Oral history interview with Amie Modigh, 2010

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WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Amie Modigh
INTERVIEWER: Therese Strohmer
DATE: March 16, 2010
[Begin Interview]
TS: Today is March 16th, 2010. This is Therese Strohmer and I’m in Chapel Hill, North Carolina to conduct an oral history interview for the Betty H. Carter Women’s Veterans Historical Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I’m with Amie Modigh, and, Amie, why don’t you go ahead and tell me how you’d like your name to be on your collection.
AM: Okay, Amie Modigh is fine.
TS: Okay.
[recording paused]
TS: Okay Amie, go ahead. You don’t have to talk, just, like you’re talking to me like this.
AM: Amie Modigh.
TS: Okay excellent.
[recording paused]
TS: All right, try me one more time
AM: Okay.
TS: Where were you born?
AM: Stockholm, Sweden.2
[recording paused]
TS: Well, wonderful. Why don’t we start off, Amie, by having you tell me when and where you were born.
AM: I was born in Stockholm, Sweden, July 13th, 1933.
TS: And what—did you have any brothers or sisters?
AM: Yes. I was the last of four children—two older brothers and a sister—and I was the baby. And although I was born in Stockholm, we moved soon to the southern part of Sweden because of my father’s military career. He was reassigned to the southern part.
TS: To the southern part?
AM: Yeah, on the west coast, and that’s where I did my growing up.
TS: What was it like growing up?
AM: It was wonderful! [laughs]
TS: What kind of things did you do as a young girl?
AM: Well, I went to a good school nearby where we lived. In the winter, we skied to school and in the summertime, we bicycled to school.
TS: How far was it that you had to go to reach school?
AM: It was about ten minutes of cross country skiing, about five minutes on bicycle.
TS: Is that right?
AM: Yes. So it wasn’t very far.
TS: Did you grow up—was it like a rural area or in a city? What was it like?
AM: It was in a good sized city just on the outskirts—very nice, up on a hill towards the mountain area. But it was within the city limits. We were on the hill and we had a beautiful view over the water, so it was very lovely.
TS: Well, a lot of the people that will be listening or reading your transcript won’t know much about Sweden.3
AM: Oh.
TS: Can you tell us a little bit about, you know—
AM: Well, it’s one of the Scandinavian countries. It’s the biggest of the three Scandinavian countries [the three Scandinavian countries are Sweden, Norway, and Denmark]. And it’s a beautiful country. It’s very long and very narrow. It’s only about eight million people— nine million people who live there. And it’s a hundred and fifty Swedish miles, so it’s about six hundred American miles long. [The Swedish mile or mil was historically 36,000 feet (6.8 miles), standardized in 1889 to 10 kilometers (6.2 miles).]
But only about fifty miles wide, so it’s very long and very narrow. So the vegetation to the south of Sweden to the north of Sweden is extremely, extreme, so to speak. And also it’s the daylight—daylight’s twenty-four hours a day up in the northern part in the winter time—in the summer time. And, of course, it’s dark twenty-four hours a day in the winter time—or twenty-three, not twenty-four. In the southern part it’s not as noticeable. It’s still more so than here—light in the summer and dark in the winter, but not as extreme as it is up in the north.
TS: How was that for you growing up?
AM: Well, I was in the southern part, so I didn’t see any extremes as much. My brother—oldest brother—did some of his internship as a lawyer in the northern part—in the very northern part— that was quite interesting. We went to spend Christmas there and visited him several times: once in the middle of the winter with Christmas and all, and it was dark. [laughter] It’s about an hour’s worth of daylight.
TS: Is that it? That’s all you--
AM: An hour and a half—maybe 10:30 [AM] to 1 [PM] it started to get dark again.
TS: Kind of like what it is for Alaska.
AM: Right, very similar to Alaska actually.
TS: Yeah.
AM: On a much smaller scale.
TS: Smaller, that’s right, that’s true. Well, what kind of games did you play as a girl growing up?
AM: Well, soccer was my favorite one. I was an avid soccer player, which, of course, when I came to this country and told them about it they said, “What’s that?” [laughter] So that was not popular yet, now it’s pretty popular, but most people didn’t know what soccer was.4
TS: That’s true.
AM: We played a lot of soccer. We played tennis. Lots of—not baseball—they didn’t have that. I never could understand the excitement of baseball. [laughter] No football. I thought, “Why do they call it football? All they do is lie in a heap and hold the ball in their hands, and they don’t kick it but once in a blue moon.” So it was very different. But we did play a lot of, you know, hide-and-seek, and all that stuff since we lived so near the woods. It was a great place for games. Skied all winter, bobsledding, all that kind of stuff.
TS: Oh, you did bobsledding?
AM: Oh, yeah a lot
TS: That would be fun.
AM: Yeah. Not the luge—I don’t like that.
TS: Not the open, but the—
AM: No, the old fashioned bobsled that you steer with a steering wheel.
TS: Yeah.
AM: That was fun. And the skiing, of course, which we did a lot of both downhill and cross country.
TS: Yeah, both. Did you like one over the other?
AM: At different times in my life. I started cross country skiing when I was three years old. And I liked cross country for, you know—I liked cross country of the peace and the quiet going through the woods. And then, of course, when I was a teenager and early twenties I wanted the daring downhill—the more the merrier. But then as I got older again I kind of enjoyed the cross country and I still do that if I can.
TS: Do you?
AM: Yeah.
TS: Not so much in North Carolina?
AM: No.
TS: Although, a little bit this year you could’ve—
AM: I brought the skis with me, actually, when we moved down here and almost used them one time.5
TS: Almost could’ve about a month ago or so.
AM: Yes, and of course at that time I was down in Florida. [laughter]
TS: Oh, you missed out.
AM: Yeah.
TS: Well, how about school? Tell me a little bit about going to school.
AM: Going to school was very interesting. And I’ve very glad that I had the beginning school in Sweden, actually, because it’s a lot more in depth—lots more detail with the school six days a week—sometimes five and a half depending on what grade you’re in, but never less. And we learned many different languages, not like here that you just speak English.
TS: What kind of languages did you learn?
AM: German was the first foreign language when I started, then it became—English is the first foreign language now. When I finished high school they started with that, so I lost out because when I came here I didn’t know much English; but I knew German and that didn’t do me any good. And French—French, English, German, Latin, and then you could take Greek if you wanted to—if you went a certain line in high school, but I didn’t do that. I went the science thing, because I thought I wanted to be in either medicine or nursing or something like that.
TS: Yeah, you were interested in that right away?
AM: Yeah, early on, so I knew I was going to go one way or another within the field of medicine somewhere.
TS: So was that like your favorite—science was one of your favorite subjects?
AM: Yeah. And now I like languages very much too, but not all languages. I like German, French, and English very much, but Latin was okay for what I needed for the military—I mean, for the medical stuff.
TS: Right, true. Good background for that for sure.
AM: But I didn’t have any interest in learning Greek whatsoever.
TS: So you would’ve grown up, then, actually during the war years?
AM: Yes, I did.
TS: Do you want to talk about that at all?6
AM: It was pretty spooky in many ways because in 1939—when I was six years old—and the war started. And about 1940 was when Germany went and occupied Norway. And, of course, it was much more convenient to fly over Sweden to get to Norway, so we experienced—what do you call it—dark nights—black—
TS: Blackouts?
AM: All the lights were off and we had to have black paper on our windows, and every night at eight o’clock they would come over to Norway and every night at one o’clock, they would come back. So we would get up and run down to the basement and turn off all the lights, and all that kind of stuff, and the same thing at—between one and two in the morning. And, of course, I was kind of little, so I was either scared to death or thought it was fun. [laughter]
TS: Those are your two extremes.
AM: That’s right. And my mother was—I still remember to this day the very first time I heard those sirens and then the boom, boom. You see the flares go up and hear the boom right after—before we had the black covers. I ran to my mother and I said, “I want to be with you when I die!” And she reassured me, of course, we weren’t going to die, so then I thought it was kind of fun.
TS: Oh, after she assured you that you were—
AM: That’s right. And my brothers were also very good. They were older and they always looked out for me. And so we had to evacuate, actually, one time inland because the coast was getting dangerous to be near, because [Adolf] Hitler threatened to bomb us no matter what we did—even if we did let them go over. But Sweden—the king and the prime minister said, no, we weren’t going to let them do that anymore.
And so he said, “Well, if you don’t let us do that, then we will bomb you”.
And there was a deadline set for that, so my father who was up at the Finnish border at that point called home and said, you know, “Get out of there!” And he made all the arrangements for us to go to a little house in the country with another military family. So the man who was in charge of my father’s hunting dogs—that was his big hobby—came in with a big truck and picked us all up in the middle of the night, and we went to this little darling cottage in the woods and we stayed there for four months.
TS: Oh my!
AM: And the deadline came and passed and nothing happened, thank God nothing happened.
TS: And so then you moved back?
AM: Yeah. We moved back and everything was—it was pretty soon slowed down considerably. But we had a lot of Finnish people—kids—over in Sweden, because they 7
had a terrible time with the war up there [there were three consecutive wars waged in Finland during the period of the Second World War: The Winter War (1939-40), The Continuation War (1941-44), and The Lapland War (1944-45)] and we had a Finnish boy in our house. He stayed with us for four years—cutest little guy you’d ever want to see.
TS: How did that come about that you’d get the children? Do you recall?
AM: There were lots and lots of—I don’t know exactly—the mechanism, how it worked, but there were some like five thousand or six thousand children from Finland, they came to Sweden [in total some 70,000 children were evacuated from Finland to neighboring countries] because the parents were scared to keep them there—keep them at home because of the war. Many of them were killed before they got to us, but—so every city was notified of how many children there were and what family could possibly take and how many. So we volunteered to take one and we said we preferred a boy, apparently—I don’t know, my mother and father did that, not me.
TS: Yeah. So you had someone in the house a little bit younger than you, then?
AM: Actually, he was two years—no, he was the same age as me.
TS: Same age.
AM: Yeah and he was a lot of fun. He went to school with us. He was there for two years.
TS: Did—was your schooling disrupted at all?
AM: No.
TS: Just everything continued?
AM: Except for the three months we were in the cottage in the woods.
TS: Right.
AM: But other than that we were in school pretty much regular as it was.
TS: Now, here they have like the summers off for school. Did you have the same sort of thing?
AM: We had the summer school. We had summers off, but there was summer school for two reasons: either if you were told you had to go to summer school because you didn’t do well during the year, or if you really wanted to because you had—you felt you hadn’t done well in some certain subject. So it was a choice, and sometimes it was a “you will”.
TS: Oh I see, okay.8
AM: And luckily I—it happened to me one time that it was suggested. It was very nicely suggested that I do it in one subject—I can’t remember what it was even now—for the short period. You could go for the whole summer or you could go for the six week period, so I did the six week period. That was the only time I did it. But a lot of kids did it— and a lot of kids had to—so that you know you had to really be very good and very studious and work very hard to get the grades. It wasn’t something that was easy, so that’s why summer school, in many ways, was helpful because I know that I vol—well sort of volunteered—as I said, it was a combination of suggestion and volunteer. I felt a little weak in a subject. I think it was math and I liked math, but I still didn’t feel that I had enough—I mean, it was way up in trigonometry by that time.
