that was wonderful, because I wouldn’t have to do all these other duties I was doing. I was doing sewing, because I took sewing and home economics in high school, and so I could sew for people, and then I’d do hair and I could do hair for people, and then I was cleaning house, you know. And if I got this money, I wouldn’t have to do any, well, not all of those things, not as much as I was doing.
So she said, “Well, don’t you want to know about the obligation?”
And I said, “Yes, ma’am.” I said, “You can tell me,” I said, “but, you know, I’m nineteen years of age; I can do anything.” [laughs]
So she said, “I’m telling you anyway.” So the deal was, the army had a shortage of nurses, and what they wanted was to send nurses to nursing school in exchange for—they’d send you for one or two years if you were in a baccalaureate program—in exchange for two or three years of payback time as a nurse in the army. And I thought that was a good deal, because I was just nineteen. I could do that. So I took the papers, because I wasn’t old enough to sign up myself. You had to be twenty-one and I wasn’t old enough. So I took the papers, and when I went home at Thanksgiving I told my mother about this situation, and she said, “Oh, that sounds like a good thing. You could get your education, and then you would have an opportunity to travel as you wanted to,” because as I said, I learned to read when I was four, so I knew a lot about places of the world.
And I always said, “When I grow up I’m going there.” So I was looking to do that, and she remembered that I’d talked about that. So I said, “Okay. I will go and do this.” Well, my father came. He was the one to convince. So we talked to him about it and he didn’t say very much about the whole thing, because he was a part of this group of 8
farmers that got together at Walter Myatt’s grocery store, and they talked about what went on with the crops and their families and everything. I mean, it was just a little social club, the DDs. I used to call them the boys. I still call them the boys. And he’d go and talk to them about these situations. I grew up and people used to talk about how women gossip, and I said, “Listen, men gossip, too, a lot, about a lot of things,” and that’s what they used to do in there. That’s basically what they were doing. So he came back and he said, “Well, I’ll tell you,” he said. “I was talking to them up there at that store, and they said that all Clara wants to do, Clara Mae wants to do is to go into the army so she can find a husband.”
And I remember my mother said, “There is nothing that Clara Mae can do in the army that she cannot do right here.” She’d had enough of the boys on the corner. So she said, “Sign this paper. It will help you in terms of being able to deal with your money, and you don’t have to pay her tuition anymore,” because, see, the army paid tuition, room and board, and a two hundred and fifty dollar-a-month stipend. I was a rich kid. [laughs] So she said, “Sign this paper right here, because it will help us in terms of being able to manage these other children that we have here.” So he signed. I saw the paper the other day; I was in there looking at some files. He signed and I went off to the army. I joined the army.
HT: Now, was this part of the ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps]?
CAE: No, no. This was before ROTC. This was called the Army Student Nurse Program, where they would take in these nursing students and give them, we say a scholarship. They would say a scholarship, which included tuition, room and board, and two hundred and fifty dollars a month. It was wonderful. And also, you got a rank in the army. You had a rank as a private, and I was a private in the WAC [Women’s Army Corps] Reserve. And I went to pfc [private first class] before I got my commission. I was twenty-three months in that program. I had a wonderful time.
So when I left college in 1961 I went off to the army, because I said I would. And you know, while you’re in college you develop relationships with people, and I had met the absolute love of my life there at A&T at that time. So he said to me as we were getting ready to graduate, he said, “You know, you are graduating,” he said, “but you know, you don’t have to go into the army,” because at that time if you got married your obligation was no longer, as a female. I have never understood that. I wonder how come that was so. Men could do most anything, and they had to keep their obligations, but for women, if you got married—at that time you could not be married as a female and be on active duty. All right.
So he said, “We should get married,” at this point, and I couldn’t understand that, because I made a promise that I would go.
And I said, “But the army needs nurses.”
He said, “Yes. But if we’re going to get married we should do it now. And I will tell you, it’s either me or the army.” Oh, he should never have said that. That was not the right thing to say.
So I said, “Give me time to think about it, overnight.” What that meant was, telephones had come to the country then, so I had to go talk to my mother. [both laugh] Because I always bounced these important things off my mother. She was a great mom.9
She could talk to you about anything—never would tell you what to do, but would just lay out the situation so that you could understand it.
And, you know, I always appreciated that from her, and since I’ve grown up and learned about educated people and all that kind of stuff, I always wonder how she could do that, because my dad left school when he finished the third grade, and my mom left when she finished the sixth, because they all had to go to work, to help to support the family and everything. But I’ll tell you, she had more common sense than anybody, and she could sit and listen to you and tell you what she’d heard you say, and tell you what you had said before, and then help you. And you’d say, “Oh yeah, that’s clear.” It wasn’t so clear to me before, but after she laid it out it was very clear to me.
So I talked to her and she said, “Well,” she said, “Clara,” she said, “you know you’ve always said that you wanted to go and join the army, and the reason why you wanted to get into this program is because you wanted to travel.” She said, “I know you’ve talked about traveling all of your life, and this was an opportunity for you to do this.” And she said, “I just want to ask you, if you’re not going to do it now, when?”
I thought about this, because, you know, when you get married you’ve got somebody else who gets an opportunity to have a vote. So I said, “I guess I’d better go to the army.” Well, the love of my life became the un-love of my life very quickly, because I said, “I’m going to the army to do my obligation.” And he went off and married somebody else. But I never regretted that. I saw him a few years later, you know, and he’d rolled up, gotten bald, and was paunchy and everything, so I said, “Yeah, that was all right. That was a good decision.” [laughs]
So I joined the army, and while I was not in ROTC, the ROTC department at A&T really did help me out a lot. I mean, they treated me just as if I was one of their cadets that was in ROTC, because I had to learn how to salute and march and do all that business, and I had to learn how to wear my uniform and do all those things, and I didn’t know any of that stuff, and they helped me with all of this. That turned out very well.
HT: Were there other female students in this Army Student Nurse Program with you on
campus?
CAE: There were two seniors who were in this program when I was a junior, and there was one other person—was there one other person? No, I was the only person in my class, and then they picked up a couple more kids the next year. Yes, yes, yes. At that time not too many joined. Before that program finished there were a lot of students at A&T that joined. I’m talking about eight to ten at one time. That’s a pretty good group, you know, to get out —
HT: So you said the ROTC people helped you quite a bit. Did you do marching and that sort
of thing with them, or how did that work out?
CAE: Yes. Well, when they were practicing, you know, I could go over, and they would take me and practice me, and then they would teach me how to salute and do all that kind of stuff, and the reservists were very good at doing those things, too, you know, because I was in the WAC Reserve.10
HT: Did you have to attend monthly meetings?
CAE: No, no, no, had no obligation. My only obligation was to go to school and make a grade of 2.0 or above. Well, that was easy for me. I graduated with 3.3, so that was pretty simple. So I did that and it was a delightful time, because I had a tough time in high school. When we were in high school we probably went to school about 150 days out of the 180, because you had to stay out and do the tobacco, and my father said, “I need you here during this time.” And as we were doing that, we’d meet the bus in the afternoon, and my girlfriend would send me my assignments and I’d work them out at night, and get them ready after we had done all the work that we had to do in the evening, and then I’d meet the bus in the morning and give the assignment to the driver, and he’d get it back to my girlfriend.
HT: And the teachers had no problems with this at all?
CAE: No, no, because there were a number of kids who were doing that, a number of kids who were doing it. Now, if you’d see my record my record would say 178 days, 180 days, and all of those things for high school, but I wasn’t there all that time. But the principal knew what he had to do in order to be able to get us out of there, and he’d put down those records, especially those who were trying to go to college, just what they needed in those, because, you know, I did the work, you see. I just wasn’t present. But I never missed my work.
HT: That is amazing. So after you graduated, I guess it was May of ’61 from A&T, you graduated in May?
CAE: June.
HT: June. What was the next step? Did you go into the army right away?
CAE: No. First I had to take the state board. I had to take the North Carolina state board. You have to do the board before you go on active duty. So I had to take the board and I had to wait around until I found out whether I passed or not, and so we did that. Another thing that they would try to do, too, was to get me to be twenty-one, because I wasn’t twenty-one when I graduated, I was twenty, and I wasn’t twenty-one until July, you see. So we took the board. We graduated the first week in June, we took the board, like the second week in June, and then about the middle of July we got the result. The result came back and I got this envelope, because the board is terrible, and I got this envelope and it had a little window down there, and it said passed. I didn’t care anything about what it said inside. It didn’t matter to me. It said the right words on the outside, so I could see.
[Tape recorder turned off.]
