Willetta Whomes Oral History 2 of 2

Dublin Core

Title

Willetta Whomes Oral History 2 of 2

Description

Willetta Whomes Oral History 2 of 2

Creator

Churchill County Museum Association

Publisher

Churchill County Museum Association

Date

Tuesday, June 29, 1999

Relation

Format

Analog Cassette Tape, .Docx File, MP3 Audio

Language

English

Oral History Item Type Metadata

Original Format

Audio Cassette

Duration

1:00:52, 28:18

Transcription

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewer and interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Churchill County Museum or any of its employees.

This is Janet Swan on behalf of the Churchill County Museum's Oral History Program interviewing Willetta R. Whomes in her home in Reno on Tuesday, June 29, 1999. Today I've asked Willetta to again go over her early history starting with entering nursing school and continuing until her move to Santa Monica as well as other thoughts to add to her previous interviews. Most of the oral history of her early days first recorded on May 14, 1999, was lost due to a malfunction of the tape recorder.

SWAN:  Good morning, Willetta. Thank you for agreeing to repeat this recording so this information can be in your oral history. We'll start, Willetta, if you want to go back to the beginning of nursing school, or how you chose the nursing school.

WHOMES: I think I chose St. Joseph's and nursing because I was in boarding school in the Willamette Valley and several girls there talked about going to nursing and told me about St. Joseph's in Vancouver [Washington] that only cost about fifty dollars for the three years, plus your uniforms. So that sounded like it was within our means, and I kept that in my mind. This was when I was a sophomore that I heard about this. I kept this in mind and applied when I was a senior and, fortunately, was accepted. In our class there were about . . . I think we started out with about twelve and ended up with probably six. Two classes graduated together. One that came in in January and one that came in September so it was more an acceptable amount of people on the stage the day we graduated. I remember that I had to get ready for all of this, getting ready for nurse's training by myself since I didn't have a mother around, and I bought a red Chinese robe that faded on your body when you perspired. I had to help with the finances. I drove my dad's mail route for a dollar a day to get some of the money together. I thought I was responsible for most of this, but, of course, I think my dad did it just to teach me the value of money. Then I had to send in all my applications. 1 had to make arrangements for a physical, and I had a hernia at the time, an inguinal hernia. I didn't mention it, and the doctor, of course, didn't look so I got in nurses' training with an inguinal hernia which, by the way, I had repaired when I was just going in my senior year, and I kind of pretended that I got it working so hard. [laughing]

SWAN:  [laughing] No pre-existing condition.

WHOMES: So, I had my surgery during nurses' training. I lived about two hundred miles from the school, so my father took me down on one of the freight trucks that he drove from Condon to Portland, so he took me across the river, picked up my stepmother where she lived in Portland, and the two of them took me to the hospital that first day. I was nervous, and they kept telling me there was nothing to be nervous about but once I got there I settled in pretty well. The nursing home was filled so they put five of us new gals in a room on the fifth floor of the hospital. All five of us in one room. I was not used to roommates. I was not used to that many women around me. I chose to dress in the closet which they thought was so funny. Then somebody-I'm not sure it was upper classmen or what--put salt in our beds, and I thought it was some sort of a disinfectant, so I slept in that salt and never said a word. Everybody was waiting for me to say something, and I never did. Oh, dear! Anyway, nursing school was very exciting to me. I can remember writing my dad after I'd been there about three weeks telling him I was allowed to take patients' temperatures. I was just so thrilled about all of this. I liked being away from home. I thought it was exciting, and I loved being where there were so many trees and water. Condon is nothing but wheat fields and dry dust so this was a nice break for me.

SWAN:  Vancouver is near the Columbia River.

WHOMES: Yes, it is. It's just across the river from Portland so it's a lush place. We didn't have much money. Fortunately, nobody had much money, but I was the only one in the class who smoked, and I learned that with my dad, so they called me Toughy. I just remembered that. That was my nickname all through school. Sister Theresa who was our superintendent of the school, frowned on that name, but behind her back they all called me Toughy, and I was always called Willetta at home, but in nurses' training then they also called me Willie. That's when I started calling myself that. I was the only one who smoked but I think everyone smoked but maybe one or two by the time we got out of nurses' training. I kind of got them going, but money was at a premium. Cigarettes then were just ten cents. Domino cigarettes were only ten cents a pack. Lucky Strikes were fifteen, so I smoked Dominos. We used to go to a place which was called the Chicken Coop downtown which was maybe six or seven blocks from the hospital, and we would buy one Pepsi and share it. The Pepsi, I think, was fifteen cents, and then we'd share it. Oh, God, we were so poor it was kind of fun. We got three dollars and seventy-five cents every month for spending money. It normally would be four dollars, but they took twenty-five cents out for Kotex. Every month you'd have a package of Kotex thrown on your bed, and it was just like a rope. It was the cheapest stuff you ever did see, but it was thrown on our bed every month and for that they took twenty-five cents out of our allowance.

SWAN:  [laughing] I wonder if you could have bought it cheaper at the store yourself.

WHOMES: I have no idea. I can't even remember ever buying it. I presume I did prior to going to nursing school, but I can't remember that. Our instruction was all at the nursing home, but in the homeroom. We didn't have a regular classroom. We had a library and we had chairs set up in what we called the homeroom, and that's where we received all of our instruction. I wish I could remember the name of my teacher. She had been at the school for many years Ten years, actually. She'd been out of nurses' training for ten years, and I thought, "Glory be to God, I hope I don't have to do this for ten years." Well, you know how that turned out.

SWAN:  [laughing] It was forty-four years.

WHOMES: I was going to get married and have all these babies, and I wasn't going to stay in nursing forever and ever. Well, that isn't how it turned out. This one, she slept at the nursing home, too, because she kind of kept guard over us during the nighttime hours if we got raunchy.

