NURSING GROUP
Pitt County Memorial Hospital

August 7, 2000

Interviewer: Beth Nelson

The following retired nurses were in attendance:
Hannah Gaylor
Verta Manning
Blanche Brooks
Doris Skinner
Olive Jones
Hilda Norris
Grace Turner
Vera Smith
Rena Jones

Also present: Betty Bailey and Sally Lucido

Beth Nelson: For the purpose of differentiation, hospitals will be referred to as the Johnston Street Hospital, Old Hospital (Fifth Street), and New Hospital (Stantonsburg Road.) This was done for the purpose of everyone referring to the proper hospital.

I would like to go around the table and have everyone tell us a little about their background.

Blanche Brooks: I came to the old hospital in 1957. I had received my nursing training in Taylor Hospital in Washington and the patient capacity where I came from was about thirty or forty patients a day. When I came to Greenville I thought I had walked into Duke Hospital. I loved my work and stayed there twenty-nine years and I loved everything I did there. In the last hospital I worked on the second floor. I worked the surgery floor and then I transferred to orthopedics, which I dearly loved and I stayed there all those years. I loved the doctors and there wasn't the turnover there like there was on the surgery floor. Surgery was too big a turnover for me and it was driving me crazy. An orthopedic patient would come in and stay four or five days and sometimes two weeks and we got to know them.

Beth Nelson: So you have only been retired a few years?

Blanche Brooks: I retired in 1986.

Doris Skinner: I came to Greenville on November 4, 1950 and I worked at the Johnston Street Hospital for three months. I came prepared to work days and I got stuck in pediatrics for the 3-11 shift. Then finally I got into the operating room and then I transferred to the new hospital (Fifth Street) and worked in the delivery room and then I worked every floor in the hospital. I supervised and ended up working in the pharmacy for a number of years. I did everything in the pharmacy. We did not have a registered pharmacist at the hospital. However, we had pharmacists in town who were on call and if I had a problem of any sort I would call one of the pharmacists.

My sister was Phyllis Martin, who was the first Director of Nurses at the hospital. She and I both graduated from South Baltimore General Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland and then when she came down here she had been working with the University of Maryland Hospital and South Baltimore Hospital, both places at the same time. Then she came down here in 1950.

Beth Nelson: What brought you here from Baltimore?

Doris Skinner: She did. The doctor who taught OB/GYN in Baltimore was Dr. James Brown and he was from Greenville. His brother was Dr. Billy Brown who had worked here for years and he had a brother who had a pharmacy here and he had a brother who was a lawyer and another brother in Chicago who was a doctor, and that is how we got down here. Dr. James Brown recommended Phyllis and then she brought me down. I have been here ever since. When I came to Greenville I thought I was at the end of the world. You have no idea. I mean there was nothing here. There were very few doctors. The only doctors that are still living that were here on opening was Dr. Malene Irons, Dr. Fred Irons and Dr. Steve Bartlett. I don't know of anyone else who was here. I am talking about the ones who are still living. Allen Taylor was not here when we opened because we had a doctor from Washington who would come in.

Olive Jones: I came to Greenville and went to work at the hospital on Johnston Street in 1937 and worked there until the hospital on Fifth Street opened. I was there on opening day. I went over the day before and helped to set up the emergency room and the pharmacy.

Doris Skinner: The first day we moved in to the Fifth Street hospital we delivered babies and had surgery. If I remember correctly, Dr. Fred Irons had an OB patient that came in and he was trying to induce her and I told him he wanted to have the first baby in the new hospital but somebody else beat him to the draw. I told him we couldn't induce that patient, as we were moving.

Beth Nelson: So, Ms. Jones, you were there on opening day in the Fifth Street Hospital. What areas did you work in?

Olive Jones: I worked in the emergency room and the pharmacy and relieved part of the time on different floors when they needed me.

Beth Nelson: What is your background and education?

Olive Jones: I graduated from St. Luke's Hospital in New Bern in 1934. It closed many years ago. I retired from PCMH in May of 1982.

Beth Nelson: So you worked in all three hospitals. That would probably be true for a number of you having experience at Johnston Street, Fifth Street and what I call the new hospital.