HT: Before we turned the tape off we were talking about the state board you had just passed.11
CAE: Yes, just passed. I just got the little envelope, it had a little window down there and it said passed, and that’s all I needed to know. Then I checked on the grades and that type thing later. But then I could go and send that information off to the army, and then get ready for my orders to go to the officer basic course, because, see, I got my commission as a lieutenant in the United States Army, second lieutenant in the United States Army Nurse Corps in February of my last year of school, in February of ’61. They commissioned me three months early, before I graduated. And that was great because, you see, after that you’d get lieutenant’s pay.
HT: It’s even better.
CAE: That would be even better, even better than the private’s pay. So that turned out very, very well for me, and then I was able to get my uniforms and do those things that were necessary for me to get ready to go on active duty.
HT: So when did you go on active duty?
CAE: I went on active duty in August of 1961.
HT: Where was your first duty station?
CAE: Fort Sam Houston, Texas, down at Fort Sam Houston.
HT: Did you go into anything like a basic training course?
CAE: Yes. Well, that’s what it was. They called it officer basic orientation, yes, officer basic orientation course, OBC. What you do primarily, what we did primarily in that area, and the reason why we went to Fort Sam Houston was because that is the home of the Army Medical Department. We went down to Fort Sam Houston because it had, at that time it was called the Medical Field Service School. It’s now called the Academy of Health Sciences, but at that time it was the Medical Field Service School, and we went down there to learn all of the basic information that was necessary about being officers in the Army Medical Department, and also to learn the basics of being a soldier, you know, which was shoot, march, salute, drill, and ceremony, all of those things. Well, I was doing pretty good, see, because I had already had a little bit of training in that saluting and doing those kind of things, and marching, so I could get in line and I knew my left from my right, which a lot of nurses did not know. [laughs] It was fun. We had a great time.
HT: How long was that training?
CAE: That was six weeks, it was six weeks, right, and that was just temporary duty, because after that I already had orders that indicated that I was to go from there, once I was finished, to Fort Dix, New Jersey, which was really my first duty assignment, and it was my first choice of duty assignment, too, which you don’t often get.12
HT: Why Fort Dix?
CAE: Because my sister was living in Newark, my oldest sister, and she and I had lived together when I was out of school for that year, and I wanted to go up there and be assigned close to her. I didn’t want to go to Fort Bragg, [North Carolina], because I always thought if anything happened to Mother and Daddy, and I needed to have a compassionate transfer, I could always get down to Fort Bragg if I hadn’t been there before. Plus, that was too close to home for me. You know, I had to go some places and see some things, you see.
So I got to Fort Dix and did my first duty assignment as a lieutenant. It was wonderful. I had a great time. I enjoyed the work I had to do. I enjoyed the meeting new people and dealing with the patients, and there was a lot of work, too, I’ll tell you.
HT: What did your family and friends think about you being in the army?
CAE: Oh, my mother thought it was great, you know. My dad, he still was skeptical about various things, but he got over it. But they all thought it was great, you know, and when I finally came home, got a chance to come home and was in uniform and all this stuff, and they found out I was doing well, you know, my mother always supported, always supported anything that we wanted to do at any point in time, and especially if we were doing well. Now, if things didn’t go right she’d say, “Listen. I don’t think that’s the right thing for you.” But if she saw you were doing well at what you were doing, she said, “Yeah, go for it.” And so we always did that. My friends, they thought it was interesting, too. They thought I was kind of a little bit nuts to be so far from home.
HT: Especially your boyfriend at that time. [both laugh]
CAE: They thought I was crazy to be so far from home, and wanted to be so far from home, because they just never envisioned that they would ever live anyplace but right down there where they were. And I never envisioned that I would ever live down there again, because it was a small town and I could just see other places that I needed, because I read a lot of books and I had a vivid imagination, and so I could see other places that I could be and go, and things that I could do, and so I wanted to see some of that.
HT: What type of work were you involved in at Fort Dix?
CAE: When I got to Fort Dix I was assigned as a staff nurse in—well, actually it was a general- duty nurse, general-duty nurse first, and then a staff nurse after a year—in one of the first intensive care units, surgical intensive care units that was established by the army. It was a six-bed unit, and we took care of all of the patients who had had serious surgery, and at that time serious surgery was to have things such as to have half of your stomach removed, and to have a large bit of surgery done as far as your bowel was concerned, you know, large portions of bowel taken out, you know, that type of thing. That was considered serious surgery.13
HT: Was that your specialty, surgery?
CAE: Yes, surgery. Yes, surgical nursing was my specialty, yes, and I stayed in that for all of the time that I was laying on hands. But intensive care was at that time, and still is, a subspecialty of surgery, because you had to have skills over and above the regular skills of a surgical nurse, because you had to be able to take care and resuscitate folk if they became ill all of a sudden, and to take care of emergencies and do all those things, and we had to do the cardiopulmonary resuscitation and all that kind of business.
HT: If we could just backtrack for a second back to your college days, where did you get
hands-on experience?
CAE: When I was in Greensboro? At two facilities. One of them I believe is probably at this point in time L. Richardson Memorial Hospital, and the other was Moses Cone [Hospital]. Yes. Of course, it was interesting, this was mostly for medical-surgical kind of nursing, the basic kind of nursing we do with adult patients.
Moses Cone was interested, of course, in our coming and dealing at that point in time, and, of course, this was during the time when segregation was still the law of the land. Not too many facilities in North Carolina allowed African American students to practice in them, but Cone did, and for them it was an economical thing. I mean, we were cheap labor, because that’s what nursing students were mostly. That’s how come everybody enjoyed the hospital schools, because they were cheap, cheap labor. [laughs] But we did about half the time that they did, and so we were just cheap labor. But they allowed us to come.
But for a psychiatric affiliation and for TB affiliation, and what else did we do? We had to go to New York to do psychiatric affiliation, because Dorothea Dix [Hospital] would have no part of them, you see, and that was the largest place in North Carolina. Greensboro didn’t even have any psych places then, and we had to travel from Greensboro up to New York to do that affiliation.
HT: How long did these periods last that you were stationed at various hospitals either in Greensboro or New York?
CAE: That was a twelve-week period. Yes, you had to do one whole semester there, I mean one whole quarter there, yes, yes, because they were on the quarter system at that time. Now they’re semester. So we had to do one whole quarter there, so that was the whole summer, you know. We had to go up there for psych affiliation. Oh, that was interesting. And then we went to—for the TB and long-term illness, because we couldn’t use the nursing homes and those things at that time either. Well, you had to learn how to take care of patients that had long-term illnesses, so we went out to Oteen, [North Carolina], near Asheville, you ever been out there, to the VA [Veterans Administration] hospital?
HT: Oh, the VA hospital.14
CAE: Right, VA hospital near Asheville, but the place was called Oteen at that time, and I think it still is. And that we did another quarter. Actually, we did ten weeks. We did ten weeks there, I remember.
HT: So you did quite a bit of traveling, even though you were just a college student.
CAE: That’s right. We did a lot of traveling at that time, yes. I remember one time, because— and I was glad that we got a chance to go to Oteen, because, see, my oldest sister was teaching in Newark. She had subsequently gotten married in 1960 and she was teaching in Newark, and so I knew that if I got to New York, if I got any time off I could go and visit her. Plus my favorite aunt, she just died last year, lived there, too, and when we were up there she was so nice and so kind to us, and so I wanted an opportunity to go and spend some more time with her and do all those things, because she was a marvelous gal, and we had a marvelous time.
The hospital there was Central Islip and it was out on the island, out on Long Island. As a matter of fact, it was just before the last stop on Long Island, so I used to have to take the train in to New York, take the Long Island train into New York, and then switch over to the bus system—I mean, get a cab and go over to Port Authority, and then get on the bus system and go into Newark. I used to check my money and make sure that I had enough money to do this, you know, because if I got there I knew they’d help me with my stash, because two hundred and fifty dollars was enough to keep me down in Greensboro, but it was not enough to get you straight up in New York. So I would have enough monies to get over and do what I needed to do, and then I’d get to Newark and they’d take care of me.
One time I was coming back—I’ve told people this story on many occasions, but it was interesting. You know, I wasn’t used to—I was used to the fact that people would yell and do catcalls and those things at you, and try to pick you up and that kind of business, but I didn’t—in Greensboro, because we—outside of the university there—it was a college at that time, but outside there was the street going up, Market Street, there was a little area where the winos hung out, you see, and as you were passing through there they’d always say, “Hey, baby, how you doing?” Because we had to walk uptown, because we walked almost every place we went. And what you did was, you spoke to them but you never stopped, you see. You just kept right on walking, you know, and they didn’t mind that you kept walking, but you had to speak. You know, I’d say, “How are you?” I was very good at speaking to people and doing that stuff. So we get uptown.