SWAN:  You probably had a curfew, didn't you?

WHOMES: Oh, I should say. We had to be in by ten o'clock. We had an iron set up at the far end of the corridor. That was one iron and one ironing board for all those girls, but we managed it somehow. We had to press our uniforms every morning. We didn't have a clean one every morning, but we had to press them every morning. They were too big. You belted it in and then made pleats in the back so it would fit more or less. It had a seven-inch hem. It really made it stiff. Oh, it was an interesting uniform, and I was so proud of it. I just thought it was great. You were there for three months before you got a cap. That was a very important time. Quite a ceremony for capping. My social life was pretty limited. There was a family down the street that had a couple of boys we'd go visit. This one fella who was so nice to most of the nurses--his name was Ted Degonya, and he was a friend to all of the nurses so that if you were really in a bind and needed to go some place or whatever because none of us had cars, Ted Degonya used to be very nice about that. In fact, they lived in the same place the whole three years I was there.

SWAN:  Was there a father in the family?

WHOMES: I can't remember. I remember the mother. There was also a family behind the hospital whose daughter was six months ahead of me in nursing. Her name was Edna King. Because we smoked, and we could not smoke on the grounds, we would have thirty minutes for lunch. We would eat, run over to Mrs. King's, she always left the door open so we could run in and smoke a cigarette and get back in time to go on duty again. Can you believe it?

SWAN:  [laughing] Well, smoking was in style.

WHOMES: I know, but she was such a sweet lady to open her house to us like that.

SWAN:  She probably loved you all.

WHOMES: Well, she did. She was just a sweetheart. What was I going to say about Ted?

SWAN:  Ted Degonya?

WHOMES: Oh. He made fun of my boyfriends if I ever got one. Once in a while I had one. He'd make fun of those. He was kind of like a big brother. A nice, nice fella. I was going to say something but I forgot. I had a roommate in St. Joseph's, and her name was Cecilia Whitney. She had been a classmate of mine in boarding school, so that made it very nice. She was a beautiful girl. She had been Miss Cherry Blossom in the little town where she lived, and she was just a lovely, lovely person. When we took our affiliation in Seattle our junior year, we continued to live together, but the rooms were so big they let us have a third roommate. Well, that is never a good thing. Three people in a room didn't work out too well. It was kind of the odd man out. When we moved to Seattle for affiliation we took psych up there and dietetics, obstetrics. We stayed there for a year and lived in this room where we could smoke in the room. They had kind of ceramic tile floors and everything was kind of fire proof. It seems to me we were about on the second or third floor. Up there we did not get an allowance, so my dad sent me five dollars a month. We didn't get anything. Five dollars didn't go very far either because just buying hose. It wasn't easy. It was exciting to be up there, too. I'd never been any place but Condon until I got in nurses' training, so being in Seattle was quite a deal. For excitement we used to walk down to Jackson Street. The hospital was on 17th and Cherry, so we'd walk down which was the kind of the Reno. It was a dangerous walk down there to see if happen on Seventeenth and to Jackson Street Lake Street of street, and we'd anything would happen.

SWAN:  [laughing] Sounds like youth, doesn't it?

WHOMES: [laughing] Nothing ever did. We'd walk the full length of that thing. Oh, dear!

SWAN:  No one bothered you. [laughing]

WHOMES: Nobody bothered us. Then we used to go on bus rides because you could transfer and ride all over town for ten cents. We also went to the Trianon ballroom on Thursday nights because it was a kind of campus night, and we got in for very little money. It was a dance place, and mostly college kids went there on Thursday nights. We used to do that quite a bit. Sometimes, I can remember, we would try to get a ride home because I think the buses stopped. I don't remember, but I know it was harrowing trying to get home sometimes. My roommate, Cecelia, met her husband there.

SWAN:  Oh! For goodness sakes!

WHOMES: And my other roommate in Seattle was named Vivian Crowder, and she was from Idaho. She went home on vacation one time and had a car accident and her hand was outside the car door like this and she took off the first joint of two fingers.

SWAN:  Gosh! Which hand?

WHOMES: The left hand. When I first saw her after that accident, her first thought was that she didn't have any fingernails. Not that it incapacitated her, but that she didn't have any fingernails. She was an interesting character. She used to borrow a coat that I had. One night she had borrowed this coat that had had a fur collar. I got an opportunity to go to some place, so I wore her coat. And she came back, she was as mad as a horned toad at me for wearing her coat. I said, "Well, you had mine." She said, "Well, if you're stupid enough to lend me your coat, that's your problem." [laughing]

SWAN:  [laughing] Isn't that something?

WHOMES: [laughing] I hate to admit it, but we've stayed friends. We really do, but her sense of values is different than mine.

SWAN:  That is interesting. Nothing like roommates to learn about the world.

WHOMES: I saw my first birth in Seattle. We sat with our patients and timed their contractions. I felt that if I missed counting one contraction or timing a contraction that something would happen to this baby. I just was so conscientious and so damned scared that something would happen. I can remember, also, having to clean up the delivery room after a delivery, and I never once got all the blood. In fact, I think I would have gotten an F if I'd been graded on cleanliness because I would look and look in every crack I'd think. Then those tables have a lot of little spaces, and I just had a terrible time with that. But I remember then when I took a class. The supervisor was our classroom teacher. She was amazed that I could do the classroom work, I think, because I couldn't keep our table clean. She told me, in fact, "I'm surprised at how good you are in class."

SWAN:  [laughing] They expected a lot.

WHOMES: Oh, they really did. We had to do a lot of cleaning.

SWAN:  Oh, I should say. All that free labor.