TS: Yeah.
AM: So I took it for six weeks, and it was very helpful and the next year I was fine with it.
TS: So it gave you kind of a little primer for going—
AM: Yeah.
TS: I see. Now, I’m curious—I’ve talked to a number of women who grew up in the Depression in the United States, did you feel any hardship at all in this way?
AM: Here? No.
TS: No, when you were growing up?
AM: No. I can’t say I did—spoiled rotten. [laughter]
TS: So you had—so we had the war and the war’s over in ’45, so you would’ve been—
AM: Twelve?
TS: Twelve years old, right. So you’re still in like what we would call elementary school.
AM: Yeah. I started high school when I was twelve.
TS: Oh, you started high school. So now the war’s over—now do you see any changes—were there any changes with your family?
AM: Oh, well, Daddy was home a lot more.
TS: Okay.
AM: So that was very nice. And—
TS: Yeah. Did your mother work at all?9
AM: —he was promoted—no.
TS: Okay.
AM: No, she was a hostess at the regiment. That was the extent of her—
TS: That was her work.
AM: And she wanted to be home with the kids, and that was very nice. I still advertise that for people, because I enjoyed coming home from school every day knowing Mother was there—even though we had a cook and all that kind of stuff—and she was lovely—we adored her, but first question to her every time she’d open the door, “Mother home?” So we were a little spoiled with that, but I’m very glad we were. My brother said the same thing. It was great to have Mother at home.
TS: But you say your father was home more, too, then?
AM: Yeah. He was—when he was—moved to Halmstad —he became chief of the regiment there, so he was living at home more.
TS: So now you’re—the war’s over, you’re still going to school?
AM: Yeah.
TS: Now do you have a sense of, you know, what your future’s going to be like? For a girl growing up in Sweden, what kind of opportunities were available to them at this time?
AM: Well, my father wanted me to go to medical school. I did not want to go to medical school, because no women went to medical school—no girls went to medical school in those days.
TS: Why did your father want you to go?
AM: Because it was not good enough to be a nurse. He was a little bit on the snobby side— bless his sweet heart—but he wanted what was best, I guess, for me, but I didn’t think that was best for me at the time. So I wanted to be a nurse, so he thought maybe I should look into visiting [The United States of] America for that.
TS: Oh, okay.
AM: Because the status, apparently, was better for nurses here than it was for nurses in Sweden. He thought that being a nurse in Sweden was similar to being a maid. Which I don’t think most nurses in Sweden would agree with, but that was how he felt about it. So when Mother was going to Sweden—back to America for a visit with her family, we all went anyway. We couldn’t go during the war, but after the war we went to visit Grandpa 10
and Grandma and aunts and uncles in Connecticut. And that’s how I started going and looking at nursing schools.
TS: So what’s your mother’s—how was the connection of your grandma and grandpa being in the United States? Did they just move here or—
AM: No, they—my grandfather on Mother’s side was Swedish to begin with, and married a German woman, but then she drowned in an accident along with two of Mother’s brothers and sisters. So he had three girls left—Mother and two other girls—and they came over to America because he had some relatives here. And he did some business with inventions and things like that, so he was in New York for a while and he met this very well-to-do woman who came from a banking family, and they got married and she took care of his three girls.
She must have been somewhat of a saint to marry a man with three girls, but anyway, she did and they built this big house in Connecticut right on the Long Island sound. It was the first one out there at that area. And so by the time I was in the picture and visited them there it was 1949—so I was fifteen or sixteen—I was fifteen when I came. I had my sixteenth birthday here. I was just to visit, looking into things, then I went back and finished high school in Sweden and came back to go to college.
TS: Okay.
AM: So I still did not want to go to medical school even here, because even though there was—no, there still weren’t any women in medical school at that point, I don’t think.
TS: Probably very few.
AM: Yeah, not in Connecticut anyway.
TS: So why did you decide to come to the United States for schooling?
AM: Because I was impressed with the people that I met in the United States and the program, and when I compared it I thought I would really like to do it here, I think. And I also was interested in veterinary school, so I worked at a veterinarian’s office clinic for the summer when I was here.
Well, actually I didn’t last very long because I was no good at it whatsoever. I was just in constant tears every time I saw a dog suffering; I was no good for him. I couldn’t understand it, at that young age, why could I deal with a sick person—and deal with it quite well—I did nursing aid work just to try that too and I did quite well with that. But I see a puppy and I would be no good. [laughter] And the vet was cute and very understanding, and he said, “You know, there is not anything wrong with you, it’s just that some people are better with people, and others are better with animals. You’re fine with animals, but not sick animals.” [laughter]
TS: You don’t like them to be sick11
AM: No, so I decided to give that up. So by excluding different things, nursing was definitely it, and it became very clear during that summer.
TS: Did you notice any differences in cultures?
AM: Oh yeah.
TS: What kind of things struck you?
AM: I thought that everybody in America was extremely friendly and very informal. Sweden is very formal. I mean, you make a friend in Sweden, he’s your friend forever, but it takes a while to get to know them—it’s not as easy. My mother used to say, “It’s easier to breathe in America.” I thought she was a little nutty when she said that, but I knew what she had meant after I had been here for a while. I could see it myself, but I couldn’t describe exactly why. It was just a feeling.
When I went for my interviews and stuff, it was very informal. I mean I guess they considered it formal. They said, “You’re going for a formal interview,” but to me it was informal. People were smiling and talking and laughing and making jokes, and I wasn’t used to that for an interview. In Sweden it’s very [makes noise]—it’s changed a little now, but it was very formal.
TS: Yeah.
AM: And a military background my father was made rather formal too. I mean, even having a dinner party: so-and-so sat this side, if his father was something, they had to put him on this side—I mean it was—the rules and regulations were very stiff. They’re not that much anymore, but they’re still a little bit. Much more so than here, but much less than it used to be.
TS: Kind of like a social hierarchy?
AM: Yeah, oh yes—very definitely, very definitely.
TS: So you ended up going to—where did you go to school?
AM: University of Connecticut.
TS: That’s right, University of Connecticut
AM: Yeah, my aunt wanted me to go to Vassar [College], so I went there for an interview. And it was very nice too, but I didn’t like the fact of—spending four years with nothing but girls, was not really—I couldn’t stand that thought. University of Connecticut for an interview and it was animals, boys, girls—all kinds of normal things and cows and horses. They called it an aggie [agricultural] school, I think, at that point. [It was] sort of derogatory, but I thought it was great. I was very impressed with it and I thought, “If I’m going to go to college in a heavenly place I certainly want to go here.”12
TS: Tell me a little bit, then, about going to University of Connecticut for your college.
AM: I started there in ’52 and it was a five year program at the time. So the first two years were strictly on campus with a couple summer sessions down at Yale [University] in New Haven—that part of Connecticut, and that was also very nice. The University of Connecticut was great fun. The freshman year was very exciting; I knew right away that I was in the right place at the right time. Everything—every course I took I liked.
And I had to start out with the English 99 or something, because I didn’t know how to say much English. “Hello. How are you? I love you. Yes and no,” that was about it. But I picked it up pretty quick, so after about five weeks I dropped the 99 and got into 105. And then I was with the rest of the same class, so that was good. And everything I took, I enjoyed. Sociology, I found very difficult at first word-wise, because there were so many long complicated words. But I loved the subject, so I really worked very hard. In fact, I had better grades my first semester as a foreign student—even though I was scared to death that if I didn’t have good grades they’d ship me back to Sweden. But because I really worked hard, I didn’t go to any parties, I didn’t do anything but study for my first semester.
TS: For your first semester?
AM: Straight As!
TS: And then what happened in the second semester?
AM: And then I started going to parties and have fun with friends.
TS: What kind of things would you do?
AM: We’d play tennis, we went horseback riding, went to frat parties and sorority parties, and all that kind of stuff. Went to movies, went hiking, joined the—what do you call—Outing Club or something—went white water rafting and hiking in the mountains, and all that kind of stuff. It was very busy all the time, so I didn’t have time to study quite as much. I did okay, but I was not a straight A student anymore, ever. I was usually a couple of B’s— always B’s—and a couple of As, but by no means all anymore.
TS: But you were having a good time?
AM: Oh, I was having a wonderful time. That’s what I was told you were supposed to do when you were in college, so that’s what I did. And that was fine with me. The only time it ever hurt me, it didn’t really hurt me, was when it came to go to graduate school, because they look at what you did in your undergraduate.
So I had no problem getting into the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but my first choice was University of Washington in Seattle. And they just laughed at me and they said, “You’re not a straight-A student, so you can’t get in. Don’t even bother to come for an interview!” 13
And I thought, “Well, that wasn’t very nice. If you knew how nice I was, you would want me!”
Well, that didn’t do any good. I got accepted a couple other places, but I was impressed with Chapel Hill when I came here for an interview, so I chose this one.
TS: Did you go right after?
AM: No, no, no, no, no.
TS: Later, years later.
AM: Yes. I decided—I thought I was a big shot with a BS [Bachelor of Science] in Nursing. In those days that was good. So I was—I worked at Yale [University] for a while.
TS: I’m sorry where?
AM: Yale in New Haven—just for the summer, because I’d been there, so I knew it well. I worked at Cornell Medical Center in New York City.
TS: So you would’ve graduate in ’56?
AM: Fifty-seven, it was a five year program.
TS: Fifty-seven?
AM: Yeah.
TS: Oh, five year program.
AM: I went to Europe for a year, and then I came back in ’58 and went to Cornell and lived in New York City, and it was loads of fun. Three of us shared an apartment. And again, that was a very big adventure, you know, being in New York City at that young age. All of our parents had to come in and check the apartment before we were allowed to take it. It had to be an apartment building with a doorman and all that kind of stuff, because it wasn’t “safe” otherwise, quote, unquote.
But it was great fun. I enjoyed Cornell very much. And I started in pediatrics, actually, and after a year they asked me to be evening supervisor. And so, I did that for a while, because I enjoyed working evenings. That was always my favorite shift: it was so busy and family was there, you know, it was very active and all that. And I could do a lot of things in the daytime, because I was always a morning person. And in New York City you can go out at midnight, too, if you wanted to, so that was no problem.
So I was at Cornell and became an instructor—my first instructor job—and had a dual position of instructor and supervisor for daytime. So I did that for a couple of years, and then my boss said, “You know, you really should go get your master’s [degree], because we want to keep you here and do x, y, and z.”14
I started an internship program for nurses—for BSN [Bachelor of Science in Nursing] nurses—and—because they were so bright and good in many ways, but they were not practical when they came out. They graduated, you know, with all kinds of stuff up here, but they didn’t know what to do with their hands. Well I thought, “Well, medical students have internship. Why don’t we have it for nursing students?”
And so the director said to me, “Why don’t you work one up?”