Well, I went into the Long Island train, trying to get back to Central Islip one Sunday night in New York, and went into Penn Station—
[End Tape 1, Side A—Begin Tape 1, side B.]
CAE: —went into Penn Station, down in to get the Long Island train, and this guy came over and he’d had a lot to drink, and he was trying to pick me up. [lowers voice] And I remembered the behavior of some of my patients that I’d just taken care of out there in Central Islip, [resumes normal volume] and I decided to start saying things. [laughs] So I 15
started saying, “Get away from me! Get away from me! I see you standing in my room.” So this fellow saw that obviously I had a problem, and so he took off and went in another direction, and I told my aunt about that the next time I was in Newark, and she laughed about that for many years afterwards. She said, “Oh, you are absolutely out of your mind.” I said, “Well, that’s what you are when you’re out at Central Islip. I mean, you can go crazy and be anything you want to be.” [laughs] We had a great time about that.
HT: Oh, god. I guess we’d better go fast forward again and—
CAE: Get me back on active duty.
HT: Get you back to active duty. I’m sorry, I should have thought of that earlier. [both laugh]
CAE: Yes, I was at Fort Dix, and that was my first duty station, and I learned a lot there about how to take care of patients and how to deal with patients in real situations, when you have the responsibility, and not only that, you have the accountability for those patients. And it’s a lot different than what the book says, but that was reality over there in that corner.
One of the highlights of being at Fort Dix for me was that I worked in this intensive care unit, but I worked with a sergeant who was a licensed practical nurse. His name was [Richard] Zeitlin, and he had been in the Korean War, and so he knew a lot about how to take care of patients. So he came to me one day and he said, “Lieutenant,” he said, “you know,” he said, “I think you’re going to be a good nurse,” he said. “And you listen to people,” he said, “so I’m willing to help you,” he said. “And what I will do is,” he said, “I know all the practical stuff, and I know how to do all the treatments and the procedures and all those kind of things.” He said, “I’ll teach you all of that.” He said, “But now if the supervisor comes round,” he said, “now, remember, you have to be the lieutenant.” He said, “I can’t go reporting to the supervisor,” he said, “because that’s not my job as long as you’re here.” He said, “As long as you’re here, you’ve got to be the lieutenant.”
So I said, “Okay. I can handle that.” So he taught me all those procedures and all those things.
He said, “And I will do this,” he said. And then one day when we were working together he said, “I’m going to go over to the recovery room,” because we ran the recovery room and the intensive care unit. He said, “I’m going over to the recovery room and I’m going to get in one of the beds, and I’m going to sleep, and then I’m going to see how much you’ve learned, because you’re going to have to take care of all the patients.”
So I said, “Okay.” So we worked at this for about three, four weeks, and then one evening we had, you know, one night we had night duty together, me and Zeit, Zeitlin and I.
And Zeitlin said, “Okay, lieutenant. This is your time to shine.” He said, “I’m going over there,” and he said, “but you always know that if you need me, all you have to do is call me.” He said, “If a lot of patients come in and you need to have some help,” he said, “you let me know, and I will come and help you.”
Let me tell you, what Zeitlin didn’t understand was, there was no way that I was going to call him for anything, because I could handle it, and so we started the evening, 16
the night. It was eleven to seven. Things were pretty quiet when we started, had two or three patients over there, nothing going on. I said, “This is a breeze.” But it was the weekend and it was Fort Dix, New Jersey, and we had a physician that was on call. He was the surgeon on call, that no matter when he was on call, all the patients came to see him with their little illnesses, and needing surgery, and all this other.
So it was about two o’clock in the morning, I guess, when they called me about this person, an air force sergeant that was down in the emergency room. Do you know Fort Dix, New Jersey at all?
HT: I do not.
CAE: Well, McGuire Air Force Base is right across the way. But this guy was—they have a lot of little roads in New Jersey, and many of them are very dark at night, and these guys would be driving down these roads, you know, and they’d been to a club somewhere, they had two or three more than they should have had, and they would hit things, you know, or things would hit them. Like transfer trucks run into them, and things like that.
And this guy had gotten all broken up in his face, and they took him to surgery and literally lifted his face out. He had on this little—we used to call him the moon man, because he had his turban on, and they had literally lifted his face out, put wires in there, and kept it pulled out so that the bones could heal back in place. Ooh, those surgeons could do most anything, I’m telling you, with the dental surgeon. So he had had his face pulled out and was—and I said, “Oh, he’s going to be a lot of work.” But I got everything set up. I knew what he needed, got him all set up and got him into the bed, and was going along dealing with him very well.
Well, he had also, because he couldn’t eat at this time, and wasn’t going to be able to eat for several days, they put in what we call a nasal-gastric tube. They call it a stomach tube sometimes, too. They run the tube through the nose and down through the esophagus and down to the stomach in order to be able to take out the fluids that collect there, because fluids collect there whether you’re eating or not, you see. So they ran the tube down there so that they could keep the stomach decompressed and the gut decompressed, so that he wouldn’t vomit and do all those other kinds of things. Well, at that time those tubes were made of rubber, and they were known periodically to collapse after you had them in, because if you don’t have enough air in there to keep them open, the suction will cause them to collapse and close off. Well, hell, you don’t want that to happen either, and they had given me these scissors over there, because they had the jaws all wired together. They had given me the scissors so that if anything happened, like if that thing collapsed and he started vomiting, you could clip the wires and then he could open up. But what you’re going to do, then, is you’re going to wreck all of that surgery.
So, I mean, and I’m a new lieutenant. I don’t know that I’ve got this much sense to do this stuff or not. [laughs] And Zeitlin’s gone to bed. I mean, you know. And I ain’t going to call him, I don’t care what happens. Well, he started to—I said, “Oh, something is not right.” So I tried to move the tube a little bit, and nothing happened. And that’s the other thing it would do, too, is that as the wave action happens in the esophagus and going down to the stomach, it can cause the tube to fold back on itself, and you get a little kink in it, and when you get a little kink in it, if you pull it out you pull it out a little bit from the nose, and then it’ll open up. I pulled it out a little bit; it didn’t open up. I said, 17
“Oh, my god. I’m going to have a problem over here. I’ll never get this straight.” So I worked on it a little bit more, and then I pushed a little bit of air in it, and I turned him in another position a little bit so he was on his side some more, and finally that thing opened and started to fill. I said, “Hallelujah.” And plus he was full of all sorts of fluids and everything, because that alcohol just causes everything to just kind of secrete more water than you normally would get, and so he had everything, and all this stuff started flowing out. I said, “Oh, that is marvelous. Just get it all out of there.” And so he did, and we got that straight.
Well, I’ll tell you, I had several of those little kind of incidents and things that were going on. By the next morning I was harried, I tell you. I got home and looked at myself, I said, “Oh, my god. I look like I’ve been working.”
Along about six o’clock old Zeitlin got up, Sergeant Zeitlin, and he stretched and he said, “How’s everything going, lieutenant?”
I said, “Fine.” [laughs] I had never worked so hard in my life, but I learned.
HT: You were by yourself. There were no other nurses.
CAE: No other nurses, no other nurses. We only had one nurse that was on the shift, and this particular night, because we didn’t have a lot of folks assigned—I normally would have two corpsmen, you know. Because we didn’t have too many people assigned, and we were short of folks, they pulled the other fellow to another place, and Zeitlin went to bed, and so there was just me. But I’ll tell you, I lived through it, and I was a better nurse for having done that. And he used to always joke me. He was from Philadelphia, and he used to always joke about the fact that, he said, “I know you had a tough night,” he said, “because I could see you had a tough night when I came over there.” He said, “But you’re a stubborn old person.”
I said, “Listen. I had to learn, and I was not going to learn what I needed to do if you had been there, you see. So I just decided I’d stick it out. But I’ll tell you, I had some harried moments.” I tell folks a lot about the people that make so much of a to-do about prayer in schools. Well, you can pray anywhere you want to, at any point in time. Nobody ever would know that you ever said a prayer. And I don’t need for everybody to know that, but I said many a prayer that night. I mean, nobody could have stopped me from doing that, because it was needed. [laughs] That was fun.
HT: How long did you stay at Fort Dix?
CAE: Fourteen months. Then I had requested to go off to a course for intensive care nurses, because they’d opened a course at Fitzsimmons at that time. Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center was in Denver, Colorado, and plus I saw another place that I could go, you see. They did this course for eight weeks, and I said, “Jeez, I’ve never been to Colorado.” It was wonderful. I always said I’d wanted to go out there, because it’s the only place I’d ever been where it was seven below, and I was in this little light jacket and I felt fine, high and dry, you know, there in Denver.