WHOMES: Then I got to scrub in on a case, and that's the first baby I saw born. And I was just . . . that was as close to a miracle, I think, that I ever saw, and after this big baby came out and was laying on the table, I looked back at the mother. She looks just the same as she did before, and I thought, "How did that baby get out of there?" Oh, it was just such a miracle. What a wonderful experience that was. In dietetics, for instance, I had never seen or tasted an avocado, an artichoke, oh, just any number of things, so this was a neat experience. The patients, I think, were served better meals than we were, and so what we would do when we were in the diet kitchen is that we could stop the elevator between floors, and we'd eat bacon. We'd eat anything that was loose. If a patient sent back food on her trays or whatever, we ate well. Also if I were in the diet kitchen. I can remember making salads with avocados, grapefruit. Oh, they were so good. I don't know if we gained weight during that period or not, but we ate well. What else happened in Seattle? We had some interesting boyfriends in Seattle which were scary. I just hate to even think of how scary it is. The fellows that we met at the Trianon ballroom. I came back a couple of weeks ahead of time in order to take care of my hernia because I convinced them that I got it in Seattle. I had my surgery at St. Joseph's and had to stay in bed for two weeks because that's how they managed hernia surgeries at that time. I could just hardly walk because I'd been bedridden for so long and gas pains that wouldn't stop. About my fourteenth day I was discharged, and my dad picked me up in his trusty truck, and we went over to Portland to stay overnight in a hotel where many truck drivers stayed. Well, all the truck drivers decided to go out to dinner and have a few drinks. In fact, they had a few drinks in the hotel room, but they were kind of passing a bottle around and every time it came around, I took a little sip, too. My dad really didn't know this, but it made all my pain go away. I wasn't stressed at all. We walked for miles to this restaurant and had dinner and came home. The next morning because I hadn't used any of these muscles for so long, I could hardly move.

SWAN:  Oh, you poor thing.

WHOMES: I was so light hearted and fleet of foot the night before. I remember that horrible two hundred mile trip home in a truck. Oh, dear. I got to stay home for about two weeks and then came back for my senior year. I finished nurses' training in September to make up for the time I was off for my surgery and to make up all the days that you had to have to graduate. So, I was finished in September and then went to work for the hospital. And, as I said in my previous story, that one day you were making nothing and the next day you got two dollars and fifty cents, and it just seemed so wonderful. We took state boards in Seattle, and I can remember that. We all got on the train and went together. It seems to me we ate lunch on the train. It was a very exciting time. I remember when we took state boards we went to a state building downtown, and I sat so long with, my head in my hand that I got a stiff neck so that I could hardly straighten up. After we took state boards, I met the fellow that I was dating in Ellensburg, so as soon as I finished I got on the bus and took off for Ellensburg where his sister lived and he was home from the service. That was just the nicest ending of this day. I went back and continued to work at St. Joseph's. When we got our returns, three of us were living in an apartment. When we got our returns from state boards--of course, you're always afraid to open them—my roommate who was one of the brightest people in class turned two sheets at one time in the test and failed. Isn't that just terrible? She eventually made it in time, but what a terrible thing for her because she was so bright. I continued to work. I guess I was working the evening shifts because I was on duty while everyone else had gone to dinner, and I was the only one at the nurses' station. This lady came up and asked if the director of nursing was there, and I said, "No, she isn't. She's at dinner. Could I help you?" She said she was looking for someone to go to Hawthorne, Nevada, to work as a night nurse. Then she told me that the salary was a hundred and twenty dollars a month, and they provided room and board. I said, "Well, I'll take the job." I made up my mind in about ten minutes, and she was overjoyed that she had put so little effort into this, so we made arrangements right there that I would go and I would be there by January 7. I had no idea where Hawthorne, Nevada was at the time, but I must have had enough information because that was my only contact with her. From there I went to Hawthorne. This same boy that I had gone to Ellensburg to visit was home for Christmas, and this was probably the fifteenth or sixteenth of December. No, it was just after Christmas, and I told him I was going to Hawthorne, Nevada. He was stationed at that time in Riverside, California, and he was going to be driving down to go back, and he wanted to know if I wanted to drive with him. I said no because I had to say goodbye to my dad. My dad didn't know about this trip, yet, and I needed to tell him, so that was the last I saw of this fella. He's the one that wrote me the Dear John letter, and I didn't respond.

Side 2 Tape 4 This is Janet Swan interviewing Willetta R. Whomes in her home in Reno on Tuesday, June 29, 1999.

SWAN:  Willetta you were just talking about…You were about to begin your trip.

WHOMES: In preparing for this trip I packed a trunk and took it down to the railroad to have them ship it. Hawthorne didn't have a railroad. We didn't know really where to ship this trunk so we picked a place called Thorn and thought, "Well, maybe that's related," and as it happened it was not more than ten miles from Hawthorne on a railroad that ran on the opposite side of Walker Lake. So, off my trunk went, and I took a train. My father and my brother took me to the train. Of course, a coach. It was a night train, but I just sat up. It went to Klamath Falls. I got off the train, got on a bus, and went to Reno. The first thing I saw in Reno was the sign that said, "Biggest Little City in the World," and I had seen that in the movies, and I was so excited by that. It was so interesting. Then I looked out the window. It seemed to me they were gambling right on the street because you could see right in. All the doors were open. You could see all these people playing slot machines what seemed like right on the street. I thought, "Oh, my God, what have I gotten myself into?" When I got off the bus which was near Lake Street and from there I walked to the Riverside Hotel--must have been carrying this luggage--to the Riverside Hotel because, also, I'd seen that in the movies and thought that's a good safe place to be. I wanted to be in a safe hotel. I got there and had to walk across the [Truckee] river, and the room cost five dollars. I had thirteen, and my dad would have died had he known I left home with so little money. I had thirteen dollars, and I had to buy a ticket to Hawthorne. I don't know how I did this, but, then I went to the movie, the Majestic Theater which, again, was just two or three blocks from the hotel. I saw Bette Davis in Dark Victory. Then I got up the next morning and went back to the bus and took the bus to Hawthorne. Well… There wasn't much to see on the way until you got to Walker Lake, and it's amazing. There was all this desert and then all of a sudden this gorgeous, gorgeous lake, so that was a pleasant surprise going along the cliffs. Then when I got to Hawthorne they stopped at the El Cap (El Capitan) which at that time was on Main Street. It was the bus stop. I got out of the bus and the wind blew my hat down the street, and I had to chase it. I don't think I ever wore a hat after that. Then I went to the phone. You had to go through the operator then. At least the system in Hawthorne was set up this way. I asked for the hospital's number, and the operator said, "Are you the new nurse?" and I said, "Yes, I am." She gave me the phone number and I called, and they sent a pickup down to pick me up. This telephone operator turned out to be one of my best friends because she was the same age as I. It was interesting that everybody in town knew that there was going to be a new nurse. Almost the full first year I was there I was called the new night nurse. I didn't have a name.

