INEZ BROWELEIT

Inez Broweleit was born in Dodge, North Dakota, a town of about one hundred and twenty people.  Like so many families, hers moved a bit during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era.  She started studying at a country school in Haliday, North Dakota, then moved on to Minnesota for the third and fourth grades while her father looked for work wherever he could get it.  The school she attended in Minnesota was also a typical country school.  She was not taught decimals, so her dad, whom she claims was a "math whiz," tutored her and the rest of his children in math at night.  He had wanted to be an accountant but the depression got in his path, and he was only able to complete an eighth grade education.  Yet when Inez got to nursing school, of the thirty-six students in her class she was the only one who could divide fractions.  Her parents wanted their children to have an education and made sure all seven of them had the opportunity to be good readers, encouraging them to find little nooks in their home to quietly read as often as possible. 

She and her family moved back to Dodge when she was in the fifth grade and Inez stayed there until she graduated from High School in 1944.  The school she attended contained all classes first through twelfth  in one compact building, replete with a spiral slide serving as a fire escape from the top floor.  A daylight basement held grades one through three and the restrooms.  Grades four through six occupied one side of the first floor, Grades seven and eight the other.  The High School met in the two rooms on the top floor where required subjects were taught in rotation throughout the four year program.

It was in that building on December 8, 1941 that Inez and her school mates heard President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declare war.  She and her family had heard the news about Pearl Harbor the day before on their battery operated radio, but it was while she sat with her classmates in their familiar high school surroundings that the sobering news of great impending change settled down on her life.  Over the next year major transitions occurred at the school: all the men teachers disappeared to be replaced by women or by men who were not accepted for service in the armed forces. 

"They got who they could," Inez recalls.  "Our Principal was a man who had taught in a reformatory." 

Inez had wanted to be a teacher all her younger years, but just shortly before the news of Pearl Harbor came to Dodge she had experienced another kind of change in her life.  She had accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord, and almost immediately thereafter determined she wanted to be a nurse.  So it was that she graduated from High School on June 4, 1944 and reported for three years of classes and training on June 7, 1944 under a program sponsored by the United States government called the US Cadet Nurses Corps.

The US Cadet Nurses Corps had been established in June 1943 to increase the number of nurses in the country as quickly as possible.  So many had been called upon to serve in war zones in Europe, the Pacific, and on the China-India-Burma front that there was a huge demand for nurses both at home and in combat areas.  The United States Public Health Service subsidized the entire education of nursing students like Inez, including tuition, fees, books, uniforms, and a monthly stipend.  The students were required to then engage in essential military or civilian nursing for the duration of the war.  The program offered an accelerated three-year training period and increased the number of graduate nurses prepared for advanced teaching and specialized positions in all nursing programs.  In the last six months of the program the Cadets were assigned to civilian or military hospitals to help alleviate the critical nursing shortage. 

The program was in operation from July 1, 1943 through December 31, 1949.  The total federal expenditure was one hundred sixty million three hundred twenty thousand four hundred and forty-five dollars.  One thousand one hundred and twenty-five out of one thousand three hundred schools of nursing participated. In most of those one thousand one hundred and twenty-five schools eighty to one hundred percent of the students enrolled joined the Cadet Nurses Corps.  Total enrollment in all one thousand three hundred schools numbered one hundred and seventy-nine thousand and of that number, one hundred sixty-nine thousand four hundred and forty-three were Cadet Nurses.

There were six students in Inez's High School class.  Three of them went into nurses training.  When Inez reported to Bismarck Evangelical Hospital School of Nursing on June 7, 1944, she immediately began a rigorous training program that prepared her for her chosen career.

Her first summer's classes which ran through June, July, and August included pharmacology, sociology, psychology, and chemistry and anatomy, both of which had labs.  After two weeks respite at the end of the summer her class dropped from thirty-six to thirty-three women who continued together in a regular nursing curriculum at the hospital until they graduated on June 7, 1947.  Only one failed to graduate because she dropped out six months early to get married.  The women were trained not for war service, but for nursing, to serve where needed in all departments.  They trained in various Operating Rooms, Radiology, Obstetrics, everything, not specializing as is done now.  Most of the lectures were provided by doctors on staff.

"Some of the doctors were not nice.  We were looked upon as their slaves.  But, maybe respect for doctors was a good thing," Inez said thoughtfully.

The Cadet Corps women were on call at night, any night.  When a woman presented for delivery, they stayed to welcome the newborn.  In lab situations they were required to practice on each other, performing such things as baths, bed making, and giving injections.  If they broke a thermometer or syringe they had to pay for those things out of their stipend which was five dollars a month when they started, increasing to ten dollars a month during their last year of training. 

"The first time I gave a shot, a good friend was my 'patient,' " Inez said with a smile.  "After I gave it to her I asked her how it felt and she hadn't felt it at all!" 

Living conditions during her Cadet Nurses Corps training provided fond memories for Broweleit.  The hospital bought an old mansion, the home of a Bismarck banker, and converted it into a richly appointed dormitory for the Cadets, who were considered by other medical people on the campus to be renegades.  Their home for three years was decorated with gold leaf and other ornate features.  The girls were assigned sleeping quarters on bunk beds in bedrooms and ten of them, of which Inez was one, slept on bunks on a sleeping porch.  The spacious living room was on the first floor, as was the housemother's bedroom and bath.  They had study halls plus shower rooms built into the basement. 

Early in life Inez had learned good study habits.  She liked to learn and did so by reading the text assigned, listening in class, and taking notes.  She was able to easily remember what was relevant.  While other students would burn the midnight oil cramming for exams, Inez would fall asleep with a book on her lap, then take the test.  She ended up with a 4.0 average.

Life was strenuous, but also had its lighter moments.  A friend, Maxine, found a woolly worm one day and put it on the open pages of a book she was reading.  Forgetting it was there, she slammed the book shut.  Inez joined all the nursing students who put scarves over their hair, formed a procession, and had a backyard funeral for the little woolly worm.  She did mention that a cranky woman next door was constantly complaining about the fun they were having, even frequently calling the police who seemed unbothered by the young women's behavior.

The war had little direct effect on Bismarck Evangelical Hospital School of Nursing.  Since it was not a military hospital they were not recipients of the wounded or prisoners of war.  As the war began to wind down, senior nurses started filtering back from war service, as did many doctors. 

In 1946 Inez's dad bought a stump farm in Idaho and moved his family west, leaving her in North Dakota.  That year she bought Christmas presents for all her family and mailed them to Idaho, all on what she was able to save from her stipend. 

Although she graduated on June 7, 1947, Inez had to work at the Bismarck hospital until July 17^th to make up for some days she had been off sick over her three years of training.  Once those days were made up, she headed west on a Greyhound Bus.  She looked for work in Lewiston, then at Gritman Hospital in Moscow, but was unable to get a position because nurses who were married to men taking classes on the G.I. Bill were given preference.  There was no hospital in Pullman, so she finally ventured over to Colfax in October of 1947 and asked for an interview.  She was granted one on the spot and told, "You're hired."  Broweleit started the next Monday. 

She credits her quick hire to the understanding the people interviewing her had about the reputation of the Quain and Ramstead Clinic based at Bismarck Evangelical Hospital.  The doctors gathered there had been the ones who trained her and they were considered nationally to be as good as the people at Mayo Clinic. 

The Cadet Nurses Corps provided Inez Broweleit with an education that served her well not only in a career that continued into the late 1980s, but also as she provided care for her husband, Elmer, and her daughter, Gail, as they sustained long term illnesses.  Her dedication to nursing also inspired her daughter Chris to follow her mother into her profession.