So I went out there, met some more people, wandered around, went to Aspen, watched them ski, decided I couldn’t do that skiing, and so I never got on skis. Then when I finished that course, because it was just temporary duty there, I came back to Fort 18
Dix and I was in the dining facility one day—we called it the mess hall at that time—and I said to the chief nurse, she said, “Oh, we’re glad you’re back,” she said, “but I’m going to stop sending nurses off to those schools, because every time I send them off to school they get orders.”
I said, “Oh, who got orders?”
She said, “You.”
I said, “Really? Where am I going?”
She said, “Korea.”
I said, “Oh, my goodness.” Well, I had to get ready for that situation, and first I had to get my mother ready for that situation. But, you know, she usually didn’t have too many problems with what it was I was doing. I just had to go and assure her that I was not going to be involved in combat directly, and all those kinds of things, and so I went down, I talked to her and I talked to my dad, and it was for one year that we had to go.
So then I went off to Korea, doing the same kind of jobs. I went into intensive care out there, and that was, until I went to Europe, that was absolutely my best duty assignment in the army.
HT: At which base?
CAE: I went to the 21st Evacuation Hospital, in a manmade city there called ASCOM City, Army Support Command, A-s-c-o-m.
HT: What was that near?
CAE: That was just about seventeen miles from Seoul, near Seoul. The hospital subsequently got moved to Seoul, but it was outside of Seoul at that time. We were in one step above tents in that place, because we were an evacuation hospital, and so we were in Quonset huts. They were known as Quonset huts at that time. The hospital was in Quonset huts and we lived in Quonset huts on the grounds there at that place.
It was a good assignment for me, though, because, one, I was with a bunch of lieutenants for the first time in my life. See, at Fort Dix we had a lot of captains and we had a lot of lieutenants, but we also had a lot of captains and majors there. But in Korea it was mostly lieutenants, and the first thing that I learned, in terms of dealing with the army’s hierarchy is that, you know, there’s always somebody above you. [laughs] And when I dealt with the lieutenant portion, of course, there was a lot of people that were above me, and so I had to get myself ready to do the things that were necessary, because I knew we were going to have to do the duty.
So I went off to do the evenings and night duties, because I knew a lot of evenings and nights were coming to me, and they did. But I had a good time doing that, and I had a good—because on those shifts I was able to learn what I needed to do as a nurse, without having someone else there to tell me how to do it. I could make the decision. I could make the decisions for me. I could make the decisions for the paraprofessional personnel that I had working with me at that time; now they’re called assistive personnel. So I could get all of those things together, and then we could do the work that we had to do.
HT: How did you get along with the doctors?19
CAE: Got along with them fine, yes.
HT: They didn’t try to lord it over the nurses and that sort of thing?
CAE: No, no. See, because the military has a different setup than the civilian world does. See, in the military everybody has rank, and it goes by your rank, okay, and physicians started as captains, all right, which means that they were much closer; even though they started a rank ahead of us, they were still much closer to us than they are in the civilian world, see, because in the civilian sector physicians are not employees of the hospital, and all these physicians on active duty in the army are employees of the United States Army, okay? And as a result of that, we all worked for the same people. You see, so you can’t come in and decide one day that you don’t like the way this person parts her hair, or you don’t like what they did to you yesterday, and so therefore somebody ought to fire them, and I still get people saying that that happens to them in hospitals in this country, because we all worked for the same folks. I mean, you’ve got to go through the right person to get that done.
The second things is, we’ve always made it very clear in the military that nurses are in charge of nursing practice. Physicians are not in charge of nursing practice. They can’t be. They don’t know the practice, and so they can’t be in charge of that. We say, “Y’all go and do the doctoring, all right, and you can sit here and you can say—” and at that time they were all, all of the hospitals were commanded by physicians. It’s changed, because nurses command hospitals now, too, and so do hospital administrators. But at that time they were all commanded by the physicians. So we said, “Okay. At that level you can deal with that.”
And the surgeon general, who is the three-star general, has always been a physician. But the law got changed, so they need not necessarily be now, so we’re going to see that switch out one of these days. But at that time that’s the way it was. But in facilities it was always very clear that we had a chief nurse, and the purpose for that person being there was to administer the practice of nursing, and be responsible for the nurses, the nursing assistants and the folks that dealt with that.
HT: How about the corpsmen? How do they fit into all this?
CAE: Well, the corpsmen fit in in that the corpsmen have a dual management, because the corpsmen are enlisted folks, and being enlisted people they then deal with one boss whenever they’re on active duty, and then another boss whenever they’ve got to go to sleep and to the company, you see. But the person that is really responsible for them most of the time is the company commander, all right, and at one time the company commander used to be responsible for the corpsmen and corps women all of the time. But what they would do was, whenever they’d come to duty, if they had something they needed to have done in the company, or somebody called a parade, they’d come to pull all the people off the unit whenever we needed to work. You can’t have that! I mean, you can’t run a nursing service if you don’t have the control of the people. So the rules now are, when you’re on duty, for the period of time you’re on duty you’re responsible to the chief nurse and to the chief ward master.20
HT: That certainly makes sense.
CAE: Yes, oh yes. We had to get it to make sense. And then when you get finished with that duty—and that chief nurse and that chief ward master, the chief ward master is doing the most of it, since they’re enlisted people—then does the negotiation with the company commander as to who you can pull out when they’re on duty and not, because we know there’s some duties that you have to do that for, and so that’s how we negotiated that. But that worked a whole lot better than the other way around, so we managed to get that all sorted out.
But the physicians, I’ll tell you, over the years they really adjusted to the situation that exists as far as the military is concerned. I mean, sometimes some of them want to do a little bit differently, but we still have to sort it out with them and tell them, “This is what it is that we’re about, and you need to understand that when you want to deal with the practice of nursing and the nurses who are involved in it, that you get an opportunity to have your input, but the decision comes from the chief.” So that works out very well.
And I was glad that I had had some good experiences. I have had some that were not so good, but I can say that most of the experiences that I had to deal with were very pleasant ones, and as a result of that, when I got to be the chief, and especially had to assign the nurses to certain facilities—see, because we assign nurses to facilities, I as the chief of the Army Nurse Corps, when those nurses go into their assignments I have no further control over them. They report to the chief nurse in that facility, and to the commander, okay, and that’s who they’re responsible to in that facility.
So when I got to be chief of the corps I then started giving, you know, picking folks to go to hospitals, because I had done a lot of inspection of hospitals and I found out that you’ve got to send people to places that have a certain personality, because facilities themselves have personalities, and we tend to send people there that have got the same personality that fits into that facility. I’m telling you, I didn’t know a whole lot about organizational effectiveness and that kind of stuff, but I will tell you I learned it on the job, and I found out that was so, so I tried to make sure that I matched the chief nurse with the personality and management style of the physician, so that you don’t put a built-in problem to start with, you see. And if you get folks pretty well matched together, then you can deal with what happens to them.
HT: You had to have very good people skills.
CAE: Oh yes, oh yes. I’d worked on that, yes.
HT: I guess having so many brothers and sisters really helped you in that way.
CAE: It sure did. And see, I didn’t even understand that when I was growing up, but it sure did pay off later, I’ll tell you.
HT: After you were near Seoul, Korea, where was your next duty station?21
CAE: What’d I do after I finished Seoul, Korea? Oh, I came back to San Antonio, Texas, again, and this is the first time I’d been back since I left the basic. I went back there to do my, what was known as the career course, a nine-month course where you start to learn management within the Army Medical Department. You need to understand that I was a fairly new captain going to that course, and at that course at that time they only sent senior majors. Senior captains and majors used to go to that course, and I had just—as a matter of fact, I got promoted in the course to a captain. I was about finished, and they promoted me to captain. But I was one of three lieutenants that were selected to go to the course.
HT: Did you request to attend this?
CAE: No. They invited me to come, as a lieutenant. I was surprised that I was getting to go down there. But I had asked to go to teach in one of the army’s schools for medics, and so they said, “Well, while you’re down there at Fort Sam Houston, you might as well go on to that course, and get finished, and then go stay there and teach, and then we don’t have to move you twice.” So that’s what happened.
It was very good for me because I always wanted to teach, you know. I had grown up—when we were growing up we used to have what I’ve described to people as the family council, you know, that used to happen every night. Daddy would get together to ask us our opinion, not that we were ever going to get anything out of it, but he’d ask us our opinion about things, and my sister, of course, being the oldest was the spokesperson for the children, you know. And I saw her go in there one time, and she did not have her act together. And you did not go to Daddy to do nothing when you didn’t have your act together. I mean, if he’s going to ask you a question, you need to have an answer for it.