I said, “That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but I just thought it was a good idea”—so I did [create a program].
And then—oh, I had to go back home to Sweden for a while because my mother was sick. So I wasn’t sure I was going to go back and do that stuff with the internship—I had left all of the material—somebody else could pick it up. Came back on the boat and got a call on the boat saying, “We want you to come back and do that, and you’ll get a good salary blah, blah, blah”—a real temptation, in other words.
So I said “Okay.”
So I took it for a year and that’s when they said, “You really ought to go get your master’s and then stay here forever.”
I said, “Okay, whatever you say.” I liked my boss. She was very good and I admired her a great deal, so I thought “Well, if she thinks I should”. And I thought, “Why do I need a master’s degree? I have a BS for heaven’s sakes!” Well, of course, now we all know that was just the beginning of more and more and more, and that’s when I started searching where to go.
TS: That’s when you started—
AM: Searching where to go for my master’s degree
TS: I see.
AM: And when I came here to [the University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill I thought, “Well, this will be a good place to go because there’s nothing to do here but study!” [laughter]
You know, in New York—I didn’t want to go to Columbia [University] in New York, because I had too many friends and too much activity and too much fun there. I would never study. So I came here—I thought nothing to do in Chapel Hill but study, so this is a good place to get my master’s—a terrible reason for coming, but anyway.
TS: When did when did you come to get your master’s?
AM: Sixty-four.
TS: Sixty-four.
AM: Cornell wanted to pay for me and send me, and I said, “I don’t want to do that because I am going to come back—there’s no question about it in my mind—but I don’t want to feel obligated should something happen”. Because if they paid for me then I would feel obligated, of course, to come back. So I got a traineeship—a federal traineeship—came 15
down and started and fell in love with Chapel Hill while I was here. And I was offered a wonderful position on the faculty and, of course, I was just absolutely intrigued with it, so I said “yes”. And I said to Cornell, “I don’t believe this—you’re not going to believe me, but I’m going to stay for a while and teach down there.”
And they said, “Oh you can’t do that! You told us you’d come back!”
And I said, “Yeah, but I didn’t take your money.”
TS: What was it that you liked so much about here?
AM: Well, I thought it was a charming university town. It was something—it reminded me a little bit of a Swedish university town my brother went in the southern part of Sweden—is just very nice. And I liked the idea that you had quite a bit of independence in the faculty thing and the study.
This particular course that she offered me to work in was the student chose—they had to take the course, but what they took within the course was up to them. If they wanted to do six weeks of peds [pediatrics] or OB [obstetrics] or med-surg [medical-surgery] or emergency room, whatever, they could do that and they wrote their own objectives and all those things. It was a very highly motivating thing for them, because it wasn’t just somebody telling them, “You have to do this. You have to do that.”
It’s “What do you want to do? It has to be so many hours and you have to write decent objectives that we approve, and then you can set up your own hours for the clinic.”
It was great. So I was very intrigued with that so when I was offered that I thought, “Oh yeah, I’m staying to do that.” And eventually I became in charge of that course and it was fabulous.
TS: Excellent. Now, did you have a sense that when you started on this journey in the United States that this is where—this was kind of—that you would end up teaching in this way?
AM: I thought I probably would.
TS: Yeah?
AM: Yeah. I was teaching fairly early on, you know, at Cornell and all that sort—I saw that as a—I wanted to be clinical very definitely, but the teaching had to be in there, too.
TS: Did you also—were you still doing clinical work at that same time or were you mostly just dedicated to your teaching?
AM: At that—when I was in the graduate school, and after I got my master’s, then it was all teaching. Clinical—when I had students in various areas, of course, I had to do some clinical.
TS: How was it with your family? Now you’re living here and you’re separated from your family, how was that for you?16
AM: My mother spent part of her year here always with me.
TS: How nice.
AM: Which was very nice when I was an undergraduate. We had a house in Connecticut. We did not stay with the big family in the big house anymore. We got our own little place in New Canaan, Connecticut and then she went back to Sweden. And she would come here for a while during the wintertime, because it was very cold in Sweden; as she got older, she was happy to spend a couple months here in the wintertime. And then we’d go to Sweden during the summertime, because I often went to Sweden during the summertime with her. In college we had summers off and even during vacation time I would usually hop home for a while in the summertime.
TS: So I’m thinking about the time period here we’re talking about. The late ‘50s—the early ‘60s.
AM: Yeah ,’64 I came down here to get my master’s and graduated in ’66.
TS: One of the things that I usually ask is about the Cold War at that—that’s going on at that time.
AM: Yeah?
TS: Did you have any sense of that politically?
AM: Not really. I mean it was going on but I did—I was not living in Sweden at the time, and Sweden didn’t really think that anything much was going to come of that. A very unpleasant situation; but, they didn’t really think it was going to be affecting them a whole lot. Although Russia was pushing in the Baltic Sea for a lot of places—they just set up in the Swedish navy—which my brother was part of for a short time—was a little spooky. But I wasn’t feeling personally involved as much, because I was over here at that point.
TS: Well, you said your father was a general in the Swedish army.
AM: He was almost retired at that point
TS: At that—okay. How about—so you would’ve been here when [President] John F. Kennedy was assassinated?
AM: I was here.
TS: Do you remember that?
AM: I certainly do.17
TS: Do you want to tell me about that?
AM: It was pretty spooky because—I was trying to think exactly—I used to know exactly where I was. I was in Connecticut at the time, living at one of the houses on the family estate and working in New York. I was commuting back and forth. I can’t remember what time of day exactly it was, but I remember calling my best friend who was also working at Cornell at the time and lived in old Greenwich. When we would commute to home together she’d get off a couple of stops before me. And somehow I guess I must have been—I can’t remember what time of—
Do you remember what time of day it was?
TS: It would’ve been like the afternoon here.
AM: That’s what I thought, yeah.
And I remember the first thing I did was pick up the phone and call her and said, “Did you hear what I heard on the radio?” I think it was radio, not television, it was radio.
And she said “no”. So she turned it on—so—because it was on all the time for a while.
And we were just stunned. I mean, I couldn’t believe it could happen in America— no way! Because everybody was crazy about Kennedy so, you know, he was an idol kind of thing. “To be shot? No! Can’t be! Must be”—I kept waiting for them to say it was a mistake or that he was grazed or whatever—“He’s in the hospital. He’s okay.” And then when he got to the hospital—shortly after he got to the hospital they announced that he was dead. I mean it was just awful. I think we were all stunned for a couple of days. I thought, well, I guess things aren’t as perfect here as I thought they were. I remember thinking that somewhere along the way.
TS: That things just weren’t perfect?
AM: Yeah.
TS: Yeah.
AM: I mean, to me—I became a citizen—when was it, ’64?
TS: Sixty-three.
AM: Sixty-three. Okay. I became a citizen in ’60, so I mean, I was real American at that point.
TS: Why did you decide to become a citizen?
AM: Because I knew there was no place else in the world that I wanted to live but America. And I also knew I wanted to join the military sooner or later, and you couldn’t do that unless you were a citizen in those days. Today they’ll take anything to help out.
But no, I was very, very proud of—I mean, I loved Sweden. I’ve always—and I thought to myself—because I had friends that came from other parts that were not so on 18
friendly terms with America as Sweden was—and I thought, “Well, thank God I come from a country that America likes and we’re friendly to,” and all that kind of stuff. So I would go home a lot, but I was as far as living goes, no question, I was sold hook line and sinker.
TS: You said that you knew that you wanted to join the military at some point? Why would ` think that?
AM: Well, I had always been interested in the military, I guess, from my father’s point of view. I spent a lot of time at the regiment with him and learned a lot about the Swedish military. And I ran into a recruiter in this country when I was a senior in college—in undergraduate, and he talked to me and my roommate at that time—my best friend who later became my sister-in-law—and we both decided that the navy sounded like a great thing to join, and maybe we should do that when we graduate.
TS: What recruiter was it? What service?
AM: Navy.
TS: Navy, okay.
AM: I liked the uniform. You know, at that young age those things are important. So we thought, “Well, let’s do that.” So we almost signed up. We had plans for—definitely knew we were going to do it. And then her mother got very sick, and she thought that she better not go for two years somewhere not knowing what was going to happen to her. And I didn’t really want to go all by myself at that point.
So we thought well we’ll wait and see, you know. It’ll be there, it’s not going to go away, so we’ll see what happens. But then, of course, she got involved with my brother and this kind of stuff—we never did do it. But the next time that I got involved and interested it was the army—which was the end of graduate school many years later.
TS: It was during graduate school?
AM: It was—no—actually I did finish graduate school with my first year of teaching at UNC. And one of my students in that course—I was telling you, you can chose your own thing— she wanted to know if she could have fifteen minutes at the end of class to talk about the Army Reserve. And I thought, “Oh well, of course you can have fifteen minutes. Why not? I mean, I’d be interested in hearing it myself,” says I.
So she really appreciated it. She wanted to talk to the whole class, because she had been in Vietnam already or was—yeah, she had been to Vietnam. And she was very interested in getting people into understanding what the Army Reserve could offer somebody if they were on temporarily active duty or if they were full time active duty— that’s fine. So I listened probably more interested than any of the students, and sure enough, it was her talk that made me go and look for a recruiter. He didn’t come looking for me, I come looking for him.19
TS: Do you remember what this young student did when she was in the Army Reserve?
AM: Yeah, she was a nurse.
TS: She was a nurse also?
AM: Yeah, and she was in Vietnam as a nurse.
TS: About what year would that have been?
AM: Let’s see,‘60—
TS: You said you joined in ’67, so somewhere around that time?
AM: Sixty-five.
TS: Okay, so a few years before you joined.
Well, before we get into you joining the reserve, can you tell me a little bit about the like—did you—for your time off now—now you’re teaching, right? What did you—did you go to dances? What kind of entertainment did you have?
AM: Oh, in Chapel Hill when I was a young teacher here?
TS: Yeah.
AM: We did a lot of sports, did a lot of partying, did a lot of outdoor things. There was still tennis—didn’t play soccer anymore—they didn’t do that here—skiing, of course, in the wintertime, all the time. Of course—even found skiing in North Carolina was pretty decent up near Beech Mountain, Sugar Mountain, and places like that; so that was good. School dances at the university—they had some things—plays—
TS: See any movies or anything? You remember any particular movies stars that you enjoyed to watch?
AM: Ingrid Bergman—Swedish movies. Loved Cary Grant—Clark Gable was popular in those days—Cary Grant was my all-time favorite I think. Some of the western even—Gary Cooper I liked. Humphrey Bogart with Ingrid Bergman—Casablanca was one of my favorites and I still remember—I’ve seen it a hundred times.
Of course, we still went to New York [City] periodically to go to shows. We’d take a week and go see a couple good Broadway shows. Got spoiled when I lived in New York, you could just walk down the street and go to a Broadway show. But then they had some good ones even here in Raleigh [North Carolina] I guess, at that time— they had started. So it was a pretty busy life both teaching-wise and fun-wise, and outdoors—a lot of outdoors stuff, which I’ve always been interested in.
