SUNDAY, MAY 9, 2021 E10
SALUTE TO NURSES
THE NORTH PLATTE TELEGRAPH
Minnesota nurse reflects on career with humor
was born Caroline Bunker in 1937. Her father, Frank Bunker, dabbled in poetry and served as a Sauk Centre postman. Her introduction to nurs- ing came as she suffered rheumatic fever at age 4. Idolizing her nurse, Mrs. Runion, little Caroline dreamed of following in her “Cuban-heeled white shoes.” Her father suffered a heart attack when she was 16. The principal pulled her from gym class, but a nun barred her from entering St. Michael’s Hospital because her gym clothes were deemed inappropriate. Quietly seeth- ing, she went home to change. She had applied to be a nursing aide at the hospital, which at the time was hiring only Catholic girls despite its standing as the Sauk Centre community hospital. One of the nuns, soon after the heart attack, called to offer her a job — saying later how the teen- ager impressed her by staying calm despite her fear and an- ger. Key nursing attributes. “I was mad, but I must have been polite because I became the test case — the first Protestant girl hired as a nursing assistant,” Rosdahl said.
as a nurse, educator and text- book author. She used her pandemic isolation to chron- icle a career that started as a teenage nursing aide in her hometown of Sauk Centre, through her years as Wright County’s lone public health nurse in the early 1960s and the ensuing decades on hos- pital floors fromHennepin County to the University of Minnesota. Her cutting-edge use of behavioral objectives in nursing education in Anoka County led to 11 editions of “Textbook of Basic Nursing” — a widely used tome for stu- dent nurses. “Textbooks are putzy; this project was a lot more fun,” she said from her home in Plymouth. At a time when appreci- ation for nurses — and the need to laugh — are both jus- tifiably sky high, Rosdahl’s tales prompt chuckles while offering a firsthand glimpse from health care’s front lines. There are plenty of awful memories, like an autome- chanic’s blowtorch explosion that left himhorribly burned. Her humorous memories offset the heavy stuff. As a school nurse in the north- ern Minnesota town of Waubun, population about
By CURT BROWN (Minneapolis) Star Tribune On a 20-below-zero night in 1965, nurse Caroline Rosdahl explained to a patient that he couldn’t le- gally leave Hennepin County General Hospital because he was on a psychiatrist hold. “Next thing I know, he’s running down the third- floor hall with me right behind him,” she recalled. “He crashed right through the window, landed unhurt on a snow-covered bush and didn’t miss a beat — run- ning down Seventh Street in downtown Minneapolis.” Rosdahl called police, who asked how to identify the AWOL patient. “Well, he’ll be the only one running with an open-backed hospital gown and paper slip- pers,” she said with a laugh. “It didn’t take long before they brought him back.” That’s just one of the an- ecdotes in Rosdahl’s new self-published memoir, “The Naked City” — a title in- spired by that night in the psych ward. (It’s available on Amazon at tinyurl.com/ NurseRosdahl). Rosdahl, 83, recently re- tired after more than 50 years
Star Tribune via Tribune News Service
400, she asked students to fill out index cards with their birth dates, parents’ con- tact information, allergies and other basic informa- tion. In the small box labeled “Sex,” where students were supposed to put “male” or “female,” one girl jotted down: “Once in Waubun.” Writes Rosdahl: “It was a good thing it was only once,
because that space on the card was very small.” Humor, Rosdahl insists, is as important a trait for nurses as compassion and anatomical know-how. “If you don’t have a sense of humor, it’s almost im- possible to work as a nurse because things often turn so sad,” she said. An only child, Rosdahl
Georgia WWII veteran, nurse celebrates 100th birthday By SHANNON BALLEW Marietta Daily Journal, Ga. Inez Long of Marietta, Georgia, one of Cobb ever the doctors needed her to do. It was at the Numa base hospital that Long Jr. remembers his parents being the
Yuma in 1944 and would be together for 72 years. Inez Long was dis- charged when she was pregnant with their first child. When the war was over, the Longs and their daughter, Georgia, moved to Marietta. InMarietta, they had a son, Ed Long, Jr., and Inez continued her nurs- ing career at a local doctor’s office and later became an assistant at a dentist office, while her husband worked at Delta and Lockheed Martin.
“The war was on, and that was it,” she said of her decision to use her skills in supporting the war effort. Inez went through basic training in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Santa Ana, California, and spent the rest of her time stationed at the hospi- tal at Numa Army Air Field in Arizona. There, she tended to patients, administered medicines and shots, and worked on the floor, doing what-
that she be a teacher. She followed in her sister’s footsteps, and graduat- ed as a registered nurse fromEmory’s Crawford W. Long Hospital School of Nursing, according to family records. That hospital is now Emory University Hospital Midtown. She worked a little over a year as an in- dustrial nurse in a Savannah shipyard, en- listed in the Army Air Corps in 1943 during the Second World War.
hosts to many parties on their front porch and in their backyard, always loving to have company. Life has been quiet- er in recent years for Inez Long. She doesn’t remember as well since a stroke a few years ago, and she is hard of hearing. But she still enjoys walks and hav- ing company, though the pandemic has cur- tailed visits by family and friends.
she met her husband, Ed “Bud” Long, who served as a B-17 bomb- er pilot. As the family story goes, the two lieu- tenants first met when Ed Long was waking up from a tonsillectomy. He was just as struck by Inez’s beauty as he was by the punches she was landing on him, forcing him to breathe. The couple married in
County’s few surviving World War II veterans, celebrated her 100th birthday in January. “It’s good to be alive,” Long said before the ap- proaching milestone. BornMinnie Inez Scurry on Jan. 30, 1921, in the south Georgia town of McRae, Long said her older sister be- came a nurse despite their father’s insistence
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