And I remember being about six years old, which meant that she was about eleven or so, and I said, when she got finished I said, “Listen. You should have said this to Daddy, and you should have been able to argue this point.” She said, “If you think you can do it better, why don’t you do it?” That was all I needed to know. [laughs] I took over that spokesperson. So they’d come to me and they’d tell me all this stuff, and what they wanted to do, and what they want to be about, and all this stuff, and I’d go and I’d argue my case in front of Daddy. But I’ll tell you, he got me ready for a lot of stuff, because he knew the questions to ask, he knew what he wanted to know about this whole thing, and I had to sit down and say, now, he may ask this, he may ask that, and if he asks this then I need to know this, and I’d work it all out before I got there, the most of it. Sometimes I didn’t have things, but I could just tell by his eyes. He was always impressed that I could manage to pull that stuff off. And listen, I could discuss with him right down to the last minute, and would do it, too. [both laugh]
So I had learned a lot about debating and dealing with what it was I needed to deal with, because Daddy got me ready for that. And so when I got out—and it happened in nursing school, too. I ended up being spokesperson for a lot of situations, lot of situations, with the students, and then, of course, working in various clubs. I was president of the Student Nursing Association at one time there at A&T, and you know, just had a marvelous time doing many of those things. I always had a lot of energy and so on, and always needed to channel it somewhere, so I used to keep it going.22
HT: What were some of the things you learned at this school in San Antonio that you attended for nine months?
CAE: Well, what we did learn primarily was the management and leadership of nursing staff, you know, how to manage and leading nursing staffs in various kinds of situations—mostly in case of mobilization in war, because that’s what the army prepares for all of the time, you see. The reason for the army existing at all is to fight the nation’s land wars, you see, and since they’re going to be doing that, any of the support groups that are there with them have to be able to take care of patients in those kind of settings.
That’s why we have such a great camaraderie and friendship with the infantry people, you know, infantry artillery and armor, because that’s what they do. They fight the war. And as a result of that we have to be there to support them, and that’s what we were learning how to do. But at the same time that we learned how to take care of those skills and to be able to be good managers and leaders in nursing, we also at the same time had to do a section called military science, where you got to learn a lot about what the army is doing at that time, and what you learn in those courses, of course, is all those things that have to do with the type of weapons that are being deployed, what they do to the human body when they’re being deployed, and what kinds of facilities that you have to set up and be able to deal with in order to be able to support an army in the field that’s mobilized. Learned a lot of stuff there.
HT: This lasted for nine months.
CAE: Yes, it did at that time. Yes, now it lasts for about six.
HT: What did you do next after you finished school?
CAE: After I finished that school, oh, then I went to teach in the Medical Training Center. I went to teach medics, basic medics. These are the basic hospital corpsmen.
HT: And this was at Fort Sam Houston?
CAE: At Fort Sam Houston, Texas, yes, teach those medics, and I taught them for three years. Yes, it was ’64 to ’67, and then after that I left and went to graduate school, got picked up for graduate school.
HT: When you say you taught, did you teach all day long?
CAE: Yes, all day long, right.
HT: Just normal types.
CAE: Seven-thirty-to-four kind of thing. Well, in the beginning I used to do a lot of platform time, which meant that I’d go in the classroom and we would do classes that were straight lecture, or we would do lecture discussion, or lecture discussion and demonstration. Like if we got to a situation where we had to teach them how to give injections, then you’ve 23
got to talk for an hour, then you’ve got to demonstrate how it gets done, and then they’ve got to do the practical exercise, so that’d be about a four-hour class, I mean, you know. And we had eight hours of class that we did. We’d do four in the morning, and four in the afternoon most days. Some days you didn’t have to do any in the morning at all, and then you’d have to do four in the afternoon. But we had to have time off to write our lesson plans, to revise the lesson plans, and to do those kinds of things.
HT: And this was geared toward corpsmen only.
CAE: Right, geared toward corpsmen only, right. It’s really like a basic nursing-assistant course.
HT: Both male and female?
CAE: Male and female, right, yes.
HT: And then you say after that you went to graduate school?
CAE: No, no. Well, I did go to graduate school, but I taught on the platform for about a year, and then the next two years I did what was called the ward training, because what we would do was we’d take all of the procedures that were necessary for them to do within a facility, and we’d give them one whole day of doing the practical exercises, doing the injections, doing the bed baths, and all this. And lord have mercy, kids can be something whenever they’re basically learning this stuff, and this was during the time when we did not have the all-volunteer army like we have now, so many of the people that were there didn’t want to be there in the first place. So you’ve got to make things at least interesting for them. This is Vietnam. This is Vietnam era, you know, because it was ’64, and the buildup had already started. We started out teaching like five lines per week, five, six lines per week, and we went to fourteen lines per week, and the lines is the number of students that you have coming through at a time. But they also increased the numbers that were in each line, and so it was a big buildup time.
HT: How were people chosen to join the Medic Corps, corpsmen? Was it just by chance?
CAE: No, no, no. They had something they call a battery of tests that they did, the army’s battery of tests, and they looked to see anybody who was mostly a social, outgoing person, good dexterity, good manual skills and things of that nature, and if they didn’t need anybody to be a truck driver. [laughs] No, they used to send us pretty good people, because, you know, at this time, since it was not volunteer and folk were getting drafted, we’d get lawyers and folks who had some background in being a medic before, and people with pretty good high education, you know, and so forth.
I had this one kid one time—I used to tell people about this—that was in the class on injections, and we were doing venal punctures, trying to teach them how to stick a needle into the vein and that type thing, because many of those kids went off to be medics in units in Vietnam, you see, so they had to know a lot of basic things to start with. So we were doing the venal puncture and we had this kid over there, and I was watching him 24
and he was good. He was very good at getting, finding the vein and putting the needle in and doing stuff. So I went over to him and I said, “Listen.” I said, “You are very good at this.” I said, “I think you’ve had some practice before.”
He said, “Yes, ma’am, I have.”
I said, “Where?”
He said, “On the streets of Chicago. This is how I used to make my money, giving heroin to the junkies.”
I said, “Well, you’re here, brother. Let me tell you, the skill is the same.” [laughs]
HT: What a story.
CAE: The skill is the same. Lord, a lot of them kids had some stories, I’ll tell you. But the skill is the same, and he was good, he was very good at doing it.
So I taught there for the next two years, had a marvelous time, really did enjoy that, and left from there, and that was 1967, and went to graduate school, University of Minnesota. Froze myself to death for two years. Great school, learned a lot about teaching, because I had decided at that time that teaching was the best and only thing that a person could do in life. I mean, you know, here you are, responsible for folks’ education, and the army was opening a school of nursing, had opened a school of nursing, because this was Vietnam and we needed to get more nurses out. So the army had opened this school of nursing, which it had opened twice before and closed, but they needed to open it again to get more nurses out.
So that’s what we did, we opened the school of nursing, and I was going there to get my master’s degree so that I could teach in that school, because I had already made known the fact that I wanted to teach there. So they took me into the university, and I went to the University of Minnesota because I’m still dealing with my traveling bit. I had never been to the Midwest, and I thought education ought to come from more than one side of the world, I mean of the USA. So I said, “I’d love to go out there. I’ve never been to mid-America to go to school. I’d love to go there.” So I got selected and went there, and the University of Minnesota has a reputation of being a wonderful school. So I went there and I majored in medical-surgical nursing with an emphasis on teaching, and got my master’s. Then I was sent to Walter Reed [Army Institute of Nursing], to teach in that school of nursing, where I stayed for the next five years.
HT: That was an unusually long time.
CAE: Yes. But I had a wonderful time. And the reason how come I stayed there was because every now and then crises come up in this life, all right, and a crisis came up. That’s how I stayed the last two years. I was over there teaching, doing my assignments, doing those things I was supposed to do, and we were getting ready for the fall year, because we were changing the curriculum and doing a number of things, and someone came and tapped on my shoulder. So I said, “Oh, what is happening here?” So they said, “Listen. The chief of the corps is here, and her name is General [Lillian] “Lil” Dunlap, and she wants to see you. Well, I had known Lil Dunlap since I had been in that course—you remember I went to that career course as a lieutenant?25
HT: Yes.
CAE: To learn management and leadership of nurses? I had a problem there, because I had a roommate that was failing the course, and there were some students in the class who thought that I should be responsible for this woman who was failing this course. And I was having a little bit of concern about that, because I thought I had to be responsible for me. I didn’t know I had to be responsible for everybody else. And so I said, “I’m going to go ask somebody about this, because obviously I don’t quite have this straight.” But it was a little captain that was telling me that I had to do this, and so I said, “Let me go check out Colonel Dunlap,” because she was in charge of the course. At that time she was a lieutenant colonel.