TS: How about music?20
AM: Yes. I liked music a lot. I didn’t play any myself, unfortunately. I mean, I messed with the piano, but I was never good at it. But I loved concerts. I loved a lot of classical music—went to concerts in New York again.
TS: You had at this time kind of the counter-culture coming in too in this period.
AM: What do you mean counter—
TS: Well, there’s a change in the type of music that’s happening—
AM: Oh yeah.
TS: —and there’s a change in—because of the war—you had a lot more youth using drugs and things like that. Did you see this or experience this or—
AM: I saw some of it. I did not experience it myself, thank God, but I did see a lot of that— especially for the people that came back from Vietnam, and that was really very disturbing to me.
TS: Do you want to talk about that a little bit? You talked a little bit about that before we started the recorder.
AM: Well, because I had a friend who was very, very bright. She was on the faculty before she went to Vietnam and she was with the 312th [Evacuation Hospital]: the unit that went to Vietnam, and she was there for almost a year, and she came back totally destroyed in a way. She’d been heavy into alcohol, heavy into drugs—mostly marijuana started it—and then I don’t know what other drugs there were too, because I didn’t ever ask her. But she was just totally—she finally got straightened out, but it took over a year of pretty heavy therapy that she was in.
And I saw, well, a couple other people that were not as close friends as she was, but acquaintances that I also saw—there were some not as bad off as she was, but had either alcohol or drug problems coming back from Vietnam.
TS: Was she a nurse also?
AM: Yes, this one was a nurse. There was-- they were all three nurses as a matter of fact, the ones that were messed up.
TS: So did this give you any feeling about the war in Vietnam, at all?
AM: Yeah
TS: What were you thinking personally about it?21
AM: I was beginning to wonder, you know, I thought it was something I’d be very proud to do if I had been called. And I thought to myself, “Why are we really there?” I was beginning to wonder because everybody came—I mean this society was so anti-war, or anti-Vietnam rather, that we were all doing the wrong thing by being there.
We had—I was in—when I was in the reserve we had to go to meetings over in Durham at our headquarters—besides the trip down to Fort Bragg once a month—the Durham headquarters we met once a week. And you were scared to death to go in your uniform, because people would throw rotten eggs at you.
TS: Did you ever experience that?
AM: Yeah. So we decided that we would actually carry our uniform in a bag and change there, because it was almost getting to the point of being scary. They threw rocks at some people if they were in uniform. It was not a very long period that I remember experiencing, but it was enough to be scared. I mean, when we started realize—I was so proud of my uniform—to think that I had to stick it in a bag to carry it—because I didn’t want to walk down the street with it—that was very hard.
It was about a year, I think, that was really bad. But then I don’t know what made it change, but it changed. I guess it was at the end of the Vietnam War. Those poor guys that came back didn’t get any recognition or any thank you. When I think about what happened when Vietnam—I mean, Operation Desert Storm was over and I was in [Washington] D.C., because I had been involved with that myself and the hero’s welcome that those guys got was unbelievable and that was less than a year that that war lasted. These guys had been slaving over there forever, it seemed and lost lots of things—came back and got nothing. That was really tough. So I thank God I was not on active duty then, but that I was in Desert Storm instead.
TS: Well, let’s go back, Amie, and talk about why you did then finally decide to join the Army Reserve. What was it that piqued your interest about it? Was there something that you were looking for? What was it that you can remember about it?
AM: When I did the interview—also, I had a neighbor who was a retired general here in Chapel Hill. We used to play bridge together. He brought me in to meet some other people and the two of us would go play bridge with these other very nice people, all retired, and here I was very young—I was only thirty—I was the only young person in there. But he talked a lot about the reserves—I mean the military—of course, being a general.
And he knew my background and said, “Why don’t you join the reserves? You really should.” He was telling me that I should go down to Fort Bragg [North Carolina] and look to see what they do—what the unit does when they go down there for a week—because there’s no way anybody can tell you the same way that you can see it.
[conversation about Amie’s dog redacted]22
AM: So anyway, I took his advice and I went down to Fort Bragg, and I met some of the people from the 3274th [U.S. Army Hospital Unit], on a weekend when they were there, and they showed me around the hospital, Womack Army Hospital where they did their work—and the classroom teaching of corpsmen [enlisted medical specialists] —as well as working in the hospital with the corpsmen.
Because the nurses did not have to learn to work as nurses—they already knew that, but the corpsmen could have been anything from mailman to service station gas pumper—that kind of stuff, who had to learn how to be medics. And that appealed to me—that we could help teach these people to be useful in the medical situation part-time. Because you always need more people than you have in the medical field, I know that just from teaching and being here.
So I thought, “Well, that would be great. One weekend a month, that’s not a lot to give up.”
So after I saw what they really do, you know, some people said, “Well, they go sit in a room somewhere and listen to people giving classes, and that’s it.”
And I thought, “Well, that doesn’t sound like much fun.” But when I saw what this unit did I was very impressed. And I thought, “Yes, I would like to be a part of that.”
I went back and told the general and he said, “I told you, you would like it. But he said “It’s been so long since I had been in. I wasn’t quite sure what they did at this point.” So we talked some more about it and that was when I went to find out about signing up for the 3274th, and I did.
TS: Now tell me, you told me earlier about why you picked the unit that you picked.
AM: I wanted to be sure that I picked the one that was going to Vietnam, because I thought at that point that’s what I wanted to be in the military for. So I did not know. I didn’t know much of anything, but certainly didn’t know whether this unit or the unit in Winston-Salem [North Carolina] was going to be the more likely one. If I had known what I know now, obviously a field unit would’ve been much more likely to go than a hospital unit that was going to be taking over Womack Army Hospital in case of war. But the guy who was helping me make the decision, I found out later, was interested in having me in the unit rather than looking out for what was best for me and my interests. But we became good friends anyway, so that was okay but there was no dating situation. But—
TS: So originally you had hoped to go to Vietnam. Why did you feel that you wanted to go to Vietnam?
AM: Well, it seemed to me at that point that they were always talking about how they needed people and medical folks especially, they were talking about—I’m sure they needed others too, but that was obviously what appealed to me—the medical part. So I thought, “Well, if I’m going to join, I guess I should join a unit that is likely to go, because then I could be of any more use.”
And I was very proud of being an American citizen—joining the army and all these things that my father would’ve loved to see me do. He had just died, so he never did see me in my uniform. I went to his funeral in uniform, but that was it. So that was why I really wanted to go to Vietnam, but I’m also very glad that as it turned out that I did not. I 23
think I was better off here and contributed more here than I would have in Vietnam, because I don’t think I would’ve dealt as well with all that suffering. Some people did very well with it; some people did not.
TS: And you had told me earlier that you thought that maybe that was a blessing sort of—
AM: Yeah. It was a blessing in disguise. Somebody bigger than I decided this was not where I needed to be. I would do better for the 3274th, and I think I did. I became the chief nurse of that unit my second year in. I was still a major—I came in as a captain, was promoted to major the next year, and asked to take over the position as chief nurse with two full bird colonels ahead of me. And I thought, “Now wait a minute I can’t do that!”
And they both convinced me that, “Yes, you can do that!” They didn’t want it.
TS: They didn’t want it?
AM: No.
TS: Why didn’t they want it?
AM: They were quite a bit older and they were close to retirement, and they really didn’t want to take on that much. I mean it’s a big job—no question about it. And as a reservist, especially, you had to spend a lot of time between—it wasn’t just a weekend once a month, you had to spend a lot of time planning and working out lesson plans, and working out strategic planning for conferences and that sort of stuff—activities in order to be prepared to do what you had to do the next annual training session. You know, it’s a lot of time consuming things, but I was thrilled to do it. It was not a chore for me.
TS: So you’re working in that capacity, and also your full time job?
AM: Right.
TS: At Chapel Hill?
AM: Yes.
TS: You were pretty busy.
AM: Yup. My friends who didn’t live here—friends that I had elsewhere—used to write Christmas letters, you know [unclear]. They used to call up and say, “Gee, I get exhausted just hearing—reading your Christmas letter.” Yes, I think I was extremely busy when I think about it afterward— in retrospect—but it was fun. I mean, I enjoyed it. It was not a chore. It didn’t feel like a chore.
TS: The idea of being in the reserve was it—do you have any notion that you were going to end up twenty-nine years later—24
AM: No.
TS: —retired as a colonel?
AM: No, I thought I would stay in a couple of years, and hopefully contribute something to this wonderful unit that I had joined that I really enjoyed. And then, of course, when I became the chief nurse a year later then I thought, “Well, I guess I’ll stay a couple years if I’m going to take this position.” So I thought I’d probably stay three or four years maybe, and that would be it. No, I had no earthly—if anyone had told me I was going to stay twenty-nine I would say “You guys are crazy!”
TS: Well, tell me about when the first—if you recall— the first time you got to put the uniform on.
AM: Oh yes, I do remember that very well, because that was the first weekend I was going down to Fort Bragg. And we had gone down before—two other girls who were already in the unit—and they took me down to help me go to the clothing store and get the uniform, which was very nice of them. So we did that instead of waiting for the weekend, since I had to be ready to go—I couldn’t get the uniform then.
So we drove down in between the two drills and got my uniform, and I put it on that morning. We drove down on Fridays—we always spent the night down there— everybody met at the officer’s club on Friday night, had dinner and dance—the old fashioned dance bands, you know those wonderful things don’t exist anymore.
TS: Like a swing band?
AM: Yeah, right!
Oh, it was great! We were always a great big huge table—start out with five, six, seven people coming in, and as the evening wore on everyone would be driving down. Everybody came down Friday night—almost everybody—because they wanted to be part of the party thing as well and dancing and having a great time.
So Saturday morning I got up and put on my uniform for the first time. I got up two hours in advance to be sure I had everything on right, must have looked at it ten times—went knocking on the door next door and said, “Do I look all right? Did I put it on right?”
Oh man, I was so proud! I felt like I was a peacock. I really was. And [I] took it very seriously.
TS: Your father would’ve been proud.
AM: Yeah. And it was a very first weekend that I was at Fort Bragg that I got a telegram about my father. And he got the letter that I had sent that I was going to join—and this was going to be my first weekend—fell into the mailbox the same morning that he died, so he never saw it.
TS: He never got your letter?25
AM: No.
TS: Oh.
AM: But I know he knew it anyway. It was funny—well, it wasn’t funny, but strange that it happened that way.
TS: Yeah. How’d your mom feel about it?
AM: Well, she was very—she kept, you know, reassuring me, because obviously I was rather sad at the time, that Daddy knew that I was going to join and that he would be—she was over with me here at the time—that he would be very proud to have me come to the funeral in uniform.
So man, I did. And I was scared to death, because I’d only worn it once and I was going to a foreign country and wear it to a funeral. Wow, that was a biggie—a real biggie. And I had a cousin over in Sweden who was in the [Swedish] Air Force and I thought, “Well, he can check me out and be sure.” Well, he didn’t really know for sure, but he thought I looked all right. So we went to the funeral together with all the family of course, and I guess I did all right.