Olive Jones: Well I worked for a couple of years at St. Luke's after I graduated in the operating room.

Beth Nelson: Was St. Luke's a predecessor to Craven?

Olive Jones: No, it was way before then and it was a small hospital. I don't think we had more than fifty patients.

Beth Nelson: What organization supported that hospital? Was it owned by doctors?

Olive Jones: By doctors.

Beth Nelson: Was it tied to a denomination of any kind?

Olive Jones: No, not when I graduated but later it was Catholic. It wasn't open too long. They did have a training school in Greenville for a short while at Pitt General. They sure did. The nurses had to be sent away for their last year I believe.

Beth Nelson: Affiliated with what group?

Olive Jones: Pitt General Hospital.

Beth Nelson: The hospital had its own nurses training?

Olive Jones: Well, the doctors did the teaching and they also did the teaching in St. Luke's too.

Doris Skinner: The hospital in downtown Greenville was upstairs in one of those old stores. I think that was the very first one.

Beth Nelson: Right, and when the doctors found out they were going to go to the Johnston Street Hospital, they were so anxious and there was such a demand for their services that they chose to open a temporary hospital upstairs above the store and they say it smelled of feed, tobacco and everything. It was a very different environment from what you might imagine for a hospital to be but I guess they had to start somewhere.

Grace Turner: When they had a very serious case sometimes they had to send them somewhere else. My father had a ruptured appendix and they took him on the train to Kinston to the hospital. I don't remember what year that was.

I'm Grace Turner and I got my training at James Walker Memorial Hospital in Wilmington. I got another year of college over here at East Carolina and I worked six months right after I finished training during the polio epidemic in Hickory but Greenville was my home so in March of 1945 I came back to Greenville and I nursed in the old Johnston Street Hospital on the obstetrical floor, third floor, for awhile. Then I set up the first Central Supply in Greenville which was one room next to the operating room on the third floor. Back in those days hospitals even during all of our nurses training gloves were washed and dried and powdered and sterilized. Anyway, I did all that and they brought in gloves from the emergency room. We also patched gloves back in those days.

You took an old glove and cut a little circle large enough to cover the hole that was in the glove. You didn't use these gloves for sterile procedures but you used them for other things like rectal. Anyway, back at that time the hospital had just started getting penicillin and we didn't get much penicillin because the Army and so forth got most
of it when it first came out. We had to make up all of that penicillin and I did all that and I mixed it up. There was a short supply because of the War and it was a new drug and it was just coming out in the hospital. Hospitals got it during the War but hospitals all over the United States didn't begin getting it until around 1950 and 1951.

Beth Nelson: Did you also work in the Fifth Street Hospital?

Grace Turner: Yes, well let me get back to my story. I worked in central supply until I planned to get married and then Ms. Lethia Clark was our Director of Nurses at the time and she left here and became Director of Nurses at Duke School of Nursing.

Anyway, I handed in my resignation in a period of time before I was supposed to get married because I knew I would be going out of town and Ms. Clark was so upset with me. She was a stout lady like I am and she didn't know why. When I got off work one afternoon I told her I needed to talk to her and I told her why and it was all right, it was fine then. After she knew why I was going out of town it was fine. Anyway, I got married and nursed in Dallas, Texas in nineteen different hospitals while I was there with private duty. I did private duty all the time I was out there and then went to Louisiana for awhile and did private duty in a hospital there and then I came back to the Fifth Street Hospital in April of 1951. I worked in the nursery and it was on the third floor and at that time they only had one nursery nurse at a time. We spent time making up formulas for the whole hospital. You had to go across the hall and put on all your stuff and your mask and everything else to make formula. We had a big old autoclave in there that we autoclaved. In the meantime you had to run to the door and peek through at the babies. You put all the babies in front of the windows that you possibly could so that you could see that they were doing all right. We didn't have a resuscitator in the nursery at that time so you had to run back to the operating room to give them some oxygen right quick.

I worked in the nursery, I believe, for around three years and then I went back to private duty and I went to the other hospital and did private duty right up until about five years ago. I worked from 7-5.

Beth Nelson: When you came back in 1951, were you there on opening day?