So I went to see her and when I went to see her I told her about my situation, and she said, “Let me tell you something, lieutenant.” She said, “If you fail this course because you are going out of your way to try and help somebody else pass,” she said, “I will see to it that you never get anyplace in the army.” She said, “You’re responsible for you here, and nobody else.” And basically she said, “You keep your mouth shut and do your work, and I’ll get you where you think you need to go.” That was my first lesson in mentoring.
And she picked me up and she kept in touch with me for the next fourteen years. And I was never assigned with her, and then we kept in touch by either she was—because she went on to the Surgeon General’s Office in Washington after that time, and she was in charge of the branch there, and she would call me on the telephone that she was in charge of the nursing career branch there, and she would call me on the telephone or she would come down on a staff visit, or I’d see her someplace like that, but we were never assigned together. But I will tell you she moved me along, because she would call up and say, “Hey, listen. This is the next assignment you’ve got to go to. This is what you’re supposed to do when you get there, and you go and take care of it.” And I did. I mean, I knew I could do the work, you see, but mentors are about taking care of the things that you can’t take care of.
HT: What happened to this woman who was failing?
CAE: She failed, yes, because she didn’t have good study habits, you know? Her idea of study was to get two or three minutes after she had come home. First she took off her clothes, she said, “I have to relax.” So she’d have herself about three highballs, and, of course, that’ll get you ready for something, but it would not get you ready for studying too very well. Then she’d have her steak, and she always ate a steak and salad. That was her evening meal. And then she’d have a couple more drinks, and then she’d think about she wanted to study, and by that time she was too sleepy to do anything.
I had a friend that she and I studied together all of the time. She’s dead, someone told me she died. We used to always study together, and so when we got finished and we got undressed in the afternoon, we’d just go hit the books before we forgot what we got told that day. [laughs] So we’d get all that together, and at that time I wasn’t much of a drinking person anyway, and so we’d do that and then maybe we’d go up—I ate a lot of ice cream, and we’d do that and then we’d be finished, you see, for the evening. But that’s the way we did ours, and that’s how I was getting by. And out of the class I 26
graduated number six in that class, because I applied myself and did very well in terms of doing that.
And plus, this woman was a captain. I didn’t see how come I had to be responsible for a captain. Well, she had to leave the corps finally, because she was not making the grades and was not keeping up.
HT: That must have been very embarrassing for her.
CAE: Yes, yes, I guess it was.
HT: Would something like that ruin your career?
CAE: Oh yes, oh yes. You’re probably pretty well done after that time, you’re probably pretty well confined to not getting promoted along with your peers, that’s for sure.
So that’s how I got picked up by Lil Dunlap, and so then after then she started to move me around and do whatever, and I started to shine. I was going places and doing things. I left the career course and went down to that school, and I got down to the school and I was doing great in that school, and not only did I get to go in the school, but I got to go and work in the ward training section, which was considered to be a very, very choice area to work, because you had regular hours, you had Monday through Friday. Most everybody was doing Monday through Friday, weekends off, and that’s great. I mean, nurses want that more than anything else. But the other thing that you had to do, you didn’t have to do all those lesson plans and that kind of stuff, because you just had to do these four or five lesson plans for this particular area, and you didn’t have to review all the twenty or thirty more that was used up in the other areas.
So I thought things were going great, and I was doing very well there. And I had had a chief nurse that was up at Fort Dix when I was first assigned there, and she had gotten another job as chief nurse of what was known at that time as the Continental Army Command. It’s now Traydock, but it was the Continental Army Command at that time, and they did training and doctrine for all the military schools around. So she came down to visit the school at the Medical Training Center. Now you know, I was a captain. I wasn’t in charge of anything but my little ward training section, okay. But we had a chief nurse in that area. When she came down to see the chief nurse she said, “I want to see Lieutenant Leach while I’m here,” because she knew I had been at Fort Dix, and I was a good nurse there for her in her area. So she wanted to find out what was going on in that place, and she figured if she got a hold of me she could find out. [laughs] Well, she knew I’d tell her what I knew.
But it didn’t help me with my relations with my boss, you understand, that she would come down and instead of saying, “I want to talk to you about what’s happening here,” “I want to go down and see Lt Leach.” Well, I’ll tell you, that didn’t make for good relations at all, and I had a boss who had a little bit of vindictiveness in her. So that and a couple of other situations that went on, and unbeknownst to me, to her trying to get me removed from the job that I was in, because she wanted to put her friend into it, got me to get a terribly, terribly, terribly bad efficiency report.
We had an efficiency report at that time that had a grading system where they showed a pyramid of people. I don’t know if you’ve seen that grading system, but they 27
have the one person at the top, and then you’ve got about two on this line, but it all adds up to one hundred people, you know. But as it’s shown, it’s kind of like a curve when you get finished, you know. When you turn it on its side it’s really kind of like a bell curve, but when you stand it up you’ve got one person at the top, and you’ve got—I used to say one man at the top, and then you’ve got one man at the bottom, right. I was rated down there with that little man at the bottom. I was holding up all the other men. And I didn’t know that she had done this. But I was called—it was in July, in San Antonio. San Antonio, Texas, is a very, very warm place. Fort Sam Houston was in San Antonio. Oh, you know, you did the Air Force.
HT: That’s right. I went to Lackland, [Texas].
CAE: You’ve been there.
HT: In November, and it was still hot.
CAE: It was still hot! It could be that way. Well, in July you can know—oh, lord, I remember the Six-Day War. Every time anybody talks about Israel and the Six-Day War, I remember standing there doing blood pressures, and the water was dripping down my face that afternoon. Probably part of how come it was dripping down is because they had already alerted us that if we have to go and help out Israel, you need to know that you may be going. Oh, my god, how am I going to explain this to my mother? It’s always, how am I going to explain this to mother.
But anyway, we were down there and it was hot this day, and I was over there battling with the students in war training, and somebody came down and said, “Listen. The commander wants to see you.” Commander? What did I do? You know, it’s always, what did I do now? And I couldn’t remember anything.
So I said, “Well, I’m just going up here and see the commander. He’s just going to have to tell me what this is about, because I don’t know nothing.”
So I went up to see him, and I remember him saying to the secretary—she said to him, “Shall I close the door?”
And he said, “Oh no.” He said, “You don’t have to close the door.” He said, “If Clara starts yelling and screaming in here I think we can handle her.”
So I said, “My goodness. What am I going to yell and scream about?” I didn’t know nothing. You know, people don’t ever tell you what it is folk want, especially when it’s the commander. They don’t ever tell you anything except for, “The boss wants to see you.” So I sat down and he gave me my efficiency report, and at that time you didn’t have to show people their efficiency reports. As a matter of fact, most times they didn’t, you know. Now it’s a whole different system. I mean, you’ve got to talk to people and tell them all about stuff. As a matter of fact, you’ve got to talk to them all the time. But at that time you didn’t get to see them.
But there were some commanders who, if it was going to be an adverse report, they would show it to you, and this was an adverse report. When I looked down there—again, I first opened up the thing and I started looking at it, and I read the first side, and I remember thinking, god, that didn’t say very much. I thought I was better than that. Then 28
I read the back and I got down to those little men, and she rated me round here, “unconfident, incompetent.” What is this all about? So then—
[End Tape 1, Side B—Begin Tape 2, Side A.]
CAE: Okay. I was talking about the report that I got. Then I looked at the report and I told him, “Oh, I didn’t realize that I had done so badly in this time.” And so I started to cry.
And the commander just kind of sat there with me and he said, “Well, Clara, what do you think?”
And I said, “I don’t know, sir.” I said, “I don’t believe that my performance was as bad as she has portrayed it here.”
He said, “Well, did you see what the endorser and the reviewer wrote?” because he was the reviewer.
And I said, “Yes, sir. I saw what was written there.” But, you see, at that time the person that was your immediate supervisor was the rater, and that individual was the most important person in the system. Their—what they wrote got the most weight, it carried the most weight in your report, and so I knew that this was going to be considered to be a terrible report.
So he said, “Well, Clara,” he said, “I will tell you. Since it is such a discrepancy between what the rater has said and what the endorser and reviewer has said,” he said, “we have sent it forward one time.” He says, “Matter of fact, we’ve sent it forward twice, so this is coming back to us for the third time, and this time we just thought we should notify you that this kind of report is going in.” And he said, “That’s why I had you come and read it.” And he said, “Well, is there anything that you want to say about it?”
And I told him, I said, “Sir,” I said, “I don’t believe it’s true.”
And he said, “Well, are you aware of the regulations that’s necessary to be able to object and to formally make your objections to this?”
