These Nurses Are From the Old School and They Liked It Better

Lois Dunbar Mushrush swished around in ankle-length skirts when she carried babies between the nursery and their mothers, fulfilling her pledge as a student nurse “to make something of myself.” In 1917 she graduated from Pasadena’s Huntington Memorial Hospital School of Nursing and left the big old student dorm that had been her home for three years. Then she joined the Army and nursed victims of the World War I influenza epidemic.

She never gave medication. Doctors and head nurses did that. She was steeped in patient care, and she worked hard for her $30 a week.

Today, at age 92, she remembers the miles of corridors she walked in high button shoes, and still says “there was not one disagreeable moment” during the six years she was a nurse.

She was the oldest member at the annual Huntington Hospital School of Nursing Alumnae Luncheon attended by 140 graduates recently. The school turned out more than 1,000 nurses from the time it began with a class of seven in 1902 until it closed in 1956.

Thirty-five years after Mushrush graduated, Dodie Bevis Cassidy lived out her childhood dream of becoming a nurse. In 1952 she graduated at the top of her Huntington nursing school class and married the Caltech student whose looks she liked when she first saw him at a dorm party. She had to have nursing school authorities’ permission to marry Mell Cassidy just before her graduation.

Like Mushrush, Cassidy remembers a “wonderful education,” her starched uniform and cap, and her starting salary--$185 a month.

“We did a lot of things that weren’t necessarily nursing, like cleaning utensils and sharpening needles,” she said.

Today, Cassidy, 55, a Sylmar resident, is night administrative coordinator of nurses at Huntington Hospital. Not only does she give medication, but like other nurses she is equipped with stethoscope, pocket calculator to figure drug dosages, and far more education than she had as a graduate 33 years ago.

“I was born in the Huntington, trained there, my four children were born there, my father died there, and my grandson was just born there. How’s that for having your feet in cement?” she said. The affection these women have for their rigorous training, the restrictive dorm life and the demands of their profession was reflected in the roomful of their fellow alumnae. The annual luncheon continues to draw big crowds, despite having no new members since 1956.

Today, hospital nursing schools are all but extinct. Students attend classes and get their degrees in colleges and get their clinical training in hospitals. Nursing students are married or single, male or female, in pants or skirts, just out of high school or middle-aged.

“They are very knowledgeable, but they lack the dedication we had,” Cassidy said. “We had such a wonderful camaraderie and that doesn’t exist now. Of course, I’m prejudiced.”

“I don’t want to slam anyone, but I was recently in the hospital and the personal care simply wasn’t up to our standard,” said Mushrush.

The women held their reunion this year in La Vina Auditorium, the newest unit of the 600-bed hospital.

Then they went back to the site where they used to live--where the big old brown nurses’ residence stood. It serves a more modern function now: a parking lot.