Grace Turner: I came in April and I think you all moved over there before April.

Beth Nelson: It was a brand spanking new hospital when you moved in. Compared to the hospitals you had seen in Texas and Louisiana, how did it compare in terms of modernization, quality and that kind of thing?

Grace Turner: Well, of course, naturally, everything was new and everything huge and there were differences in those hospitals. Some of them were more modern than others but there was not a lot of difference.

Beth Nelson: Did you have a sense that it was a very up to date and modern facility for its time?

Grace Turner: Yes.

Vera Smith: I came to the hospital on Johnston Street in 1948 and two of my classmates came with me and one is supposed to be sitting right here and couldn't come today, Mabel Baker. We came in 1948 on Johnston Street and did a little bit of everything. I did my nursing training for three years at Carolina General Hospital in Wilson. All three of us graduated together. Pauline Cox who just died recently came as a supervisor two weeks before we came so there were four of us from the hospital in Wilson that came here. I wanted to work in pediatrics and I didn't get the chance to work in pediatrics much. They even put me on OB but I wanted to work in pediatrics. The first baby that I had to watch in the delivery room was Booger Scales. I was scared to death and he was a nervous wreck. It was the most horrible night I ever spent. I came to the hospital when it opened in February but the last of March I left and headed to Washington, D.C. and took a post graduate course in pediatrics so I could work in pediatrics. Then I went to another hospital and worked a year. They had a new hospital and they didn't have a pediatric ward so I set up one there. Then I came back here in 1952. I was here from then on. I had thirty-six years. I helped move all the new babies from the Johnston Street Hospital to the Fifth Street and then I helped move all the little babies from the Fifth Street Hospital to the new hospital.

They opened the first little ambulatory unit over at the Holiday Inn and I helped set up over there and then we moved back to the hospital and I helped set up over there. I got out of pediatrics after the medical school came. My thinking was too old fashioned for the new building. I was there for a long time, not in the new place they have now. I was in pediatrics for twenty-seven years. Then I went to private nursing and there have been a lot of things. I remember moving all those little kids and you know we didn't have all this modern stuff. We had these little croupettes that you put the babies in and you had to put ice in the back of them. We moved some from Johnston Street in the ambulance.

Beth Nelson: Describe a croupette. I am trying to get a visual image of what a croupette was.

Vera Smith: It was plastic and then we had some that were metal so they more room. Actually they are what you know as isolettes. The old oxygen tents they used to bring the plastic over the bed and it came down to about midway. Croupettes were smaller and they didn't have a machine, they had ice. You had to keep the ice in the back.

Beth Nelson: How long would they have been in use? Since the sixties?

Vera Smith: I think so, they were in use then.

Hilda Norris: I came to work in Pitt in 1965 and they didn't have them so it was the beginning of the sixties they stopped using those croupettes, probably in 1962 or somewhere around then.

Beth Nelson: So, was an isolette a more mechanized and more electrified unit?

Hilda Norris: Yes.

Doris Skinner: It was invented by a doctor who taught me when I was in training.

Rena Jones: I came to the hospital on Fifth Street in the spring of 1966. I graduated from a three-year diploma school in Suffolk, Virginia, Obici, and I was there the first year that hospital was built. We affiliated through Medical College of Virginia in Richmond for Psych and Peds for six months and I went when I was a senior. I came here because my husband was from here. We had met and married in Suffolk, Virginia and he wanted to come back to Pitt County. I came and went in to see Phyllis Martin and told her my background and Phyllis told me that when I got ready to move and get here for me to just come back to see her and she would give me a job. This is what I did. I came back and applied for my reciprocity in North Carolina and she put me to work on old first and Mabel Baker ran the floor I was on and it was a wonderful experience working with Mabel.