SWAN:  [laughing] Did they call you Willie or Willetta?

WHOMES: They called me Willie.

SWAN:  How big was Hawthorne then?

WHOMES: Well, Hawthorne had had the Navy base since the beginning of the thirties. This was 1941, so it was fairly well established. Babbitt was not there yet. The little town of Babbitt wasn't built until the [World] War [II] started because they needed places for civilians who worked in the ammunition depot. Hawthorne wasn't big enough. No, Hawthorne was small, but I have no idea, one main street, a few houses, and then this little twenty-bed hospital, and out of that there must have been about ten beds that were used for the indigent county patients. We had a little surgery and we had a delivery room which was just a room that was called a delivery room that had a single bed in it and a dresser. It had no stirrups. You held the mother's legs. You reached over the top to get some ether. Well I was talking about the delivery room. It did have a mirror in it, and I remember the patients just hating to have take off their clothes and look at themselves in this mirror because it was not a pretty sight. But bless their hearts, I wonder how we did this that we managed to deliver good babies in this awful little room where we had to pull the bed out from the wall in order for me to get back there to drip ether for the patient. Of course, we draped the bed with sterile drapes and this sort of thing. Our sterilizer was a, oh, my goodness, it was an electric one that you poured water in the top. It was a little autoclave that was probably twelve inches in diameter--it was pretty funky--where in our operating room had an operating room table. We had a lot of packs put up by the Navy base because they had a better medical facility than we did. We used the Navy doctor for surgeries. In fact, he was the only doctor there when I got there. His name was Dr. Sergeant, and he was the only doctor in the whole community so that they did bring packs for surgeries. Sometimes corpsmen would help us out with operating and surgery.

SWAN:  So, if it wasn't for that military there wouldn't have been any doctor at all.

WHOMES: Exactly. My living conditions were that I lived in a separate building that also housed some ambulatory county patients, all men. Maybe there were five there, and I had the private room, and I also had a shower.

SWAN:  Were you responsible for their care or supervision?

WHOMES: No.

SWAN:  That was just somewhere for them to . .

WHOMES: That was just living arrangements. They would putter around. They'd have a garden. It was just like an old folks' home. They'd just go up to the hospital for their meals, so they were more or less self-care. I didn't have that responsibility. This is something I didn't know when I was hired that my shift was going to be from ten P.M. to ten A.M. so that I also had all the morning care. I also didn't know that there weren't any days off, so I worked seven days a week.

SWAN:  [laughing] That's why your salary was doubled.

WHOMES: But that's why I made 120 dollars a month versus the seventy I was making at St. Joseph's, but that wasn't all bad. You could just gear your mind to that kind of schedule. I don't think it bothered me all that much. But in addition to the 120 dollars a month that I made, I had my uniforms were done for me by the laundry downtown, I had board and room. I had absolutely no expenses so I was able to save my money.

SWAN:  And no time to spend it either. [laughing]

WHOMES: And absolutely no time to spend it. Then I was dumped by this boyfriend about one week after I got there, and I had absolutely no one to talk to about it. It was a pretty sad time.

SWAN:  I'll bet because you had gone with him for about four years.

WHOMES: I met him before I went into nurses' training. So I wrote him this scathing letter and put it under my pillow and slept on it for about four days and then burned it. That was the best thing I ever did because it saved my face. He never knew what happened to me. What happened to him, though, this group of soldiers-he found another girl, by the way--but this group of soldiers were sent to the Philippines and so he was there in the Battle of Corregidor and was taken prisoner by Japanese, and he lived.

SWAN:  Was he on that death march?

WHOMES: Um-hum, and he was deaf when he got home from the cannons, the gunfire. This I found out from his family afterwards. I got so hung up on telling about him that I don’t know what I was about to say.

SWAN:Oh well I was going to say on the malfunctioning…

WHOMES: Oh! I know what I was going to say. This was really an opportunity for me to get a foot up financially, and I did save my money. Another thing that I did during this period of time was every day when I got off work at ten I'd go take a shower, change my clothes, go down and have lunch with my friend who was the telephone operator. She worked for the Power and Light Company, so when she was able to go to lunch at twelve o'clock we went to the El Cap and everyday we had a fried ham sandwich and a lemon-lime coke. We had that every day.

SWAN:  [laughing] And you loved it.