TS: How did your mother feel about you being in the army?
AM: Oh, she thought it was wonderful. She was very proud. So that was no problem with that.
TS: Tell me a little bit about how you juggled both of those worlds: the civilian world and then the military world.
AM: Well, I spent the time—I organized it pretty well, because there was a lot to do being full time faculty to prepare for classes and lectures and that sort of thing. But it was a matter of organizing your time. You spent certain evenings doing that, and the week before you were going down to Fort Bragg for your weekend—or couple of hours here and there—you had to be sure you had the faculty in place—all the people that were going to do whatever they were going to do for teaching.
And we covered all the hospital wards and we opened two clinics for the hospital—doctors and nurses from Duke [University Hospital] and [University of North] Carolina [Hospital] that we had down there. And I recruited half the faculty from the School of Nursing. They even said to me, “Boy, you better not ever go on active duty, I’m going to lose half my faculty!”
And I said, “Well, don’t worry, it’s not going to happen!”
Well, it happened, of course, many, many years later, and I still got blamed for that. But anyway, I had organized the time—that’s all. And I had to give up very little— some social activity—I couldn’t go to parties as much maybe, but that was okay. That became less important as both the job and the army was becoming more important. And I had Friday night when we went down there. It was always a fun party night—goodness gracious!26
Now, after I became chief nurse I didn’t stay out till four and five in the morning anymore. Everybody said, “What are you doing going home? It’s only one o’clock!”
“One o’clock is late enough. I need a few hours sleep if I’m going to be in good shape tomorrow.” So I got a lot of teasing for being too serious about the job—that was just me.
TS: Chief Nurse might need to have a little bit of seriousness.
AM: Yeah, absolutely—absolutely. I mean I couldn’t say to them “you’ve got to be on time for this that and the other” unless I was. And I had a wonderful general who promoted me— when I was promoted from major to lieutenant colonel—he said, “We all must remember that every promotion brings many more privileges, and rank has its privilege, you know that old saying, but it has a Siamese twin and it is called responsibility.”
And I never forgot that. It just went in there and stayed there forever. And I thought, “Well, that makes sense.” So if they want to make fun of me because I had to go home early, I don’t care.
TS: Did you—did you sense any different cultures with the work you were doing in the military, and then the work you were doing in the academic world?
AM: Well, they were very different of course. It’s much more flexible in the academic world. Everything is pretty much “this is the way it is” in the military, you don’t vary it a whole lot. Your students, if they wanted to change things—especially in the course which I was involved with, which was a lot of freedom—was very different than the way we were teaching down in Fort Bragg. These guys had to have lesson plans and this and that and the other— one, two, three—much more rigid. But it was still nice to have the flexibility in your head, because you could be—not lenient, I don’t mean that—but you could instill in these students, who were by no means medical folks—who were lawyers or gas station attendants or whatever who had to learn medical stuff—that it’s, you know, get them to see that it was fun to do that, and not just one, two, three.
So it was different, but it worked. I was able to feel comfortable in both and bring some of the best to both.
TS: Now, at the time that you’re in the service, here in the late sixties—early seventies—there’s a change kind of in the American culture as far as women’s rights, civil rights— and you have the civil rights protests going on in Greensboro [North Carolina] too, when you were in Chapel—well, actually it would’ve happened a little bit earlier than you had moved down here.
AM: Yeah.
TS: Did you have a sense of what was going on in—around you for that?
AM: Yes, very definitely, because we had no black faculty, for instance, in the School of Nursing. And the dean asked me one day if I had any black friends when I went to New 27
York all the time—when I was at Cornell—because she had heard that there were some black faculty. And I said, “Oh yeah, one of my best friends from Jamaica.”
“Well, that’s even better because she’s not all black.” There was brown or whatever—I didn’t know how to differentiate it, but anyway that was more acceptable. “Do you think she would like to come down here?”
And I said, “Well, I don’t know. I’ll ask her when I go up next time,” because she was a very close friend I often stayed with her when I was in New York. So I made a point next time of going, “Hey Carol, why don’t you come down and take a look at our school of nursing down there?”
I mean, she was extremely valuable at Cornell. They offered her green meadows and much money. And she graduated from Cornell. She was my first student in my class teaching there. Scared me to death, because she was so inquisitive about everything and I didn’t have the answer to half her questions.
Anyway so she said, “Well, it would be fun because it would be nice to be with you and Sandy” —and some of these other people she knew down here—“but I don’t know, some people are funny in the south.”
I didn’t quite know what she meant at first, to tell you the truth, because that sort of thing—a lot of that went over my head completely. She said, “I don’t consider myself black, but people would consider me black if I came down. I might have to sit on your porch and rock a baby.”
And I said, “Oh, come on, don’t be ridiculous.”
So anyway, long story short, she came down for an interview, and of course she was offered a job. And she moved down here and she became the professor in the path of physiology, and without a doubt one of the best that’s ever been here. She got the teacher award the second year she was down here. And we’re still best of friends. She moved to Charlotte, North Carolina to UNC [University of North Carolina at Charlotte] up there many, many, many years later when I—same year that I left here as a matter of fact—and stayed there ‘til she retired.
But so yeah, there were not any black faculty until Carol came. She really broke the ground with everybody because she was so good. The dean told me I gave her a treat, because she couldn’t have started with a better person—which was true—but I didn’t know that. She was a friend of mine, of course she’s going to come down.
TS: Did she experience any of the discrimination—
AM: No.
TS: —that she was worried about?
AM: No, she really didn’t. She had a white roommate, who was her roommate in New York [City]. She came down here also to go to graduate school. Carol was already finished with graduate school at the time. So Pam went to graduate school here, and then became a bigwig in psych[ology].
And so they lived together for a while and then Pam got married—no she didn’t— she moved out one summer. But anyway—so yeah—she—but she didn’t feel I guess— because she was always in with the rest of us who were white, for one thing. In fact, she 28
was almost—what do you call it— prejudiced herself, which I didn’t realize. Because I had another friend who was definitely a black American who came to visit, and Carol was a little snotty about it. And I thought to myself “What the heck is this? It doesn’t make sense!”
And she said, “Well, you know, I grew up in Jamaica—grew up on a plantation. We had servants. We had this. We had that.”
“Oh, so you mean it’s even within this race there’s different grades and so on?” “Oh yes.”
So I learned a lot about it from her, but I had no idea. I thought, “Well, if your skin color is brown than it’s the same all over.” Oh no, no, not at all! Big difference if you’re from upper-class Jamaica, and you look down upon the average black person in America. Okay.
TS: How about in the military? How did this translate?
AM: I did not see that in the military. You know, when I joined the 3274th, we had black nurses. We certainly had lots of black enlisted. My favorite sergeant was black.
TS: Male or female?
AM: Male. Because I didn’t—I never experienced having prejudice myself, so therefore I may not have seen it as much as if I—you know—if I was looking down on them myself, maybe, I would see more.
I even asked them one time—oh, one of the—I had two sergeants who were black as a matter of fact: one male and one female—no, these were both males. And they wanted to take a picture of us—the chief nurse and two sergeants—and I said, “Okay”.
So they said, “This is an Oreo cookie.”
I said, “It’s a what?”
They said, “Oreo cookie: two black and a white.”
I missed half of those jokes, because I was so naïve it was ridiculous; but, they accepted me as I was, and we had a great time—and oh, they were fantastic. But they lived—and we all lived in the same quarters. I don’t think that they experienced— certainly they were promoted just like anybody else.
It was looking more at what they were doing than what the color of the skin was—that was my experience. And I think that it was their experience. I can’t swear to that, but I know that they felt very much a part of the group. In 3274th, maybe we were the exception. It was an exceptional unit in many ways, so maybe that was part of it.
TS: Well, as chief nurse didn’t you get some of the personnel issues coming through your door for that?
AM: For the black issues?
TS: Any—any personnel issues.
AM: Oh yeah, any problem would go through my door of course. But—29
TS: What kind of things would you have to deal with for that?
AM: I had a couple things of nurses who would not—who would be dating enlisted—or officers would be dating enlisted, and that was a no-no. I couldn’t do anything about that. I mean, I could tell them that this is a no-no, but if they still did it there wasn’t anything I could do. I couldn’t go out and grab them out of the bar or wherever they were, but it was not— it was very little of that actually.
But I did have one nurse who got into trouble—got into bed with somebody—one of the patients in the hospital, and that did not go over too great. So and then—so I really had to give her some pretty much harsh reprimand. Most people I could talk to and that would be it—one time talking and no more. But this particular little soul, I must have talked to her five times, and then finally had to discipline and threaten her with demotion if it happened again, because I could not make any more excuses for her. And I hated to do it because she was a good nurse. And she was great when she was great, and when she was bad she was horrid. And she also drank an awful lot, and that was a problem, because every time she was caught doing one of these things, she was drunk. So you know I kept saying, “You need help with your drinking. You don’t need discipline for your behavior, you need help for your drinking and you’ll be all right.”
So she actually did have some counseling about her drinking, and I think she went to—she started going to AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] up in—here in Chapel Hill, because she was working at Duke [University] as a nurse too, and that didn’t go [unclear].
TS: What other kind of issues did you have to face?
AM: Occasionally, somebody would be disappointed or angry or wonder if it was fair that they didn’t get promoted, but that was very rare. It was—that was pretty standard. We were very fair and square when somebody was eligible time wise—and if they hadn’t done anything bad—they would be promoted. It wasn’t if they’d done anything super good— just that they had done their time, and they had been good and not done anything bad— followed the rules and regulations. That was it. So that was most unusual that somebody would be unhappy about that.
But later on promotion became more difficult, you may have to do something besides just not get into trouble—maybe do something outstanding to get to colonel or lieutenant colonel or even major. But in those days it was pretty much doing your time, and keeping your nose clean as they used to say.
TS: Now, with women in the military, in the military culture—now, you were in the Army Nurses Corps?
AM: Yes.
TS: So there’s a lot of females.
AM: Yeah.30
TS: In the way that the hierarchy went for that.
AM: Yeah.
TS: Was there any type of—did you—how did you feel that you were treated as a woman in the army?
AM: By?
TS: By your—say your superiors, at all?
AM: In the army?
TS: By men and women, yes.
AM: I think I was personally—I can’t say that I ever felt not treated well and respected for my grade, as well as my job, and being chief nurse and all that. And I think most of my col—most of my nurses felt the same way—that they were treated with respect.
And I think, as you say, it was the one thing I remember was when I was teaching here at Chapel Hill. The first couple of years there was a student who told me that when her parents came down, would I talk to them, because she really wanted to join the Army Nurse Corps. But her parents said, “You can’t do that because it’s not good. Women only join the military, because they want a man or another woman.”
And I thought to myself, “Really?”
I mean, that had never entered my mind that that was really true. So it was Parents’ Day—and I’ll never forget it—and she came up to me. She said, “My daughter wanted me to meet you because I understand you’re in the military.”