I want to go back a little bit to where Grace was talking about central supply and supplies and so forth. We used to have so many patients on old first back then. We used to have all kinds of patients on that floor, all kinds. We had two labor beds standing there right across from the elevator and you had to watch people in labor and get them on the elevator and get them to third floor to deliver them. We had everything down there and most of the time the halls were full. To finish our day's work we had to autoclave down there and also this little boiling machine down there and if you played out of the things you needed to finish your day's work with you washed and rinsed them very well you autoclaved and you boiled which you did to finish your day's work. Ms. Martin sent for me to come around to her office one day and asked me how many months I had been working with Mabel. Like I said, it was a wonderful experience and she was a wonderful teacher and Mabel told me before I went around to the office that I had better watch it because Ms. Martin probably wanted to give me something else to do. Well, she was right. After that, for several months until in September of 1967 Dr. Pott was my doctor and made me stop work twenty-one days before I had my first child but I circulated the hospital. Back in those days when I circulated the hospital on the 3-11 shift I usually went on old second and sometimes I had an RN in the emergency room and other than that the hospital was covered by LPNs and anything they couldn't do or had a question about they called you and anything that couldn't be handled in the emergency room. We went to labor and delivery for all deliveries. You also entered and exited everything out of the morgue when you circulated. We sometimes filled drugs as Doris told you, depending on what was needed.

Beth Nelson: Are you talking about accompanying deceased patients into the morgue.
and what was involved?

Rena Jones: Yes, they all had to go through you. They bombarded you with paperwork. If they weren't locals, being sure that it was the right person. Back in those days we had funeral homes that fought over the deceased. I was relieving one night and before the sun rose one of the funeral homes was there to get that person and I hadn't even been able to get anybody there to give me any information on the person. It was the next morning before sunrise. Here was this fellow who said he was coming to get this lady and I told him that was strange and asked him who sent him because I hadn't any family member and that I had no information. It was kind of like that and you were the check system.

Also you covered for anybody who didn't come in on duty and you also covered the private duty register when people wanted a private duty nurse. You did the calling. Those were some of the things that we did. We gave anesthesia for people in the delivery room under the supervision of a doctor.

Then I left here due to the terminal illness of my mother in 1958 when my first child was about eight months old and I went back to my home school and did that same sort of thing. I worked with the person who had been my supervisor in school and worked on the 3-11 shift back in my home school. I left in 1958 and returned in 1964 to Fifth Street and again they gave me a job right away and I worked on what was then A-1 around the corner from the one I had previously worked on. It was medicine and peds at that time. I was expecting my third child then and I came back here in August and I worked right on until nine days before I had the baby.

Beth Nelson: That would have been very uncommon back then as most of the women were encouraged to stay home long before that.

Rena Jones: I came in on a Saturday morning and picked up my last paycheck and had the baby on Monday morning. Then they did some renovating and some changing things and I went back to work on nights on that same floor that I was working on that summer. That winter of 1964-1965 it was a forty-bed surgical unit and I worked night duty for the next five years on 2-A. Sometimes I would be pulled to another floor which was so busy and they didn't have anybody and Dr. Ira Hardy's first patient was put there in one of my four-bed rooms and the first radiation therapy room was put down there in a two-bed room.

Beth Nelson: I want to go back to something you said just a minute ago about when you were the 3-11 circulating nurse you talked about how few RNs were in the house all together. Typically during that time there would be LPNs and Aides and you and two other RNs would be supervising the house. How many patients would there have been in the house all together?

Rena Jones: I think that before they ever added on that other wing I think we had a capacity of about eighty-five patients and then I am not sure when they added on how many more.

Beth Nelson: Now, that would scare a lot of people that the house had only three RNs. People at the maximum level of training and experience to do all of that and that a lot of things can go wrong in a hospital.

Doris Skinner: When I was in training we had a supervisor on 3-11 and the whole hospital was run by student nurses at St. Lukes.

Beth Nelson: So the way we were staffed was pretty typical of the times that you were living in?

Rena Jones: At the time that I did five straight years of night duty on that newly opened surgical floor we did all our additives to all our IV fluids ourselves. Whatever it was and a lot of times I had ten and twelve continuous IVs then and you got people from xray and surgery the next day. There were no recovery areas. You got them ready and they would come back to you when I did surgery on A-1.