And I said, “Yes, sir. I know a little bit.” I said, “But I don’t know everything I should, but I will.” So I left his office and he gave me a copy of that report, and he told me that they were going to send it back the next time, because they had brought it back twice and asked her to change it; she’d refused. So if she refused to change it the third time, then they would send it forth. So they brought it back to her and she refused to change it, so then it had to go before a board to see what happened, because the discrepancy was already there.
Well, my brother had a good friend who was an air force sergeant, and he and I used to get together very often, and he was in personnel. When I showed him that report he said, “Oh, Clara.” He said, “You’re going to be a major.” He said, “You’re going to be a major very soon.”
I said, “Why?”
He said, “Because you can’t write a report like this and have it go through.” He says, “There’s too much of a discrepancy between what she said and what the other folks had to say about you.” And he says that what the other folks have to say about you indicates that they have also seen your performance many times on an infrequent basis, but frequent enough, because the commander used to always come down with all the 29
dignitaries. See, I worked in a place where all the dignitaries came through, because these kids were doing hands-on training, and everybody wanted to see somebody doing some hands-on training. So I was down there and I would, whenever they came down, of course, I being the gracious and gregarious person that I was, I would tour them through the area, talk to them, deal with everything they needed to deal with, answer all their questions, and deal with what’s happening.
And so my rater at that time wanted her friend to work in this area, and she went to the commander to get him to move me, because I was a junior officer. There was no doubt about it, I was a junior captain there, and her friend was a senior captain. And she said, “I’d like to put her down there in that place, because she has more experience in this area,” la ti da ti da. The real big thing was she was her friend, because she was not a people person.
So the commander said, “No, don’t, you can’t move her,” she said, “because Capt Leach is doing just fine down in that area. Leave her to do what she’s doing.” So the long and short of it all was, she would not agree to change the report, and I went out over that weekend and I found that regulation, read the regulation, did all the information that I needed to do, got all the information gathered that I needed to gather to offer a rebuttal, and I never had to do it.
Because when the report went forth a third time it was sent from—actually, Lil Dunlap was by then a full colonel, and she was in the Office of the Surgeon General, doing personnel for the Army Nurse Corps, and she got the report. Then she called up my boss there and she said, “What on earth are you writing for this officer? I know this officer myself, and I know that she’s better than what you have written here.”
Well, she says, “That’s the way I see it.”
So she said, “All right.” So they sent the report forward and the report finally got to something called the Army Board of [Record] Corrections.
They took that report and they said, “There’s no way there’s so much discrepancy between what the rater has said, and what the reviewer and endorser said.” So what they did was, they threw out what the rater had to say, they threw out what the reviewer had to say, they doubled the score of the endorser, who was the middle person—who had given me a good score, by the way—and that report stood in my record in that fashion.
HT: That’s amazing.
CAE: The rest of what they did was they went back and looked at, because they saw something that they thought was a pattern of behavior of this particular rating official, so they went back and looked at all the people that she had rated over time, and when they got that finished and they looked at that, they said, “It is substantiated. There is something about the manner in which she rates folks, and she has a tendency to be very tough on the folks that she has rated, especially if they were African American.” So they whipped it right out of there, and pretty soon she was no longer in the army. They sent her packing.
So I said, oh, I got out of that one. And the commander, though, the commander was very, very—he was very, very supportive of me, and he said to me, he said, “Clara, you know, you are very good at what it is that you do,” he said, “but I will tell you, in some ways you’re a very naïve person.”
I said, “Why do you say that, sir?”30
He said, “Because you really believe that everybody will do the right thing, and that everybody is pleased whenever you do well.” I learned a lesson that day. And he said, “And I will tell you, on both of those points it’s not always the case.” He said, “So you’re going to have to learn to pay attention to what it is that people are about, and see what it is they’re saying, because then you may be able to find out some more about which way they’re going to go and how they’re going to deal with you when the time comes.”
But, you know, I didn’t know anything about envy, jealousy, and all that other good kind of stuff, because the work environment I had come out of, which was in those tobacco fields, the main value there was that you worked, and that you worked well. And if you didn’t work well, it didn’t matter who you were, you were not valued in that environment. My father said, “You’ve got to be able to do your job and carry your load, and you’ve got to be able to do that well.” So I just went through life just doing that, you see, assuming that everybody was going to consider this is important to do. Well, some folk consider that to be something that you’re doing to try and get one step ahead of them. I didn’t know anything about that stuff. So he told me, “Take this and pay attention, and pull this record out every now and then and read it, and know that people can do different things.” So I learned the lesson that day.
But Lil Dunlap saved me again. And so I taught at that school. I stayed there and taught at that school until I went off to graduate school, and that was the other concern, too, was I was on my way to graduate school, and she knew it, and she knew if I got an adverse report in my record that I probably would not be picked for graduate school, because the folks who were picking me for graduate school were military people, you see, and the army is not going to send you out there with not a good record of having performed well in the military.
HT: So the graduate school would have been like a leave of absence, almost, for you.
CAE: That’s right, for two years.
HT: A little sabbatical.
CAE: That’s right. Oh, it was wonderful. [laughs]
HT: And she had it in for you.
CAE: Lord, did she ever!
HT: I mean, there was probably nothing you could have done otherwise, I mean, to change her mind.
CAE: That’s right, that’s right. She didn’t even tell me to start with, so there was nothing I
could have done in there.
HT: What was this person’s rank?31
CAE: She was a major, yes, but she was a senior major, you know. See, I tell people very often, as I tell that story I tell people very often, I probably did not help my situation very well anyway in this case, because I was incredibly honest to the point of being blunt some days, you know, because she used to always go around bragging about the fact that when the next list came out for promotion to a lieutenant colonel, she was going to be on it. And we used to have to listen to that every day. And so the list came out, and I got your Army Times and I went and looked, and her name wasn’t on it. And so I said, “Hey, I’ve got your Army Times last night, ma’am, and I looked. You know, I didn’t see your name on there.” [laughs]
HT: That’s a little jab there, right? [laughs]
CAE: And you know, I didn’t even really mean for it to be that way, but I really didn’t see her name on the list, and I just wanted to say, “What happened? Did they forget you or something?” You know, that’s what I was about. I wasn’t trying to say, “Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.” That wasn’t it at all. But you see, things can be taken in a different kind of way, and now, today, I would never say anything like that to anybody. I would just let that opportunity pass. [laughs] I have let many opportunities like that pass. I heard a lot that day.
So I got out of that one, and the Army Board of [Record] Corrections cannot correct to—it’s just like the law, very often. You can’t correct to what you feel would be equal, this person gets. Like if one person kills another person, you can’t take but one life, you know. And in this particular case, when somebody does you a grievous injustice over here, you can only fix it one time, and then you can only fix it to the extent you think you ought to fix it, and then you’ve got to be done with it.
So they kind of made sure that they kind of overcorrected in my favor. So what they did was, when that record got thrown out, luckily the process was finished before the board adjourned for my going to school, and also for my consideration for a promotion. Now, I wasn’t in the primary zone of promotion that particular year. I was in the secondary zone of promotion. But the folks looked down and they saw that record over there, where there had been, obviously, some kind of difficulty, and they saw what kind of score I got as a result of having doubled the score for the endorser, and they tacked me onto that list in the 5 percent of the people that were below the zone for promotion, but who otherwise showed potential. I was on the bottom of the list, and a couple of people pointed that out to me, too. They said, “Listen. We saw that promotion list, and your name is on it. You’re right down at the bottom.”
I said, “But I’m on the list, where are you?” [laughs] Because they’d wanted to go get on the list, you see. So I made below the zone promotions to major, lieutenant colonel, and full colonel, and it started with that one particular thing. But after that set me free I went on out there and did some more things with some more people, but I had to have a little bit of help to get me out of that one, and they got me out.
Then when I got finished at that school, I went off to graduate school up to University of Minnesota, marvelous experience. I always liked school. I like going to school. I always liked being in school and learning new things and different things, and I will tell you, Minnesota was new and different. I arrived there out of having been in San Antonio, Texas, for three years, and having dealt with that, of course, the weather that 32
you talked about in November down there in Lackland, and the weather that I had known right up into Minnesota.
Got there in August, and, of course, September kind of drifted by. September’s kind of cool sometimes, but it can also be warm. Well, listen. The first of October comes, you can count it out in Minnesota. That temperature dipped down to thirty-five degrees. I thought I was going to die. And people laughed at me. I had on two coats, and boots, and everything. They said, “Oh, lord, you think it’s cold now, just you wait.” And I waited, and it got colder. I mean, it really did get cold. When it went down to fifty below I said, “I don’t think I could live here much longer.” Ice and snow and sleet, and school never closed, you see, because if they closed school because of a little ice and snow and sleet, they would never go to school there from October to May. So I said, “Oh, I’d better get used to this.” And the rules there were that if you lived within a mile of the university, you walked to the university every day. Some days I made it, but some days I would drive our car. I knew every person who took care of the garage, because I would always bribe them into letting me park someplace, so that I could get home without having to walk through all that cold weather. And they took pity on me, and they would let me do that.
