Ex-Nurse Recalls WWI-Style MASH

While serving with U.S. forces in France as a nurse anesthetist during World War I, Sophie Winton of Hollywood recalls, she was assigned to a mobile hospital--the MASH of those days.

And when enemy shelling began near the hospital, she has often mentioned to friend Joyce Kelly, she would hold a metal surgical tray over her patient’s and her own head, while continuing with the anesthetic of drop ether and chloroform.

These stories and others about Winton are being remembered because on April 24, she will become 100 years old.

Kelly said that her friend later managed a dental and plastic surgery clinic in Hollywood, and has photos showing celebrity patients for whom she provided anesthesia.

“She attributes her longevity to having been brought up on a farm in Minnesota,” Kelly said. “That, plus the fact that year-round, ice permitting, she would go swimming in a nearby lake.”

Apple for an Educator

Honors have come to Arturo Madrid, who heads the 2-year-old Tomas Rivera Center at Claremont Graduate School. At its annual meeting in Chicago earlier this month, the Hispanic Caucus of the American Assn. of Higher Education presented Madrid its Distinguished Leadership in Higher Education Award.

Madrid, a native of New Mexico, who holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. from UCLA, has held faculty appointments in the humanities and administrative posts at Dartmouth, UCLA, UC San Diego and University of Minnesota. Also he has served on numerous foundations and boards involved with higher education. He is the current president of the National Chicano Council on Higher Education.

The center he heads at Claremont is one of the first policy centers to focus on issues of concern to the Mexican-American and larger Latino population of the United States.

Madrid missed the ceremony in Chicago, he said from his office at Claremont recently, but was pleased to be recognized.

In talking about his efforts to improve the status of education for minorities and, especially, the Latino population, he sounded as if he were trying to make the milestones on his curriculum vitae available to everyone. He has tried, he said, to help not only students, but also professionals in higher education--all the way up the ladder--from entry to graduate school, to job placement, to finishing doctoral dissertations, to getting past tenure hurdles, to obtaining appointments to boards of higher education, panels, commissions . . . .

“We’ve always been at the margins,” he said of his efforts to integrate Latinos into the whole picture “and you know what happens at the margins--you get rubbed out.”

Last Steps of Global Walk

Bethel, Ohio, is preparing a hero’s welcome for “The Worldwalker,” hometown son Steven Newman who completes his walk around the world April 1 with noon ceremonies at City Hall. Newman, 33, who passed through Los Angeles in August on his four-year walk, set out from Bethel on April 1, 1983--a journalist in search of a learning experience and adventure. He walked through 21 countries depending, all the way, on the kindness of strangers for accommodations.

The organizing committee for the welcome has invited people to walk the final steps for two hours with Newman on Wednesday as he makes his way along Ohio 125 and Sugartree Road to his mother’s house on Charity Street, then on to the festivities at City Hall.

“I feel very fortunate to have walked around the world,” Newman said in inviting people to join the final steps, “for I have seen and experienced what before I could only hope was true. There really is a family of Man.”

Holocaust Memorial

If Otto Schirn has his way, a 20-year project finally will begin to take shape this fall at Pan Pacific Park in Los Angeles’ Fairfax District. There six triangular black granite columns, each 18 feet tall, will be erected as a memorial to the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Designed by Joseph Young, the monument also will include panels of text and bas-relief sculpture depicting events from Nazi Germany’s World War II extermination campaign.

After two decades of planning, permit-seeking and fund raising, Schirn said the group that he heads, the American Congress of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, has raised about $150,000 of the estimated $1 million it will cost to build and maintain the memorial.

Schirn, who spent three months in a concentration camp in France and whose parents died at Auschwitz, said hundreds of people have contributed to the building fund but that donations still are being sought.

Honorary chairmen of the project are Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, state Sen. David Roberti, Los Angeles County Supervisor Ed Edelman and Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky.

A mimeographed brochure about the memorial is available by writing Schirn at the Congress, 1706 Garth Ave., Los Angeles 90035.