Beth Nelson: Before I forget, there may be things, artifacts we will call them, that you all may have at home that might be of benefit that you might want to donate or loan to the archives of the library. What we want to do is ideally have a display - if you had any instruments, or early nursing caps that would have been worn in all three hospitals. When we went to the new hospital in 1977 there were still nurses who wore caps, not many but there were still some that did. To me an interesting thing to display would have been a nursing cap that would have survived through the expansion of three hospitals in Greenville. If there is any things like that you would like to donate outright or to loan, they would be identified as having been donated or loaned by you. I have even asked people if they had copies of their old hospital bills perhaps from the Johnston Street Hospital. Some of those kinds of things would be wonderful. We could either photograph them for the book, possibly for the video, but also we would display them in the library. I think people would find that most interesting. I thought I would just mention this to you before I forgot.

Doris Skinner: There was something that we nurses did way back and I can't remember what year it was but Dr. Heizinger who was the OB/GYN doctor who came the same time I did and Mr. Christopher who was in charge of housekeeping had got some dolls and I hope they are still at the hospital. We dressed those dolls. They had two dolls, a male and a female, and they changed them. If a doctor was short they cut the legs down and made it short and dressed the doll just like that particular doctor. We had Mr. Ward and all the doctors who were on that original staff. Some of the nurses dressed their dolls in the graduate uniform. I dressed mine in my student uniform and Phyllis dressed one in the graduate uniform and also a Florence Nightingale outfit. The purpose was to represent everyone. We put them on display in the lobby at the hospital. The visitors could all see the dolls. Somebody told me that they were in the laboratory down there.

Beth Nelson: Were they developed for the move to the Fifth Street Hospital?

Doris Skinner: This was after we moved into the Fifth Street Hospital when we did all of those dolls. Different people did the dolls but I think Mrs. Christopher and Dr. Ann did most of the doctor dolls and they dressed them like they were dressed. For instance, they also did one of old Dr. Pace. They did one of old Dr. Crisp-all the doctors that were on the staff at that particular time had a doll. Dr. Crisp's doll looked just like him, I can remember that.

Rena Jones: After I retired from the hospital I went into some other fields and worked in alcoholism and developmental disabilities, mental health, did some private duty in Greenville. The first place that gave me a job back was the new hospital now. I went to Rehab and worked with them and took a refresher course back in 1985.

Hilda Norris: I graduated in 1961 from Kate B. Reynolds in Winston-Salem. I took my training at Baptist. I worked at the hospital in Ahoskie from 1962-1965 in that little nursery they had there. We had isolettes back then too. I came to Greenville because I married a man who lived here and Dr. Andrew Best told me to come on to Greenville that he would give me a piece of land for $1.00 so I did it. I gave him the $1.00 for the piece of land which was on the corner of Ward and Nash Streets in West Greenville.

I wanted to work in the nursery. At the time there were no policies or procedures in place although there were in Ahoskie. Phyllis Martin asked me to write a policy and procedures manual for the nursery. I introduced formula to the hospital. There were no apnea monitors and no billi lights. The first billi light was put in because I went into Mr. Ward's office and took his lamp off of his desk and several weeks later he found it. It was a billi light which was used to help the babies to break down the billirubin in the blood. We used to raise the curtains so the babies would be in the sun and we didn't have this. So, I was in Mr. Ward's office and I saw this big light so I just unloaded it and walk out of the office. After Mr. Ward found it he came and laughed.

When I came there were not any policies and procedures written. There was not a book. Everything you had to look for a procedure was on a piece of paper stuck on the corkboard. It said you did this for a certain thing. Nothing was documented right on how you did anything. None of this was in writing, just little pieces of paper all over the board and I had to write a procedure manual. It was for treatment of babies in the nursery. Ms. Martin told me to write this so people who would come behind me would know what to do. The things were put into notebooks and we added to them. It spoke to blood exchange, circumcision, how to take a temperature, how to feed a baby, how to burp one, how to read the monitor and all of those sort of things. These things had to be put down in writing.