“Oh yes, I am. Yes, she did tell me that, as a matter of fact. Very happy to meet you—talk with you—blah, blah, blah.”
They said, “Are you sure you’re in the military?”
I said, “Yes, I’m the chief nurse in the unit here. I’ve been in for four years and I love every minute of it.”
Well, they just for some reason didn’t think that I fit in the picture, whatever the picture was. I guess I didn’t look like either a man chaser or a woman chaser. I didn’t know what it was, but I thought it was funny myself. Sure enough, she did join later because I got a card from her after she had gone in. Oh, she joined the navy, that’s right. And she did very well and had quite a career. [I] heard from her a couple of times as she went up the ladder. And her parents went down for her first promotion, and they were very fine with it, and met other people who, quote, “were normal too”. Oh, that was funny.
So yes, there was probably a lot of that that I was not aware of. It probably went over my head like many other things did.
TS: Did you have any cases that came to you for, like, sexual harassment or things like that?31
AM: No, there was one only, and I think that was justified, because it was a very bright nurse—very attractive—and she was promised by this visiting general that we had from the next higher ARCOM [United States Army Reserve Command] from us—3274th was under—of course, I don’t know how much you know about the hierarchy in the military. But you were in the military yourself, weren’t you, of course you know.
Okay the ARCON above us—the general would come to inspect periodically to see that we were doing well and all that kind of stuff. Well, you know, we always took them to dinner and they became part of the party, and blah, blah, blah. But apparently he found this nurse very attractive and kind of was a little pushy, and she didn’t like that. She was not interested, besides the fact that he was married, so she thought that—she considered that harassment.
And I didn’t know hardly what harassment was. I had to go look it up in the dictionary. But anyway, there was an unwanted thing you know. I thought he was just being polite and telling her she was attractive—that was okay. People told me I was attractive. I never took that as a what-cha-ma-call-it—harassment.
But what he did which she shared with me before I got the official complaint, was that he was going to see that she got promoted ahead of time if she went to bed with him. Now, that’s not a smart thing for a general to say, because she, of course, told me and our commander. So we both had to deal with this harassment thing and it was pretty ugly actually, because he tried to be very ugly to her as a result of this. But it ended with—he lost—I mean, she was taken out of the situation completely—bypass him for her promotion and all that.
TS: What happened to him?
AM: He got reprimanded—not demoted. He should’ve been demoted as far as I’m concerned. I mean, he got two warnings and he still kept doing it. That’s pretty bad in my book, just because—and I would say—because he was a man and he was a general—and I think a lot of that happened other places that I never heard about it, but you hear about it later or read about it—whatever. I mean, you read so much about it today; women being harassed still. I never really thought that much of that—I thought it was a rare occasion, but I don’t think it was a rare occasion. I think it happened quite a bit, but I didn’t personally get involved except this one.
TS: Did you think that there was anything in particular that was difficult for you to deal with in the military? Like, say, emotionally or physically?
AM: I can’t think of any. I know a lot of my nurses had a hard time with the PT [physical training] test. They were expecting a lot of a woman to do all the push-ups and the running. I loved it, so I didn’t have a problem with it. Even though some of them had all kinds of reasons explaining why physically it was very bad for a woman to do pushups. Well, I did push-ups, I didn’t have any problem. And sit-ups, women do better than men because of the pelvis, so I had very little sympathy for the ones that griped about the PT test I must say. Because, if you kept yourself in halfway decent shape—and I thank the army for that, I still go to exercise three times a week thanks to the military. I’m sure I never would have done it otherwise. I would’ve go walking or done what I did physically 32
I mean, sports-wise, but when I could no longer do that I wouldn’t have gone to exercise and lift weights and all that kind of stuff. I would’ve thought that was stupid. But no, I consider that a great thing.
But yes, there were some people that felt that was very difficult and it was not good for them to do those things, and they were very adamant about it—some of them. Luckily, most of my nurses accepted it and did fine. And I always—I was a little proud, I guess. I had to be sure that I could do it as well as any of them or better—preferably better. [laughter] If they did it in twenty minutes two miles, then I should do it in eighteen. It was friendly competition that they seemed to like too, so that was okay.
TS: Well tell me a bit—so you had your month-to-month that you went—
AM: Can I get some—
TS: Oh yes, let’s take a little break here. Yes, here, let’s pause.
[recording paused]
TS: Okay. We had a short little break there, and I’m back with Amie. And I was going to ask you, too about—so physically, you’re fit and trying to make sure that you’re showing off a little [laughter]; and now, mentally, was there anything that was difficult at all for you?
AM: I really can’t think of anything, to tell you the truth. Again, I think I was very fortunate. I was always in the right place in the right time with the right people.
TS: Do you think—that’s a point that I’m interested to know more about, like, with the right people. So, do you feel like you were mentored at all?
AM: I had very good commanders—every one of them—I cannot say that I had a bad commander in my entire experience, which I think is pretty unusual when I talk to other chief nurses and other people who were colleagues of mine. So I’m sure that that helped a lot, why I didn’t experience some of the things that some of my colleagues did experience.
TS: Like for example? Can you give me an example of something like that?
AM: Some women felt that they were treated inferior and not fairly always, and some of them actually felt that they were treated like second class citizens. I never felt any of that.
TS: So you think that had a lot to do with who was in the chain of command for you?
AM: I think it does. I think it did. Because as I said, I can’t think of a single commander I had anywhere that I would’ve said, “Oh, I wish he was not my commander!” There were 33
some that were better than others—that I liked more than others maybe—but there wasn’t any that were bad or unfair, or any of those things, I didn’t feel.
TS: Do you think that because they’re the ones writing for your promotions right?
AM: Yeah.
TS: Your performance reports?
AM: Right.
TS: Was that an obstacle for some of the other women?
AM: Yes, it was, and I never felt that. And even when I left the 3274th and went to my next job, the commander from the place I left and the new commander talked to each other, and there were good words said before I even got there.
I was really very blessed, because as you—the longer I was in the more difficult it became for the higher rankings to find a slot. And promotions were pretty much automatic, as I said, when you first started—when I first started—unless you did something terribly wrong—but then you really had to kind of shine when you got higher up, because there were only so many slots for lieutenant colonels and even fewer slots for colonels. By the time Sandy came for the board of colonels—she was a little behind me—a couple years behind me—there was only twelve slots for colonels in the whole country, so you had to be, you know, ranking in your performance pretty high up to get there.
Again, I was very fortunate that way. I had good positions. So if you did a good job in a good position, you couldn’t lose. But if you didn’t live up to that—because it was pretty high standards you had to live up to—if you were already put in a position as a young officer—I mean, I was put in a chief nurse position as a major. That’s pretty puny— I mean, not puny rank, but it’s unusual to be a major chief nurse at that big of a unit.
TS: How many people were in that unit?
AM: Four hundred and something.
And then when the slot—when I moved to St. Louis, I really didn’t think I was going to find a colonel slot because there was only two units there and none of them had an opening. And I thought, “Well, I guess I’ll just go talk to the commander and see if there’s any possibility of something in the future.” But I didn’t want to lose—at this point I was in long enough that I thought, “Well, I want to go for twenty now”. Plus, I loved it, so I had no desire to drop out.
So my commander called Colonel Burmeister[?] in Saint Louis [Missouri] and told him that unfortunately he was going to lose his chief because of a civilian job that she had accepted in Saint Louis, and she’ll be coming to talk to you and see if there’s any opening in your unit for an O-6 [colonel pay grade]. And he said, “I strongly suggest you look for an opening.”34
That’s what he—what I found out later he’d said, which was very nice. So obviously, I came with a good recommendation. And I went to see Colonel Burmeister and he said, “It’s really funny, but it just so happens that the chief nurse I have is getting ready to retire.”
“Oh, was she?” I don’t know why. She was awful young to retire, but anyway, she was not there when I came back to stay.
TS: What year was this that you made that move?
AM: Let’s see, ’87?
TS: Eighty-seven?
AM: Eighty-three.
TS: So why did you—why did you make this shift?
AM: Oh, this civilian job. I got this great offer in St Louis to—actually both of us—Sandy got— I got the job first to help with starting a teaching nursing home with Saint Louis University, and I would be working with four geriatricians. Absolute paradise, because I was in geriatrics at that point—both in their clinics. I would have my own clinic with one of them, and I would be with all four of them in our geriatric unit in our hospital. And I would be with all four of them teaching in the school of medicine.
I thought, “Gee, you know, how could I turn that down?” I hated to leave North Carolina, but I didn’t ask for this job, it just came looking for me. I was in Saint Louis to visit Sandy’s family; just happened to see this ad in the paper. I was reading in the backseat, and my aunt, who was living with us for ten years at that point, said, “Well, you know, you were offered that job in Texas—San Antonio, Texas.”
I said, “I’m not going to look for this job, Aunt Ruthie. I’m just going to go for the fun of it, because they were asking for a geriatric nurse practitioner,” which there were very few in the country at that point. So I thought, “Well, I’ll just check it out.”
Well, that was mistake number one! I went to check it out, and what was interesting was they were talking about the teaching nursing home—all the exciting things that they were doing—but I said I had already been for an interview in San Antonio Texas, “So, I can’t promise you anything. I’m supposed to be thinking about that one when I really came in as a fluke to see.”
So I had to ask Sandy and her niece who had gone shopping. I said, “Leave me here for an hour, because that’s all I need.” It was just so I could look in and see what they have—what they’d been doing. They came back and I said, “Will you give me another half hour?”
And they said, “Uh oh, something’s happening.” So anyway, long story short, they just really buttered me up. And they asked me if there was any way I could interview one more time while I was there, since I was going to be there all of Thanksgiving. They took me out for lunch. They took me out for dinner. The guy who was in charge of it was in Ireland at the time, John Frederick[?] as cute as he could be. 35
[He] said, “You really would love this job don’t say no to it! You don’t want to go to San Antonio.”
I said, “I had an obligation to go back to San Antonio for a second interview. I’ll be happy to think about this one, because I must admit I’m quite intrigued with what you’re all telling me.” So I talked to him on the phone from Ireland. We had a conference call, it was really funny.
Anyway, I went back home, went back down to San Antonio for my second interview. Pat Hawkins was the dean there and she was a wonderful woman: very inspirational, very strong, and very good dean, and very anxious to have me come on the faculty. So when I came back and we went out for lunch and I told her about Saint Louis, and about halfway through the lunch she reaches across the table and she said, “Amie, it’s been a real pleasure, but you’re not coming to San Antonio.”
And I said, “What do you mean? How do you know? I mean, I wish I knew!”
She said, “The gleam in your eyes when you talk about the job in Saint Louis is unbelievable.”
I guess I’m an open book. She was right. I didn’t know it at the time. It took me another two weeks before I made up my mind, because San Antonio was very inter—I knew San Antonio so well from the military. I’d been there for a hundred courses back and forth—felt like my second home. And I liked Patty. And I had two other friends on the faculty who had moved from here down there, who were really hoping that we were going to come. And Sandy was offered a position too, so there were several reasons why it was attractive.