The university is really a marvelous place to go to school. It is a rather liberal university in a very otherwise conservative state. Roy Wilkins, who was very big in civil rights in this country, came out of St. Paul, which is the capital of Minnesota, born there, and that was his home. There were not too many African Americans in Minnesota, and I think much of the problem had to do with the weather. [both laugh] African Americans usually don’t like it that cold. They mostly don’t like that cold weather, so I think that’s one of the reasons how come.
I enjoyed my time there. I minored in anthropology and did a couple of papers. I wrote a couple of papers that had to do with death and dying and how it is, and I still like to deal in that subject, and how it is that people cope in various societies with the whole idea of dying. I did a lot during the school time with recruiting of other nurses, because the nurse that was there that was the nurse counselor in that area that was responsible for recruiting, she’d come over and get me to help out and go out and talk to the people and everything, and so I did a lot of, lot of recruitment activities.
I did a lot with the church, because I had changed my religion when I came in. See, I used to read about religions of the world and this, and I always said, whenever I went in the army and had an opportunity, I was going to become a Roman Catholic. So I did that when I was in basic, in my basic orientation course down at Fort Sam Houston. I started taking the catechism and getting, you know, my lessons together and that kind of business, and I finished it off up at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and met a Catholic chaplain who taught me everything that he knew about being a Catholic, and I took care of everything that he needed whenever he used to come to the ICU to see his patients.
When he’d walk in and the doc would say, “Well, chaplain, I’ve done all I can do. It’s in your hands now.”
He said, “What am I supposed to do?” [laughs] And so I was in the ICU when he came in the ICU to see patients, I would always call him up, because that was our deal. He said, “If you will teach me everything about those patients when I come up there to see them in the ICU,” he said, “I will tell you everything I know about being a good Catholic.”33
So I said, “All right. That’s my deal.” And so I did that. He did his part and I did my part, because we had some real serious situations there very often, and I would just tell him about it, and then when he went in the room he knew how to talk to the parents, and he knew, you know, how to deal with the situation, and everything worked that way.
Oh, I was in graduate school, doing my graduate school thing. I worked in the St. Lawrence Parish there in Minneapolis, and it was a Roman Catholic church, and I did a lot of work there because it was another time of tremendous social change in our country. It was in the late sixties, and the Civil Rights Act had just passed in ’64, and Martin Luther King got killed in ’68, and I went to school there in ’67, and I will tell you it was a time when people were discussing a lot of things, and this parish was committed to making sure the folk got educated about the social change that was going on in the country. So I would spend time with this one Catholic priest, well, actually, these two Catholic priests. One of them is a monsignor now, and the other one is retired. He was older than both of us at that time. But he’s retired and he’s down in Florida, and I get to see him every now and then. We used to go into homes and talk to folks about what was going on with the African Americans in this country, and what do they want and what are they trying to do, and how are they dealing with the protests and that kind of stuff.
Whenever—of course, Martin Luther King got killed—much of this country burned. Much of it did. And understand, just to set it in the right perspective, I had just left San Antonio, Texas, and parts of Dallas had burned during that time, Washington, D.C. had gone up in flames, followed by Newark, Columbus, Ohio, Cleveland, Ohio, and all these places, you know, all. So I went there to do my basic studies, but I ended up doing a whole bunch of other things that I found was important to get done, to help promote understanding among individuals and groups. That’s what I was about doing. It was interesting. We used to have some very heated discussions about much of this stuff. But by this time I had learned how to stand my ground, and so it all worked out pretty well.
HT: But you were still on active duty while you were at the university.
CAE: I was still on active duty, but I wore civilian clothes and never, never had to wear a uniform there, because you wore civilian clothes and you did those things in the civilian community, because your duty was to go to school and make the grades.
HT: When you went around to help your friend with the recruiting, did you wear an army
uniform at that time?
CAE: Sometimes, sometimes, yes.
HT: So that was not an official duty of yours, I assume. It was sort of unofficial, the recruiting?
CAE: Yes, right. It was unofficial. Yes, it was unofficial.
HT: So that was on top of going to school, was just helping out a friend.34
CAE: I just helped my good buddy over there. I graduated from University of Minnesota in 1969, so I went there in August of ’67 and I graduated in May of ’69. After I got finished there I got assigned to the Army School of Nursing at Walter Reed, taught there from ’69, late ’69 to ’74, left there in ’74.
HT: What was Walter Reed like in those days?
CAE: Walter Reed was a bustling, busy place, lots of patients, because it was Vietnam time, and a lot of people were getting shot up in Vietnam, and were coming home, and I had these young students that were there that had their own ideas about what they needed to be about, and what they needed to get going for themselves, and what they thought about the war and all those things. So it was one of those situations where I was really earning my money and my keep every day, you know?
We’d get some of the young fellows back from Vietnam and they would have weird and different dietary habits and these kinds of things. For example, there was this one kid who came back. He wanted nothing but 7-Up to drink, and he wanted to eat nothing but peanuts, breakfast, dinner, or supper, he’d just take this. And my students were concerned about this, they said, because, “You know, he needs some other things to have at this time.”
And I said, “Well, now, tell me about the content of protein in peanuts.” They went back and found that out and everything, and they decided that probably was all right for him to eat, but what about this sugar water he was drinking? Well, I said, “Sugar, carbonated water. I don’t think it’s going to cause him any problems, but at least he’s getting a lot of water.” So we didn’t bother about trying to get him to switch up until he was ready, which was probably about four or five months later. But he did just kept that steady diet three times a day. He had the drink, the 7-Up, and ate the peanuts. All right. I’ve often wondered what happened to that kid; lost both his legs.
I had a lot of association with the students, and their ideology was different than mine at that time, because I was one of the folks who had agreed to serve and support, and so I was going to get that done no matter what went on, because I believed in the cause that we had going there. My sisters spent some time—my sisters were in school during that period. No, by this time I had gotten them out of school, because they went in right after I got to be a lieutenant, so I got them out of there in the middle sixties. They got out just before I went off to school, because they went in ’63, so they were coming out. Yes, they graduated in June and I started school in August, September that same year.
But that was a great time for me. I really enjoyed that, being back in graduate school, taking care of students, dealing with students and patients in the hospital and clinic setting, and that all turned out very, very well.
HT: After you finished your chores at Walter Reed, where was your next assignment?
CAE: Finished Water Reed and then at that time, let’s see. Oh, I went to Fort Meade, [Maryland], for a year, and I would not have gotten to Fort Meade except for they had the need for a person there who knew something about the spoof and spy business, and could help take care of the patients in the hospital over there in that area, and facilitate the 35
relations between the hospitals and the National—what’s the name of that place? National Security? NRC, National Security Center. That’s at Fort Meade.
I stayed there for a year, and then I got selected to go to the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. This is the army’s middle-management school for middle managers, those individuals that normally, for those individuals who are going in as senior majors and lieutenant colonels, to learn how to do their basic skills in this area. [pause] It is the first school that really does a cut on who may get to be general officer at some point in time.
At that point in time, especially if you’re sending folks out, like nurses, who only had one space, you know, because we had one space in the school at that time. We’ve got a lot more now, got over twenty plus who are nurses to go in residence, and I went in residence, and I was the only nurse selected to go that year.
HT: I think you said that this school lasted a year, is that correct, for a full year?
CAE: Yes, it lasted one year, right, one year.
HT: What type of courses did you take there?
CAE: Well, I took a lot of courses having to do with tactics and strategy, mostly tactics, and I learned very quickly how come I didn’t carry a rifle. I don’t like rifles. I don’t like weapons. I don’t like weapons at all.
HT: Well, of course, in your career you had seen what they did to people.
CAE: That’s right, and that’s my thing, you know. A lot of people said, “Oh, look at this. This is a neat weapon. We can kill this, this—” “Yeah. You could also maim this, this, this and that, too,” and that’s where I come in, where the big problem comes. But I had to, of course, go through the course and get to associate, and that’s what you do in those courses more than anything else, is you go to the courses, you get to associate with people from other [army] branches, you find out what they do and they find out what you do, and you go right ahead doing what it is that you’ve been assigned to.
HT: So you were in school situations all day long?
CAE: That’s right.
HT: Just like a regular college-type courses.
CAE: Yes, all day, oh yes, all-day long, regular school.
HT: By this time you were a major, I think you said?
CAE: I was a lieutenant colonel.
HT: Oh, lieutenant colonel. [Continues in Part Two]