We were making milk from primitive goat's milk, powered milk, for pediatrics and the newborn nursery for twenty-four hours. We would do it a day in advance. Newborn took six bottles and preemies took eight bottles and we had to make the sterile water and the glucose and when first floor had pediatrics we had to make it for them too. Across the hall was the only formula room. They had an autoclave and the bottles; you had to stretch the nipple across the bottle. You had a plastic or paper to put on top of them and I would take a box of those home and write everything done for the next day ready to stick on the bottles. While doing this you also had to keep checking on the babies, which were right in front of, the glass window and you would go and peek them and make sure everyone of them was breathing. Dr. Haar would worry me to death making formula for him every thirty minutes.

When you would walk into the nursery over to the right were the big babies. To the left was the intermediate nursery which could hold six babies at maximum and they were prematures. The little small prematures would sometimes have what we call apnea episodes. A baby would stop breathing and would forget to breathe until you stimulated him. In order to get to them I took gauze and tied the gauze on their ankle and hung it through the isolette hole and slipped it through. When the baby looked blue you could just pull on this and it would stimulate him. Now they have apnea monitors so that when a baby stops breathing it beeps and you check that way. If you took the time to wash your hands before we had monitors it might have been too late so I was able to pull on the gauze. We used cloth diapers and the pins were rusty and dull. I told the hospital staff that we could not use these and that we had to have Pampers. I went to Mr. Ward and he agreed and the Pampers came rolling in. The old cloth diapers came all thrown in a big white cart and you had to fold them. Sometimes you had to fold one right quick and put it on the baby.

Verta Manning: I came here in 1951 and I circulated the whole hospital. I supervised and when we supervised at night we had to circulate in the operating room. Also when someone came and had a baby we had to help with that too. I worked until 1965 and then I worked elsewhere.

Beth Nelson: What about technology. Did you have a sense that our hospital at that time was up to date with what was available in the rest of the world? What was your perspective of it?

Verta Manning: I think it was up to date, I really do.

Beth Nelson: Do you remember any particular new equipment or technology that came on board when you were there?

Verta Manning: No because we still had the oxygen tents.

Hannah Gaylor: I did my training in Hamlet Hospital. I came to Greenville in 1951 and lived in the nursing quarters. They also had a house that Dr. Pace owned on Jarvis Street and Verta and I lived in that one. When the hospital on Fifth Street opened we were still living on Jarvis Street and we had to get a taxi back and forth to the hospital because the nursing quarters was not finished. We started working night duty and worked straight for about three months and we worked all the floors, we supervised and we did everything. We knew everybody and just had the best time. Then we started alternating shifts. I had worked 3-11 on the surgical floor and we were only making $165 a month and I thought if we relieved help for four days we were supposed to get some extra money but for some reason I didn't get it. I think that was the maddest I have ever been. I left in 1974.

Sally Lucido: Let me ask you a question about the nursing quarters, was your room and board included in your salary?

Hannah Gaylor: Yes, it consisted of about $10.00 a month.

Beth Nelson: So the value of your place to stay was $10.00 a month.

Hannah Gaylor: And you could eat off of that too. We could eat dinner and lunch.

Beth Nelson: Let's talk more about this. There was a nursing home on Jarvis Street, a duplex. Lets talk to those of you who lived there. How many people could live there at one time?

Hannah Gaylor: We had a housemother and seven to eight nurses lived there and there was one bath on each side. There were two girls to a room.

Doris Skinner: When I first came to Greenville I lived there and I was supposed to be working in the operating room and they stuck me in pediatrics on 3-11. Everybody in the nursing residence was working days so in the daytime I was all by myself and when I got home at night everybody was asleep. After two weeks of that I told them I was packing my suitcase and going back or somewhere. That is the way I existed over there in that residence. I was the only one there. In the daytime I was all by myself and at night everybody was asleep. That wasn't real nice.

It was a duplex and we shared bathrooms. We had a little kitchen and a living room and this was included in our salary. We washed our clothes in the bathtub and we had a string across the back porch to hang them on.

Beth Nelson: When you stayed there you were probably just out of school. Was it mostly women your age or was it a mixture of older women too?

Grace Turner: We had some xray technicians and some lab technicians living there.

Doris Skinner: We had to walk from the nurse's residence over to the hospital to get our dinner.

Beth Nelson: What about the idea of living like that? Was that the kind of thing you did for six or eight months until you found a place to live or got married or did you stay there for several years?

