Evelyn Ruth Coffman, R.N.

This is my mother at her 1938 graduation as an R.N. from the Coatesville Hospital School of Nursing. Wasn't she beautiful! She was 'till her dying day.

Coatesville was and maybe still is a steel town. In her day it was Lukens Steel Company. It was huge. It employed almost everyone. A lot of people were coming to Coatesville from Italy and Poland and Germany and Eastern Europe. They were used to hard work and sent back home every dollar they could to bring the rest of the family over. There were lots of languages spoken in Coatesville, and lots of churches to serve their particular nationality and denomination. Some of the churches held dances and beyond there were social clubs and nightclubs where Whites and Blacks gathered for Coatesville-style jazz and drinking. My mother told me that on one of their midnight excursions to downtown, she and her pals visited a nightclub, for the music. They were crazy about music. I believe she told me it was there she smoked her first and last cigarette. She said they did not stay long. It was too hep for student nurses. But there was dancing everywhere in those days. Any building with a roof and a wide, flat floor could book a good local band and even some of the big ones. She went out dancing all the time. Everybody did. After she graduated nursing school and was working, she still went out dancing. You had a date in those days. It was on a blind date, at a dance, that she met my father. Follow your heart!

The Coatesville Hospital School of Nursing was up on the side of a hill overlooking the steel mill. Student nurse quarters were on the second floor. There was a ledge along the side of the building and an upper patio, where the class picture was taken. Imagine a string of student nurses creeping in pitch dark along a narrow ledge twenty feet up and climbing down the balcony with nothing but the grip of their fingers and toes, just to go dancing. They were of the Greatest Generation. She said that going out after dark into Coatesville was always safe. They were never afraid and never molested. Those were the days! Being student nurses, they were aware of those places in town that supplied the fodder for their training. A combination of booze and knife got many an immigrant into a hospital bed, where the students, under supervision, would tend them. Nurse that she was, my mother had only compassion for them. Once out of the nightclub and onto a hospital bed, they were charming and appreciative . Some were in and out so often they came to know the nurses by name. Mother had only one patient who was ever trouble, but they brought his mother in and she set him straight.

At one time a very serious accident occurred at the old Lukens, and it caused me to ask Mother if she had attended any unfortunates brought in from the mill. She said that once a young man had got his hands caught in a press. She said they did not even look like hands anymore. The doctors left his hands on and every day around the clock, a student nurse would show up and massage his hands. All day every day. Eventually the students' work did the trick, and his hands returned to where he could use them. He didn't have to lose his job, which was a nightmare for a man in those days, especially one trying to put away money to bring the wife and kids over ASAP.

The injuries she talked most about, once the pump was primed, were the decapitations. The steel mill was a very, very dangerous place, and the factors that ignite disaster came together twice for my mother. On a busy night they called my mother, who probably didn't have too much skill yet, to go to the bedside of a steelworker. They did not tell her what his condition was, but with some ingenuity Mother was able to get him laid out well enough for his relatives to look. There was another case, but it must have been further along in her training, because she was able to talk about it with a sort of gallows humor.

There was no air conditioning, no relief from the heat in the hospital unless a patient brought his own electric fan. Everybody, students and staff, was expected to work uncomplainingly under conditions that would not be tolerated in an animal shelter. Student nurses, as Lowest of the Low, were handed every assignment for which they were qualified that no one above them wanted. Discipline was designed along the Marine Corps plan, like many institutions of professional education back then. Caps and uniforms had to be starched and white and spotless. Stockings were white, shoes were white and had to stay that way. Being on time, handling the academics, sailing above the blood and gore and screams, making do with medicines so primitive that today's nurses might not even recognize their names. Folding a towel the wrong way could get you extra night duty. Falling asleep on night duty could get you a week of towel duty.

I think my mother was born moving, and so she was an ideal candidate for a student nurse in the '30's when twenty or a hundred other young women were standing behind you, eager to take your place in the school. It must have been under the head nurse's orders that they ever got her to sit down for the picture.