WHOMES: Yes. Every working day we met there. Then after I'd been there, maybe in March sometime--I went there January 7--so in March sometime my boss who worked from ten A.M. to ten P.M. called me up that she had somebody she wanted me to meet. There was a patient there from Gabbs who had a broken leg was one of our patients. He was a young fellow. She said, "Just put on a robe." I remember that robe. It didn't fade on me. It was expensive. It cost me six dollars. It was a chenille robe. I had bought that with this great money I was making. So I put on this robe, and I went out there not knowing who in the world she wanted me to meet. It was a fellow that was visiting, and she introduced me to him and said why didn't we go out and have a drink or something that she'd stay on for me, so I had to run down and change clothes, and I was about as interested as nothing because I was still sad. I wasn't ready for anything else. But, anyway, I did go. I got dressed and went with him to a bar. As sophisticated as I thought I was, I didn't know anything about bars or liquor except right out of a bottle. I didn't know what to do with a mixed drinks, but, again, I'd read stories so I had heard of scotch and soda, and I knew that was a cocktail, so I thought, "Well that's what I'll ask for". Of course, a scotch and soda to a novice is just poison. I sat there, and, of course, I couldn't drink it. He said, "You don’t like that very much, do you?" and I said, "No, I don’t" and so he said “Let me order for you," so he ordered a pink lady. Well, of course, it's probably got as much alcohol but it certainly tasted better. So anyway this person was just a nice, nice person, but I was still kind of grieving over my other fella, but we did gradually date, and we went together for a long, long time. But that was very, very pleasant. I went with him the whole time I was in Hawthorne. So about May I had quite a bit of money saved up toward a car, and in my life I thought having a car was absolutely the most important thing in the world. Can you believe Hawthorne had no car dealers, so I had to go to Fallon. Mary Foster's husband, Bill Foster, was the car salesman, and that's where I bought my car. Then I had to go to Reno to pick it up. I think cars were getting a little bit harder to get it seems to me. This was before Pearl Harbor. I don't know, but I took a car that was the ugliest green. I didn't have any choice of color, I remember. But I took this, and I thought it was the most beautiful car I'd ever seen. I picked it up in Reno, and like I'd drive to Fernley. I'd get out and look at it. Then I'd drive to Fallon and get out and look at it. [laughing] Oh, I just loved that little car! It went really fast.

SWAN:  And the roads weren't crowded, right?

WHOMES: No, not especially. It seemed so big to me. I guess I'd ridden in trucks so long and pickups and things, I can't remember of ever having a passenger car. We just had utility vehicles when I was growing up, but I did know how to drive fortunately. Of course, it was a stick shift. That's all they had then. I did take that day off.

SWAN:  Your first day off.

WHOMES: Um-hum. That was my first day off in May from January. Then when I got back with it everybody in town wanted to drive it, you know. It didn't have white sidewall tires. You were able to buy white rubber paint, so I painted white sidewalls on it. Alicia's boyfriend laughed at me because I made the stripe too wide. I had almost white tires.

SWAN:  [laughing] Who was Alicia? Was she the day nurse?

WHOMES: Alicia was my friend, the telephone operator, and her boyfriend made fun of my white sidewall tires.

SWAN:  [laughing] They were important. I mean, they were very stylish then.

WHOMES: I stayed in Hawthorne until . . . I was there for Pearl Harbor and I can remember being in a patient's room listening to the radio when I heard that the war had started, that President Roosevelt had declared war. What a sinking feeling it was and not realizing that it would take four years. In talking to my boyfriend about it and when he said in all likelihood it would be four or five years I just couldn't believe that it would take that much time out of your life. That Christmas he and I went to California. My brother was in Venice, California, which is just adjacent to Santa Monica. Frank's sister and brother-in-law and mother lived in Long Beach so we went down there for Christmas. I spent it with my brother and we saw each other down there, too. We drove home in a horrible snowstorm and we slid off the road into a ditch, so he caught a ride back to Lone Pine to get somebody to help pull us out.

SWAN:  This was your little car that you went in?

WHOMES: This was my sweet little car. While I'm in this ditch-we had all this fudge that they'd sent with us--I had good fudge to eat. Then a policeman came by and said he'd pull me out, so he did. He attached something and pulled me out and got me turned around. So, here I am driving so carefully and so scared on all these slippery roads going back as the wrecker comes. [laughing] I'm honking.

SWAN:  [laughing] And they noticed you?

WHOMES: They noticed me, so everybody turned around and we went back to Bishop, so we must have been out of Bishop. We finally got chains and we were able to get out of there. It took us quite a while and I had to call the hospital to tell them that I would be late. That was December of 1941, and I stayed until December of 1942, and that's when I took over the hospital because my boss, Mrs. Dixon, became ill. There wasn't anybody else to do it, so I took over the management of the hospital.

SWAN:  Is that when you recruited someone from Vancouver? Didn't one of your classmates come down?

WHOMES: Yes, one of my classmates came down to work for me. It was very difficult to staff because the war had already started. There were some nurses who came through with their husbands or boyfriends--well, mostly husbands, people didn't live together then--on the base, so once in a while a nurse would appear from there. Then I had a nurse that was from Yerington. But, at least, I started an eight-hour shift rather than a twelve-hour shift. Nobody had really kept books at the hospital. The county would just make up the difference every month. Nobody did much billing of patients, and it wasn't really a free hospital. It was supposed to be self-supporting. The accountant who worked at the power company where Alicia worked set up a bookkeeping system for me and that way, at least, I was able to keep track of how much things cost and how much the patients owed. I sent out bills. It was the first time we ever made any money.

SWAN:  Your administrative talents were emerging?

WHOMES: Isn't that interesting? I look back on it now, and I don't know where I got that moxie. I really don't.

SWAN:  It was certainly an ability.

WHOMES: It was my first time where I really had that responsibility. I liked the neatness of the organization of knowing where things are going, but just doing the billing was a big help.

SWAN:  Did you have to do it yourself, or did you have help?

WHOMES: I had to do it myself.

SWAN:  Besides working.

WHOMES: I'm sure I carried a shift, too. I did in Fallon, too. I can remember I had a very difficult time staffing, and that would really get to me because they really bossed me. They could tell me when they wanted to work, and I had no control. Previously you could tell people what you had open, but not anymore.

SWAN:  They could write their own ticket.