Doris Skinner: You were there until you got married or found another job. Even when the new residence opened up you lived there until you got married or left. Most of us all got married the same year.

Beth Nelson: The new residence was behind the hospital. Describe that.

Doris Skinner: That was very nice. The rooms were supposed to accommodate two people but there were not that many over there so most of us had a private room. I had a private room and a bath between my room and the next room. Phyllis lived over there until she got married and she had a little apartment since she was DON. She had a bedroom, living room and a private bath. We had a nice living room over there. We had a hi fi in there and I still have some of the old records that I used to play on that hi fi over there. There was no where to go and no way to get anywhere unless you had a car. We went to the movies every afternoon that we could and walked uptown but then we got a bike. You really did need a car in Greenville. Phyllis and I bought our first car together.

Grace Turner: When I first worked at the Johnston Street Hospital we made $100.00 a month. I did not stay in the nursing home, I stayed at home. We worked a 12 hour shift with the understanding that we were supposed to get two to three hours off sometime during that shift if they had two on the floor. You were supposed to be able to go to a bed and lay down if you wanted to or if you had some way to leave for two or three hours you could do that.

Olive Jones: I remember one night when I was on night duty I took my time to go to bed and the girls forgot to come down and call me and I woke up and the day shift was coming on. They forgot to wake me.

Betty Bailey: It really has been interesting and I loved hearing about everything. I was not a part of the Johnston Hospital. I came in 1961 to the Fifth Street Hospital and Phyllis Martin hired me and she hired me very quickly and I was six months pregnant and asked her if she hired pregnant people and she asked me how long I would work and I told her until I had the baby and Phyllis told me she went into labor in her office with both of her children. I thought if she could do that I could work and do all I had to. I came to work in 1961 as a part time person and I worked nights and it was like one or two nights a week and she was very good to me allowing me to choose my working hours and I worked PRN which meant that I worked all over the hospital in every department. Hannah and Verta and I used to supervise the nights that we didn't do staff nursing and we had the best time. Everybody loved everybody in that old hospital. I didn't go back to the days of the "patched glove" as that was before my time. The new wing had just been completed when I came and I thought it was wonderful. We did wash our gloves and we had the little sterilizers that we autoclaved. We did not have a lot of disposables at that time. One thing that I thought was interesting and I tell the staff now that when they complain about their salaries that when I started to work in the old hospital that my salary was quoted at being $12.50 for eight hours, that was not for an hour. One gal made the comment the other night that $13.00 an hour wasn't bad to start off in those days and I told her not an hour but for an eight hour shift. Right after I started to work we got a little raise of .50 so we made $13.00 per eight-hour shift. Nights that we supervised we made $1.00 extra, we made $14.00 for supervising the entire house. I thought Phyllis Martin was very fair. When I was supervising I always went to the delivery room for the deliveries. I never went to the operating room but Phyllis used to come in at night and work that operating room. She took call for the operating room. She must have been taking call the nights that I supervised because I did not go to the operating room.

Doris Skinner: I remember when Hurricane Donna hit here she was on call that night and they were doing an appendectomy on an 89 year old women and in the middle of the night Phyllis called me and asked me if I could come over and baby-sit as she had to go to the hospital. She went in the middle of the hurricane and she went to the hospital so she could take call.

Rena Jones: I remember on a few occasions when Phyllis Martin was able to cover and I remember she used to come down on A-1 and do all the paperwork and answer the phone and she did all this to free us up so we could work.

Hilda Norris: I remember that just two weeks after Phyllis Martin had a C-Section she came back to work and was working at her desk.

Doris Skinner: Money was scarce at the old hospital. Phyllis would have loved to give everybody a raise every time they asked for it but it all had to go before Mr. Ward and the Board of Directors. They had to approve everything and sometimes she had to fight tooth and nail for every little thing she got. She also went down to the stock room and made all the forms like the nursing note sheet and all these other things to save money for the hospital instead of having the hospital go to a printer and have them. She would go down there and she would mimeograph them. Many a time she would come up and there would be ink all over her. Then she would also pad them.

Beth Nelson: Did she retire when she left the old hospital?

