VITAL SIGNS....An Update from Alumni and Development Where is the Class of 1964? Come and Connect for our 50th reunion
Can you believe that it was only yesterday when Professor Mary Black was marching us down the long corridors of the old un-air conditioned Columbia Hospital. Yes Alice, we wore heavy duty white hose, white shiny polished (every night) clinical nursing shoes and stiffly starched aprons that wilted by the end of the day, not to mention a nursing cap pinned to our heads by bobby pins. We all stood at attention when a physician or Mrs. Eunice Medhurst or Mrs. Helen DeYoung would enter the nursing station. There were a group of us who were RNs in that Class including Emily Collum, Bonnie Bloom (Shrimpf ), Nettie Dickerson and myself, Ruth Queen (Seigler). Professor Esther Starkey took us to Fort Jackson to their Children’s Preschool to give us experience with normal healthy children before she took us to our hospital pediatric experience where we would see children with polio in an iron lung. Of course Dean Amy Vigilione (Cockcroft) ruled with the authority of a commanding naval officer which she was. The McCutcheon House on the Horseshoe was the location of the School of Nursing. We shared the building with Anthropology and Sociology. It was a cold drafty building during that era. Professors Virginia Phillips and Doris Lister introduced us to the exciting world of Public Health Nursing. We all learned to sing the Carolina Alma Mater, the Fight song, go to Doug Broome’s for a soda, or the Huddle House for Chocolate Pie. Football was the weekend entertainment or maybe a sorority or fraternity party. We refined our shag steps, went to the Carolina Cup in our madras skirts, signed in the dorm under the house mother’s nose and never wore Bermuda shorts in public without a London Fog Raincoat covering us. The decades have passed and here we are 50 years later with the chance to return to Carolina and the College of Nursing to share the past, the present and future. Let us know where you are and what your memories of those days are. Please join me at the 50th Anniversary of the Viana McCown lecture and the Class of 1964s 50th reunion (further details to be announced) and Click here to register for the USC Alumni events.
Ruth Queen Seigler, MN (‘80) BSN (‘64)
CON 2006 Outstanding Alumni, Dr. Marion Broome MN (‘77), named Dean of the Duke University School of Nursing. Read More Here.
Former Partnership Board Member and alumnus, Justin Chavis BSN (‘14), has been accepted to the Vanderbilt Pediatric Residency Program (Pediatric Critical Care Track). He begins the program on July 21st.