WHOMES: They could write their own ticket, and if they decided that their husband was coming in port or something, they took off, and there you would be. It became pretty stressful, but I did do it for a year. Finally I just couldn't do it anymore. My boss was a sweet, sweet doctor. Dr. Smith from Mina, and he must have been well into his eighties by then.

SWAN:  An old country doctor. Had he been in Mina?

WHOMES: Yes. He had been there for years, and when I said that there was only one doctor, actually Dr. Smith had been doctoring people in that county for years, but he was getting up in years and couldn't drive over there for babies and this sort of thing. In my first year at Hawthorne was when Dr. Miller came. He had just been married to Rae in August, I think, and they came there in September. That was really a boom because besides the Navy doctor we then had a doctor right in town.

SWAN:  Do you know how he happened to come to Hawthorne?

WHOMES: He had been with the CCCs. Do you remember that?

SWAN:  That was the Civilian Conservation Corps?

WHOMES: That was exactly what it was. He was a doctor for them, and he was stationed in Winnemucca. That is where he met Rae who grew up in Paradise.

SWAN:  Oh, for heaven's sake.

WHOMES: So, she was working for a doctor as a receptionist, and she was just out of high school. She was working for this doctor, and then Leonard was working for the CCCs, so he kind of came in and helped this doctor. That's how he and Rae met. Then they were married and looking for a practice and came to Hawthorne. That was the best thing that ever happened. Then Rae and I became very close friends almost immediately. She had no girlfriends, and I had just Alicia. We used to do lots of things, and I think Dr. Miller got kind of jealous of us. We had so much to do. We'd go down to the USO building and put nickels in the nickelodeon and dance together! We'd go to the lake and play around. We just had a good time. Leonard was a very, very good doctor. He seemed to appreciate me because I didn't call him. See, I'm working night shift when he first came. I'd wait until the last minute to call him for a delivery and that sort of thing, and he appreciated that. The fact that I could examine patients and know how dilated they were and that sort of thing, so we worked well together and socialized a lot together, too, and did for years and years and years. Then he got called into the service, let’s see he came in September and so we worked together for probably about year, and he was called into the service early fall of 1942. And wouldn’t you know he took off and we told him good bye.

SWAN: Tape 5 Side 1 This is Janet Swan on June 29, 1999  interviewing Willetta Whomes in her home in Reno, Nevada

SWAN: Willetta we were just talking about you had a goodbye party for Dr. Leonard Miller when he went in the service, and everyone said goodbye.

WHOMES: We all said goodbye to him, and one day I was working and turned around and here he is standing in the hall. He was sent back to Hawthorne which was a joyous time for us really, and he didn't mind it either, but then they had a house down on the base where the officers lived. So, at this time, the Millers were very interested in finding me a husband, and they would almost do anything to push this thing along. I can remember I was dating somebody by the name of Barney Peterson who is a pretty well-known person in Carson City. A wonderful fella. Rae felt I ought to impress him, so she invited him to dinner and I was helping with the dinner. We bought a chicken, and we were trying to cut up, but before we got that chicken cut up, it was skinless. We just could not--we didn't know the first thing about doing this. It wasn't a great dinner. She was nineteen and I was twenty-two. We had never had an opportunity to learn to cook, but she would do just anything for me. In fact she helped me find my husband when the war was over.

SWAN:  They never gave up.

WHOMES: I got so frustrated at the hospital because I couldn't get enough help, and I just felt so overwhelmed that I told Dr. Smith, bless his heart, that he was just going to have to find somebody to take my place, and they did. Before I left they had this older nurse that was going to take my place, so I quit around December 1. Then I kind of stuck around because there was no hurry for me to go to Santa Monica. Jonesy, my roommate, the gal that I used to know in nurses' training was also down there, and she was living in this little house with me with the county patients. We decided that we'd leave together and that we would go down to Santa Monica where my brother had been. My brother now is in the service, but his wife is in Venice next door to Santa Monica. We thought at least that gives us a starting place. I gave them notice, and then I was unemployed still living at the hospital. I went down to the drugstore and worked for a little while before Christmas and they put me in the stockroom. I learned a lot about markups and drugs and things like that there. I wasn't very good at it, actually. Sixty six and two thirds of this and that, it didn't . . . that's the markup of the things that were on the counter. I never could measure out, never figured out how to run the cash register, and never really figured out how to weigh candy on the candy scales, so I stayed in the back room as much as I could. Rae also worked there, and she was in the business office. She was about as efficient as I was, I think. But, we both had a job. I can remember wearing knee socks and plaid skirts, and it was so foreign to me to dress like a civilian in a job. I left about the sixteenth of December with Jonesy, headed out for Santa Monica. This Barney Peterson, this friend of mine, didn't think it was safe for us to go down there by ourselves. He had an acquaintance who worked for him out at the base that lived in Los Angeles and wanted a ride down. He would go along to kind of be our guardian angel. Well, we got to Lone Pine. He was driving. I drove part of the way. Jonesy didn't drive, and he drove part of the way. So we got to Lone Pine, and the railroad tracks go diagonally across the highway. He stopped for a train, but didn't put the brake on, and there was a little incline. All of a sudden my little car hit the train on the right hand fender, the right hand headlight, that area of the car. Every time another boxcar came along it knocked my car a little farther around so the passenger side's getting closer and closer to the train, and he jumped out of the car and took off. I scooted over really quick and put the thing in reverse and backed it off, but it didn't back off easily because it was all bent down on the wheel. Oh, God! After the train left, the headlight is sticking up straight up shining into the sky. There was a service station nearby. They pushed my car over to the service station, and it was just baling wire kind of held it together and turned the headlight back down, and we took off again. I didn't let him drive anymore.

SWAN:  What did he say when he re-appeared?