Doris Skinner: Oh, she went to the ARC. That was the best thing in the world she ever did. Phyllis never took a two-week vacation in the whole almost twenty years she worked at the hospital. Once she went to the ARC she had holiday time, much better pay, vacation time and just better everything. She did better herself. She was the first DON for the ARC. Once she left Pitt Memorial they put three nurses in her place. Then they had to hire somebody else to do purchasing because Phyllis did most of the purchasing for the hospital.

Hilda Norris: They have hired four people at Pitt Memorial to do what I did.

Doris Skinner: When Phyllis decided to leave it was at the time that my mother was terminally ill and some of the doctors even came to the house and asked her to reconsider and not to leave and they were very upset with it. Finally she said maybe she had better stay at the hospital. My mother looked at her and told her she had worked so hard for so little except for the gratification, if you go back to that hospital I will not talk to you. She told mother okay she would go to the ARC.

Betty Bailey: It was certainly not unusual to be around at night and see her coming in at 3 a.m. to go to the operating room and circulate. I remember regarding the equipment that Phyllis said that Dr. Fearrington was going to have a demonstration on a respirator and we thought what in the world was that. When we went to the inservice there was this machine that you could maintain someone with. We used it mainly to give respiratory treatments. I was so excited. You rolled it around if you had to give somebody a respiratory treatment. We had one of them in the old hospital and it was probably in the early sixties. It was the Bennett machine.

Doris Skinner: When equipment would not function properly they would bring them to Phyllis and ask her to fix it for them and she would fix it. I am not mechanically minded at all but she was and she could fix this, that and the other thing and I couldn't but she could and she would.

Betty Bailey: The other thing I remember so vividly over at the old hospital that we have not had in the new hospital was that we had patients in the halls all the time. You had to put a little screen around them. We didn't have the pump that you regulate IV fluids with now.

Grace Turner: I nursed my first patient, Dr. Fearrington's patient, with a cardiac monitor and at that time that was the kind of monitor that you rolled around from room to room and that was the first. I nursed the first aortic aneurysm surgery in Greenville and that was Dr. Longino's patient. He also did the procedure where they put the catheter up the left femoral artery up to the heart but I can't remember what it was called but Dr. Longino did that too. This was in the 1960s/

Doris Skinner: Phyllis set up the first ICU unit at the old hospital but I don't remember what year that was.

Beth Nelson: Somebody mentioned earlier that when patients were really ill that if they couldn't be handled in Greenville they were put on a train to Kinston.

Grace Turner: That was way back in the days. When Pitt Memorial first opened up we took patients to Duke and so forth and they would transport them through Wilkersons. We used his hearses. Before Dr. Hardy came there was nobody here to take patients with surgical spine fractures and serious stuff like that. They were transported by ambulances also.

Hilda Norris: All the sick babies went to Duke back then.

Doris Skinner: A lot of the heart patients went to Birmingham, bypassing Duke. One of the doctors in Birmingham was related to the Wilkersons.

Grace Turner: We made our first 4 x 4s and you had to stay busy folding them and we sterilized them. We cleaned our needles, we sharpened our needles and sterilized our needles over a Bunsen burner back in 1945. You sterilized the needle over it before you gave a shot.

Doris Skinner: We didn't have all these disposable things like disposable enemas like they have now and every floor had an enema tray. Well, all of a sudden one time the enema tray was missing from the emergency room and everybody came up to Phyllis' office telling her we needed to get a new tray and nobody knew where it was. Once Phyllis went to visit a friend of ours and she said to us we would go next door and see so and so and we went over there and guess what - there was the emergency room enema tray sitting in her house and she had it for weeks and she said Dr. so and so gave it to her.

Phyllis picked up the enema tray and told her it was going back to the hospital. The trays cost $30.00 and that was a lot of money forty or fifty years ago. She picked it up and took it back. Then another time one of the doctors went to Phyllis office, and she seemed to get the brunt of everything, and he was fussing at her because they couldn't find the reflect camera, nobody could find it. In the meantime she had to take Susan to one of the doctors and she went there and there is the reflect camera, not just one but two with Pitt Memorial Hospital written on it. She picked them up and took them back to the hospital.