So here’s Saint Louis trying—oh, it was funny. But anyway, I eventually said “Yes, I’ll come to Saint Louis.” And they thought it was salary, so they kept upping my salary in Saint Louis. I said, “Leave me alone for two weeks! The salary is fine. I don’t need any more money. That’s not the reason.”
“Oh, but the weather’s not that bad in Saint Louis.”
I said, “The weather is not the problem either. I like cold winters. I don’t want to be hot like in San Antonio. That’s a negative rather than a positive.”
Oh, it was funny. He called three times and upped the salary while I was trying to think. My secretary says, “You’re not going to believe who’s phoned this time.”
I said, “Oh Rocky, don’t tell me.”
It was funny, but anyway, long story short, I made my decision to go there.
TS: Okay.
AM: Which made it harder to find a unit, because San Antonio had several slots for a colonel but I had to go with a civilian job which—you know, a full time one—if that was the most exciting one. And it sounded so exciting to work with those guys and teaching nursing and all this new first thing that we were going to start first. I always like firsts. So it was just a matter of getting into that unit and that wasn’t too hard either, so everything worked out. And that was a very interesting unit. It was a terrible unit to start with.
TS: Why was it so terrible?36
AM: They had—they did absolutely nothing but sit in the classroom and listen to somebody; half of them were asleep or doing crossword puzzles or something. Oh, I was shocked. When I saw it I said, “Gee, this is going to be a challenge, to take this thing over.”
TS: So what did you do to—
AM: And it was.
TS: What did you do to change that?
AM: First thing I did was reorganize what we were going to do. They were going to go out and work in the hospitals. They weren’t getting any training sitting in the classroom, what were they going to do when they were called on active duty. A crossword puzzle isn’t going to be what they expect us to do.
And nobody is out teaching our corpsmen. They’re sitting in another room doing something even less—I mean I never—3274th was top notch. 21st General [Hospital] was bottom. But Burmeister said, “If you can do anything even remotely similar to what you did at 3274th I will be forever grateful to you.”
“No problem.”
Then I met them and I thought, “Oh my gosh, what did I promise?”
So the first thing we did was ask them what they wanted to do—why they were in the reserve. And I interviewed every one of them and asked them, “Why are you in the reserves?” And I got some of the dumbest answers I’ve ever had in my life: “Extra money”; “Something to do on the weekends”
“Well, don’t you have anything else to do on the weekends? Play? Date? Whatever?”
“Yeah, but it’s different. You can wear a uniform.”
“Well, you don’t wear it very well, but yeah!”
I mean it was hilarious. And they all laughed three years—four years later—when I had moved again, because they had gone from nothing to one of the best units in the country. We had every nurse out there working in a hospital setting. I went to Pope Air Force Base [sic, Scott Air Force Base] in Illinois to see if we could negotiate with them to have our unit come there for military training. And they were thrilled to have us. And then the unit—the nurses—thought I was crazy. But I said, “Well, let’s do it on a volunteer basis. How many of you would like to go to work in a military installation, so you’re not totally lost some day if you do have—if you have to go?”
Several volunteered after a while, and they loved it once they started. The thing that they were so worried about was, “How am I going to get there? Am I going to drive a car, like you do in the city except I’m going to drive a little bit outside the city? And it’s going to take you about forty-five minutes to get there!” [exaggerated gasping sound]
Well, they did, and they did it well. And the corpsmen were happy to volunteer, because to them it was exciting to be able to do something, rather than—I mean, they don’t do anything medical during the month. They didn’t do any medical during the drill, so they were very happy to do it. And once it started it took off like—they all wanted to go to Pope Air Force Base, but I had two other groups in the city at the regular hospital and one of the psych hospitals. And Sandy was my educational assistant, so she did a lot 37
of the training for the—oversaw the training for the corpsmen and the nurses. Of course, they were pretty good nurses by themselves once they decided to do some work. And then we had a nurses meeting every weekend just to see where we stood, what had we done, what we needed to do as a group.
I said, “Okay, now I think it would really be fun if you all want to see—I think we can arrange that we can all go to AMSUS together”.
And they looked at me like I had two heads, “What’s AMSUS?”
I said, “Oh my gosh, they don’t even know what it was.” And, I had gone every year since I was in the military practically.
TS: And what is it?
AM: It’s the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States. It was a big huge meeting once a year, usually in November. It’s [U.S.] Army, [U.S.] Air Force, [U.S.] Navy, [U.S.] Marines, [U.S.] National Guard. The topics are medical and some military and outstanding speakers, and then they have some social activities as well and a big formal at the end. I mean, it’s really a thrill and an honor to go to that.
Well, they had absolutely no idea such thing existed. I said, “No wonder they didn’t have any [unclear].”
So out of my forty nurses, thirty-seven went to the meeting for the whole week. And we met for dinner most nights and we had a huge table for the formal banquet and they had so much fun, and they worked like dogs after they came back from that. You never saw anything like it. You’d think I had given them each individually a million dollars. They would just eat out of my hand after that and do anything. So that you know it was like mules when I first started, and it was like fairies when I left.
TS: Why do you think that there was that type of culture when you first got there?
AM: You know, unfortunately, I heard that this was rather typical of reserve units in the seventies—sixties and seventies. They just, you know, there was nothing to do. They didn’t really care about really trying to stay up to shipshape, because they never got called on active duty.
TS: This was ’83 was when you—
AM: When I left there. I came there in—no, I came in ’83 and left in ’86.
TS: So you were there for about three years?
AM: Three and a half—I didn’t leave until July, and I came in January of ’83. But many reserve units—even when I was at 3274th and heard of other reserve units—they sat around in the armories and did nothing. They got paid, so why would they want to do something? I mean, there wasn’t anybody there that put them on fire or make them feel excited about anything.
TS: How was your retention after you started this?38
AM: 100% the last year—we didn’t have a single soul leave.
TS: How about the first year?
AM: It was pretty bad. They were dropping out like flies. I think it was something like 50% we lost the first year, and very few second year, and nobody the third and fourth. So that was pretty exciting. And when Operation Desert Storm [United States operational name for the collation combined air/land offensive against Iraqi forces occurring between January 17th-April 11th, 1991] came, they were called on active duty. And I went down to visit them just for the fun of it, and, sure enough, they were so grateful that they had had this; because, at least they knew what an army hospital was and what a military hospital was. And I thought to myself, “Gee, that little tiny thing helped them so much, and helped them help those who came in afterwards after I was gone.” So that was very exciting!
TS: Well, you helped prepare them for that.
AM: Yeah. I mean, that’s what we were supposed to be doing. It wasn’t anything extraordinary I did. That’s what I thought everybody did. That’s why I was so shocked! I didn’t realize there was such a thing as people sitting around on the weekend and doing nothing.
TS: Well, you talked a little earlier about some of the training that you did in San Antonio for the military. What kind of training was that that you had to do?
AM: Went down many times for courses: how to be a better chief nurse, how to be a better leader of any kind —leadership courses were excellent down there. [I] had a chance to go to several of those. I asked to go down for basic, and my commander thought I was a little crazy. He said, “You’re a major!”
I said, “I know, but I don’t know anything about the military. I came in as a captain. I was promoted to major before I even knew how to put on a uniform practically.”
It was a slight exaggeration, but, you know, I didn’t know anybody, military history, military this—so, I really would like to, but I had to learn some of the tough stuff you’re supposed to learn.
TS: Did they let you do that?
AM: Yeah, they did.
TS: Where did you go?
AM: To Fort Sam [Houston, Texas], and out in the field. And it was mostly lieutenants, and this little major who openly admitted that I really didn’t know that much and that I had been given permission to skip all that and that’s not a nice thing to do to somebody. It’s not a favor, because I didn’t know some of the stuff. Made me feel like a dummy, it is 39
okay not to know it to be a lieutenant. It’s not okay not to know it and be a major. So that was the only time that I felt inadequate, was before I went down for this basic stuff. Boy, I felt like a sharp—sharp shooter when I came back.
TS: What year did you go through it?
AM: That was—see, I joined ’76 —I mean ’67, so it must have been ’68.
TS: So about—not far into your reserves.
AM: Oh, no, first or second—end of the first year, beginning the second year.
TS: I see. Interesting, now did you have a two weeks duty?
AM: Yeah, every year you had at least two weeks.
TS: What kind of things did you get to do for that?
AM: Depending on where you went, but most of the time you would go to a military installation. That was the only time that a lot of reservists went to a military installation. Now, we were fortunate enough to go to Fort Bragg every weekend. So the two weeks that we were on active duty we went to Fort Benning a couple times—very similar hospital as Fort Bragg. Went to Fort Gordon, Georgia, went to a couple other places— similar. And twice we went out in the field, because we were supposed to be able to operate in a field as well as in a hospital and set up tents and things like that. We went to Fort Drum, New York. Those were great experiences.
TS: What kind of things would you do?
AM: You set up tent. You took in sick people—sometimes fake sick people, so [unclear] they were covered with painting and blood and all that kind of stuff to see—
TS: Like exercises?
AM: Right. What would you do if somebody came in and they had been shot, or they had stepped on a land mine, or—They would come in with a big thing that said exactly what had happened to them. And sometimes they could talk—sometimes they could not—you know, this kind of stuff. So you should be able to do what you would do in the real world. Because of the simulation, you saw failures[?] before and things like that too—very intensive, very good training.
TS: Did you ever go overseas at all?
AM: No, unfortunately not—didn’t do that. But things at Fort Drum—and then when we were at this unit in Saint Louis, we went to Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, twice. And that was a 40
good eye opener for these people, because we were out in the field part of the time and they thought, “Why did you get us into this?”
I said, “I didn’t get you into this! We were told to come up here.”
TS: So you ended up leaving Saint Louis about three years?
AM: Yeah, I came to Richmond and that was—now, I do have to think it through.
TS: Okay, let’s pause it again.
[recording paused]
TS: Okay we took a short break for orders. [laughter]
AM: Lunch orders.
TS: So now we’re back, Amie. Okay, so you’re getting me to Virginia, right?
AM: Yes.
TS: Sandy wants me to hurry up! [laughter]
Sandy Venegoni: Don’t you put that on tape!
TS: Oh. it’s too late! It’s already there!
AM: We’re in Saint Louis, both of us. Of course, it was fun being in Saint Louis, because of Sandy’s family, and we had my wonderful aunt living with us at that point too.
TS: And what was her name?
AM: Aunt Ruthie.
TS: Okay.
AM: So she became everybody’s grandmother—Sandy’s nieces and nephews—and she just loved Saint Louis and her husband, who had died of course, was a symphony conductor. And he had been in Saint Louis for a long time, so it was like being home for her. So all in all, Saint Louis turned out to be a very perfect place, both for the civilian job, the life, and for the military. That was a real challenge—the military—but it was very good, because it ended up perfect. So then here we are and my ex-friend from the 3274th [Major General James “Jim” Holsinger], whose wedding I had gone to before we left Fort Bragg. He’s a doctor at Duke. He was in our unit as a doctor, and he married a nurse from Duke—who I knew also—and so I went to their wedding.41
He later became the commander of 3274th and then moved to Washington D.C. and became a commander of the 2290th [U.S. Army Hospital] GOCOM [United States Army Reserve General Officer Command], which is outside of Washington and became a general.