WHOMES: He never even offered to help pay for it. Fortunately, I was insured, but he never even offered to help pay for it. Then we had to deliver him some place when we got there, and I don't know Los Angeles at all, but I did drive the rest of the way. We delivered him and then I had to find my brother's place. All of this is in the dead of night. Actually, there were restrictions about car lighting and things. I don't remember this very well, but I think you had to keep your parking lights on rather than your headlights in the city. I had been to my brother's apartment before because I had been down the previous Christmas so I knew where to go as far as that was concerned. Then Barney came down for Christmas that year, and I thanked him [laughing] profusely for sending this guardian angel with us, and it took me a long time to get the car fixed because, again, the war is on by this time. It was difficult but I did get that car fixed. As I remember I paid $850 for the car, and I sold it for $900.

SWAN:  Wow!

WHOMES: I sold it to a liquor store owner across the street from our apartment for $900 after I'd had a wreck with it

SWAN: [laughing] Oh. You were a good business woman. [laughing]

WHOMES: Well, I think I probably could have gotten more, actually.

SWAN: That's something. Because of the scarcity of cars.

WHOMES: Jonesy and I stayed in Venice for about three months. We lived in the same apartment with my sister-in-law. Again, three roommates. That was jolly. I was the only one with a car, and when I was working or something, sometimes my car disappeared. Then we eventually moved to Santa Monica. The hospital is on Santa Monica Boulevard and about Twenty-Second Street. We lived just maybe two blocks in an apartment house. Just Jonesy and I lived there because my sister-in-law by that time had gone back to be with my brother in Great Lakes, I think. Jonesy and I both worked in obstetrics. She worked in delivery room and I worked in nursery, and so we saw a lot of movie stars because they came to visit patients, and they were having babies, so it was an interesting time. I just loved working there. St. John's was a brand new hospital. Only three weeks old at the time that we moved in.

SWAN: That was your first experience in a brand-new hospital, but not your last. So I think we've got about there before. Willetta, you were just talking about some of the celebrities that were at hospital in Santa Monica. St. Johns was it called?

WHOMES: One of the things that happened is that Johnny Weismuller's wife who at that time was a socialite from San Francisco. He wanted to have his picture taken with his new baby for the newspapers, so we knew that this was going to happen, and he had set up a time. Our supervisor's name was Miss Dobbin. We were vying for the privilege of holding the baby, and she was being very coy about it. She didn't know who she was going to choose and this sort of thing. We all wore turbans and masks. You could hardly see us. He knocked on the window, and they opened the blinds, and he looked in, and he chose me because of my height. I think he wanted a medium-sized person, so I got to be in it. I never thought I'd have a chance because she was teasing us all, and so he chose me. I got the baby and I'm inside the window and he's peering in, and they took this picture. It appeared in all the Hearst papers, and it had my name, also. My brother was back in Washington, D.C. for some reason, and he saw my picture, and he almost fainted to think that his sister was in the paper.

SWAN:  [laughing] Isn't that fun!

WHOMES: Yes.

SWAN:  The Hearst papers were all over the country.

WHOMES: We had Bing Crosby's brother. See, so many people came up to the window just to look at the babies, and that's when I told you, I think, that Linda Darnell was there.

SWAN:  And she worked there.

WHOMES: Yes, she was there assisting. She was so beautiful, and she used to tell us the gossip. She used to tell us about Hedy Lamar. They were just like a bunch of college kids talking about each other.

SWAN:  Oh, I can imagine because the image that went out to the public was different.

WHOMES: You know how you sit and do things, or we did then, like roll sponges and we did a lot of handwork. Take care of your own needles and stuff, and she would be there helping. Remember how we used to make cotton balls? Or maybe, you're younger than I am, but we used to roll cotton balls. We folded our sponges that we used in surgery.

SWAN:  I do remember. Willetta we… In earlier tapes, we had talked about when your children were born in Fallon and your recollections about that, so if you'd like to talk about it.

WHOMES: In 1954, there was an earthquake in the summer, and I can remember it happened around the Fourth of July because we had been to the lake, and I was going back to Sacramento with my sister-in-law.

SWAN:  To Lake Lahontan, you mean, or to Tahoe?

WHOMES: Tahoe. I was going back with her, and the one night I was away from Fallon, they had this earthquake.

SWAN:  Oh, my goodness! You missed it! [laughing]

WHOMES: And I missed it, yes. Oh, it happened on July 6 because on April 6 [1955] my first child, my son, Roger, was born, and we always said that it was the earthquake that did this even though I wasn't there. We were in the duplex at that time, and it was a scary proposition. I worked up until about March 1 of that year [1955], and then I took time off thinking that I needed this time off that having a baby is going to be much harder than it was. My dad came to visit, and I had a nice time during this time waiting for the baby and then took three months off until July before I went back to work after the baby. I lived in the duplex on Bailey Street at this time, and I was so enamored with this little thing that I wouldn't even go to the clothesline without taking him with me for fear something might happen while I was out of the room. But uh…we…I can’t remember what I was going to say.

SWAN: We’re continuing. Willetta just closed some windows because of the banging. So you were talking about Roger your son.

WHOMES: Yes I was. I was going to tell you about the delivery. I started having contractions early in the morning. The little guy was born about six in the evening, but during this time the staff got together and decided that they thought it would be a neat gift to me to tape record the baby's first cry. I didn't know anything about this, and I was very anxious that as few people as possible be in the delivery room. Dr. Dingacci was going to be my doctor, so when I got in the delivery room I could hear all this fussing going on, but I had a saddle block so that I wasn't having much pain, but I could hear all of these people talking. As it turned out, Ding said, "If anybody turns that thing on before I say go, I'm going to throw it out the window." As it turned out it was the tape recorder that they were going to tape the first cry.

SWAN: And you didn’t even know.

WHOMES: I know one thing that got on this tape, oh, God, I'm not going to tell that. She was a pig. She did comment on Roger being such a sturdy little boy [laughing], and I remember my brother listening to this tape saying that kid's going to take that tape to high school with him. Anyway, I did have a tape, then, of Roger's first cry, and Marshall Rigsby is the one who did this tape. Marshall Rigsby was our lab man, and Bonnie, his wife, worked with us, also. For Lisa, I had been down to San Francisco, and I didn't feel well down there, at a convention or some kind of a meeting. I got home, and I was telling my staff when I got to work that I just didn't feel good down there, and I'm not feeling so well today. Emmy Lou [Winder] Getto said, "You're pregnant." When you work together over a long time, you all start menstruating at the same time, so they say. Maybe that was happening to us, but she seemed to know that I missed a period, and I didn't know it, but sure enough I was pregnant. [laughing] She knew before I did, and she told me. This time I realized that I probably didn't need to take as much time off as I did, that I was pretty healthy and that sort of thing. So I worked until--and at that time I was working on the floor. This is 1958. So I was working on the floor and it was December 17, and I said to Dr. Dingacci when I made rounds with him that morning, "I am so tired of being pregnant," and he said, "Why don't you take some castor oil?" I said, "Okay, I'll do that." Dorothy Birch, who a lot of people in Fallon will remember, was my director of nursing, and she said, "I'll go get it for you," because she was going to get some orange juice to go with this castor oil. She brought it back to me at the nurses' station, and I took it. I said, "Gee, that wasn't bad at all." Well, all I'd done is drink the juice. The castor oil wasn't in it. We kind of remedied that. I took the castor oil. This is around lunch time, so I continued to work until the end of the shift, and about four o'clock I started getting contractions, so I thought I'd better go home which I did. I remember I was crossing the lawn rather than going on the driveway and the sidewalk, and my husband stuck his head out the door, and said, "Stay on the sidewalk." He didn't want me messing up his lawn. I said, "Leave me alone. I'm in labor." [laughing] I felt that gave me a license to walk across the lawn. [laughing] I couldn't be bothered with those things. I remember coming in and having oyster stew and taking a shower and getting ready to go back to the hospital. I suppose I got there about eight o'clock, and I had her just before midnight. I was trying to wait until the eighteenth because I like even numbers, but she was born on the seventeenth.

SWAN:  Did Dr. Dingacci deliver her, too?

WHOMES: Dr. Dingacci delivered her, too. Here I went really pretty fast. I said to my husband, "Now, don't be concerned about this nurse. She's pretty excitable." I said about the nurse that was on duty. Then when it came down to the wire, Don decided it wasn't the nurse that was excited, it was me. I kept saying, "Get me to the delivery room. Get me there. I'm going to have the baby in bed," and I just was having a fit. Finally, Allie Mahoney, bless her heart, she was working in the office, but she came down to just see how I was doing, and I said, "Get me up there." She got the gurney and got me to the delivery room. Okay, Allie got me to the delivery room. I'm telling Ginny Coffee who is going to give me a saddle block supposedly, "For God's sake, hurry up," I told her, and she said, "Well, wait a minute. I've got to get my mask on." I said, "Well, just don't breathe." [laughing]

SWAN:  [laughing]

WHOMES: Anyway, we got through that. Oh, God. What funny stuff. Roger was so cute with his little sister. He looked in the window of the nursery the first time they brought him over. He had been very close to me, and I'd been talking to him about his new little baby. He knew quite a bit about all this. At this time he's about three years and nine months. So, he looked in the window at his little baby sister, and he said to his dad, "I don't think she recognizes me."

SWAN:  [laughing] Isn't that precious?

WHOMES: Isn't that precious? [laughing] I thought it was, too. I feel sorry about this that I only stayed off two weeks. I had somebody come into our house. I always did, even for Roger, but it makes me sad to think of it now that I took so little time off. In fact, I think that mothers ought to stay with their children. We thought it was impossible for us to do it, but I think it could have been managed.

SWAN:  Yeah. You had so many responsibilities everywhere.

WHOMES: Well, that's true. I stayed home just two weeks with her and went back to work. In fact, I can remember, the morning after I had her, I had a salesman coming, and I wanted to see something that he had. It was Zimmerman orthopedic instruments, I think, so I slipped on my robe and went down to my office, and I told him I'd had the baby the night before, and I thought he was going to faint. [laughing]

SWAN:  [laughing] This woman is really devoted.

WHOMES: [laughing] Oh, God, yeah.

SWAN:  [laughing] At least you weren't in uniform--you were still a patient. [laughing] That's funny.

WHOMES: That's about all I have to say about Lisa's . .

SWAN:  They didn't tape record you this time? [laughing]

WHOMES: No, but the thing I thought I was doing right is I never let anybody else bathe my kids or any of those things. In fact, as they got older we'd keep them up till ten or eleven o'clock just so they'd sleep in and wouldn't have a baby sitter any longer than necessary. So that we would be with them. Don got off at three, so it worked out pretty well, actually. It really did.

SWAN:  This concludes the third session of taping with Willetta Whomes. On behalf of the Churchill County Oral History Program, I thank you Willetta Whomes for doing these interviews. They are of great interest in the history of nursing in Churchill County. Thank you.

Interviewer

Janet Swan

Interviewee

Willetta R. Whomes

Location

Reno, NV

Comments

Files

Auxiliary Scans001.jpg
Whomes, Wiletta R. (2 of 2 Interviews--FINISHED).docx
Whomes, Wiletta (Interview 2 tape 4 of 5).mp3
Whomes, Wiletta (Interview 2 tape 5 of 5).mp3

Citation

Churchill County Museum Association, “Willetta Whomes Oral History 2 of 2,” Churchill County Museum Digital Archive: Fallon, Nevada, accessed March 29, 2024, https://ccmuseum.omeka.net/items/show/709.