And I had met him once or twice since their wedding. You know, you write Christmas cards for a while, and then you just sort of disappear from each other. And he was at one of those AMSUS meetings I was telling you about, and he was, of course, asking what I was doing and all that. So he kind of kept an eye on me now and then. And so, he calls me out of the clear blue sky out in Saint Louis, where I’m with this teaching nursing home idea that we were trying to establish. So I was there late. It was eight o’clock at night. It was a message from my secretary at the other place, who had gone home at five o’clock saying, “Some general called you. I didn’t know you knew a general!”—she was so funny, but anyway— “He’s going to call you again at eight o’clock, and I gave him the number of where you were going to be at the nursing home out there.”
So at eight o’clock at night, sure enough, he called and he says, “Hi this is Jim, blah, blah, blah”
“Oh, it’s so nice to hear from you. How’s the wife?”
All that chit-chat and he said, “I’m calling to tell you—offer you something, but I’m not going to tell you what it is.” He says, “I don’t want you to say yes, I don’t want you to say no. I want you just to think about it. And I want to take you and Sandy out for dinner when we meet at the next AMSUS meeting in Anaheim”— it was going to be in Anaheim that year— “So save one evening for us—for me.”
So I said, “Okay, you going to tell me something about what it’s about?”
And he said, “Well, yes actually, I want you for two things.”
And I said, “Okay, what are they?”
“One is the VA [Veterans’ Affairs], which you may not be terribly excited about. And the other one is to be my chief nurse at this unit now that I’ve become a general.”
And I said—we used to joke about this when he was a captain and I was a captain— “Someday I’m going to be a general, and you’ll be my chief nurse.”
Well, anyway, so that’s what he was telling me. And I just kind of laughed and I said, “Well Jim, I’m very honored. It’s very nice, but the VA does not appeal to me. I just want to be honest with you.”
He said, “I told you not to say yes, not to say no; say maybe [unclear], and we’ll talk in California.”
I said, “Okay.”
So I came home and told Aunt Ruthie and Sandy about this phone call. And Aunt Ruthie said, “Oh no, we’re going to move to Richmond.”
And I said, “Oh heavens no, don’t be ridiculous.”
Anyway, so we met out in California and he told me about the two jobs. And he told Sandy that she—you know, she was teaching at Saint Louis University at this time and was involved with our teaching nursing home, which was right up her alley, so that was perfect too. And he said to her if she’s going to stay in the academic world today, you’ve got to get your PhD—which was true. And I had my master’s [degree], I was finished with school. I wasn’t going to do anymore, because I was in clinical and administration—for that you did not need your PhD at that point. So I was perfectly 42
happy where I was. And I was going to even consider the job at the VA—it was chief of geriatric services, that’s administrative, and I didn’t need a PhD for that.
So he said, “Well, you know, Sandy really does need a PhD, because she’s strictly academia now and you need that”; which, I knew, we all knew the handwriting was on the wall for that.
So he said, “They just started a PhD program at the NCV [sic, VCU, Virginia Commonwealth University], and it’s a very good one and they’re giving scholarships for that.”
So Sandy was sort of interested in that thought, but I wasn’t sure I was interested at this point—and the military was exciting—being a chief nurse of a GOCOM was pretty exciting, because that meant seventeen medical units under you: all the medical units in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. That’s a pretty gigantic job! But the VA one, I wasn’t excited about at first, which is funny, but anyway I did agree—okay, so that was for Sandy. And he said Aunt Ruthie would love Richmond because of all the music and the arts, and all the stuff that she adores.
I said, “Jim, what have you got for our dogs?” [laughs] I mean he had for me, for Sandy, for Aunt Ruthie—“Do you have something for the dogs too?”
TS: You had five dogs?
AM: No, we had two dogs and two cats at the time.
TS: Okay.
AM: So that was funny.
But anyway, long story short, I did go for an interview in Richmond, by myself the first time, because I wasn’t really interested. I didn’t think I was going to go. And I was impressed, I must admit. I was impressed with the VA, which I didn’t expect to be— not with the whole VA—but the geriatric department. That’s of course where I was going to be. And I was quite intrigued with the military—the GOCOM position—that was exciting.
So I said, I would think about it and “I have to admit that I am a little interested, which I didn’t expect to be. I’m just being very honest with you.”
He said, “I knew you would be honest, and I knew you would be interested.”
I said, “Okay.”
So I went back home and talked to everybody and all that kind of stuff. And he calls up and he says, “Okay, when are you ready to come back for your second visit,” and he said “Bring Sandy this time—I’ve set up some people for her to see at the School of Nursing.”
So we came back for a second visit. She did her thing down there. I did my thing at the VA—presentation for them on something—I’ve forgotten what now. That was part of the deal. And it became very, very interesting. The more I learned about it the more exciting it was. So I said to Jim, “You know, I would really like to consider it.” But I said, “I don’t want you to think I’m going to stay here forever, because my record, first of all, is five to seven years at the most wherever we have gone. But if I’m going to take a 43
job as high as that in the VA—which I know nothing about—I would not do it unless I promised you at least three years.”
He said, “That’s fine, by that time you’ll be hooked.”
I said, “Okay, if you say so.”
So, we both accepted.
TS: In what year was this?
AM: That was 1985 that we were visiting, but we didn’t come until July ’86.
TS: Okay.
AM: Because I had to get somebody to take my position in Saint Louis. That was the main reason, yeah, because I was pretty involved. We had two or three nursing homes: two nursing homes and the clinics, and all that kind of stuff. So, I had to get someone to replace me before I could leave. And I had somebody, and then they got sick and then I’d get sick. So anyway, it took a little longer. So, we moved in July of ’86 to Richmond.
TS: Now this is a position through the reserve?
AM: No.
TS: Okay, so it’s a civilian—
AM: Civilian position at the VA "
TS: Okay.
AM: Strictly administrative—and, but I mean as far as the administration in the VA, but I was also having a clinical one because I didn’t want to give—I was a geriatric nurse practitioner at this point, and I didn’t want to take a job where I couldn’t keep my skills up.
TS: Okay.
AM: So I would have a clinic a day—the person—the physician, who was also this chief of the geriatric services, he—I would be— we would be partners. And he was very much for being partners—not he boss and I second—not me boss and he second—so we were called co-directors of the program, which was wonderful. And Tom was absolutely awesome to work with. We were like sisters and brothers. He was a lot younger, so I used to call him my little brother and he called me his bigger sister, and we’re still best of friends. It was just awesome. And every—what Tom didn’t have, I had, and what I didn’t have, Tom had.
Tom was the world’s best organizer. My god, he could get the biggest mess and organize it in no time. His people skills weren’t the greatest. My people skills were pretty good, so together we were unbeatable. We really were. Everybody at the department said 44
that, “You two can never break up, because it can’t be the same with anybody else. Can’t replace Amie, can’t replace Tom, so you have to be together forever.” Okay! We were almost—but anyway—so we came, and then of course the position at the GOCOM was very exciting. I did not know how exciting that was going to be.
TS: And that’s a reserve position?
AM: Yeah.
TS: Okay.
AM: GOCOM stood for General Officer Command, and that’s why it was so big. And the biggest unit was the one that was over— that took over Walter Reed [Army Medical Center] during Operation Desert Storm, that was part of—So every weekend that unit, which was one I was chief nurse of, would go to Walter Reed and we had—talk about one weekend a month! It was three weekends a month. We were on the road to visit all these other units, because we had seventeen units in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, and they all had to be visited at least once a year—many of them twice a year. So it was two to three weekends every month that I was on the road.
It was a busy life enough, and then I had this huge job at the VA which I was brand new—I didn’t know anything about the VA. I mean, that first year was unbelievable. It was almost too much even for me, I must say. I mean, I didn’t have time to do anything other than work. My assistant at the VA—who’s very, very bright and very sharp and very cute—little black girl and she was sharp as a tack—and she would say, “God, where do you go?”
Wednesday—every Wednesday you drive up to Rockford, Maryland for evening meeting, come home at midnight, go to work the next day, blah, blah. And two or three weekends a month we would be at one of the other units to visit them, and my assistant would run the GOCOM over at Walter Reed—
TS: So you had two pretty high intense jobs: one in the civilian world, one in the military world.
AM: Yes, yes, indeed. Poor Aunt Ruthie didn’t see much of us for a couple of years, but that was okay. She was a good sport. She was one to—as a matter of fact, in the first couple of times that I would go up for these Wednesday evening meetings, Sandy was in school because she was in the PhD program. So Aunt Ruthie would take it upon herself—she decided that I could not go by myself. She would ride up with me to keep me awake coming—she was afraid I’d fall asleep driving home, because after a long day of work and then driving for two and half hours—be at a two hour meeting—and then drive back for two and a half hours—that was just too much. She usually went, so that was okay. And she was so funny, because she would often fall asleep in the car, but she made me promise if I got the least bit drowsy “Wake me.”
Well, once I did get a little bit drowsy. I said, “Aunt Ruthie can you wake up and talk to me?”45
She sat right up and started a conversation. It was unbelievable. Fascinating, I couldn’t stop talking to her till I got home.
TS: She had that conversation probably ready for you for that moment.
AM: Yeah, she was an awesome woman.
TS: Oh, that’s wonderful.
AM: She lived to be ninety-two, and lived with us all the way to the end.
TS: Wonderful!
AM: And super sharp until two days before she died.
TS: Wow. Let me ask you—now, I’m going to have you just do—because I know we’re going to get into Desert Storm here, soon. Now, I want to reflect because you went in in ’67. We’re now into the mid-eighties, so you’ve been in twenty—almost twenty years—well, I guess about twenty years. At what point, after this three year tour you were going to do at Fort Bragg, did you realize that you wanted to stay in for a longer time?
AM: By the time I was in Saint Louis I think I knew I was going to stay in. There was no, you know, I was going to reach my twenty for sure. I wasn’t saying I was going to quit or retire at twenty. I’m going to retire when I think I’m ready to retire, or when I don’t have anything exciting to do in the military any more—or, anything good to contribute.
TS: So what was the draw for you?
AM: To stay in?
It was so exciting! I mean, every weekend was fun and interesting. You see what you could do with that unit, how you could help this unit, and how you could get them to get more out of it, or each other, or whatever. It was such— it was always a challenge, and they were all different, it was so funny. They were all good units, but they were so different. Some were really gung-ho, and others were “Well, it was okay”—they weren’t really super thrilled to make the best of it, but most of them were.
TS: Did you see the culture changing in the military for the women at all during this period?
AM: Yeah. There was [sic] much more professional women in there who saw it the way I did: as an honor to be in there, and as a wonderful place to contribute and learn. And there was lots more pride in being in than, sort of, the shame that you were in the military.
TS: Previously? {Continues in Part Two]